Eccentric Neighborhood (34 page)

Father had to travel to New York in search of funds for his campaign. He took Tío Ulises along, which galled Mother, who regarded her brother-in-law as a relentless skirt chaser. But Father set her mind to rest by assuring her that Ulises was essential because of his excellent connections with the mayor of New York, who arranged for them to rent Madison Square Garden for a nominal sum. The Partido Republicano would hold a Puerto Rican rally there to raise money for the statehood campaign.

It was past midnight when Father returned a week later. As soon as I heard his car turn into the driveway, I got out of bed and flew across the yellow and gray tiles of the terrace to the door. Dressed in his navy-blue wool suit and gray silk tie, with his cinnamon-colored hair, light brown eyes, and delicate mustache, he was the handsomest man on earth. I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him on both cheeks.

Mother, strangely enough, stayed in her room. When Father went to the master bedroom calling her name, I followed, ignoring the fact that they probably wanted to be alone.

Mother sat propped up in bed in one of her silk georgette nightgowns. Her table lamp, a Sèvres shepherd dressed in a blue jacket, threw a delicate oval of light over her embroidered coverlet.

“Did you have a nice trip?” she asked Father coolly, without glancing up from the novel she was reading.

Father said yes and sat on the edge of the bed. He leaned over to give Mother a kiss. “Siglinda called this afternoon,” Clarissa went on. “She said she saw a picture in the
Daily News
of Ulises and you at Madison Square Garden. She said you weren’t alone; there was a platinum blonde hanging on to each of you.”

Aurelio burst out laughing. “You can’t be serious!” he said. “We’ve been married for more than twenty years and you’re behaving like a jealous bride!” he said. He turned and winked at me. “They were campaign aides. Didn’t you notice the statehood flags draped across their chests?”

I laughed, too, and looked down sheepishly at the floor. I didn’t dare look at Mother. “I have the proof right here that I was thinking of you the whole time!” Father added, pulling a small black suede box from his pocket and putting it on Mother’s lap. “Open it,” he said, smiling broadly. Mother looked at him, eyebrows knit. She took the ring out of the box: it was a three-carat star sapphire. But instead of putting it on her finger, she threw it angrily toward a corner of the room.

I stood there petrified. Father got up laughing from the bed and went looking for the ring under the wardrobe. When he found it, he came over to where I was. “You take it, darling,” he said, slipping the ring back in the box. “Your mother’s right not to want it; she deserves something much better. I should have bought her a diamond.”

“Don’t you dare, Elvira! Your father has a guilty conscience and he’s simply trying to make amends!” Mother shrieked from the bed.

But I took the box, opened it, and carefully slid the jewel onto my finger.

“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, kissing him again.

T
HERE WERE FEW CULTURAL
activities in La Concordia; the Athena Theater seldom presented operas or ballets, and there was no public library. Probably because she was bored, Mother one day accepted an invitation to a bridge party at the house of Rosa Luisa Sheridan, the wife of a distillery owner. Not everyone in La Concordia got invited to Rosa Luisa’s parties, but Mother belonged to the sugarcane aristocracy of Guayamés and Rosa Luisa considered her one of her own.

The sugar barons of Las Bougainvilleas still managed to live relatively well, thanks to rum’s golden ambrosia. Most of them had their own distilleries—Ron Llave, Ron Palo Viejo, Ron Bocachica, Ron Caneca, Ron Carioca, Ron Agüeybaná—which stood on the outskirts of La Concordia. But with the sugar industry on the wane, the reign of King Rum was coming to an end also, and the sugar barons knew it. Every once in a while, a distillery would be uprooted piece by piece like a half-rusted dinosaur and shipped to Santo Domingo or Venezuela, where it would be reassembled and the sugar barons would begin to make money thanks to the meager salaries paid to the peons.

The only thing the sugar barons could do was resign themselves to seeing their fortunes dwindle and live it up as best they could with the last swigs of rum at the bottom of the barrel. Probably for that reason the expression for getting plastered at the time was
darse el palo
, literally “clubbing oneself to death.”

Every sugar baron’s house in Las Bougainvilleas had a bar made of glass blocks, with colored lights, a brass rail, nickel-bright stools, a polished mahogany counter, and shelves loaded with liquor at the back. The barroom usually had no windows, which added to the shadowy cabaret atmosphere, already clouded with cigarette smoke. A phonograph with huge Philco speakers ensconced in a “built-in” wall unit exuded mood music, and an air conditioner was usually kept going full blast, so the sugar barons could pretend they were in New York. Pickaninnies with corkscrew penises, Coca-Cola openers shaped like steel breasts, pin-up calendars with naked models of all shapes and sizes were part of the usual decor. The exception to the rule was our house at 1 Avenida Cañafístula, where Father and Mother would have had their heads chopped off before allowing a bar. Whenever they gave a party, they stopped serving drinks at midnight, a hint for everybody to go home.

These bars often had a door leading to the back of the house, where gentlemen met their paramours and could make a discreet exit without their wives noticing anything amiss. Rum and sex were, in fact, the two main entertainments in Las Bougainvilleas. The men pursued them openly. The women, on the other hand, drank like fish but had to be careful about the sex. Female infidelity was not permitted—shooting your wife if you caught her
in flagrante
was a sport husbands practiced successfully—and ladies were forced to socialize only with other ladies. Mother, isolated at 1 Cañafístula, was unaware of this situation when she went to Rosa Luisa Sheridan’s bridge party.

She got there late, delayed by a dental appointment, and found the front door ajar. She stepped in, pushing it fully open with her umbrella and calling out for Rosa Luisa. Soft music wafted out from the bar. Instead of the elegant little card tables she was expecting, with ladies shuffling the deck and betting in low voices, she saw a group of women dancing and others lying on cushions strewn on the floor. They were kissing and rubbing slowly against one another, and they were so drunk they didn’t even notice Clarissa standing there. She turned and ran out of the house, her face flaming.

Aside from backroom bars, coronation balls were another form of escape for the sugar barons. They were held every year at the Sports Club, located in an art nouveau building designed by Bijas at the beginning of the century. It had once been a beautiful building, and one could still pick out the elegant prairie-style design of its overhangs and courtyards. But now the structure was eaten through by termites, and the ballroom’s plank floor was full of holes. There were coronation balls for everything: for the Carnival of Pirates, for the Carnival of Animals, for the Carnival of Planets, for the Carnival of Birds, for the Carnival of Dolls. Clarissa and Aurelio had each taken part in a carnival when they were teenagers: Clarissa had been Queen of the Dolls and Aurelio King of the Planets. When I heard about this, I told Father I wanted to be Queen of the Carnival at the Sports Club also. Father probably would have said no if it hadn’t been 1956 and he hadn’t been running for governor.

My parents offered to pay all the expenses of the carnival that year and I was named Queen of Music. I was exultant. The ball was to be given in June, and Mother ordered a beautiful dress for me from Saks Fifth Avenue (this was a formal affair and Monserrate Cobián was simply not up to the occasion). The ball was a perfect opportunity for political fund-raising, as was the cocktail party preceding the ball which would be thrown in San Juan.

My dress and train were of billowing white organza embroidered with musical notes, and the skirt was held in place by a huge hoop petticoat. A crown with a giant rhinestone C clef sat on my head. Father himself, dressed in tails, played the first movement of Chopin’s second piano concerto on the Bechstein, specially brought over to the club for the night.

Followed by my pages and maids of honor, I strutted up the stairs to my throne—a huge lyre, done in pearl-colored silk—and regally seated myself. From up there I saw Mother hiding behind a column, dressed in black and clutching the little white lace handkerchief with which she had been dabbing powder on my face a few minutes earlier to dry my perspiration and take away the shine as she prayed that nothing would go wrong.

As carnival queen I accompanied Father to many banquets, balls, and rallies that summer, driving through the towns of the island. Mother usually stayed home.

O
UR HOUSE WAS NEXT
to Tío Ulises’s, and separated from it by a low stuccoed wall with an arched doorway. The door was later walled up, but its outline remained there for years, and it excited my curiosity as a child. Why had it been cemented over? I didn’t unravel the mystery until many years later.

Tío Ulises’s house at 2 Avenida Cañafístula had a showy wrought-iron fence decorated with white scrolls and spirals that gave it a festive look. Ours had a seven-foot-high wall around it that created a cloistered atmosphere that Clarissa cherished because it reminded her of Emajaguas. Next to Tío Ulises’s house came Tío Roque’s, and next to Roque’s was Tío Damián’s, both as beautiful as their elder brothers’. On the other side of the street was a handsome plot of land the Vernets bought for Abuelo Chaguito, hoping to convince him to build there someday. Several years after Abuela Adela’s passing, Abuelo Chaguito was still living with Brunhilda in the old wooden house on Calle Esperanza in the center of town. He didn’t want to leave; there were too many memories there of his life with Adela.

Tío Ulises was an advocate of laissez-faire, and I remember his two favorite sayings: “Money has no ideology; it grows both to the right and to the left” and “He who tries to control energy will only destroy himself.” Perhaps because he believed that nothing lasts forever and that the world is in a state of constant change, he would give money to the Catholic, Evangelical, and Lutheran churches, all at the same time. In politics he was just as flexible, contributing to Fernando Martín’s Partido Democrático Institucional, to Tío Venancio’s Partido Republicano Incondicional, and to the Partido Independentista. At election time you would see all three flags flying from the roof of his house: the Partido Democrático’s red
pava
, the Partido Republicano’s tricolor, and the Independentistas’ white cross on a green field. He probably voted for all three parties, because he had friends among the voting officials and they let him into the polls long after they were closed.

But Abuela Adela’s death continued to affect Tío Ulises. Her blessing of Aurelio on her deathbed had been a terrible blow to him. Ulises was the eldest son, the one who resembled Adela the most. He had inherited the Pasamontes’ financial abilities, and yet Adela had preferred Aurelio over him and had made his brother the head of the family. Ulises couldn’t understand it. If Aurelio was smarter, Ulises at least would be more of a man. And yet, if his mother didn’t love him, no woman would ever love him. And so Tío Ulises began to feel that Caroline Allan’s love wasn’t enough; he needed to prove that other women loved him also. That was when he began to run after every available female who crossed his path, “even if she looked like a broom,” as wags in La Concordia said.

Tío Ulises had a different girlfriend on every street corner. Whenever he spent the night out, Caroline would angrily demand where he’d been, but he wouldn’t tell her. She could ask anything she wanted except his whereabouts, because they fell under the heading of laissez-faire. “Sexual energy is like money—it cannot be controlled,” he told her. “He who tries to control it will be destroyed.” Caroline eventually fell ill and her family came to get her in the
Cormorant
, their yacht. They forced her to return to Boston, and she divorced Tío Ulises in 1931.

For the next several years Tío Ulises remained a bachelor, and when the Star Cement plant began to make millions of dollars, he closed up his house and decided to go to Europe. He traveled for three months all over the continent and liked only two things: the Lido in Paris—where he saw more bouncing breasts and bejeweled pussies than he had seen in his entire life—and Venice. In Venice he had a magnificent time. He rented a motorboat and spent a week roaring around the canals at thirty miles an hour, swamping every gondola he ran across and wondering why tourists found them so romantic when they were so maddeningly slow. He fell in love with the Byzantine basilica’s four golden domes and with the doge’s campanile on Piazza San Marco. “Venice,” he told Aurelio and his brothers when he got back to La Concordia, “is the passageway to heaven.” He also admired Venetian merchants enormously, and above all, the doge Enrico Dandolo, because he had dared defy Pope Innocent III’s papal bull and had turned the Fourth Crusade to Jerusalem into a commercial venture.

A few weeks after Ulises’s return, Abuelo Chaguito sent him on a business trip to San Juan. He drove across the island in his sporty blue Morris. He was passing through Maunabo, a little town on the east coast, when he saw a young girl standing by the side of the road selling mangoes under a palm tree. The mangoes were ripe, and they shone like golden globes at the bottom of a tin pan at her bare feet. The girl was very tall, and as she stood there, she swayed in the wind this way and that, just like the palm trees behind her. Her clothes were too tight for her, and her breasts rose like perfect spheres from beneath her white cotton blouse. “Has anyone told you look like a Byzantine cathedral?” Ulises asked her, getting out of the car. “Your breasts remind me of the domes of Saint Mark’s basilica, your neck of Giotto’s campanile, and your arms are made of the same bronze Ghiberti used to cast the doors of paradise.” The girl thought he was crazy and burst out laughing. “I have no idea who those gentlemen are, but if you buy half a dozen of my mangoes, I’ll close shop and go back home. I’ve been standing here in the sun all afternoon with no luck.”