Eccentric Neighborhood (18 page)

“Nothing could be done about it. My sisters all accepted Abuela Valeria’s will in the end and left the management of the mill in Alejandro’s hands. But Alejandro would have to prove his mettle, and only time would tell if he could do the job or not.

“Worried about the mill’s future, I went on insisting. ‘How are we going to finance the new crops, Mother?’ I asked. ‘In January we have to buy fertilizer and employ twice as many workers to plant the seeds in the fields, as well as pay the peons to cut the cane when the
zafra
begins. That’s only six months away and Alejandro doesn’t seem worried about it. Venancio can help us get the money. He’s got contacts in the banking community and he’s generously offered to lend us some personal funds, interest-free. He said we could repay him four years from now, when the Partido Republicano Incondicional wins the elections again.’ But your grandmother refused.

“‘No thank you,’ she answered dryly. ‘Alvaro left half a million dollars in cash for this kind of an emergency. Alejandro is the only one who knows the combination to the safe, and we are simply waiting for all the provisions in Alvaro’s will to be taken care of before opening it. But we’ll open it tomorrow; the whole family has been notified.’ My sisters were very surprised at this and for a while their hopes were rekindled, but I was skeptical.

“‘I hope the money’s there, Mother,’ I answered, ‘because otherwise we’ll soon have to take out another loan at the bank.’

“The next day the whole family went down to the basement to stand around as witnesses. I had seen Father open the Humboldt safe many times. It was a huge affair, a black iron box so large several people could stand up inside it. Alvaro had had it made to order in Germany, and it had taken twenty men to haul it down from the ship at the Guayamés bay and mount it on a sugarcane truck to bring it to the house. Every once in a while, Alejandro would go in with Abuelo, clicking his boots and smirking at me because I wasn’t allowed to go in with them. I remembered seeing Father turning the wheel on the door slowly, its numbers tiny as hairs sliding silently around the rim.

“But when Alejandro opened the door, the vault was empty. A musty gust of air came out of its dark crevices. Alejandro blanched and had to sit down. He seemed just as surprised as everyone else.

“Valeria was the first one to react. ‘Someone else must have known the combination,’ she said, looking at me suspiciously. ‘You were your father’s favorite; maybe he told
you
the numbers also.’ I was indignant. ‘And what is the combination, Mother, may I ask?’ Valeria handed me a piece of paper that read: R 4–24 L 6–32 R 3–22. I stared at Siglinda, then at Venancio, who was silently looking down at his shoes. But I still couldn’t believe Venancio had taken the money. I was sure Alejandro was the culprit, so I kept quiet.

“‘I propose we all go to the bank together and ask if Alejandro has opened an account in his name recently,’ I said loudly. But Valeria wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Alejandro is your brother; he’s incapable of behaving so despicably. You’d only shame him and he’d never forgive you.’

“Then Miña spoke up. She was standing behind me in the shadows, at the back of the office. ‘About six months ago, a few days after Alejandro came back from school, I got up when it was still dark to boil the family’s laundry over hot coals, and as I came out of the carriage house I saw a man opening the door to the basement,’ she said in her deep voice, holding a wooden spoon up to command everybody’s attention. ‘I didn’t get a good look, but I’m sure of one thing: the money’s safely put away in a bank!’ And no sooner had she said this than Felicia, perched on her shoulder, began to screech, spreading her yellow tail wide, as she always did when she was angry.

“Siglinda, Venancio, and Alejandro all left the room in a rage. The rest of my sisters were absolutely stunned.

“‘Alejandro is a hoodlum,’ I whispered to Dido. ‘He’s severed the family’s jugular!’

“A few months later Mr. Winston, one of the managers at Caribbean Sugar, the mill adjacent to the Plata, came to the house and asked to speak to Valeria. ‘We’d like to make you an offer on Las Pomarrosas, the farm that’s nearest to our mill. We’re willing to pay a goodly amount.’ The Partido Socialista was making the large American sugar mills bleed with higher taxes, and Caribbean Sugar was expanding its operations in a desperate effort to cut costs. They needed more land to produce more sugar. Valeria said she would consider their offer. Alejandro was in favor of it.

“When I heard about it, I hurried to Valeria’s room. I couldn’t believe that Mother could do such a thing, that she could so utterly submit to my brother’s advice. ‘You can’t sell my farm, Mother. Father never intended you to sell
any
of the farms. I’ll take you to court if you do,’ I threatened. ‘Go ahead and take me to court, Clarissa,’ Valeria answered fiercely. ‘
Pleitos tengas y los ganes
,’ she said, a gypsy curse which meant, in effect, ‘May you wage lawsuits and win them all.’

“Alejandro tried to unruffle my feathers. He knocked on the door of the room I shared with Dido and asked to be let in. ‘Don’t take it so hard, Clarissa!’ he said, sitting down on my bed. ‘The sugar industry is doomed. Even the American sugar mills on the island will soon go down the drain, although they’re so powerful they’ll be able to survive a few years longer. We can’t pay for the modern machinery they have, and they produce more sugar than we do. Do you know how many tons of sugar Caribbean Sugar produces? Fifty thousand tons a year. The Plata produces twelve thousand, and we have twice as much land. But it doesn’t make any difference. It’s better to cut our losses now, when the farms are still worth some money, than to sell later, when they’ll be worth next to nothing. But if you don’t want to sell your farm, Clarissa, we won’t sell it,’ he said. And he put his arm around my shoulders in a conciliatory gesture. I pushed him away. I didn’t trust Alejandro anymore.

“Competition from Caribbean Sugar was fierce, and six months later the Plata was even more in the red. Valeria and Alejandro began to sell the farms one by one, all of them but mine. Without the land, the Plata had less and less cane to grind. Soon it was evident that the mill was going bankrupt. Caribbean Sugar made an offer of nine hundred thousand dollars, and after agonizing over the situation for a number of weeks, Alejandro decided we had to sell. Valeria agreed it was the wisest thing to do.

“Alejandro deposited all the money from the sale of the mill and the farms in Valeria’s name, and she made a will leaving each of her daughters the exact amount their farms had sold for. Soon Valeria was reconciled with her daughters—except me. In my case it was different. I was the eldest and should have set an example. Instead, I had banded together with Venancio against my own brother, and that had been an abominable thing to do.

“Valeria forgave my sisters. She didn’t spare any expense with them, and their lives went on as comfortably as before. They had clothes and money and traveled to Europe with Mother, but I didn’t go with them. I stayed at Emajaguas with Miña and had almost no money. But when I asked Valeria to help me out, she told me: ‘You still own Las Pomarrosas. You can pay your own expenses.’

“I took a job teaching history at the public high school. It was the only way to make some money and at least be partly independent from Valeria and Alejandro. But all this happened so long ago that I feel as if it happened to a different person.”

A
YEAR AFTER THE
Plata was sold, Tío Alejandro bought a fifty-three-foot Chris Craft Sports Fisherman and went fishing almost every day. It was a beautiful boat. It had a mahogany-paneled cabin, four bunk beds, an ample fishing deck at the back, and a wall-to-wall-carpeted lounge with a bar. He loved to go out in his boat because on the ocean there’s no short or tall—only engine power matters.

Just as Tío Alejandro had foreseen, more and more local sugar mills were closing down because of the Partido Socialista’s policies. The huge mills owned by American investors were in trouble also and began to cut production. It was a painless operation, however. Absentee owners lost a lot of money on the stock market, but their losses were strictly financial. To the local hacendados, on the other hand, bankruptcy was a social tragedy. Once they closed their mills they didn’t belong to the local aristocracy anymore. They opened new businesses—car dealerships, department stores, insurance companies—but it just wasn’t the same. Sugar money was at least two hundred years old, whereas the income from these new businesses put them on the same footing as the nouveaux riches.

The hacendados of Guayamés who had lost their mills tried to forget their disgrace with some kind of pastime, and fishing was one of their favorites. Tío Alejandro invited his friends to go boating and drinking with him, and they sometimes brought their party girls along. These women weren’t exactly from the best families and usually wore high heels,
rumbera
turbans, and large hoop earrings. They were very gay and laughed at everything, especially when Tío Alejandro yanked off their shoes, which were making dents in his deck. But Abuela Valeria didn’t care; she only wanted Tío Alejandro to be happy, with or without his picturesque party girls.

Alejandro loved fishing for blue marlin, and he had his yacht especially fitted out for it. He bought sturdy bamboo fishing rods that were so long you couldn’t tell whether they were to cast over the sea or across the sky. He had a beautiful aluminum fishing chair made to order in Florida that looked like a throne, with its bright-red leather seat, upholstered arms, steel stirrups, and halter. Sometimes from the terrace at Emajaguas you could see marlin out on the water at sundown. They would spring out of the sea as high as twenty feet, flying over the ocean like giant one-winged angels. But although he dreamed about it every night, Tío Alejandro had never managed to catch one. He would sail off with his friends and often he would return home completely drunk. Urbano would have to undress him and put him to bed.

Once a year a marlin competition was organized by the members of the Guayamés Yacht Club. A golden cup was put on exhibit in a glass case, to be conferred on whoever caught the largest fish. Marlin could run up to a thousand pounds and measure anywhere from six to ten feet long. Alejandro promised Abuela Valeria he would win the competition that year and thereby regain some of his lost prestige. And if he didn’t win the competition, he swore to his friends, laughing, a rum and Coke in his hand, he was still going to catch the biggest marlin of all. His sisters had been spreading false rumors about him in Guayamés, he said, blaming him for the Plata’s bankruptcy and accusing him of having pocketed money from their lands. But when the marlin he was looking for finally swallowed his hook, he was going to prove them wrong. It would pull his yacht behind it like a winged chariot, and his reputation would be saved. That was what the red fishing chair was really for, Tío Alejandro joked to his friends as he stirred the ice in his glass. It wasn’t for fishing at all—it was for the yacht’s charioteer.

Abuela Valeria was upset when she heard Alejandro talk this way but she tried not to make an issue of it. Alejandro had her complete confidence—he was a good businessman and had invested the money from the Plata and the lands wisely. Thanks to him, the family had managed to weather the storm in spite of the disappearance of the money from the safe. But it worried her that on his fishing expeditions Tío Alejandro drank so much.

Whenever Tío Alejandro left on one of his trips at dawn, Clarissa would stand at the window shivering in her nightgown and watch him leave. Miña knew that intense look in her eyes and cautioned her: “Remember, Alejandro nursed at my breast just as you did. I don’t like him any more than you do, but you’re
hermanos de leche
as well as
hermanos de sangre
. If you wish him ill, you’ll pay for it, because there’s no greater sin on earth than fighting with one’s own kin.”

One day Tío Alejandro had been cruising off the north coast of the island, over the Puerto Rico Trench, a vast underwater abyss twenty-five thousand feet deep. A storm was brewing and the sea was churning into a lather when Alejandro’s rod gave a tug. Alejandro pressed the release button on the fishing reel to set the line free and it went whirring over the water with the screech of an eagle. He ordered the captain to cut the motor, and the yacht lurched backward and forward for a few minutes, at the mercy of the waves.

Tío Alejandro shaded his eyes and looked toward the horizon. The sky was as clear as the sea. Not a single cloud was in sight, and the fishing line cut a path between sky and sea like a silver whip. All of a sudden, in the distance, a blue wing cleaved the water before plunging back into the ocean. Alejandro knew his moment had come. He put down his drink and stumbled to the fishing chair, his friends all gathering around him, cheering. He sat down, put his feet in the stirrups, slipped on the halter, and picked up the fishing rod. The reel was still unraveling at a dizzying speed. He was using a hundred-pound line and the brake would put a twenty-five-pound weight on the fleeing creature’s mouth.

Alejandro knew he had to give the marlin breathing space, tire him out before he gave the line the first yank. The beast was large, he could feel it in the rod, but he couldn’t guess how large. Alejandro grasped the rod more tightly and braced his feet against the stirrups. He struggled with the fish for over twenty minutes but the pull was still strong. All of a sudden the line went slack, and Alejandro was sure he had lost the marlin. Everyone held their breath as Alejandro unbuckled himself from the chair and went to look over the side, half expecting to see the monster slide silently from under the boat. But there was nothing there, so he sat down and began to reel in the line, buckling himself up just in case. Precisely at that moment the marlin bolted and the line got caught in the chair’s pivot. The chair, with Alejandro still in it, was wrenched over the railing and went flying over the water. His friends couldn’t believe what they saw: Alejandro still holding on to the rod, his captain’s cap on his head and his legs stretched out before him as if he were on water skis, a huge wing flying in front of him. Then the chair began to sink with Alejandro still strapped to it, until at last the wing took a dive and Alejandro, chair, fish, and all disappeared into the depths of the sea.