House on the Lagoon (12 page)

Arístides was overprotective of his daughter. After Quintín and I got married, Rebecca herself used to tell me about the trouble he gave her when she was growing up. When a boyfriend came to visit her in their Guaynabo home, he always sat with them in the living room and made small talk. The visitor would feel so self-conscious he wouldn’t say a word, eventually leaving the house in dejection. When Rebecca was invited to parties, Madeleine stayed home and Arístides was the one who chaperoned the young woman. Her father enjoyed following a tune and loved to dance with Rebecca, so her friends rarely had a chance to dance with her. When they did, Rebecca was so accustomed to her father that she invariably stepped all over their toes.

Arístides wasn’t aware that anything was wrong; he thought his daughter was enjoying herself as much as he was. One evening he asked Rebecca to dance with him for the third time and she burst out crying. “Don’t you see what you’re doing, Father? If I dance with you all the time, I can’t keep step with anyone else.”

Arístides shamelessly spoiled Rebecca; he bought her everything she wanted, but in return he expected her to obey him in all things. She became a virtual prisoner; he never let her do anything on her own. When she wanted to do volunteer work at Presbyterian Hospital, he refused permission. When she was offered a job proofreading at
The Clarion,
San Juan’s largest newspaper, he called the owner on the telephone and pressured him not to hire her. When she wanted to visit her cousins in Boston, he wouldn’t allow it. After she graduated from high school, she wasn’t permitted to go to the university; she had to stay home and help Madeleine with the housework. Soon she was so bored she began to retreat into a fantasy world. When she turned sixteen, the ladies of the committee from the Spanish Casino fortunately paid her a visit. Who knows what would have happened to Rebecca if they hadn’t arrived with Buenaventura’s portrait in its red-velvet frame.

I suspect Rebecca’s difficult relations with her father were at the root of her advocacy of political independence for the island. I remember her telling me that when she was a child she had a stamp collection, and her favorite stamps were from France. Many of these commemorated the French Revolution and had the initials RF printed on them. As her full name was Rebecca Francisca, they were also her monogram. Blazing cannons, flying banners with cries such as “Long live the Republic!” or “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” in blue, white, and red completed the picture. Rebecca swore that one day she would gain her freedom and fly to all parts of the world, like the letters her stamps gave wings to. “Every woman should be a republic unto herself!” she often whispered into her pillow before she went to sleep at night.

Years later, after she began to hold her literary soirées in the house on the lagoon, Rebecca’s artist friends were all Independentistas—albeit of the salon type. When they argued that the island should be a sovereign nation and cease being a territory of the United States, she agreed wholeheartedly. If she couldn’t be independent herself, she would say, at least her country should have control over its own destiny.

A
BBY WAS MY FAVORITE
Grandmother. She was petite, no more than five feet tall in her bare stockings, and she liked to remind you that Letizia Bonaparte, Napoleon’s mother, had been the same height. She had delicate features and her skin was as smooth as ivory. After Abuelo Lorenzo died, she always dressed in black and wore her gray hair pulled back in a knot, which made her coal-black eyes look even darker and livelier.

What I admired most was her presence of mind. She was convinced that greedy people always ended up badly. “Ambition,” she used to say to me, “is like a plague of termites. It makes inroads from father to son, from brother to brother, and before you know it, the beams of your own house are eaten through and through. Termites never sleep, they bore tunnels underground day and night until they finally reach the heart.”

Abby’s maiden name was Valentina Antongeorgi, and she was also of Corsican descent. She was born in San Juan in 1885; her father was a schoolteacher and her mother a social worker. Abby was preparing to be a nurse, but her mother died, and she had to take care of her younger brothers. She was forced to abandon her studies when she was sixteen and a sophomore in high school. The federal government had instituted health programs all over the island, teaching people the value of vaccines and modern sanitary methods, and she had planned to work in hygiene after her graduation. But she also enjoyed literature and music and took courses in both at school.

When Abby’s father remarried, her stepmother took over their house in Old San Juan, and Abby was practically relegated to the status of a servant. She had to cook, clean, and sweep the
zaguán
every day, because her stepmother was pregnant. The house was on San Justo Street, near the wharf. One day Abby was sitting on the balcony when Lorenzo Monfort rode by in his tilbury.

Lorenzo was a coffee planter from Adjuntas and he had come to San Juan to see about the arrival from France of a new crushing mill. One morning he rode by the house and saw Abby sitting there with a live chicken in her lap. She looked almost like a little girl, her features as delicate as porcelain. Her hands, though, were very strong, and as Lorenzo looked on, Abby took the chicken by the head, gave its neck a lightning twist, and in an instant the chicken was dead.

The next afternoon Lorenzo passed by the house again and heard someone playing the piano. He looked in through the window and saw the same girl, but this time her hands were flying up and down the keyboard as daintily as butterflies. He needed someone like that by his side, he thought, who could kill a chicken at devilish speed and play music like an angel. A few days later he went to see her father and asked for her hand. The year was 1903, and Abby considered herself very fortunate.

Abby and Lorenzo went to live at San Antonio, the coffee farm near Adjuntas which the young man co-owned with his brother. The town was high up in the mountains; the steep terrain made its houses look like eggs at the bottom of an eagle’s nest. Lorenzo was a gentleman farmer. He had studied agronomy in Barcelona and knew about all the modern inventions related to the coffee industry. He imported the latest hydraulic crushing mills from France and had the two-ton boulder of the
tahona
pulled up the steep hills of the farm on palm husks tied to six mules that almost burst their guts with the effort. He had several turbines made to order in the United States and used them to move the machinery which husked and polished Arabian coffee beans. The farm had ten springs which provided it with water power. Lorenzo had them channeled into an aqueduct which he set up with dozens of sluices so he controlled the force of the water as it ran down the mountain. But as he also had an artistic sensibility, he built a fountain with marble dolphins which sent water down the other side of the hill. Coffee shrubs surrounded benches which allowed one to sit under the trees and read books or just talk to a friend. One of the most valuable assets of the San Antonio were the hundred-year-old
capá, yagrumo,
and mahogany trees which spread their protective mantle over this arbor.

Abuelo Lorenzo had a twin brother, Uncle Orencio, who also lived on the farm. Orencio was a merchant and took care of the commercial side of the business, while Lorenzo supervised the planting and harvesting. It was Uncle Orencio’s responsibility to get the coffee beans to Adjuntas in large hemp sacks. Thanks to Orencio’s entrepreneurship, the brothers had their own mule train to carry the sacks down the steep mountain road to Ponce, which entailed considerable savings. They also had their own warehouse in Ponce’s harbor, where their merchandise could be stored for months. Orencio would wait for coffee to go up in Europe and the United States, and would sell it only when the price was sky-high.

They were identical twins and it was difficult to tell them apart. Uncle Orencio was born a few seconds before Lorenzo and considered himself the older, so he expected everyone to obey his orders. He was very different from his brother; he had absolutely no aesthetic sensibilities and didn’t give a damn whether the Arabian coffee beans “shone like drops of black gold on the palm of your hand,” as Lorenzo used to say. He made everybody work from dawn to dusk and paid his workers the same salary year in, year out.

Lorenzo was a kind man, and he didn’t agree with his brother’s policy of squeezing the last drop out of the local peasants. But he was afraid of Orencio and seldom stood up to him. He worshipped trees. He saw them as minor deities which purified the atmosphere and kept the island’s sparse soil from running out to sea. “Trees are our best executors,” he used to say to Abby when they took long walks around the farm or sat on the benches near the dolphin fountain. “They hold on to the soil. Let us plant coffee and make a living from it, and when we die they’ll make a good resting place when we’re buried under their shade.”

When Abuelo Lorenzo brought Abby to live at the farm, he thought Uncle Orencio would move away, but Orencio acted as if nothing had changed. He didn’t move out his bed or his dresser. The only concession to privacy he made for the newlyweds was to have his meals in the kitchen instead of in the dining room, and to bathe in the cement cistern at the back of the house instead of in the enameled iron tub with griffin feet that Lorenzo had installed on the second floor after he got married. Lorenzo didn’t dare ask him to leave, though Abby would have liked him to. There were no decent lodgings around, and Orencio would have had to move into one of the peasants’ shacks or travel every day by mule to and from Adjuntas, a two-hour trip each way.

Abby was very happy with her husband. They understood each other and shared the same tastes. The house they lived in was extremely pleasant. It was two stories: the first floor served as a warehouse where the coffee ready to be sold was stored; the living quarters were on the second floor. Lorenzo lived in considerable luxury. He had his food served on delicate china, used silverware, and slept on linen sheets. He also had a Pleyel vertical piano and a small but well-provisioned library with the novels of Balzac and George Sand standing side by side—which Abby took over.

A balustered balcony was wrapped around the house like a harmonica, and Abby loved to spend time there. It was never hot and there was a magnificent view of the mountains. The
yagrumo
trees always seemed to be waving their shimmering leaves at her, and the African tulips sprouted tiny flames from their dark treetops. She practically lived in this gallery, and on breezy days she swore it hummed her favorite tunes.

At first, Abby thought she would find time to read novels and play the piano as much as she wanted to, but she found out she was wrong. There was a shantytown called Los Caracoles close by, where many of the farm workers lived. The huts had thatched palm roofs and walls made of wooden crates, and there were no sanitary facilities. People bathed in the river and relieved themselves in the plantain patch behind the workers’ barracks. The plantains that grew there were the largest and thickest Abby had ever seen, but when she learned the reason why, she wouldn’t eat them. She asked Lorenzo to build latrines for the workers, but Orencio refused.

Children ran around naked, their bellies swollen with tapeworm. Abby began to go there every day to help. She taught the children basic hygiene: they should wash their faces and hands before supper, and take a bath every day. There was a Methodist school in the vicinity, and Abby met the young American missionary who taught the children to read and write. One day she asked Lorenzo to buy three cows in town and had them brought up to the farm. From then on, she sent fresh milk to the schoolchildren daily.

One Sunday morning, Abuela was sitting out with Abuelo on the balcony when the overseer came by. The young couple had been married a year and Abby was pregnant with Father. “It’s been raining for a week and a lot of rubbish has collected upriver,” the overseer said. “If we don’t clear it up soon, there could be a flood and the mud will drown the newly planted seedlings in the lower part of the farm. If you want me to, I can dynamite the dam today, rather than wait until tomorrow when the workmen will shovel it out. But you’ll have to pay me extra, because today is Sunday and it’s a dangerous job.” Lorenzo agreed. He knew it was a difficult task. The man would have to climb on the pile of debris to leave the dynamite, and could easily be swept away.

The foreman went ahead with the job and soon there was an explosion; the dam had given way. The rain lasted all day; the farm seemed about to be buried under an avalanche of dark clouds. The deluge shook the coffee trees and the red beans fell to the ground as if raked by a steel comb. Lorenzo and Abby ate lunch and went to their room to take a nap; there was nothing else do in that kind of weather. By three it was as dark as if it were six in the evening. They were still resting in bed and Orencio was sitting on the balcony poring over his account books when the foreman came up the stairs and mistook Orencio for Lorenzo. “The job’s done; pay me now,” he said. But Orencio didn’t know what the foreman was talking about. “You were only doing your duty,” he said. “We could have waited until tomorrow and wouldn’t have had to pay you extra.”

The foreman left in a rage. He stayed up all night drinking rum and went back to the house the next morning with his sharpened machete in his hand. He stepped out on the balcony; it had stopped raining, and Abby and Lorenzo were having breakfast. Lorenzo smiled at the overseer when he saw him come near and went to take out his wallet from his jacket to pay him. But the machete flew by and hit Lorenzo on the side of the head. Abby was sitting next to him, pouring a cup of coffee, and the crimson jet left a wide arch on her skirt and spattered the soft mound of her belly. For a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, she saw what she saw and heard what she heard without understanding any of it. Then a long, woeful cry rent the silence of the magnificent woods around them.