Eccentric Neighborhood (22 page)

“Where did you learn to speak French?” Adela asked. “There are very few people in La Concordia who can speak it. It reminds me of Guadeloupe, where I was born.”

“I’ve been around,” Chaguito answered, helping her with her books.

Adela began to walk down Calle Fraternidad with her father and Chaguito. “My parents emigrated to Guadeloupe twenty-five years ago. They had a perfume and liquor store in Point-à-Pitre called the Rue de Rivoli,” she said. “We had a good life there. Father sold liqueurs and Mother sold all kinds of perfumes—L’Heure Bleu, Shalimar, Joy. I didn’t have to do anything. I just spent my days playing the piano. But nothing lasts forever,” Adela concluded with a sigh. “Mother died last year, the same day I turned eighteen, and Father developed diabetes and went blind. We had to sell the store at a loss, close the house down, and even sell the piano. We came back to Puerto Rico, where Father has a brother, Francisco Pasamontes, who owns a prosperous tobacco factory, La Bella Cacica. Tío Francisco got him this job. He sells lottery tickets to the parents of the children I teach at school.”

They were at the corner of Calle Fraternidad and Calle Salud. The street was busy with horse-drawn carriages and mule carts. Don Félix was carrying his cane, and he swung it in front of him in a semicircle to feel his way. He seemed always to know when some obstacle was in front of him. Chaguito watched in fascination; Don Félix was like a ghost dancer, padding softly down the market’s crowded alleys without bumping into anyone.

Chaguito took Adela by the elbow when she began to cross the street. She was about to shake him off but didn’t. He had an engaging way about him. He kept laughing and making jokes, and everyone they met on the sidewalk seemed to like him. It was as if he exuded some kind of substance that made people happy. So Adela crossed the street, letting him hold on to her arm.

She was headed for the Plaza del Mercado Isabel Segunda, which had been a gift to the city from Queen Isabella II of Spain. The street was crammed with vendors noisily peddling their wares; mules ambled along loaded with sacks of coffee and all kinds of produce from the mountains. The market itself was open, with a high, corrugated steel roof held up by ornate wrought-iron beams. Dozens of shops were crowded together on each side. It was like stepping inside a tropical rainbow, where the smells of cilantro, laurel,
recao
, mango, pineapple—all kinds of vegetables, flowers, and fruits—melded into an invisible perfumed arch above their heads.

Adela was excited. She enjoyed striking a bargain more than anything else in the world. In ten minutes she visited ten different stalls, laughing and talking as she carefully selected the merchandise. She took out her little brown purse, in which she had put Abuelo’s dollar, and bought a chicken, rice, and potatoes, then gave it all to Chaguito to carry. Abuelo couldn’t believe she had bought so much for so little money.

He took hold of her arm again. “Living with someone like you would be like having the Statue of Liberty holding up the roof of the house,” Chaguito said gallantly. “You make one feel secure.” Adela blushed with embarrassment and didn’t answer. But what Abuelo really liked about Adela were her breasts, which were so large she would be able to nurse half a dozen boys with them.

When they reached Adela and Don Félix’s house—a small wooden bungalow in El Polvorín, a barrio on the outskirts of town—Chaguito saw that it was badly in need of paint and that several louvered windows were askew. The narrow yard around it, however, was well tended and lush with rose bushes. Chaguito was about to leave when Adela asked, “Would you like to have dinner with us? I’m cooking coq au vin.” Chaguito was delighted to stay. After that he came by the Good Luck School every day at five o’clock, walked Miss Adela and Don Félix home, and helped paint and repair the house in exchange for Adela’s delicious cooking. He had fallen in love with Adela, but being a Vernet, he had a hard time telling her.

Some weeks later, when Chaguito was at work, he took a rest after lunch—he usually brought a ham sandwich and a thermos of coffee with him. He was sitting on the sidewalk with his back against a lamppost when a gust of wind blew an old newspaper down the street. He picked it up and saw the lottery list had been published. He’d completely forgotten about the ticket he’d bought from Don Félix, and as he flicked the pages he saw the winning number was 202. He couldn’t believe his eyes. The paper was a week old and the prize had to be claimed that day.

Chaguito ran to his tent in the engineers’ camp to look for the ticket but he couldn’t find it. Then he remembered he had left it in the back pocket of his khaki pants the week before and had just given them to the washerwoman who came by the camp once a week. She took the dirty laundry to the Jagueyes River to wash. Chaguito ran across town.

He found the old woman kneeling on a huge boulder by the riverbank. She had just soaked his pants. “Did you find a lottery ticket in the back pocket of my pants?” he yelled from the shore.

“I’m sorry, Chaguito, I didn’t look. But I’ll look now.” And before Chaguito could stop her, she put her wet, suds-covered hand into the pants’ back pocket.

“No!” Chaguito cried desperately before she could take the ticket out. And he scrambled down to the water’s edge and snatched the dripping pants from her. Then he ran down the road toward La Concordia. When he reached the school, he knocked on the door. “There’s a ten-thousand-dollar ticket in that pocket, but it’ll fall to pieces if I try to remove it,” he blurted out to her. “I’d like to make a deal with you. If you rescue my ticket, I’ll ask you to marry me.”

Adela didn’t answer. She quietly told her students to go home and closed the school for the day. Then she took Chaguito’s pants to her house, made him sit in Don Félix’s rocking chair in the living room, and built a fire outside. She hung the wet pants over it without trying to take out the ticket, and when they were dry she ironed them on a padded board. Chaguito waited patiently. When Adela finished, she carefully slid her hand into the pocket and extricated the dry ticket in one piece. “Here’s your ticket to paradise, Chaguito. But you’ll have to travel there alone because I’m never going to get married.” And she pushed him unceremoniously out the door.

“But Don Félix sold me the ticket! It’s only right that you should share in the benefits!” Chaguito cried, almost ordering her to open up. But Adela’s door remained closed.

Chaguito ran to the lottery office and cashed in his prize: ten thousand dollars in a neat green pile. He counted the money meticulously and put it away under his mattress. The next day he went by the school again. He softened his tone considerably. “Please marry me, Miss Adela. We’ll have half a dozen sons, so you’ll be able to set up your own school. And I promise to take care of your father’s eye operation.”

When Adela heard Chaguito’s pleading voice, she didn’t have the heart to say no. She agreed to marry him.

The wedding took place on May 1, 1901, at La Inmaculada, a small chapel near El Polvorín. Chaguito kept as silent as a tomb about being a Freemason. He didn’t want Adela to give him any trouble at the last minute. All during the wedding ceremony he knelt and mumbled softly to himself, pretending he was praying. When they stood at the foot of the altar Chaguito looked up at Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, with her sweet face turned heavenward and a silver halo above her head, and thought that a church ceremony was a small price to pay if the Vernets’ good-luck star began to rise.

N
OT LONG AFTER CHAGUITO
married Adela Pasamontes, he bought the house at 13 Calle Esperanza. Since thirteen was bad luck for everyone, he was sure it would bring
him
good luck. He had the house completely furnished with mahogany furniture from Casa Margarida: straight-backed chairs with square rush seats that made you feel as if you were sitting on a prickly cracker. The house was made of wood and painted light gray on the outside. But inside, the rooms were done in gay colors; Adela wanted to live in a place that reminded her of her life in Guadeloupe. The master bedroom was the color of peach brandy; the dining room was mint-green; the living room was Benedictine gold. Facing the street was a balcony, with a black-and-white domino marble floor, a silver-plated baluster, and three high, delicate columns ending in silver acanthus leaves. The gabled tin roof had two ventilators sitting on it like a pair of round steel helmets, and there was a deep patio at the back where Abuela Adela grew roses and Abuelo Chaguito kept his exotic parrots.

Abuelo also bought Adela an upright Cornish piano. He traveled to San Juan to buy it and had it shipped around the island to La Concordia. When Adela saw the movers taking the piano out of the crate she ran to the sidewalk, sat on the bench, and began to play. Out came the
zarabandas
,
danzas
, and
malagueñas
she adored but hadn’t played since she left her beloved Guadeloupe. Soon everyone in the street was dancing.

The house was just around the corner from the marketplace, which Abuela loved to visit. But Chaguito had another reason for buying 13 Calle Esperanza: the new Adelphi Masonic Lodge stood just a block away. He knew Adela would be upset if she found out he was a Freemason, so he kept his visits to the lodge secret.

With the rest of the money from the lottery, on the outskirts of town Chaguito built the foundry he had always dreamed of: Vernet Construction. At first it was small, but gradually it expanded. In the structural-steel department, electric welders fused metal sheets for water and oil tanks, kilns, warehouse roofs, and sidings; in the machine-shop department, large and small lathes whirred and cut away all sorts of metals, and then the planers and shapers gave them form; the foundry department had a cupola furnace where Chaguito cast water pipes, tanks, construction rods, cast-iron balconies, and other products for local consumption. When he had saved enough money, he built a large oven, where he smelted the scrap iron he picked up at the city dump. He loved to pour the molten metal into molds, then watch the globs of fire cool off, sizzling in the water tank. What emerged were pulleys, wheels, and all sorts of valuable machine parts. The hollow casting molds were made of sand, and Chaguito designed them himself.

Chaguito was a gifted draftsman and he began to take orders and to design the machinery for the sugar mills and coffee haciendas near La Concordia: the iron crushing mills, evaporators, cogwheels, and piston rods used to process molasses into sugar, as well as the iron
tahonas
used to husk the blood-red coffee beans before they were spread out to dry in the sun. He was only modestly successful and couldn’t sell many of them, though, because agriculture on the island was undergoing one of its periodic economic crises. The foundry business survived on the repairs that were needed at the sugar mills. But Chaguito was never despondent. Ever the optimist, he saw the foundry as the springboard for his future success.

In 1902, a year after Abuelo and Abuela moved to the house on Calle Esperanza, Ulises was born. Aurelio was born the following year. Roque and Damián followed in quick succession. But when Adela gave birth to Amparo in 1912 and then to Celia in 1913, Chaguito was very upset. “I thought we were going to have a team of six boys, to get a successful business going,” he told her.

Abuela put her foot down. “Women can do business too,” she answered, bristling at Chaguito’s attitude. “And in any case, not all business deals are made on earth. Some are made in heaven.” As she said so, she kissed Celia, the new baby, on the forehead and made the sign of the cross over her.

Ulises and Aurelio slept in the cherry-liqueur bedroom, Damián and Roque in the mandarin-yellow one, Celia and Amparo in the anisette-pale blue. The boys’ bedrooms were on the left side of the house and the girls’ were on the right, next to the bathroom and the kitchen. All the bedrooms opened out onto a living room-dining room, which was divided by a freestanding wall against which the piano stood.

Despite Adela’s colorful palette, the house had a martial air to it. The children’s beds were all identical: wire-mesh iron-frame cots with thin horsehair mattresses next to plain night tables and chamber pots. Abuela and Abuelo’s bedroom was on the left side of the house. They slept in a large canopied bed that was so high Chaguito had to climb a three-step ladder to reach it. Adela had a large pineapple carved on top of each bed column because in Puerto Rico pineapples are a symbol of hospitality.

Adela was a strict disciplinarian, which was the only way she could keep the household going on a meager budget. She asked my grandfather to cut a four-inch-wide leather strap from one of his belt pulleys, and she named it Santa Ursula. She went around the house with Santa Ursula tied around her waist and instilled the holy rule of obedience in her family.

Every morning as soon as the clock in the dining room chimed six, Adela, dressed in what Abuelo liked to call her Statue of Liberty robe, would sit before the Cornish piano and play something to wake up the brood: the Anvil Chorus or “Semper Fidelis.” At other times, to keep Chaguito happy, she played a potpourri of “La Marseillaise” and the Cuban national anthem. The children all filed Indian-style into the bathroom, chamber pots in hand; they emptied the contents into the toilet, flushed it, brushed their teeth, washed their faces, and combed their hair. They had to be seated at the table in ten minutes flat or else they would be sent off to school without any breakfast. Everybody followed Adela’s orders to the letter.

When breakfast was over, Chaguito would bring his horse-drawn carriage around and drop his children off at school on his way to the foundry. By seven-thirty everybody was gone. Adela would play the piano for an hour and then sit out on the balcony with a second cup of coffee and wait for the beggars of La Concordia to arrive. She was a good Samaritan and couldn’t stand to see people suffer. In Guadeloupe she had learned what it was to go hungry. Every day beggars came up to the balcony and Matilde, the maid, would help her serve them bowls of chicken soup or put
cataplasmas
—an unguent made with olive oil and crushed mustard seeds—on their chests. Adela also held charity kermesses at her house to raise money for the poor who lived in La Concordia’s slums.