Eccentric Neighborhood (11 page)

“I know exactly why you’ve come, Don Esteban. I have the report right here. You mustn’t worry about anything,” Manuel Felipe said, picking up a sheaf of papers from his desk. “I promise that by tomorrow you’ll get the squatters out and be able to sell your farms.” And he stood up to shake Don Esteban’s hand.

The next day Don Esteban awoke feeling ill and couldn’t get out of bed. Tía Artemisa put on her riding boots, climbed back into her jeep, and drove out to Don Esteban’s farms, but this time a government marshal went with her. She gave each squatter a little bottle of holy water, a color portrait of the Virgin of Charity, a scapular with Jesusito painted on it, and an order of arrest for any trespasser who didn’t get off Don Esteban’s land in twenty-four hours. The invaders left one by one, and a few weeks later Don Esteban could finally sell his land.

Tía Artemisa was exultant, but her happiness didn’t last very long. Don Esteban had a heart attack and passed away six months later. In his will he left the
central
Santa Rosa, as well as all his land, to Blanca Sánchez, Manuel Felipe’s sixteen-year-old daughter. The day after the funeral Artemisa received a small box in the mail, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string, together with a handwritten note. The note was from Don Esteban, thanking her for everything she had done in Blanca Rosa’s name and excusing himself for never having asked for her hand. Inside the box was the three-carat perfect solitaire, in memory of what might have been. Artemisa took the ring out of the box and solemnly put it on.

And that’s why Tía Artemisa always dressed in widow’s weeds and wore a diamond solitaire on her finger until the day she died.

I
N TÍA LAKHMÉ’S OPINION
, a beautiful dress was just as valid a work of art as a sculpture or a painting, because fashion had to do with imagination as well as with style. In fact, fashion was the truest of all the arts, precisely because it was so perishable. “A beautiful dress is like a butterfly,” she’d say to Abuela Valeria when she wanted to buy a new gown. “It glitters in the sun for a few minutes, and then it’s blown away by the wind.
La mode, c’est la mort
.” And if Abuela Valeria complained that the dress was too expensive and that Lakhmé already had three new ones in her closet, she would kiss and embrace her and tell her: “We have the money, Mother, why shouldn’t we spend it? Are we going to take it with us to the grave?

Tía Lakhmé was so beautiful she could have been a Hollywood star, and maybe that’s why she was so unhappy. There’s something about perfect beauty that puts people at its mercy; one doesn’t want to disturb it or ask anything of it; it’s a privilege just to be able to bask in its light.

Lakhmé was tall and willowy. She had red hair and curly eyelashes like Rita Hayworth’s and the silky long legs of Marlene Dietrich. She wore only clothes by exclusive designers, such as Harvey Bering, Ceil Chapman, and Christian Dior, and she always made it a point to have her silk evening shoes dyed the same shade as her gown, whether it was ruby-red, sapphire-blue, or emerald-green.

Abuelo Alvaro died in 1926, when Lakhmé was only three, but Abuela Valeria didn’t worry about her. Lakhmé was so beautiful Valeria was sure that one day she was going to marry a millionaire. When Tía Siglinda and Clarissa got married and left Emajaguas, Valeria gave their room to Lakhmé. She had it exquisitely decorated in white satin because she always saw Lakhmé as a future bride. It had white satin drapes, and the bed displayed a white satin bedspread under which Lakhmé shipped out every night to a world of dreams. Her dressing table had a three-paneled beveled mirror that surrounded her in its embrace; whenever she looked at herself in it she saw her perfect profile repeated in the distance ad infinitum.

Everybody at Emajaguas was a little bit in awe of Tía Lakhmé. She was always invited to the best parties and got to dance with the most sought-after partners, but she was terribly choosy and wasn’t easily satisfied. Nobody dared find fault with her, although thanks to her perfect sense of taste, there were few opportunities to do so. Only Aurelio had the nerve to criticize her, and then strictly in jest. “You needn’t be so proud of your good looks, Lakhmé,” Aurelio would say. “Remember, you’re the youngest one in the family, and as such, you’re its tail end. And you know what hides under the tail.”

When we were teenagers, my female cousins and I all wanted to follow Tía Lakhmé’s example, but when we grew up and saw how many times Lakhmé got married, left the family home, and came back to Emajaguas like a plucked chicken after each divorce, we stopped wanting to be like her. Lakhmé was the perpetual bride, forever stranded on Emajaguas’s shores.

Entering Tía Lakhmé’s room was like entering a fashion boutique. We would try on her evening gowns and beg her to get rid of this one or that one because it looked
fanée
and was already a year old. I hated wearing my elder cousins’ hand-me-downs, but I loved wearing Tía Lakhmé’s. They made me feel like Cinderella dressed in her fairy godmother’s clothes.

Like all but one of my aunts, Tía Lakhmé had attended the University of Puerto Rico. She had studied liberal arts for two years and always had books in her room, but I never saw her read any of them. Clarissa was forever poring over her books of agriculture, history, and sociology. Tía Dido’s room was full of poetry books, and Tía Artemisa’s reminded one of a sacristy, with prayer books lying all over the place. But in Tía Lakhmé’s room, books served a very different purpose.

The minute my cousins and I walked through her door, Tía Lakhmé would make us all stand in a row and would balance a book on each of our heads. “You must learn how to walk keeping your chin up, my dears!” she would say. “If you look down, the world will look down on
you
!” And when she curled our eyelashes, trimmed our cuticles, and plucked our eyebrows with her steel tweezers, drawing them into perfect Cupid bows and making tears come to our eyes, she’d say to us: “
La que quiere azul celeste, que le cueste
!”—“She who wants cloud soufflé must learn to suffer!” But all her wisdom wasn’t enough to teach Tía Lakhmé how to deal with the injustices of this world.

“I caught my first husband,” Tía Lakhmé told us once, “when I was nineteen years old, and I was sure I had found my mate for life. It was 1942, and Tom Randolph was a first lieutenant in the marines, the handsomest man I had ever met. I fell in love with him at the pool at the officers’ club in Guayamés. He was over six feet tall and looked just like Johnny Weissmuller.

“Our meeting was the result of an accident that was almost tragic. I didn’t know how to swim, but it was terribly hot and the pool at the officers’ club looked very enticing, so I decided to cool off at the shallow end. But the pool’s bottom was slippery and it slanted abruptly; before I knew it I was sliding down with nothing to grab on to. Soon the water was over my head and my hands were the only thing above it. I tried to keep calm and walk back up, but I kept slipping toward the deep end. Then I panicked. I was sure I was going to drown. I looked around as if in a dream, my eyes wide open, staring at my own death. When I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, I began to swallow tons of water. All of a sudden someone dived into the pool and came swimming toward me. He whisked me up in his arms and brought me to the surface in a second.

“He laid me on the ground and pumped the water out of my lungs. The minute he touched me, the positive current of the universe began to course through me. A week later, Tom came to Emajaguas to meet Mother. ‘Lakhmé and I love each other,’ he told her, ‘and we want to get married before my ship sails. I’d like you to give us your blessing.’

“Valeria saw us holding hands and felt her heart grow heavy.

“‘There’s nothing we can do with our lives except live them,’ she said, shaking her head resignedly. ‘If this man makes you happy, go ahead and marry him, Lakhmé. But please wait until he comes back from the war. Do you want to be a widow at twenty?’

“‘But he may never come back, Mother,’ I begged. ‘And then I’ll never have known love.’ So I kissed and hugged Mother and ran out of the house with my handsome marine to find a judge.

“Tom shipped out the following day, and for the next year he sailed the Pacific aboard a navy destroyer. He was at the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, took part in the landing at Guadalcanal, and returned to the island when the war was over. He looked more like a god than ever as he walked through Emajaguas’s door. He was still in uniform and his chest gleamed with campaign ribbons and medals, his officer’s cap sitting jauntily on his head. When he saw me, he picked me up like a feather and kissed me on the mouth. It was the happiest day of my life.

“Mother gave us a wedding present of fifty thousand dollars, which was part of the money from the sale of La Constanza, the farm Father had singled out for me before he died. Tom and I bought a bungalow in the hills behind Guayamés with part of the money and we lived in seventh heaven for a few years.

“Tom was the perfect American husband. He was gentle and kind, he never touched alcohol or looked at other women, and he didn’t mind helping with the housework. He dried the dishes and took out the garbage after dinner every night. But because of the severe wounds he had suffered in combat during his stint in the Pacific he couldn’t hold a job. His nerves were shattered, and three years after we were married we had spent practically all our money on medical treatments. Then disaster struck. Tom had a massive heart attack and keeled over as he was working in the vegetable garden. I couldn’t move him and there was no one in the house to help. I ran to the telephone to call Mother, and Urbano drove up the hill to our bungalow with the speed of lightning. But by the time we got to the hospital, my poor Tom was dead.

“Valeria invited me to travel to Spain with her, to take my mind off Tom. In Madrid I met Rodrigo de Zelaya, a swarthy-looking Spaniard who was ambassador to Morocco. Rodrigo was very handsome and he loved to swagger around Madrid in his riding habit—jodhpurs, boots, suede jacket, and all. The only thing odd about him was the nail on his right little finger, which was three inches long. Rodrigo used it to stir the perfumed Arabian coffee in his demitasse every morning.

“I met Rodrigo at a fox hunt at Villaviciosa, a
cortijo
on the outskirts of Madrid that belonged to a cousin of the king of Spain. I arrived dressed in a fashionable red hunting jacket, riding whip in hand, and English leather boots to my knees. ‘Do you really know how to ride?’ Rodrigo asked when he saw me so elegantly dressed. ‘Of course I do,’ I said confidently. ‘My father taught me how.’ And I easily mounted the black stallion he was holding for me, which was pawing the ground restlessly.

“I
did
know how to ride the delicate, small-framed
paso fino
horses of the
central
Plata. All you had to do was sit back in the western saddle and enjoy yourself. You could even drink a glass of champagne without spilling a drop as you rode through the cane fields, because they were as smooth as velvet and on level terrain. But I had never used an English saddle, much less in the Spanish countryside. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to post, how to pivot my weight on my knees or lean forward to urge the horse into a canter. No sooner did I get into the saddle of the huge Spanish stallion than it sensed my insecurity and galloped across the plain like all hell. I hung on for dear life, but the beast was impossible to control. Rodrigo finally caught up with me. He made me get off my horse and had me climb onto his. I sat on the rump and held on to his waist, and the positive current of the universe began to course through me again. When Rodrigo asked me to marry him a few weeks later, I said yes.

“Rodrigo had lived in Morocco for ten years, and he had adopted many Arab customs. He had embraced the Muslim religion and asked me if I minded marrying him in a Muslim ceremony. We would get married in Rabat, he said, since mosques were forbidden in Spain. I thought it all marvelously exciting but Valeria was worried. ‘Your fiance reminds me of a one-clawed hawk. Once you go off with him to Rabat, you’ll be in his clutches. Why don’t you get to know him better in Madrid before you get married?’ But I couldn’t wait.

“Mother sailed back home full of foreboding. When she arrived in Guayamés, she sold another of my bonds and sent me a hundred thousand dollars through a bank transfer, four trunks full of clothes by ship, and all my jewelry by diplomatic valise. I deposited the money in a joint account in Rabat and gave Rodrigo a checkbook so we could both draw against it.

“At first I had a wonderful time. We lived in a beautiful palace made of blue mosaics, with Moorish gardens and fountains like murmuring mirrors—something out of the
Thousand and One Nights
. Rodrigo was a very good lover, and we made love almost every night. Arabs are experts in the art of sexual pleasure. He taught me dozens of secrets: he put mint leaves in my navel, jasmine leaves in my hair, ylang-ylang blossoms on my breasts, vanilla beans in my vagina, and then would smell and lick my body from head to toe. He had a young boy sit behind my bedroom’s
masrabella
, the filigreed screen, and play the zither for us, while another boy caressed our naked bodies with a peacock feather as we lay in bed. Rodrigo’s penis was large, like an ivory minaret capped by a pink dome, and I enjoyed myself enormously pretending I was its muezzin. I’d climb up on it and sing praises to Allah at least twice a day.

“But Rodrigo had one problem: he never talked to me. The Muslim religion discouraged conversation between husband and wife, and after a while I began to grow bored. I had been used to talking to my poor Tom all day and especially at night, after we made love. But with Rodrigo conversation consisted strictly of groans and sighs.

“I decided I would amuse myself alone, to take my mind off things. There was a wonderful bazaar in Rabat and I could visit it and buy beautiful silks and damasks that I could send to Paris to be made into gowns. But when I said I wanted to go shopping, Rodrigo told me I couldn’t. A servant would go to the bazaar instead, and the merchants would bring the rolls of fabric to our house. He wanted me to wear a head scarf that covered half my face, as well as an awful ankle-length raincoat, every time I walked in the streets. I was incensed. I wasn’t going to go around like a
tapada
, walking three steps behind my husband. I wasn’t a Muslim and there was no way I was going to be made to behave as one.