House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  QUINTÍN

  QUINTÍN TOLD ISABEL IN no uncertain terms that they had to get rid of Petra. She was over ninety, too old to do any work around the house. She could have an accident at any moment and they would be responsible for her. It was best if her relatives took care of her in Las Minas. He’d be willing to pay her a generous pension; she wouldn’t want for anything.

  Isabel hedged. First she told him Willie loved Petra and would miss her terribly. Then she pointed out that Petra was the only one who knew of Manuel’s whereabouts. Manuel had gone to live in Las Minas with one of her relatives, and if they got rid of her now, they would lose track of him completely.

  Quintín knew that wasn’t true. He could have a detective on Manuel’s case any minute. But he didn’t want to contradict Isabel. He felt sorry for her, she was so completely under Petra’s spell. There was no alternative but to keep Petra around awhile longer. But he knew she would never relent. Petra was going to keep on driving Isabel until she finished the novel.

  The three new chapters in the manuscript were all the result of Petra’s sorcery. He laughed to himself when he remembered thinking—a few weeks earlier—that the novel could become a work of art. And he had been naïve enough to believe that he could help Isabel write it!

  The focus was now on him. History—national or familial—had become much less important. He felt as if he were before a camera with a telephoto lens; every time Isabel took a shot at him, she brought him nearer and nearer. And behind Isabel’s lens he felt Petra’s malevolent eye following his every step, listening to his every word.

  As he read on, Quintín began to worry that he was in some kind of danger. But it was all so absurd! What could Petra do to him? Isabel could rant and rave, paint him as a monster and accuse him of all sorts of crimes, but it was only on paper. As long as the novel wasn’t published, she couldn’t hurt his reputation and she certainly couldn’t hurt him physically. Or could she?

  Quintín looked up from the manuscript. His heart was racing like a hunted animal’s. In the half-light of the reading lamp, he could see the study was in perfect order. Everything was as it always had been. The books were aligned on their shelves. The celadon vase on the antique coffee table was full of fresh flowers. Rebecca’s magnificent Empire desk with its bronze caryatids gleamed in the half-darkness. The Mendizabal family photographs in their brightly polished silver frames stood atop the side table. But none of it reassured Quintín.

  29

  The Art Collector

  FOR YEARS I HELD Petra’s story buried deep in my heart. I never told Quintín what she’d said, and I tried not to think about it. Abby used to say adaptability was the secret of survival—one’s soul should bend and then it wouldn’t break. I had decided to heed her advice. Quintín and I had been married six years. It had been a turbulent period of our lives—we had both lost our parents and had been on the verge of bankruptcy. Ignacio had killed himself, and I grieved for him as if he had been my own brother. We had weathered those storms together and now we had a child. I wanted desperately to believe Quintín was innocent.

  Two months after Manuel was born, Quintín decided we should move to the house on the lagoon. We sold our apartment and with the money from the sale we made some improvements on the house. I felt better when I saw white paint covering the walls like an emulsion; it was as if we were spreading a coat of forgetfulness over them, erasing everything that had happened inside. Quintín sold La Esmeralda, Ignacio’s sailboat, as well as Buenaventura’s silver Rolls-Royce—which was now an antique. Juan had taken his red Porsche with him to Spain, and Calixto had sold his paso fino horses before he left. Quintín and I bought modern furniture, new kitchenware, new sheets and towels.

  Petra, Brambon, and Eulodia stayed on as our servants, although Quintín explained that we wouldn’t be able to pay them very much at the start. Brambon was understanding and agreed to his terms. “The house on the lagoon is our house also,” he said to Quintín quietly. Petra returned to the kitchen, Eulodia dusted and ironed, and order was once again established in our daily routine. There was never any silverware missing, food was well prepared and served on time, the house was immaculately clean. Carmelina was fifteen, and we put a small bed for her next to Manuel’s room, so she could help take care of him. Quintín had a soft spot for her and treated her almost like a member of the family.

  Petra had cared for both brothers when they were children, but her love for Quintín had always been special; she had helped him find his way out of Rebecca’s womb with her prayers and magic unguents and he had been born into her arms. She saw him as the warrior-hero who would be fighting for the well-being of all of us as head of the household and of Gourmet Imports. Quintín, moreover, had been very generous with Carmelina. He was paying for her tuition in a very good high school near Alamares, and for her books and clothes. And he had promised Petra that he would send Carmelina to the university.

  Quintín began to look for ways to invest our income from Gourmet Imports, and instead of buying bonds or securities in both our names, which is what I would have wanted him to do, he began to purchase works of art. Mauricio Boleslaus, a Bohemian count who was one of Quintín’s acquaintances, served as his purchasing agent and informed him of everything that was going on at the European auction houses. Mauricio was later to become a good friend of mine, but at the time I found him too eccentric for my tastes. He had a perfumed goatee, wore a silk shantung jacket with a plaid handkerchief in his pocket, and sported a bow tie. He also wore gray suede gloves, which I found ridiculous considering the heat of the island but which he insisted were necessary because in his trade things had to be delicately handled.

  Mauricio himself told me the story of his life. He was born to a noble family in Bohemia. His family had a small castle with a moat, and his parents sent him to study in Paris. He lived there as an art student for three years, until 1939, when the Germans invaded his country and his family was no longer able to send him money. At the end of the Second World War, he chose not to return to his homeland but remained in Paris. He made his living copying Picasso and Modigliani sketches and selling them as authentic works of art to the local galleries. One day the Paris police got on to Mauricio and he landed in jail. When he was released ten years later, he boarded a plane for New York and from there flew to Puerto Rico, which he had picked at random on the map because it looked faraway enough so he could live incognito. A short time after his arrival, he opened a small but very chic art gallery, the Golden Goblet, in Old San Juan.

  Once on the island, he mended his ways and never forged anything again. His expertise was so great that he could survive easily by buying and selling paintings and sculptures, since the local bourgeoisie was starting to develop a taste for art. In the sixties he still had relatives in Czechoslovakia and friends in Paris who ransacked the run-down palaces of the European countryside for works of art, which he would purchase at very low prices. They were sound investments. After all, there was a limited supply of Old Masters, and as they diminished in number, they rapidly increased in value. Mauricio’s local clients were enchanted; several were powerful people, and soon he became a legal resident of the island. Thanks to Mauricio, by 1970 Quintín had amassed a serious art collection and had invested more than a million dollars in paintings and sculptures. Mauricio had sold him a magnificent Madonna by Carlo Crivelli; a dramatic St. Andrew nailed to an X-shaped cross, by Giuseppe Ribera; a blind St. Lucia, who stood holding her own eyes in a little transparent saucer, by Lucca Giordano; and an impressive painting by Filippo D’Angeli, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, in which a dozen handsome angels were tumbling into the abyss of hell.

  Mauricio had another side to his business dealings, however, which I thought was the real reason he wore suede gloves. He was very sociable and had numerous acquaintances on the island. Ever since he opened the Golden Goblet, he made a point of being scrupulously honest, and people with money trusted him. When things went well with a collector and his business aff
airs prospered, Mauricio would offer him the best buys in the art world. If things went badly for his client, however, Mauricio could be an even greater help. As soon as he found out one of his buyers had gone bankrupt and government authorities were about to go into his home and put a lien on everything he owned, Mauricio would don his silk shantung jacket and his gray gloves and he would pay a visit of condolence.

  “Life is difficult these days,” he would say to his client in commiserating tones as he sat politely in the living room, drinking tea. “What with the worldwide rise in oil prices and the way our island’s government is always veering the ship of state in opposite directions—now to the right toward statehood, now to the left toward commonwealth or independence—consumers and creditors are exceedingly jittery. It’s no one’s fault if a business suddenly takes a nosedive and one wakes up one day with no credit at the bank. But you mustn’t worry, my friend. You have a treasure around you, which you have acquired thanks to me. All you need to do is let me dispose of it as diligently and as discreetly as possible.” And his client, who was usually at his wit’s end, would run to his safe at the house, take out his wife’s jewelry, and give it to Mauricio, together with the paintings, sculptures, and other art pieces he had acquired, so Mauricio could sell them away from the island.

  Mauricio was the one who let Quintín know he was squandering one of his greatest artistic resources: the house on the lagoon itself. “Milan Pavel, my fellow countryman, was one of the geniuses of our century. You’re living in his masterpiece, and you’re not doing anything about it,” he said one day. “All it would take to restore this house to its original glory would be a little archaeological research. I’m sure the original arrangement of the rooms can be traced with some digging here and there, because the foundations are all in place.”

  Quintín didn’t need much convincing. He had always had an enormous admiration for Pavel and in his youth he had wanted to write a book about him. If he could restore the house to its original state, he would feel closer to Rebecca; the house had been very much a part of her. He immediately set himself to the task. He visited the archives of the School of Architecture at the University of Puerto Rico, and sure enough, he found Pavel’s copy of the Wasmuth Portfolio, which the Czech architect had taken from Wright’s studio when he fled Chicago with the original plans for many of his houses. One of them was the plan of the house on the lagoon.

  A month after his conversation with Mauricio, Quintín had us move to the nearby Alamares Hotel. A demolition crew was brought to the house and in a matter of days it leveled Buenaventura’s Gothic arches and granite turrets. Slowly a fairy-tale palace began to rise from the rubble. Artisans were brought from Italy, and they restored the glittering mosaic rainbow over the front door. The Tiffany-glass windows, the alabaster skylights, and the burlwood floors were all reproduced, so they looked exactly as they had in Rebecca’s time. When the house was almost finished, the scaffolding and wooden partitions were removed, and it was joined once more to its original Art Nouveau terrace. In September of 1964, a year after construction had begun, we moved back into the house.

  The house was spectacular, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable about spending so much money on it. How could we afford such luxuries? Was it true, as Quintín had told me, that the sales of Gourmet Imports had skyrocketed in the past two years? The difficult economic situation on the island—gasoline was twice as expensive as on the mainland, and unemployment was up twenty-five percent—had been exacerbated by the recent political violence. There were strikes and student demonstrations every day; one couldn’t go out into the streets without encountering a rock-throwing mob around the corner.

  In spite of everything, Gourmet Imports was making money, and Quintín began expanding into the food-processing business. He opened tomato-, mango-, and pineapple-canning plants on the outskirts of the city. My life was blessed in many ways. I had a beautiful son and a magnificent house. I could read and write as much as I wanted, once I finished supervising the household chores. And yet I never felt truly happy. When I least expected it, I would feel a tiny doubt begin to sprout like an alfalfa root deep in my heart. Where had the money for the restoration of the house come from? Where did Quintín get the income for his expensive works of art? It was true Quintín worked from sunup to sundown, and he was very knowledgeable in business. But after my conversation with Petra, I could never be sure of anything.

  Manuel developed into a strong boy. He had inherited his great-grandfather Arístides’s imposing physique and grew to six feet two inches in height. He was always good-natured. As a baby he drank milk from a bottle which he held by himself, and went to sleep the instant you put him in his crib. He was very obedient. When Quintín asked him to give Fausto and Mefistófeles a bath before going out to play baseball, for instance, he never argued, but would bow his head and do as he was told.

  Manuel took after me in only one respect: his eyes. They were large and flint-black, like all the Monforts’. When he was brought to my hospital room the day after his birth, I remember thinking his eyes were so dark his tears would probably look like ink. I took him in my arms and stared at him enraptured, and he stared right back as if examining me in turn. I couldn’t believe he was so perfect—his flesh a part of my flesh, his blood my own blood.

  Manuel was remarkably self-assured. I never saw in him the least hint of violence; no tantrums, no fits of temper, no useless tears. The few times Quintín ordered Manuel to do something he shouldn’t have—he once asked him to do his homework over again when it was already perfect—Manuel gave his father one of his silent Monfort looks and Quintín didn’t dare say anything more.

  One day about a month before Manuel’s third birthday, Quintín came home early from the office and sat down next to me on the study’s green leather couch. He looked tired and had deep shadows around his eyes. “Today Mother has been dead four years,” he said, sighing, “and I’ve finally made up my mind to ask you to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I don’t think we should have any more children, and I’d like you to take steps to prevent it.”

  I looked at him in dismay. “Why?” I asked. “You know I want a large family. Besides, kids are healthier when they grow up together.”

  Quintín got up from the couch and began to pace morosely in front of me. “That’s precisely what worries me, Isabel,” he said softly. “I don’t want a big family. I’m tired of siblings flying at each other’s throats. I simply couldn’t take it if it happened to us.”

  “And what if our second child were to be a girl? I never had any sisters and I would love to have a daughter; she’d keep me company.” But Quintín wouldn’t even consider it. “You know how much I love you, Isabel; you’re the most important person in my life. But if you get pregnant a second time, I’ll have to ask you to get an abortion; I’m simply not going to go through the same anguish I went through with Ignacio all over again.”

  I know I should have been angry with Quintín when he said that, but instead, I was terribly sad. All of a sudden I saw myself when I was three years old, playing with my dolls under the terebinth tree behind the house at Trastalleres. I could hear Mother’s cry again as she fell on the bathroom floor. I swore I would never have an abortion.

  30

  The Magic Birthmark

  IT WASN’T UNTIL THREE years after Ignacio’s death that Quintín began to feel guilty. I couldn’t understand why he had such a delayed reaction; maybe it had to do with loneliness. Quintín had always been a loner. He’d go fishing in his Bertram yacht early in the morning, with Brambon accompanying him once in a while, or he’d play tennis at the Sports Club with casual acquaintances, but he’d never get together with them off the court. He had no social life; the family had always been his whole world. The Mendizabals were a clan; they hated and loved each other, but for them the rest of the world didn’t exist. And all of a sudden the clan had vanished into thin air. Strange as it may seem, Quintín began to miss them. He would
go whole nights without sleep and spend hours wandering about the house without turning on the lights. One Sunday when we were at church, I overheard him talking to the priest, asking him to say a Mass for Ignacio’s soul.

  The only thing that eased Quintín’s melancholy was his art collection. He stopped going to the office and would spend hours sitting in front of his Carlo Crivelli Madonna, which hung in our living room, over our blue damask sofa. It was a traditional composition: the Virgin in profile, hands piously folded in prayer, surrounded by a colorful garland of fruits and flowers. The Madonna had a serene beauty: her face, especially her high forehead and her temples, seemed almost translucent, as if chiseled in alabaster. In the months that followed, Quintín went through a second religious conversion. He bought many paintings with spiritual themes, which he found consoling and inspiring. He would stand before these paintings for hours, meditating on the suffering allotted us in this world. “We are all born on Christmas Day,” he would say to me, “and in the end we are all crucified.”

  Margarita Antonsanti arrived from Río Negro at the house on the lagoon on May 15, 1965. I’ll never forget the date. Quintín was working in the garage, fastening the last glass globule to our new crystal chandelier, which was to be hung in the living room. When Quintín saw Margarita get out of the car, he was amazed. She had delicate Renaissance features and wore her hair in golden tresses fastened around her head, exactly like the Madonna in his painting. Quintín opened the door of the car and greeted her cordially. But he had only seen her in profile. When Margarita stepped out and he saw her face, he was so horrified he dropped the globule he was holding on the floor, and it broke in two. On the right side of Margarita’s alabaster forehead, half an inch above the perfect arch of her eyebrow, she had an oval-shaped birthmark out of which grew a glossy black lock of hair. Margarita was conscious of the strong impression she made on strangers. She didn’t dare return Quintín’s greeting; she simply turned around and carried her old suitcase up the stairs.