Eccentric Neighborhood (33 page)

We visited the Metropolitan Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building, which swayed slightly in the wind and filled my heart with wonder when Father told us how the observation tower was originally intended to be a mooring station for zeppelins. But what I loved most was the roller coaster at Coney Island, where Father took me twice. The first time was wonderful. The second time was a nightmare.

We sat in a red car made of wooden slats, lowered the iron bar that imprisoned us but kept us safe, and didn’t come back to earth for almost an hour. Whenever the ride came to an end, Father would pay the ticket taker and we would go around one more time, yelling and hugging each other tightly against the rushing wind. The car would climb slowly to the top of the tracks, stand there poised for a few seconds, and, as we contemplated the beautiful tapestry of the Palisades Park and the Atlantic Ocean, plunge us headlong into an abyss. The speed of what felt like a free fall made us drunk with pleasure.

The following Saturday I asked Father to take me to Coney Island again, but this time Mother said she wanted to come too. We left Alvaro with my cousins and took the subway from the city. I was quiet the whole time, sulking over the fact that Mother undoubtedly wouldn’t let Father ride in the roller coaster with me more than once—she was sure to prefer the carousel. A few stations before we arrived at the Coney Island stop, I let go of Father’s hand and went to stand by myself near the door. My parents, deep in conversation, didn’t notice my absence. When the subway came to a stop a crowd of people surged in and I was forced out of the train. It was impossible to get back on because of the packed bodies. The doors slammed shut and the train took off with a deafening roar. As I watched in horror, Father and Mother realized that I was missing and rushed to the window. They waved at me frantically, giving me instructions I couldn’t hear or understand. I sat down on the station floor and began to cry.

My parents got off at the next stop and immediately telephoned the police. Ten minutes later two officers came by and began asking questions. Soon one of them had me sitting on his shoulders as he carried me to the nearest precinct house, where my parents were waiting for me. But for a long time I had nightmares of Father and Mother thundering away on the subway, smiling and waving their hands as they left me behind.

A
T A CEMENT PLANT
, the product is constantly monitored: a small cylinder of cement is placed in a hydraulic testing machine thirty-six hours after it has been cast, and three thousand pounds of pressure are applied to it. If the cylinder crumbles, it means something is wrong with the mixture: it may have too much lime or too little silica, or maybe the temperature of the oven wasn’t quite right when the mixture of sand and lime was made into clinker, the shiny black stones that sound exactly like their name before they are ground into cement powder.

Not everybody in my family was able to stand up to the pressures of being a Vernet. Tío Roque and Tío Damián were in a way victims of Star Cement. And so, too, was Mother.

Mother’s world had changed drastically since she had left Emajaguas: agriculture had disappeared, the lush sugarcane fields around Guayamés that she loved to ride across on horseback lay fallow and weed-ridden, and now her nerves were out of kilter. Star Cement had never really interested her, and yet the cement plant had shaped her life. She lived constantly under its threatening shadow. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t crumble because of the pressures of being a Vernet, that what had happened to her wouldn’t happen to me.

Once I told her smugly, “When I grow up I’m going to have my own career. I’ll be a doctor, a businesswoman, a reporter, maybe even an agronomist. Anything but a housewife!”

“Is that right?” she asked. “We’ll see about that, Miss Liberty!”

There was never a chance of Mother’s working. Father wouldn’t permit it. He suspected unknown dangers around every corner. She might be kidnapped and held for ransom. Or worse, she might be ridiculed, laughed at. “You mean you want to work?” he asked in disbelief when she raised the question. “What in the world for? Why should you get up at seven every day and trudge to the nearest high school to teach a bunch of undisciplined children history or agronomy?” If she answered, “Because I want to feel proud of what I can do,” he would reply: “But you’re already a Vernet. Isn’t that enough?” As if, for her, self-pride must reside in being, and not doing. And he would look at Mother with disapproval for wanting to be more than she already was.

Father was conscious of the dangers of being a Vernet and tried to protect Mother as much as he could, but that only made matters worse. He surrounded her with servants and discouraged her whenever she wanted to go into town; she should stay at the house and take care of her beautiful garden, he said. He made Crisótbal, who was tall and brawny, drive her everywhere in the family’s new blue-and-white Cadillac. Clarissa did as Aurelio wished; when she wasn’t visiting Emajaguas, she lived in isolation, taking care of her garden and eventually losing contact with the world outside its walls.

Mother and I spent very little time together in Las Bougainvilleas. I don’t remember ever seeing her in a bathing suit or taking a stroll barefoot on the beach with me. It was Father who taught me how to read and write, how to ride a bicycle, and how to swim. Mother belonged to a sewing club, Las Tijerillas, and the members met at our house every week. They were good friends of Mother’s and exchanged recipes and gossip with her. Most of them didn’t have a college education and didn’t belong to La Concordia’s sugarcane aristocracy. They were middle-class women, the wives of Star Cement plant managers, of the sales executives, of the low-level engineers, and they all did their own housework. Mother couldn’t stand La Concordia’s well-to-do ladies, who did their shopping in Miami and spoke a Spanglish peppered with
honeys
and
darlings
. These were women hopelessly spoiled by their husbands, just as Father spoiled me.

When Father went on a trip he always brought back two beautiful presents, one for me and one for Mother. Once he went on a business trip to Mexico and bought her a magnificent silver and turquoise bracelet. I got one exactly like it, only daintier. When he traveled to the island of Margarita, off the coast of Venezuela, he bought her a magnificent freshwater-pearl crucifix and brought me one just as beautiful, only smaller. I never wore the jewelry, but I kept it as a token of Father’s love.

Mother loved Father, but the protected domestic life she led in Las Bougainvilleas slowly ate away at her self-respect. Father, in turn, adored her, but there was a blind spot in his love. I remember one Saturday morning when I spilled ink on an antique French Provincial chair in Mother’s bedroom. Going to fill my Parker pen at her marble-topped vanity, which doubled as a desk, I stumbled and carelessly dropped the ink bottle. I tried to take out the stain with milk, but it spread all over the silk upholstery. When Mother came home from shopping she was furious. She slapped me and called me a scatterbrain. She ordered me to my room for the rest of the day. Father laughed and told her that a chair was just a chair and that I was only trying to do my homework; she shouldn’t lose her perspective. Mother burst into tears and shut herself up in
her
room. I apologized through the locked door, but secretly I rejoiced. I stood there next to Father and took his long, slender hand in mine. Mother couldn’t stop crying. Father winked at me, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and quietly locked me in my room. I felt betrayed.

Another time, the three of us went to visit Abuela Valeria at Emajaguas and stayed overnight. Alvaro had a baseball game and didn’t come. When I woke up I discovered I had my period. I hated having it. It kept me from swimming, going out to play baseball, behaving like a tomboy. I locked myself in the bathroom, rinsed my pajama pants, and hung them to dry over the curtain rod. I wanted to pretend nothing had happened. Rather than ask Mother for a sanitary napkin, I stuffed my panties with toilet paper.

After lunch we got into the car; Father was driving. We had been traveling over an hour and were halfway to Las Bougainvilleas when Mother asked if I had packed my new pajamas in my overnight bag. “I forgot them at Emajaguas,” I said. “I got the curse last night.” Mother dug her nails into my arm. “We’ll have to drive back to get them then. Aurelio, turn the car around.” Father tried to calm her. “We can get them the next time we visit your mother, dear. We don’t have to go back right now.” But Mother was beside herself. “You little idiot!” she said. “Why do you have to be so careless? Your head’s always in the clouds.”

Father ignored us. He looked out the window and turned the car around at the next curve; soon we were speeding back to Emajaguas. I was in tears, not because of Mother’s scolding but because I was convinced Father loved Clarissa more than he loved me.

I
N 1956 TÍO VENANCIO
approached Father and said, “I’ve run for governor too many times and people are tired of my image. I think we’d stand a much better chance if you ran this time. But I’ll still be president of the party. I’ll go on taking care of the strategy and organization. Together we’ll keep the Partido Republicano Incondicional afloat.”

Venancio’s wheelings and dealings with the sugar barons were hurting him at the polls. Still, the Partido Republicano Incondicional stood for statehood, Father’s sacred cause, and every four years at election time “
el ideal
” carried a large portion of the island’s votes.

Father accepted Tío Venancio’s offer and ran for governor. There were many towns to visit, many speeches to make. The Partido Democrático Institucional had a formidable political machine and was very difficult to defeat. Mother was terrified that something might happen to Father at one of the
mítines
. His absences were a torture to her, as she could hardly sleep at night.

Father became a politician, a public figure, and sometimes a bit of a ham actor. The moment he climbed the steps of the stumping platform he cast himself in the role of “
padre de la patria
.” During his campaign one of the most popular of the party’s songs, sung by groups of children clapping their hands delightedly, was “
Vernet, Papá, queremos estadidad
!” Aurelio loved it all: he patted, hugged, and kissed people so effusively that he became infected with mange more than once; his hair began to fall out and he got blisters all over his skin, just like the stray dogs that wandered the streets of La Concordia. Every time I heard that song I got stinging mad. My father was my father, and that stupid slogan relegated me to the status of a distant cousin.

As the campaign progressed and Father’s absences grew more frequent, Mother grew jealous of other women. She was constantly on the lookout, imagining that Father had a lover in every town. She was suspicious of his secretaries, and she made him fire all the female ones and hire only males. When she walked down the street with Father, if a woman passed by swinging her hips and batting her eyelashes because she recognized the handsome candidate for governor, Mother would narrow her eyes, whisper, “Bitch!” and hang on even more tightly to his arm. Once, a particularly good-looking party functionary walked by during a party convention, and Mother strode up quickly behind her, smacked her on the behind, and yanked a tuft of hair from her head. Then she ran down the aisle and out into the street, where she waited around the corner until Father got the car to take her home. Fortunately, Aurelio was so popular with the female constituency that these episodes never had serious consequences.

Mother’s temper tantrums began to get worse. She grew furious at the new gardener, who was a drunkard and never watered the plants; at the maid, who was a
puta
if she visited her boyfriend on her day off. Eladio, the Chinese cook, once got so upset at her when she called him a
carbonero
—a coalman—for overcooking the London broil that he threatened her with a knife, and Mother had to run and lock herself in her bedroom. She was jealous of the maids and cooks and treated them so poorly that they never stayed long. It seemed as if a different one walked through the door every month.

She would have Crisótbal drive her to the slums in the Cadillac to look for the daughters of poor but decent families whom the Siervas de María had recommended to her as maids, but after a while she couldn’t find anyone. The shantytown huts were made of flattened tin, bits of wood, and cardboard, and the streets were labyrinthine. The Cadillac would turn left and right a dozen times before it arrived at the right address; often people would “accidentally” throw garbage out their windows as the car went by. This would give the girls time to hide under the bed or scurry out the back door of the house as soon as they heard the Cadillac coming, and their parents would claim to be childless.

One time Mother went to confession at La Inmaculada, the chapel where Abuela Adela had done her charity work. It was near a slum where many of the girls who worked as maids in Las Bougainvilleas lived, so the parish priest knew many of them personally. When Mother knelt in the confessional and began to excuse herself for her short temper, the parish priest grew curious and asked her name. When she identified herself, the priest said: “I’ve heard a lot about you from my parishioners, my dear—and I’m very interested in what you have to say. A bad temper may be only a venial sin, but when you deprive someone of his dignity, it can also be a path of red-hot bricks that leads to hell!” Mother’s face flushed and she wished the earth would swallow her up. She was so embarrassed she did her best to control her temper for a while.

Most of all, I think, Clarissa was jealous of me. I was half a Rivas de Santillana; it didn’t matter how much she insisted I resembled the Vernets. When Father’s political campaign intensified and Clarissa was too tired to accompany him, he asked me to stand beside him on the platform when he spoke. I was eighteen and this made me feel important. Father needed me, I told myself, and my presence in this world made Mother’s just a little bit less necessary.