Eccentric Neighborhood (2 page)

M
OTHER WAS BORN IN
Guayamés on January 6, 1901. Her father, Alvaro Rivas de Santillana, believed she was a present from the Three Kings, but Valeria Boffil, my grandmother, didn’t agree at all. She was sure Clarissa was born because of the rains.

In Guayamés it rains a lot from July to November; gray clouds are always rubbing their bellies against the roofs of houses, shutting out the sun. The rains influenced Mother’s life from the start. During the rainy season people stay inside much of the time. Anything can happen then: a sudden gust of wind may bring a tree branch down on your head like a punishment from God, or a wave of mud from the nearby Emajaguas River may roll down the street and whisk you away.

Every year, from July to November, Abuelo Alvaro moved into Guayamés with his family instead of staying in Emajaguas, where he could easily supervise his cane fields and his sugar mill, the
central
Plata. He was always bored in town, and for that reason Abuela Valeria usually got pregnant at the end of each July and gave birth at the end of each April. Mother was the first of their six children. As an infant she was bitten by a mosquito bred in a pool of stagnant rainwater; she developed rheumatic fever, which caused a
soplo,
a murmur, in her heart. So you could say that she was born because of the rains of Guayamés and also that she died because of them.

The house in Guayamés had a balcony that opened out over the main plaza, from which Clarissa watched the Lenten procession every year with her three sisters—Siglinda, Artemisa, Dido—and her only brother, Alejandro. Wearing white lace mantillas, the girls would lean their elbows on the rail to get a good view. Lakhmé, the baby, would peek between the balusters and admire the purple silk platform where Jesus carried the cross on his back and the black velvet one on which La Verónica, with her tear-streaked face, swayed to and fro over a sea of heads. But the Lenten procession didn’t elicit any special feelings of piety; for the Rivas de Santillanas, religious excitement and pagan celebration were all part of the same play.

Around the middle of December, when the rains had stopped and the canes ripened in the fields, the family moved to Emajaguas, three miles down the coast. Abuelo Alvaro had been born there in 1880. Both his parents had died young, so he had been brought up by two maiden aunts, Alicia and Elisa Rivas de Santillana. When he was eighteen, his aunts had bought a house in town. With the arrival of the Americans on the island, the quality of life in Guayamés had improved greatly: streets were paved, there was running water, a sewage system and storm drains had been installed.

Abuelo Alvaro’s aunts had always pampered him, and even though they were only moderately well-off, they spared no expense in his education. He was taught French by private tutors and could do his arithmetic competently enough. But he didn’t like to read and was wary of people who read a lot, because they seemed to think they were above the rest.

Abuelo learned firsthand everything there was to know about the sugar industry by struggling to keep his cane fields well tended. His aunts trusted him and put everything in his hands; with their combined fortunes, Alvaro was able to keep Emajaguas in working order. But Alicia and Elisa died during the typhus epidemic that ravaged Guayamés in 1900. Alvaro and Valeria were married that same year—she was sixteen and he was twenty—so when they moved to Emajaguas, they had the whole house to themselves. Although Abuelo Alvaro was saddened by his aunts’ demise, he had been so spoiled that he thought it only natural that they should pass away. They were merely being considerate of his need for housing in his newly married state.

Abuelo remained a man of simple tastes; he was used to country life and mistrusted city ways. After he married Abuela Valeria, the only time he traveled to Europe was in 1920, and only because Valeria dragged him there by the hair. In Paris he moped around the whole time because at the Café Procope he couldn’t order
ropa vieja
—his beloved string beef stewed with onions—and
tostones
, the luscious crumbly plantains fried in oil. Abuela Valeria, on the other hand, loved to travel and took her children to Europe several times. She would spend a month in Paris, a month in Rome, or a month in Madrid, installing herself in the best hotels with her six children, a nanny, and her personal maid. She would go to the opera almost every night, as well as to concerts and museums, and would always insist that a trip to a foreign country was as valuable as a college degree.

Valeria was the youngest daughter of Bartolomeo Boffil, a Corsican merchant nicknamed Mano Negra, who had made a fortune at the end of the nineteenth century smuggling merchandise from Saint Thomas and Curaçao. Both these islands belonged to the Dutch at the time and had a long tradition of illegal trading. They were very prosperous commercial centers. There one could buy perfumes, shoes, fine linens and laces from France, and all sorts of farming tools. Machinery for the sugar haciendas was not manufactured on the island. It was smuggled in from England and Scotland.

Bartolomeo Boffil was a rough man with no education, but he was proud of his business and considered it in keeping with the rebellious nature of his ancestors. The word
corsair
comes from
Corsican
, he would tell his friends. “If we Corsicans hadn’t managed to dodge the embargo the Spanish authorities smacked on the island for three hundred years, these people would be so poor they wouldn’t have shoes to put on their feet.” Commerce with the rest of the world was banned by Spain, which wanted to benefit from it exclusively. The island had no choice but to depend for all its imports on Spanish ships coming in through San Juan.

Bartolomeo was born on Cap Corse, Corsica’s most inhospitable peninsula—a veritable tongue of rock where only billy goats prospered. He was a small, evil-tempered man who lived alone with his daughters Elvira and Valeria. His wife had died giving birth to his youngest daughter, and for that reason he was often cruel to Valeria, as if wanting her to pay for her mother’s untimely passing. He loved her dearly but couldn’t help thinking that if she hadn’t been born, his wife would still be alive and he wouldn’t be alone.

Bartolomeo’s farm was on the outskirts of Guayamés and he tended it himself. He grew ginger, tobacco, cotton, coconuts, and cacao, but his real profession was smuggling. His farm had several protected coves where fishing sloops came in from Saint Thomas and Curaçao and dropped anchor at night. A half dozen rowboats would silently skim over the waters and unload the crushing mills, iron winches, and centrifugal steel pumps for which the Puerto Rican sugar hacienda owners paid a handsome price.

Bartolomeo loved to go up into the mountains to hunt blackbirds with his dog, Botafogo. Blackbird pâté was his favorite dish; he was sure it had magical qualities and he made Valeria eat some every day. As in the story of the Chinese emperor who feeds his daughter nightingale tongues so that she will sing more sweetly, Bartolomeo was convinced that blackbird pâté would refine his daughter’s voice, as well as make her more delicate and beautiful. Valeria felt terribly sorry for the birds, but she was an obedient daughter and dutifully ate what her father served her.

She was brought up practically a prisoner, never permitted to go out of the house by herself to visit the neighbors and always accompanied by a chaperon. At home she was taught the arts of embroidery and music by a governess; she could sing in French, English, and Italian and play the piano beautifully, but she couldn’t read or write. Her father had forbidden the governess to teach her how, so when Valeria turned sixteen she was still illiterate. This way, Bartolomeo hoped, Valeria would have no alternative but to stay at home and take care of him in his old age.

Valeria sometimes went to Guayamés to visit her sister Antonia, who had married a man of means and lived in a beautiful house at the entrance to town. Bartolomeo had had no misgivings in letting Antonia leave; it meant one mouth less to feed. The youngest daughter was the one who was supposed to stay home and take care of the widowed father.

Abuelo Alvaro met Abuela Valeria during one of her visits to her sister. When he heard her sing and play the piano, Alvaro immediately fell in love and asked her to marry him. But she refused. “I can’t get married, because I can’t read or write,” she said tearfully. “What will you do when I sign the marriage license in front of the judge with an X? You’ll be so ashamed of me you’ll change your mind.”

Alvaro answered, laughing, “That won’t make any difference to me at all. If you can cook as well as you can sing, everything will turn out all right.” And that very afternoon they eloped, asking a judge in Guayamés to marry them.

Bartolomeo found out the next day. Rumor has it he ran to his son-in-law’s house and tried to batter down the door with the butt of his rifle. When Antonia and her husband refused to open it, he began to hurl insults at them, calling them scoundrels and panderers until he was so beside himself he suffered a heart attack and died. Clarissa didn’t believe the story at all, and she found out what really happened. Bartolomeo was caught in a shoot-out with the American coastal patrol, which kept a stricter eye on his coconut groves than the Spanish Guardia Civil. When Bartolomeo died, Valeria came into a third of his fortune, and her inheritance made it possible for Alvaro to consolidate his economic situation.

The first thing Valeria did when she could afford it was to have the schoolmaster from Guayamés’s public school come to her house and teach her to read and write. Soon she became a passionate reader. She practically devoured the best Latin American novels of her time, Jorge Isaac’s
María
; Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s
Sab
; José Marmol’s
Amalia
. Sometimes she read them out loud at dinnertime for the family’s benefit. Alvaro, by contrast, didn’t care for literature at all; novels bored him, and he preferred books that dealt with life as it really was. After their wedding, Valeria refused to make love if he didn’t read at least one novel a week, and in this way she managed to educate him.

Guayamés is surrounded by lush green hills where the last of the Taíno Indians lived before they were wiped out by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Its houses spill into one another without order or logic, as if huddled together for protection. The streets are narrow and cleave to the uneven terrain like ribbons of red mud; many are named for the Taíno Indians: Calle Guajira, Calle Urayoán, Calle Guaquiminí. On top of a nearby hill, overlooking the town like a huge white fowl spreading its wings, sits the cathedral, one of the oldest buildings in Guayamés.

The climate is unusually humid and rain falls in pellets that melt before they reach the ground. The frequent rains, as well as the tranquil atmosphere, bring out the vivid colors of the landscape: the limpid blue of the sky, the soft moss-green of the hills, the hard beveled green of the sugarcane fields. Perhaps for this reason a romantic imagination, an acute aesthetic sensibility, and a deep love of nature are common among the inhabitants of Guayamés.

During the rainy season, the town was relatively safe from the storms that uprooted trees and left the hills strewn with gabled tin roofs that had whirled away from outlying houses like saws in the wind. December meant the family’s return to Emajaguas for the
zafra
—the Plata’s sugarcane harvest—and over the next six months the rains were sparse and the breezes cool. April brought scattered showers (“
Las lluvías de abril caben en un barril
,” as Abuelo Alvaro used to say), May brought thunderstorms (“
Las lluvías de mayo se las bebe un caballo
”), and June, July, and August were dry as cane husks (“
Junio, julio, y agosto, marota seca para los cerdos
”).

The children began to arrive in quick succession, Clarissa in 1901, Siglinda in 1902, Artemisa in 1903, Alejandro in 1904, Dido in 1905, then Lakhmé in 1923, when Abuela Valeria was thirty-nine years old. Lakhmé was the baby of the family, and Abuela spoiled her because of it.

As the children were born and as Abuelo Alvaro prospered, he added several rooms to Emajaguas and modernized the kitchen and bathrooms. The children didn’t go to public school, as they did in Guayamés; they took lessons with a tutor, a skinny, bald rural teacher who drove from town every day in his horse and buggy. This meant they could spend the afternoons horseback riding or swimming in the river; they didn’t have to wear uniforms or even shoes. I suppose that’s why, when Mother talked to me about her childhood at Emajaguas, it was as if she remembered a lost paradise, a timeless place where days and nights chased each other merrily around on the tin sphere of the grandfather clock that stood against the dining room wall.

Emajaguas was built on stilts, and the living quarters were entirely on the second level. The first level was used as Abuelo Alvaro’s office and also served as a garage. Fresh straw rugs gave it a grassy country smell. All the windows were louvered and painted turquoise-blue, so that when one looked out, the waters of the Guayamés bay seemed to flow into the rooms. A wide granite stairway led from the front of the house to the palm-lined driveway, which descended to the main road bordering the seashore. At the back, a narrow balustered stairway painted white led from the kitchen to the garden and the fruit orchards.

A steep wall circled the ten-acre property, which included mango, soursop, and grapefruit trees, a tennis court, and a pond with goldfish. A half dozen geese patrolled the garden like a row of noisy midget soldiers. There was a well-stocked library (the pride of Abuela Valeria), a grand piano in the living room, a record player, and all kinds of table games for rainy days. There were so many things to do at Emajaguas that one rarely went into town. It was only a fifteen-minute walk to Guayamés following the road by the sea, but hardly anyone ever took it.

The house had two natural boundaries that separated it from the outside world: the Emajaguas River on the right (more a creek than a river except when the heavy rain turned it into a dragon’s tail of mud) and the public road. Four feet beyond the highway, the land fell away abruptly and the sea battered the rocks that had been placed there as a barrier. In spite of them, the waves ate away an inch or two of the highway’s foundation each year.