House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  Why was Isabel so angry, so resentful? Hadn’t he loved her enough? Had he mistreated her in any way? He’d always tried to be as kind and considerate as he could, not out of politeness, but because he truly loved her. Outwardly, they were a model couple; everyone in San Juan envied them their happiness. They were almost the only ones in their group who weren’t divorced. It was inconceivable that after twenty-six years of marriage they should break up over a silly novel!

  Isabel’s description of the cellar of the house on the lagoon in Rebecca’s time, when its dark labyrinth of tunnels had seethed with servants living off his father’s magnanimity, and where all sorts of unholy activities took place, confirmed his suspicions. Petra, entrenched in the cellar’s common room like a spider, made his hair stand on end.

  Quintín made up his mind to destroy the manuscript. He would get up from the couch, go to the kitchen, and burn it. He had the matches in his pocket. He carried them with him all the time. But he didn’t move. He knew, if he destroyed the novel, Isabel would leave him. Quintín felt like a fly, caught in Petra’s web.

  24

  The Viscounts from Madrid

  IN APRIL 1956 REBECCA and Buenaventura took Patria and Libertad on a six-month trip to Spain. The girls were about to enter La Rosée, in Lausanne, and they would travel with their parents until September before beginning school. Quintín and I were happy during that time. We both loved our apartment. It was very modern, one of the first condominiums to be built in San Juan. We were on the tenth floor, and the Atlantic Ocean was visible from all the windows, so it felt as if we lived aboard a ship.

  I had begun to write short stories, none of which I liked enough to try to have published. Quintín was totally immersed in his job at Mendizabal & Company. By then he had the business well in hand, and since Buenaventura was away, he had been making all the decisions. He ordered new stock, kept track of sales, supervised the office personnel and the workers at the warehouse. He worked ten hours a day and was paid a very low salary, but he didn’t mind; he considered it a necessary apprenticeship.

  In the month of June, three months after the family left for Europe, we received a cable from Buenaventura and Rebecca, informing us that Libertad and Patria, who were sixteen and seventeen, respectively, had married two brothers from a distinguished family in Madrid, Juan and Calixto Osorio de Borbón. A letter to Quintín followed, with full details. The girls had met Juan and Calixto at a horse show sponsored by the Domecq family in Jérez de la Frontera—in the south of Spain—and they had fallen madly in love. The two couples were married in the Church of the Holy Spirit, and the Bishop of Madrid himself officiated at the ceremony. A Papal blessing from Pope Pius XII was read at the Nuptial Mass, and an exclusive reception was held in the gardens of the Ritz Hotel. Several of the Infantas had been present at the wedding, because the Osorio de Borbóns were directly related to the Spanish royal family. In fact, Juan and Carlos were both viscounts, which meant they were grandees of Spain and could keep their heads covered in the presence of the Spanish king.

  Buenaventura invited Juan and Calixto to live in Puerto Rico, because he couldn’t stand the thought of being separated from his two little girls. “Where there’s food enough for six, there’s food enough for eight!” he said to them genially, assuring them they would have a job at Mendizabal & Company. Juan and Calixto accepted his offer. The Spanish nobility had seen their living standards considerably lowered after the Civil War, when Generalísimo Francisco Franco had come into power. Franco had promised that one day he would reinstate the Spanish monarchy and young Juan Carlos de Borbón would become king, but no one knew how many years would pass before this might happen.

  The family arrived in August, two months after the double wedding, having crossed the Atlantic in style on the Queen Elizabeth, which they had boarded at Southampton. At first, Patria and Libertad had wanted their father to buy them each an apartment in Alamares, so they could be on their own, but Rebecca had insisted the house on the lagoon was big enough for all of them. It was better for the Spanish viscounts to get used to their new environment gradually. In Spain, Juan and Calixto were accustomed to servants, four-course meals, and to having their shirts and their bed linen ironed by hand. Patria and Libertad had never ironed a handkerchief in all their lives.

  Rebecca assigned each couple a private suite and furnished it with Spanish antiques. Petra was ordered to attend to the viscounts’ every whim: they were to be served breakfast in bed, just as they were used to in Spain; their shoes were to be shined every morning and a clean shirt laid out on the bed. Brambon was to take them wherever they wanted to go in the family’s Rolls-Royce.

  A month after they arrived at the house, Patria and Libertad both announced they were pregnant. For the next two and a half years, each had a child every nine months, so at the end of the third year there were six babies in the house on the lagoon. Rebecca was delighted. She enjoyed waking up in the morning to the wailing of the babies, and ordered Petra to bring more servants to the house to take care of them. Petra complied; the next morning, seven of her nieces arrived from Las Minas by boat. The cellar became a beehive of activity. Each grandchild had to have a nanny, four dozen diapers had to be washed daily, double the amount of food had to be cooked in the kitchen, and three more cows were brought to the house, because Buenaventura’s was soon milked dry. More and more boats came and went between Las Minas and the house on the lagoon.

  Patria and Libertad were now both viscountesses, and enjoyed acting the part. Since their return to San Juan from Spain, nothing was good enough for them. Everything was boring. In San Juan there were no elegant cafés or five-star restaurants. There was only one musty theater, the Tapia, where old-fashioned dramas and second-rate zarzuelas were put on, whereas in Madrid there were dozens of gilded stages where the latest comedies could be seen. The only thing one could do was go shopping, and so they spent most of their time in San Juan’s most exclusive boutiques, and charged everything to their father’s account.

  Rebecca got along wonderfully with her sons-in-law. She wanted all her friends to meet them, and began giving flamboyant parties at the house. San Juan society was in a turmoil; everyone hoped for an invitation to the Mendizabals’ house, to get to know two authentic members of Spanish royalty. Buenaventura enjoyed the company of his sons-in-law well enough, but occasionally he made fun of them behind their backs. He liked to imitate Juan, who was very proud of his protruding chin—he boasted he had inherited it from Philip V of Spain. Whenever anyone mentioned Juan, Buenaventura would stick out his own chin and strut around the room in an arrogant pose, calling for Diego Velázquez, the Spanish court painter, to come and paint his portrait. When he pronounced the name Borbón, Buenaventura puckered his lips, which were thick and round, as if he were going to blow a whistle, and then he would immediately pinch his nose. He did this little routine every time he uttered his in-laws’ last name, swearing they were of such high rank they stank. This behavior made me wonder if Buenaventura’s legendary parchment with his family tree on it, which he had supposedly brought with him from Valdeverdeja—as well as his coat of arms—had all been a hoax. I always suspected Buenaventura, like many of the Spanish Conquistadors, was really of humble origin, though that was one of the secrets he took with him to his grave.

  25 Buenaventura’s Wake

  MENDIZABAL & COMPANY PAID very good dividends, but after the viscounts’ arrival, the family’s expenses skyrocketed and soon Buenaventura was spending more than he would have liked. Quintín began to be concerned; often, at two o’clock Thursday morning, he’d still be awake, wondering whether he’d be able to pay his employees on Friday. Buenaventura was worried also, but he always seemed to have money at hand. Quintín didn’t know how he managed it—Rebecca’s private income certainly wasn’t enough to cover the new expenditures at the house. Where Buenaventura’s money came from was a mystery, but Quintín didn’t dare ask him about it. Be that as it may, the revenues from Mendizabal’s sales wer
e never enough to pay for everything.

  Quintín worked from six in the morning until five in the afternoon, and then he would drive to the house on the lagoon to talk to Buenaventura about the day’s business and reassure him that things would eventually iron themselves out. Rebecca didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. She wanted to make a good impression on her new in-laws, and help them meet the right people. Formal dinners were held at the house every Saturday night, and Rebecca would seat Juan and Calixto at each end of the dining-room table, with their blue silk sashes across their chests and several medals pinned on their lapels. On Sunday morning we were all supposed to go to Mass together and later perhaps attend a birthday party or a christening. During the week I was expected to accompany Patria and Libertad to the hospital whenever one of the babies got sick or a new baby was about to be born. I had to spend more and more time at the house on the lagoon, and I complained to Quintín about it. He begged me to be patient; it was important to keep Rebecca from becoming resentful, so she would be on our side. Trying to get away from the house on the lagoon was like trying to get out of a briar patch; when you pulled away, you took part of it with you, and it pulled you right back.

  Having his in-laws working at the office was no help to Quintín. Every evening when he returned home, he complained to me about them. Juan and Calixto never got used to the heat in the warehouse; it was like working in a sauna, and at night they couldn’t get a good night’s rest. They woke up at nine after tossing and turning in bed, took a bath, splashed themselves with Eau Imperial, and half an hour later were drenched in perspiration again, so they had to go back under the shower. By the time they arrived at Mendizabal & Company, it was eleven in the morning. They worked for a couple of hours, and by one o’clock they were sitting at La Mallorquina, waiting for their daily crock of eels fried in garlic oil, followed by arroz con pollo and lobster asopao. At three o’clock they went home for their afternoon nap—as they had always done in Spain—and at five they rode back to the office in Buenaventura’s Rolls-Royce. There they usually ran into Quintín, who was about to slide the crossbar of the warehouse’s old doors into place. They joked with him for a few minutes—assuring him that La Puntilla was a well-chosen name for a place where people had to work from dawn to dusk, and warning him that one day one of them would drop dead like an overworked bull at the ring. Quintín stared, smiled politely, and the next day ordered the accountant to take half a day off their paycheck.

  Quintín had entrusted Juan with keeping track of Mendizabal’s stock of imported foods, but his inventories never tallied. He couldn’t see a beggar in the street scavenging from a trash can without giving him half a smoked ham concealed in a paper bag. When the Spanish nuns from the asylum, which was close to La Puntilla, came asking for their weekly dole of ten dollars, Juan always added a case of the best asparagus from Aranjuez, as well as a string of Segovian sausages. Calixto, for his part, was much too lenient with the salesmen he supervised. He was an affable man who never rebuked the salesmen when they came back empty-handed if they failed to collect the monies owed by their customers, the small-grocery-store owners in the poor inland towns.

  This upset Quintín, and whenever he saw Calixto at the house on the lagoon, he scolded him roundly. Mendizabal’s salesmen, he told him, should see themselves as eagles returning to their nest at the end of the day, proud bearers of the fruits of their efforts.

  On their first Christmas at the house, Rebecca gave Juan and Calixto splendid presents: Juan got a red Porsche and Calixto a paso fino horse, to compensate for the measly salary Quintín paid them. Rebecca didn’t want to hear about Mendizabal’s difficulties and was terribly upset if Buenaventura asked her to economize.

  Buenaventura went down to the cellar more often now for his baths, and stayed longer in the spring’s blue grotto. It was the only place he could find peace from the tumult of children and servants at the house, and from Mendizabal’s increasing difficulties. As he drifted on his back in the water’s cool darkness, sprinkled with Petra’s magic herbs, he would forget his financial woes.

  One day in the summer of 1958, a trespasser from Ponce de León Avenue jumped over the tall hibiscus hedge which grew at the back of the property, crossed the garden unseen, and wandered into the cellar. It was empty and quiet. Rebecca was celebrating one of her granddaughters’ birthdays on the terrace, and the servants were all upstairs. The trespasser tiptoed across the common room and heard the murmur of water. He was thirsty, so he headed through the door that led to the grotto.

  It was a hot day in July, and Buenaventura was floating peacefully in the gently flowing water of the basin, his eyes closed. The trespasser saw his clothes neatly laid out on a chair and began to go through his pants. Buenaventura opened his eyes and started to get out of the water, picking up a stone from the bottom of the spring. But the trespasser was much younger than Buenaventura, who was sixty-four, and he put up a fight. Buenaventura finally overpowered him, hitting him over the head with the stone and knocking him out cold. Buenaventura himself slipped on the wet floor and fell heavily to the ground. When he tried to get up, he realized he couldn’t move. A few minutes later one of the servants found them and called for help. The trespasser lay unconscious on the floor; Buenaventura had suffered a fractured hip.

  Buenaventura was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and the trespasser was put in jail. The next day Rebecca made reservations on Pan American for the family to fly with Buenaventura to New York. Ignacio was contacted at Florida State University, where he was in summer school, and he also flew north. Buenaventura was operated on at Mount Sinai Hospital, and for three weeks the whole family kept watch over him. Quintín and I stayed at the Elysée, a modest hotel on 54th Street and Madison; but the rest of the family stayed at the Plaza on Fifth Avenue, running up a huge bill. The operation was a success, and when Buenaventura was released, we all flew back to the island together.

  Once home, Buenaventura was able to walk perfectly well, but he had trouble urinating. He didn’t sleep well; he had a burning sensation in his thighs and felt like urinating all the time. When he tried to relieve himself, however, there would only be a few drops. Rebecca wanted to call a doctor and suggested he go back to the hospital, but Buenaventura refused. He was fine, he said; it was nothing. Petra had always treated him for minor ailments and he didn’t see the need to have more tests. Rebecca was afraid he would have one of his temper tantrums, so she didn’t insist. She suggested they at least get a nurse, but Buenaventura wouldn’t hear of that, either. Petra was giving him medicinal teas, which were bound to make him better. A few days later, he asked Rebecca to move out of their room. He wanted to be alone at night with Petra, who would sleep on a cot next to him.

  Rebecca moved her things to one of the empty guest rooms, apparently relieved that she could now rest through the night. She went back to her tea parties and shopping expeditions, and decided she wasn’t going to worry about Buenaventura anymore.

  “He’s a descendant of the Conquistadors; he’s made of iron,” she said to her friends at the bridge club, without a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Nothing can happen to him.”

  For the next few weeks Petra spent the nights rubbing Buenaventura with the cow-udder unguent and magic snake oil she had prepared. She put Elegguá’s effigy near his bed and lighted a perfumed Cobra next to it. But it was no use. Buenaventura developed a high fever and worsened. One morning he began to hallucinate. He thought he was lying on Lucumí Beach and the waves were washing over him; he couldn’t breathe. Something was troubling him, but when Petra knelt by the bed and put her ear to his mouth, no words came out. Petra picked Buenaventura up—she was still as strong as an ox, and her arms were as thick as tree trunks—and carried him down to the cellar grotto. Neither Rebecca nor anyone else in the family dared to keep her from doing this, since it was Buenaventura’s wish. Quintín and I were the only ones in the family who followed them down. Petra got into the pool with Buenaventura and bathed him s
lowly, letting the cool waters flow over his trembling body.

  As she rocked him gently, singing to him in her strange language, Buenaventura opened his eyes. “You must ask God to forgive me, Petra,” he whispered—though Quintín and I were able to hear. “I had no right to build my house over a public fountain. My whole life was built on water, and water should be free because it comes from God.” When Petra brought Buenaventura out of the bath, he was dead.

  The servants carried Buenaventura’s body upstairs to Rebecca, who was waiting in the bedroom. She had been told the news, but even so she couldn’t make herself go down to the cellar. When she saw Petra helping to carry Buenaventura’s body and holding on to his hand, Rebecca pushed her away and ordered her out of her sight.

  Rebecca’s hair was disheveled and her tearstained face was swollen red. Buenaventura’s body was stretched out on their bed, and she sat down beside him, tears streaming down her face. “You were my king since the day I met you, and you betrayed me,” she cried out bitterly. “One dies as one lives. That’s why, instead of drawing your last breath in the arms of your loving wife, you drowned in the arms of a witch.”

  The wake was held the following day. Buenaventura’s remains were laid out in a bronze casket set in the middle of the living room so all of San Juan society could pay its respects. Rebecca had the family’s silver Rolls-Royce specially prepared to take him to the cemetery: the gray leather seats were removed and an opening was made through the trunk to accommodate the casket. Two days later Buenaventura rode in the car for the last time, and we followed behind, in a caravan laden with flowers. We drove to the family mausoleum, which Buenaventura had had built out of granite from Valdeverdeja. The Bishop of San Juan officiated at a Requiem Mass and blessed the remains, at Rebecca’s request. Most of the servants went to the cemetery and left flowers on Buenaventura’s grave, but Petra didn’t go. Rebecca had forbidden it. She sat praying in the cellar in her high-backed wicker chair, making sure that Buenaventura’s soul arrived safely in the Underworld, following the route of the spring to its source.