House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  Margarita was my second cousin and she was nineteen. Her father, Uncle Eustaquio, and my mother had been first cousins, and her parents had come to visit us in Ponce when I was a child. When Grandfather Vicenzo Antonsanti sold his coffee farm in Río Negro, Uncle Eustaquio’s father—my great-uncle—continued to live there. At first Uncle Eustaquio—a widower—had been lucky not to have sold his part of the farm. Three years before he came to see me at the house on the lagoon, Uncle was visited by a group of scientists from the mainland who said they were interested in buying the farm to build a giant ionospheric observatory on it. The topography was just right, they said; the mountains rose all around, forming the rim of a perfect hollow. A mesh radar could be built at its center, aimed at the stars. The radio observatory would be the largest in the world, and its mission would be to discover whether or not there was intelligent life somewhere in the universe other than on Earth.

  Uncle Eustaquio was a hardworking farmer and his coffee farm provided him with a reasonable income. But he found the idea of listening to the stars fascinating. He refused to sell his land to the scientists, but he was willing to lease it to them for five years. He was thrilled that such an important experiment could be performed on his own farm, and he could go on growing his coffee shrubs under the observatory’s radar; it would shield his crop from the sun, but wouldn’t prevent the rain from getting to it.

  The ionospheric observatory was built, and Uncle Eustaquio couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw how large it was. It was as if the astronomers had hung a huge mosquito net over the entire forest. But he soon realized he had made a mistake; his coffee shrubs produced fewer and fewer beans. Nobody could explain why the radar was affecting the crops, but Uncle Eustaquio was losing money and had to take out a loan from the bank. The following year he couldn’t pay it back, and had to request a second loan. When he realized he was going to lose the farm, he came to San Juan to ask Quintín if he could tide him over for the third year of his contract. He had no money to pay us interest, but he could send us Margarita, his youngest daughter, who could work for us, and we wouldn’t have to pay her anything.

  “This could be your chance to atone for what happened to Ignacio,” I told Quintín after hearing Uncle Eustaquio’s story. “If you can save an old man and his family from bankruptcy, maybe God will forgive you and you’ll be able to sleep again. A good deed will make amends for your sin.”

  Quintín lent Uncle Eustaquio the money, and Margarita came to work for us. She was a high-school senior at the time and had to leave school, but it was only temporary. She would go back to school as soon as her father had repossessed the farm. I wasn’t going to let her work for us gratis, in any case; I opened a savings account under her name, so she could use the money to go to the university. If Quintín was doing as much for Carmelina, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t help out Margarita, who was from my side of the family.

  Margarita became like a daughter to me; having her around the house was a pleasure. Her smiling face brought me fond memories of mountain outings and family picnics. But the real reason she made me happy was that I finally had someone to talk to. I was from Ponce and didn’t have many friends in San Juan. Quintín and I had gradually grown apart. It was as if we stood on opposite shores of the lagoon, and no matter how we shouted, neither could hear what the other one was saying. I felt very lonely sometimes.

  Margarita changed all that. She brought me news of my cousins who were still living in Río Negro, and of relatives in Ponce. We talked about books and music, gossiped to our heart’s content. I could tell Margarita about my fears and hopes almost as if she were an adult. Her dreadful birthmark made her aware of other people’s needs, made her more compassionate and sympathetic than anyone I had ever known. After so many years living in the midst of people who were loyal to the Mendizabals, I felt I now had someone I could trust.

  Margarita was educated and had been brought up to be a lady. I thought she would do an excellent job of caring for Manuel, and soon after she arrived I suggested to Quintín that we put her in the small bedroom next to our son’s, where Carmelina had been sleeping. Carmelina could go back to the servants’ quarters.

  From the moment Margarita arrived at the house, Petra declared war on her. She was polishing silverware in the pantry when Margarita walked up the stairs with her suitcase in her hand. “That must be the new girl, just arrived from the country,” Petra said to Eulodia. “With that hairy cockroach sitting on her forehead, nothing good can come of this.” She was furious when she found out that Margarita was to sleep in Carmelina’s room and that she would be taking care of Manuel. Now Carmelina could go to school in the morning and clean house in the afternoon.

  “Margarita isn’t a servant,” I explained to Petra a few days later, when I couldn’t bear her long face anymore. “She’s my second cousin. She’s only spending a few months with us and has generously offered to teach Manuel to read and write, as well as help take care of him.”

  Margarita was able to smooth things over between herself and the servants. She was modest and good-natured; when Petra railed against her, she humbly accepted the scolding and asked to be forgiven. She took excellent care of Manuel; she was patient, and didn’t miss an opportunity to teach him manners. She washed and ironed his clothes, cleaned his room, and kept his toys in place. Two months after she came to us, Manuel had learned to read.

  I soon discovered there was something special about Margarita. Her presence in a room had a calming effect. If Quintín had a marketing problem at the office, Margarita would walk in and he would think of a solution. If Petra was making a soufflé and Margarita came into the kitchen, the soufflé would be perfect; if she came into the study when I was trying to write, the sentences would fly from my typewriter as if by magic.

  Carmelina was nineteen, the same age as Margarita, but they were very different. Margarita was ethereal-looking—tall and willowy; Carmelina had a sensuous body, “with rounded hips that moved like caldrons on the stove,” as Quintín would say. Margarita’s skin wasn’t white. It was more the color of sandalwood, as is often the case with people from the mountains.

  Margarita wore her hair carefully braided; Carmelina’s stood like an unruly halo around her head. Margarita washed her face every day with soap and water; Carmelina loved perfume, creams, and powders, and she was always filching them from my bathroom. Margarita wore modest cotton frocks and Carmelina liked brightly colored T-shirts and Levi’s. “You’re a timid turtledove, and I’m a black swan,” I heard her say to Margarita once. “We were brought to this duck pond by mistake, and one day we’ll both fly off and be free.”

  Carmelina was quick-tempered and high-strung; she often talked back to Quintín and to me. Petra said we shouldn’t mind; she blamed it all on the bolt of lightning that had fallen near her crib when she was a baby. Petra was immensely proud of her great-granddaughter and she admired her independent spirit, the way she spoke “of the ways of whites,” as opposed to “the ways of blacks.” When I heard her talk like that, I wondered if somehow she remembered Patria and Libertad’s silly prank, when they had painted her all white and she almost died.

  Carmelina hated what she called “white man’s food,” like T-bone steaks or coq au vin; she enjoyed pork chops and mofongo, green plantain mashed with pork rind. She loved crabs, and one of her favorite pastimes was setting traps for them. She built the traps herself—a small wooden box with a sliding lid in front, held by a wire which came in at the back, with a piece of ham dipped in honey attached to the end of the wire. She knew crabs loved honey and were carnivorous—something unusual in crustaceans. She liked to watch them seize the sliver of ham with a claw, as the lid in front of the trap suddenly fell.

  Carmelina and Margarita became good friends in spite of their differences. Carmelina was carefree; she was always singing romantic songs as she dusted the furniture and mopped the floors. She was never put off by Margarita’s deformity. She was used to seeing worse in Las Minas, she sai
d, which was full of maimed veterans of the Vietnam War. On Sundays the girls went to the amusement park or would board the ferry that crossed from San Juan to the town of Cataño every fifteen minutes. For ten cents they could ride the waves for half an hour and dream of sailing one day to distant shores. Margarita would then reminisce about the coffee farm where she was born, and Carmelina would relate how her lame mother had been raped by a black sailor and how she had been brought to the house on the lagoon after being fished out of the mud in Las Minas. She wasn’t going to be like her mother, though. She was never going to have children. When she graduated from high school, she was going to move to New York, where she would become a black fashion model for Ebony or Jet, one of the black magazines she had seen at the drugstore.

  Margarita listened and agreed. She was never going to get married or have children, either; besides, no one would ever want her, because of her ugly mole. Her father had said she’d better get used to being single, because she was going to stay at home in Río Negro and take care of him when he got old. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to do that. With Carmelina by her side, she wouldn’t be afraid to live in New York. Leaning on the boat’s railing at dusk, the girls looked at the receding lights of the city and dreamed of the day they would leave for New York together, have their own apartment, and live their own lives. I worried about this close friendship, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

  One day Quintín came into my room and pronounced it “unwise” for Manuel to go on looking at Margarita’s deformity. “The beautiful and the good should always go together,” he said, “and with her around, Manuel will take ugliness for granted. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to have her operated on? Of course, she’s your relative. I’ll leave it up to you.”

  I smiled at Quintín’s puerile reasoning, but I thought the operation wasn’t such a bad idea. I was concerned about Margarita’s future. Her dreams of going to live in the States, which she had confided to me one night during one of our tête-à-têtes, seemed not only impractical but risky. Margarita had led a sheltered life—as Uncle Eustaquio’s favorite daughter—and she wouldn’t know how to fend for herself in the urban jungle, as Carmelina undoubtedly would. Carmelina was streetwise and resourceful; no one could put anything over on her. But Margarita was not cut out for a life of adventure and danger. She would be much happier in her own home, with a husband and children.

  The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced I had to help Margarita find a good husband. And without her mole she would have a much better opportunity. A few weeks later I mentioned the operation to her. At first she was adamant and wouldn’t even consider it. “The mole has always brought me good luck,” she said. “I’m never conscious of it, and if someone really wants to be my friend, it doesn’t bother them.”

  “But what would you do in New York?” I asked. “Carmelina can work as a model, waitress, hotel maid, whatever she wants; but I don’t see you doing any of those things.” On the other hand, if she made a good match in San Juan, she could have her own family. “Once you have your operation,” I said, “we’ll introduce you to some of our friends—there are many nice young men in San Juan, and eventually you’ll find your other half.” Margarita laughed. “Mother was like you,” she said. “She also thought the operation would help me to find a husband, but we never had enough money for it.” And then she whispered, “Are you sure it’s possible? Do you think I can be like other girls and find someone who can love me?” I didn’t reply; I simply took her in my arms.

  When Petra found out that Margarita was to have her birthmark removed, she was very upset. She was first and foremost a medicine woman and was genuinely concerned about Margarita’s well-being. She went to her room, knelt on the floor in front of Elegguá. “Olorún, ka kó koi ké bé! Holy of Holies,” she prayed. “Please have pity on the poor girl. The mole sitting on her forehead protects her from the evil eye. The day they take it out, the same thing will happen to Margarita that happened to the warrior who slew the dragon in the mountains and took a bath in its blood. A mango leaf clung to his back and the blood didn’t get to it, and that’s where the enemy struck.”

  When I heard Petra’s prayer, I began to worry, but all the arrangements had been made. Quintín and I took Margarita to the hospital; she went into the operating room and was given anesthesia. No sooner was the mole removed than she went into convulsions, and a few hours later, bizarrely, she was dead. The doctor’s official report was that she had died of advanced bilharzia—a parasite common in mountain rivers which enters the body through the soles of one’s feet. It lodges in the liver, the doctor said, and isn’t noticeable until many years later, when the person is already near death. But we knew better at the house.

  Uncle Eustaquio came down from the hills and insisted on taking Margarita’s body with him to Río Negro; Quintín and I paid for the burial expenses. I was overcome with grief. Uncle Eustaquio had entrusted Margarita to me, and I hadn’t known how to care for her.

  QUINTÍN

  THE LAST FEW DAYS, Isabel had been almost cordial toward Quintín. She was affable at dinnertime and one night she began to discuss with him Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which she had been reading. She found it fascinating. The literary convention of the letters exchanged between Monsieur de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil was particularly effective. The characters communicated indirectly, through a delayed echo. “Between the writing and the reading of a text, things change, the world goes round, marriages and love affairs are made and unmade. Wasn’t all storytelling, in a sense, like that?” Isabel asked, as she took a sip of wine from her glass. “Each chapter is like a letter to the reader; its meaning isn’t completed until it is read by someone.”

  So she knew he knew about her manuscript and was deliberately teasing him, taunting him! His only recourse was to play along with her, try to get the upper hand at her own game.

  “Literature is fluid,” Quintín admitted, “like life itself. History, on the other hand, is something very different. It is also an art, but it deals with the truth. As a record of human endeavors, history is unalterable. A novelist may write lies, but a historian never can. Literature never changes anything, but history can alter the course of events. Alexander the Great identified himself with Achilles, for example; he became invincible and almost conquered the world. Therefore, history is much more important than literature.”

  Isabel looked at him with her flint-black eyes. “I don’t agree with you at all, Quintín,” she said. “History doesn’t deal with the truth any more than literature does. From the moment a historian selects one theme over another in order to write about it, he is manipulating the facts. The historian, like the novelist, observes the world through his own tinted glass, and describes it as if it were the truth. But it’s only one side of the truth, because imagination—what you call lies—is also a part of the truth. Like the dark side of the moon, it’s no less real because it can’t be seen. Our veiled passions, our ambivalent emotions, our unaccountable hates and preferences can best be understood through novels, and heard across the centuries. But I know you’ll never agree with me, so we may as well drop the subject.”

  But Quintín wouldn’t give in. He wanted to bring the conversation back to Isabel’s manuscript, make her admit she was writing it, but he didn’t know exactly how. “A novel can also be a form of escape—a way out of a desperate situation,” he went on. “It’s like a bottle with a message in it, thrown into the sea to be picked up by a tourist on a faraway beach.”

  “And it can also be a Molotov cocktail,” Isabel retorted, evidently annoyed. Quintín laughed nervously at her joke, and an uneasy silence hung between them.

  In spite of their disagreement, that evening Isabel approached Quintín tenderly, apparently bent on reconciliation. He gave in and that night they made love, after almost two months. Petra had gone for a week to her granddaughter Alwilda’s house in Las Minas, and took her two great-nieces, Georgina
and Victoria, with her. Willie was in Florida, spending a week with one of his friends from Pratt Institute. Only Brambon was in the house, and he never came up from the cellar.

  It was a moonless night, and the sky was a dome of fiery pinpoints above their heads. It reminded them of their nights in the garden of the house on Aurora Street in Ponce. They undressed in the dark and walked hand in hand out onto the terrace. A cool breeze rose from the lagoon as Isabel mounted him, wrapping her legs around his thighs, her skin like warm marble. She clasped her hands behind his neck and began to sway back and forth slowly, pulling him toward oblivion.

  31

  The Forbidden Banquet

  QUINTÍN BLAMED ME FOR Margarita’s death, in spite of the fact that he was the one who had suggested the operation in the first place. If I hadn’t asked him to help Uncle Eustaquio, he said, we would never have brought Margarita to the house and she wouldn’t have died. Not only had I lost a cousin who was almost like a daughter, I had to renounce my own world all over again. Now I would have no one to talk to about my childhood home and about the memories we shared.

  We all cried for her. Manuel kept asking for Margarita and missed her at night; Petra and Eulodia kept mentioning all the things she had done to help out at the house. Carmelina, on the other hand, was angry and dry-eyed; she kept whispering half-crazed things under her breath, reproaching Margarita for having gone off by herself, leaving her behind. I felt crushed by the loss, and by the emotional turmoil around me.

  The consequences of Margarita’s death went beyond anything I could ever have imagined. After my return from the funeral at Río Negro, Quintín began accepting invitations to all kinds of parties, which I didn’t have the least desire to attend. “I’m tired of so much praying and crying!” he said. “I don’t want to see any more long faces in this house because of Margarita Antonsanti’s death. Good sailors prove themselves in bad weather, like Buenaventura used to say, and we have no alternative but to outlast the storm!”