Eccentric Neighborhood (41 page)

Father contacted an agency in New York that brought temporary immigrant workers into the country with the aid of a subagency based in Guatemala City. He said he was willing to pay for her ticket and whatever expenses the trip might entail. My parents had never traveled to Central or South America and knew very little about those areas; it never occurred to them that Xochil Martínez, the girl the employee agency finally contracted for us, might be an Indian. At the time, very few well-to-do people in La Concordia had visited Central America, which they supposed was a lot like the island. We had enough backwardness at home, Mother said: telephones often didn’t work, water came out muddy from the tap whenever it rained heavily, and roads were often unpaved. When Father had time, we always traveled to Europe and the United States, treating ourselves to vacations in civilized countries.

Mother was eager to show the new maid off to her friends, the ladies of her sewing club, Las Tijerillas. But when Xochil stepped out of the family car, Mother almost fainted. Xochil looked like an Olmec idol. She was solidly built, with slanting eyes and a flattened nose, her round head resting on her shoulders as if she didn’t have a neck. She spoke hardly any Spanish. She wore a beautiful Mayan
huipil
, a square-cut robe embroidered with birds and stars that reached below her knees—and she carried all her belongings in a satchel. What impressed Mother the most were Xochil’s feet, which were bare and as big as a baby elephant’s. She had walked barefoot from the edge of the forest of Petén to Guatemala City. Once there, she had approached the first Catholic church she saw, showing the priest the letter from the employment agency in New York and the special permit the immigration authorities had sent her in the Petén and asking him if he could please take her to the airport. The priest complied, and soon Xochil Martínez was on her way to the island.

When Xochil arrived at our house in Las Bougainvilleas, she smiled sweetly and walked softly to the kitchen, where she sat down to have some lunch. She hadn’t eaten anything on the plane, she said, because she was afraid of getting sick. Mother served her a plate of rice and beans and a fried pork chop, which Xochil thoroughly enjoyed.

Xochil was obedient and submissive and always tried her best to please Mother. But she had never seen a telephone and was too terrified to answer when it rang. At night, she never listened to the radio or watched television: she sat by herself in the garden, singing softly in Mayan and weaving beautiful grasshoppers, butterflies, and hummingbirds with the palm leaf stalks she picked from the garden. She didn’t like to sleep indoors in the stifling heat of the servant’s room but took her
metate
outside, where on clear nights she slept under the fan-leafed breadfruit tree, a beatific expression on her face.

Mother decided to make the best of the situation. She disliked fat people, because they offended her Emajaguas aesthetic sensibility, so she put Xochil on a diet. She locked the cupboard in the pantry and ordered the cook to serve the new girl only a small portion of rice and beans, a small salad, and a
tostón
at lunchtime every day. A glass of milk at dinnertime and another one at breakfast would complete the menu.

Xochil didn’t complain but quietly obeyed Mother. She had been on a diet for a week and had already lost ten pounds when one afternoon a political
cacique
from one of the nearby towns brought Father a magnificent stalk of
guineos manzanos
as sweet as honey. There must have been more than fifty short, thick bananas on it, and they were so ripe they were already beginning to burst through their delicate yellow skins. Their white flesh was partly visible and their luscious aroma filled the whole house. The
cacique
gave Xochil the bananas to put away in the kitchen cupboard while he sat down to talk to Father on the veranda. Mother was taking a nap, and the cook had already left for the day, so Xochil was left alone with her terrible temptation. When Mother woke from her nap and came into the kitchen to help Xochil with dinner, she found her unconscious on the floor, having consumed fifty
guineos manzanos
on an empty stomach.

Xochil eventually lost fifty pounds, and Mother was able to dress her up in a size fourteen starched white uniform with lace edging on the collar and sleeves, but she still couldn’t show her off to Las Tijerillas. Xochil’s feet were so large that no shoes fit her. Mother took her to all the stores in La Concordia, but women’s shoes simply didn’t come in her size. Xochil couldn’t serve the table barefoot—that would have been unthinkable. Mother was practically in tears about the whole situation.

One day I hit on a solution. I took Xochil to La Concordia’s sports shop and told the salesman to bring us a pair of Converse sneakers size fifteen and a half EEE, the kind basketball players wear. Xochil put them on and they fit like a glove. After that she was able to serve the table at teatime and pass the silver tray with the dainty asparagus rolls and the creamy chicken puffs to Mother’s elegant lady friends.

Xochil lasted two years with us, longer than any young woman from La Concordia’s slums, without a word of protest ever issuing from her lips. But one day when she had saved enough, she quietly disappeared.

M
OTHER WORRIED THAT FATHER
was going to drive us into bankruptcy. In 1944 he had spent a fortune on his ill-fated campaign for mayor of La Concordia, and in 1948 Bishop MacFarland had sweet-talked the Vernet brothers into donating the land for the Universidad de las Mercedes, plus three hundred thousand dollars more for a science building. Mother didn’t believe in throwing money away on politics, but she was glad to help out the Church; the university was certainly a worthy cause. Philanthropy, however, should be practiced in an orderly fashion.

As a Rivas de Santillana, Mother felt it was her duty to be thrifty. But the Vernets had made more money than she was capable of comprehending. Instinct told her that she was in a dangerous situation. Once you were a millionaire it was very easy to lose control. You were awash in your money like a sailor on a raft: wherever you looked there was a wave of cash drifting away from you, and there was no way to control the direction of the swells. So Mother stuck to her frugal ways; she never spent a penny more than was necessary and lived as she had before.

Whenever she went shopping, Mother always bargained. There was nothing unusual in this at the Plaza del Mercado, where housewives haggled with the fruit and vegetable vendors for hours, trying to save a few pennies. But Mother did the same thing when she went shopping in the elegant department stores and boutiques of La Concordia, where no one ever discussed money. She bought her clothes on sale whenever possible, and when she visited an expensive shoe store, she always asked if they had any samples left. Samples were the shoes the mannequins in the windows wore, which were usually so small they didn’t fit anybody and thus were disposed of for a pittance. Mother wore a size five and she always took advantage of it. Her beautiful Papagallo and Bally shoes never cost her more than four dollars.

A few days before the laying of the cornerstone of La Universidad de Las Mercedes, Father asked Mother to prepare a formal buffet dinner at home; he wanted to celebrate the event in style. Cardinal Spellman was coming from New York to bless the foundations of the new buildings, and Bishop MacFarland and a dozen other Church dignitaries would also be present. At least thirty dinner guests were expected. Mother had the best catering service in town prepare the food: Cornish game hens stuffed with wild rice, shrimp jambalaya, and a special “prime blue-ribbon” roast beef flown in on ice from New York. She ordered her silver trays polished and her Venetian glassware rinsed. But when Mother took out her Lenox dinner service, she realized she had only twenty-four place settings, and she rushed to El Imperio, the best department store in La Concordia, to see if they had a set to match hers. They did. One had just arrived and they were exhibiting it in the store’s main show window. Turquoise-blue, the plates had a delicate twenty-four-carat gold scroll around the rim. It was very expensive, but Mother loved it. She took it home on approval, to see how it looked next to the Lenox set she already owned.

Aurelio was excited about the new university, and the day before the dinner he went to La Concordia to shop for wine and champagne. He met half a dozen friends hurrying down the street and invited them all to come to the party the following evening. When Mother found out, she was furious. “What will Cardinal Spellman think of the Vernets when he walks up to the buffet table, plate in hand, and the roast beef is carved to the bone? We’ll never live it down!” She made Aurelio telephone his three brothers that night and tell them and their wives not to serve themselves any roast beef.

Ulises, Venecia, Damián, Agripina, Celia, and Roque laughed the whole thing off. They knew how impulsive Father was and how he loved inviting guests to his house at the last minute. The following evening they served themselves only salad and bread and stood to the side drinking wine and champagne and talking among themselves while everybody lined up in front of the buffet. But Tía Clotilde took her beautiful turquoise Lenox plate with its golden scroll, walked up to the table, and served herself a juicy slice of roast beef. When he saw what Tía Clotilde was doing, Aurelio hurried over to her and whispered that Cardinal Spellman still hadn’t served himself and that she should put the meat back on the platter. Tía Clotilde was furious. She set her plate down with a bang, took Roque by the arm, and steered him out of the house just as Cardinal Spellman was pronouncing the benediction. Still, dinner was a success and when Cardinal Spellman left, he extended to Mother his beautiful amethyst ring to kiss and blessed Aurelio, Alvaro, and me, gently placing his hands on our heads.

By three o’clock in the morning Mother still hadn’t been able to fall sleep. She tossed and turned, thinking of the extravagant Lenox dinner set that she didn’t really need. The set had cost three hundred dollars, which now had to be added to the three million the Vernets had donated in land and to the three hundred thousand they had donated for the science building. Clarissa felt that the family had gone overboard and that it was her duty to economize. So the next day she carefully packed the Lenox dinner set in its crate again and had it taken back to El Imperio, where she asked for a credit because the design of the plates hadn’t blended in with her own, after all.

A few days later Tía Clotilde was in town to do some errands and she went by El Imperio. She was amazed to see Mother’s turquoise-and-gold dinner service exhibited in the window as an exclusive new arrival. She went in and asked for the manager. “Did you sell an identical dinner service to Clarissa Vernet a few days ago?” she asked, pointing to the window, her face wooden. “No,” the manager answered. “This dinner service is very expensive. Our store ordered only one. But we did let Mrs. Vernet take the plates home overnight on approval, because she wanted to see if they matched her own.” Clotilde arched her eyebrows and looked at the woman with venomous eyes. “The whole Roman Curia ate off those plates three nights ago,” she said vindictively. “Clarissa Vernet gave a dinner for Cardinal Spellman and thirty-odd priests at her home, and he ate roast beef, wild rice, and shrimp jambalaya on them. I know, because I was there. Are you still going to sell the dinner service as if it were new?”

The manager was astonished and immediately telephoned Mother. She rushed to the store, paid for the dishes in cash, and took them home with her. The story soon spread to the rest of La Concordia’s more fashionable commercial establishments and Mother never again dared take anything home on approval or even ask for a discount. But whenever we traveled to New York and went shopping for clothes at Bergdorf’s or Saks Fifth Avenue, she couldn’t resist temptation and always asked the salesladies in the designer salon for a discount, to my embarrassment.

I
N MAY 1956 I GRADUATED
from Danbury Hall, and in the fall I entered Saint Helen’s College. During my four college years—from 1956 to 1960—I studied hard and lived an austere life. Saint Helen’s was very different from what it is today. Then it was an all-girls’ college run by nuns. Students slept in army-style iron cots, there were no rugs on the bedroom floors, and you had to step on cold cement when you got out of bed in the morning to go to the one bathroom at the end of the hall. When I took my granddaughter there on a recent visit, I marveled at the aqua wall-to-wall carpets, nice soft mattresses, and beautiful tiled bathrooms shared by adjoining suites. But the spartan conditions of Saint Helen’s were good for me, if only because at home my parents spoiled me so much.

Since Saint Helen’s was a Catholic school, I would get salutary doses of religion. Father regretted having yielded to Abuelo Chaguito’s Masonic promptings and sent me to Danbury. Thanks to Bishop MacFarland, he had become conservative and now went to Mass and Holy Communion regularly, following in Abuela Adela’s footsteps. Saint Helen’s was a forty-five-minute train ride from New York City, that den of sin and iniquity, and my parents were terrified that I would venture there without a chaperon or, worse, accompanied by crazy Irish girls looking for a bar and a good time. But unlike nondenominational colleges and sophisticated universities like Stanford or Berkeley, Saint Helen’s allowed its students’ parents to choose to have their girls confined to campus. Every weekend, when Saint Helen’s rolling acres were as deserted as the Russian tundra, I had to stay in my dorm. I could get together only with the Turkish, Arab, and Japanese girls whose parents were as conservative as mine, or sign up to go to the movies in town with one of the school’s chaperons.

Fortunately, my isolation was countered by my deep interest in my studies. I was fascinated by Abd al-Rahman III, the great Umayyad emir of tenth-century Spain; the French poets Pierre Ronsard and Paul Verlaine; the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. So passionate was I that in winter I would sometimes strap tennis rackets to my shoes to trek to the library through the drifts of snow. But when I returned to La Concordia for summer vacations, I didn’t open a single book. I got up at ten and slept in a French Provincial bed with gold trim. My room had a V’soske carpet and a Venetian chandelier. Summer threw me into a whirlwind of social activities and I was invited to parties almost every night. I had dozens of ball gowns and went on daylong picnics with friends to Isla de Pargos on the
Chaguito
, the sixty-foot Norseman yacht that the Vernets all shared. Anyone would have thought I was the happiest girl in the world. I was bored to death.