Eccentric Neighborhood (29 page)

“‘Fertilizer?’ I asked Ulises, laughing so hard I almost fell out of my chair. ‘You must be out of your mind! Agriculture is dead. Cement is the future, sugarcane is the past.’”

But my father was afraid of getting Vernet Construction even more deeply into debt. He knew the cement plant would cost at least two million dollars and that the federal government wouldn’t lend such a large amount to a Puerto Rican enterprise. “Let’s wait a while and take advantage of the building that will soon be done in La Concordia by the PRERA,” he said to his brothers wisely. “The aqueduct and sewer system, the bridges—we can do all that easily at the foundry. That way we’ll save money and have more capital to invest in the cement plant when the time comes.”

Father turned out to be right. The PRERA announced a half-million-dollar loan to Governor Winship to build a cement plant in San Juan; a Baltimore firm would supply the machinery. Later the PRERA lent Winship an additional million dollars, and in three years the cement plant began to operate. But thanks to the New Deal’s reconstruction plans, the demand for cement on the island was more than the government’s plant was able to supply.

For the next five years Vernet Construction made miles of iron pipe for the sewage system of La Concordia and helped install it. It also built the city’s aqueduct, which brought water from the mountains. Thirty-five kilometers of street were paved and dozens of iron bridges spanning the island’s rivers were forged at the foundry. All of it was paid for in cash by the PRERA. By 1940 my grandfather and his four sons were almost ready to embark on their great adventure: building the Star Cement plant.

Abuelo Chaguito was euphoric. He danced around the living room singing “La Marseillaise,” with Siegfried and Gudrun barking after him. He was still a fireman at heart and cement was, in his eyes, the answer not only to his family’s troubles but to La Concordia’s. The Vernet family enterprise would at last be free of the scoundrel hacendados who had tortured him for so long. They had refused to pay for the equipment the Vernets had built and installed on commission and had left him so saddled with debt that it was a miracle Vernet Construction was still afloat.

Cement would now be produced at La Concordia, the most beautiful city on the island and the pride of the Masonic world. Star Cement would be made with Puerto Rican lime and Puerto Rican sand; the city would become practically indestructible. Bijas, Abuelo Chaguito’s architect friend, would have been proud of him. Chaguito wrote Star Cement’s first advertising ditty himself, and it went like this: “Build your house with Star Cement / And sleep secure at night, / Safe from fires, hurricanes, and termites, / That’s right!” It was sung over and over on La Concordia’s radio stations for years.

T
ÍO ROQUE AND TÍO
Damián were as important in the building of the cement plant as their elder brothers. But unlike Aurelio and Tío Ulises, they were shy and didn’t tout their achievements all over town. The competition between Aurelio and Ulises, by contrast, never ceased. Aurelio needed to prove he was worthy of Adela’s trust every day of his life. Ulises was so absorbed in everything he did, he didn’t even notice that his brother was snapping at his heels.

Tío Roque was the most ungainly of the Vernet brothers. Short, with long ears and a thick nose, he looked like a bloodhound. He never did as well as his elder brothers in college, except during his junior year. That was when he took a course called Archaeology in Lowland South America and the Caribbean as a distraction from civil engineering. It was like discovering a lost paradise. He dropped all his courses in construction management, structural analysis, behavior of reinforced-concrete structures—subjects in which he was just scraping by—and signed up for a program in the prehistory of the Amazon region.

Roque was overwhelmed with admiration for the Taíno Indians, who were living on the island when Columbus discovered Puerto Rico in 1493. The Taínos lived in harmony with nature, following the rhythm of the sun, the moon, and the tides in their daily lives. They bathed two and three times a day in the island’s pristine rivers, smoked tobacco and
campana
leaves to cleanse themselves and communicate with the gods, and made love as often as they could in their hammocks of rainbow-colored twine braided with hummingbird feathers. Tío Roque thoroughly agreed with the Taíno Indians’ way of life.

After he began to study the Taíno culture, Roque decided he didn’t want to go back to the island. He wanted to live in Venezuela and look for the remains of the Ignery, the ancestors of the Taínos, in the Amazon basin. When Aurelio heard about his brother’s plan, he was incensed. It was not for this that Chaguito and Adela had sacrificed to send Roque to Northeastern. He took the first steamer to New York, arriving at Northeastern two weeks later.

The new cement plant, although still years off, was already on Aurelio’s mind, and he knew that without Roque’s help it would be impossible to begin building it. As a civil engineer, Roque would be essential in the assembling of the steel structures which would house the kiln and the heavy mill. But Aurelio didn’t scold him or tell him he was behaving selfishly, changing his plans at the last minute and letting his parents and his brothers down.

“Did you know the limestone quarry behind the site where we’re hoping to build has a Taíno Indian burial ground that’s two thousand years old? Hundreds of pottery shards, bones, and seashells were found in it recently—
El Diario la Prensa
just reported it. The Smithsonian Institution has expressed an interest, and we plan to mine the limestone around it and save as many of the Taíno artifacts as possible. If you come to work with us, you can oversee the job yourself.” Aurelio had made the story up on the spur of the moment.

“Really?” Tío Roque asked, his eyes lighting up. “I’d love to do that. I’ll help you build the cement plant if you promise to let me supervise the excavation of the burial ground.”

Tío Roque studied hard and managed to graduate a year later. He went back to the island and helped his brothers build the cement plant, erecting the iron beams and reinforced-concrete pedestals that would hold up the long revolving gut of the mill. As soon as the plant was ready to produce cement, the electric shovels started to eat away at the nearby limestone quarry, which later was known in town as Vernet’s Cheese.

Tío Roque discovered that what Aurelio had said was true—the limestone hill turned out to contain several Taíno tombs. A square hole in the ground was discovered at the top, where apparently a chieftain had been buried. A
dujo
, or low chair, carved in stone with a lizard’s face protruding in front, was found at the site, as well as an elaborately carved
macaná
, a fighting club. Tío Roque was ecstatic. He carefully removed the relics and gave orders that, as soon as another tomb was found, all work at the quarry should stop and he should be notified. It wasn’t long before another tomb was located. Roque ran to the hill and crept into the square opening, at the bottom of which he found more priceless relics. He spent hours kneeling on the ground under a merciless sun, a small spatula and a brush in his hands, slowly unearthing the ancient objects and sniffing around to see if he could find more. Naturally, when the operators of the bulldozers, Caterpillars, and electric shovels—whose incomes depended on how fast Vernet’s Cheese disappeared under the jaws of their machines—realized what was happening, they were upset. From then on, the minute a Taíno
yacimiento
turned up, they would dig away at that side of the quarry as fast as they could, until it was buried under tons of debris. That was why, after the first couple of extraordinary archaeological finds, Tío Roque never discovered any more Taíno remains in Star Cement’s limestone quarry. He had to go scouting for Taíno relics elsewhere.

Tío Damián was Father’s favorite brother, as well as his protégé. He was short and had a frail constitution. When he was born the doctors diagnosed a delicate heart—it didn’t pump blood as effectively as it should. Asthma attacks worsened his condition, because every time he had to inhale cortisone, his heart felt the blow.

He had thinning blond hair and blue eyes like Tía Celia, and his skin was very white. He had a delicate beauty, and when he was a child, Ulises, Celia, and Adela affectionately called him White Jasmine. But Amparo and Roque liked to tease him and dubbed him the White Mouse. He always wanted to be good, and when he went to confession on Saturdays and the priest asked him if he had misbehaved that week, he’d whisper guiltily that Ulises had slapped him, Amparo had tripped him, and Roque had yanked his hair.

When Damián arrived in Boston to study at Northeastern, Aurelio helped him with everything. He steered him through registration and showed him how to pick out his courses, settled him in his dorm, and gave him half his sweaters and woolen socks because he was terrified Damián might die of pneumonia. But what really saved Tío Damián from perishing in the merciless Boston winters was the yellowish-brown muskrat coat Aurelio bought him. Father had only one overcoat: an ugly green army greatcoat he stuffed with newspapers every time he had to cross the bridge over the Charles River by foot because he couldn’t spare the ten cents for the trolley. So he walked over to the Salvation Army on Commonwealth Avenue and asked if anyone had donated any fur coats recently. He was told that the one person who had had been shot twice in a barroom brawl; the coat might bring bad luck. Since Tío Damián didn’t drink, Aurelio purchased the coat for a dollar and took it to his brother. When Damián put it on, it fell to his heels, and with his balding pate and long nose it made him look like a ferret. “No one will say you look like a white mouse anymore!” Aurelio told him.

Tío Damián had long, slender fingers and what he liked to do most in the world was play the violin. When he was a boy, he sometimes played while Aurelio accompanied him on the piano, but Aurelio always drowned him out. Damián’s violin notes were blown away like gossamer threads in the hurricane of Father’s music.

As grown men, Aurelio lived for politics and statehood, Ulises to make money and conquer women, and Roque to sniff out the trail of the Taínos. But Tío Damián lived for beauty. A poem, a sonata, or a sculpture was good only if it was beautiful, but evil if it was ugly. And the same was true of people. There were those who were able to feel beauty and those who couldn’t—the hardened, the indifferent, and the selfish.

When Tío Damián went to Northeastern, he put aside his beloved violin and dove into his studies. He emerged four years later a full-fledged chemical engineer, but without having played a single note on his instrument. He didn’t have the energy to pursue two careers at the same time. Aurelio couldn’t understand it. When Damián returned to the house on Calle Esperanza, Aurelio scolded him roundly for not having graduated with a degree in music as well as in engineering, as he had.

Damián went to his room and locked the door. Soon a sad, beautiful melody began to filter from under his door like a long sigh of regret.

T
HERE WAS QUITE A
gulf between Abuelo’s dream of a cement plant and reality. The first thing the brothers did was pool their capital. The family had around half a million dollars saved; Vernet Construction was mortgaged for another half a million; Tío Arnaldo Rosales, Tía Amparo’s husband, put up two hundred thousand; and Aurelio invested Clarissa’s two hundred and ninety thousand, which was sugar money and originally came from one of the
colmillús
, or “long-fanged ones,” the sugar barons Abuelo Chaguito hated so much. But since the Plata had gone bankrupt, Chaguito didn’t mind. The family still needed another two million, and they knew they would have to go to the PRERA. Every time Abuelo Chaguito thought about it, he cringed.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, the U.S. Army and Navy desperately needed cement produced in Puerto Rico. Moreover, with Germany carrying out massive air attacks on London, the British asked Washington for a bay large enough to harbor the Royal Fleet in case the Nazis invaded England. Puerto Rico was pinpointed as a likely haven. A search was begun, and finally the U.S. Navy decided to build a dry dock on the eastern coast, near the town of Fajardo. It would be one of the largest dry docks in the world. Thousands of tons of cement would be required, and the navy needed them in a hurry.

The first loan from the federal government for the Vernets’ cement plant—half a million dollars—came three months later, with the endorsement of both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army. Aurelio and Tío Ulises traveled to Pennsylvania and bought a used cement kiln, a mill to grind the clinker, and an electric generator. But German U-boats patroling the Caribbean sank the ship carrying the equipment before it reached the island. The operation was repeated three times, and three times the kiln and the mill ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The fourth time the brothers were successful. The mill and the kiln arrived safely, but the electric generator and the mill’s driving gear, which were transported in another ship, did not. The submarines sank that too.

Chaguito’s sons were about to give up, but he was adamant. “There’s nothing impossible for a Vernet!” he reminded them. “We can build the equipment ourselves.”

Machinery as large as the cement mill’s driving gear had never been built at the foundry. Four feet in diameter and one foot thick, it would weigh several tons. The foundry’s oven, where the Vernets cast the crushing mills for the sugarcane
centrales
, wasn’t big enough and would never stand the weight. But Abuelo Chaguito’s capacity for improvisation was endless. He ordered his sons to solder two-inch iron sheets together into a four-foot-wide cylinder and then cut out the pinion’s teeth by hand, one by one. When the handmade driving gear was finished, it was a jewel.

Father would be in charge of the plant’s electrical equipment, Roque of the mechanical side, and Damián of the chemical end. Ulises would scout the banks for a loan to begin production. Soon, thanks to the persuasive commercial abilities he had inherited from Adela, the Federal Financial Reconstruction office lent Ulises a million dollars at very low interest, accepting as collateral the plant itself. Chaguito was elated. From then on, Tío Ulises was known in La Concordia as El Mago de las Finanzas, the Financial Wizard.