House on the Lagoon (28 page)

Quintín was more concerned about his parents’ reaction than he had let on, however. That night, when he came back to our apartment, he complained that his brother was taking an unnecessary chance with Esmeralda Márquez. There were many beautiful girls among the young people Ignacio had grown up with in Alamares, and differences in how one was brought up were often more important than differences of culture and even of language. I tried to make him look at the whole thing from a different angle. Esmeralda was a friend of mine, I told him, and I knew her very well. She was not only beautiful, she was also very intelligent. She had managed to get a student grant and would soon be attending the New York Fashion Institute. She had inherited Doña Ermelinda’s excellent eye for line and color and would probably be able to get a good job in a fashion house in the States after she graduated. If Ignacio liked Esmeralda, it was his business; there was no reason why he shouldn’t ask her out. Doña Ermelinda, on the other hand, was a very elegant lady, who would do her utmost to make a good impression on Buenaventura and Rebecca, as on San Juan society. As to Don Bolívar, it was improbable that they would ever meet him. He was an old man and never went anywhere with Doña Ermelinda.

A few days later Quintín told his brother he was willing to help him out. Esmeralda was a sweet girl; with her blond hair and green eyes, she might convince Buenaventura and Rebecca to overlook her illicit home, of which she was the innocent victim. I was glad when Quintín decided to help Ignacio. He was still my old Quintín, the one I had fallen in love with when he came to visit me in Ponce.

Quintín and I went to parties regularly that summer and Rebecca often let us invite friends over to the house on the lagoon. Buenaventura liked to entertain, too. He particularly enjoyed trying out new wines and imported delicacies on his friends. It was no trouble for Quintín to organize a get-together for the following Saturday. Quintín invited a good number of his friends from San Juan, and some of my old friends from Ponce, and Esmeralda Marquez was among them.

Esmeralda and her mother arrived at the house in a black Fleetwood Cadillac Doña Ermelinda rented for the occasion, with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel. When Esmeralda stepped out of the car, she was wearing the most beautiful evening gown I have ever seen: the top was of Swiss embroidery and clung to her breasts like snow; the skirt was of silk organza and swirled around her like a waterfall. Right behind her came Doña Ermelinda dressed in tar-black taffeta, with a golden ziggurat sitting on top of her head. She was putting all her cosmetic wisdom to the test, and her skin looked almost pearl-white next to the opulent black of her dress.

Ignacio introduced Doña Ermelinda and Esmeralda to both his parents. Buenaventura was enchanted. He liked exotic people and felt immediately at home with Doña Ermelinda. He shook her hand warmly, took her around the living room to have her meet his friends, then offered her a glass of champagne. Ignacio took Esmeralda by the arm, so she would get acquainted with the young people, and after a few minutes of conversation drifted off with her to the golden terrace, to show her the moon trembling over the lagoon. When Rebecca saw them holding hands, a shiver of apprehension ran down her spine. Esmeralda Márquez looked like a nice girl; she was certainly beautiful in her white dress, which made her suntan very becoming. But Rebecca had absolutely no idea who she was and had never heard the name Márquez before.

Rebecca sat down next to a friend and began to observe Doña Ermelinda from afar. Buenaventura was showing her around the house and had taken her into the dining room, where Doña Ermelinda was busy admiring the Conquistador chairs. The dining room opened out onto the terrace, where the dance was soon to begin, and Doña Ermelinda decided to sit in one of the chairs because it offered a good vantage point. She pushed the chair to the edge of the terrace and made herself comfortable. From out of her bag she took a black lace fan Don Bolívar had bought her in Spain, and began to fan herself. She had finished her champagne and beckoned a waiter for another glass. Several ladies, the mothers of some of the other young ladies who had been invited to the party, came and sat next to her. They all began to talk and laugh among themselves.

Rebecca was amazed at Doña Ermelinda’s uninhibited behavior. A total stranger, she was acting as if she had known the Mendizabals all her life. Rebecca scrutinized her more closely. She was elegantly dressed, but there was something about her that didn’t ring true; she couldn’t figure out what. She was still thinking about it when the music started playing the first paso doble of the night.

Ignacio had hired a popular band to liven up the evening and ordered them to play only Spanish music, to please his father. Buenaventura came over to ask Rebecca for a dance.

“You’ll have to accept that girl as your daughter-in-law one day, Rebecca,” he said to her. “If I know Ignacio, he’s going to want to marry her as soon as he graduates from college; you know he’s as headstrong as you are. I think you’d better get used to the idea.” And when Rebecca didn’t answer, but kept opening and closing her fan and staring over Buenaventura’s shoulder to see what Doña Ermelinda was doing, he tightened his arm around her to bring her closer.

“Remember when
we
were almost the same age and fell desperately in love the night of your coronation ball? I was penniless but I was the happiest man on earth,” he said. “Today we can afford to be lenient and spare our children some of the difficulties we had to face.” Rebecca fanned herself slowly as Buenaventura went on whispering in her ear. He always got romantic when he danced a paso doble, and right now they were dancing
Pisa Morena,
one of his favorites.

All of a sudden Rebecca put her hand, sparkling with diamond rings, discreetly on his chest to make him keep his distance. “Stop behaving like a teenager and steer me as close as you can to Doña Ermelinda; I think I’ve discovered what was bothering me about her.” They spun around the dance floor, picking up speed, Buenaventura’s patent-leather shoes and Rebecca’s rhinestone sandals sliding in perfect unison over the mosaic floor. Rebecca looked attentively at Doña Ermelinda. When they were close enough, she made Buenaventura spin around again, flung her right hand in an arc, and struck Doña Ermelinda’s golden turban with her fan. The music stopped and everyone gasped.

When Buenaventura saw the turban fly off Doña Ermelinda’s head, he stopped in his tracks. Rebecca bent down to pick it up and, looking surprised and dismayed, gave it back to Doña Ermelinda with a smile. She excused herself and insisted she had been looking the other way when Buenaventura unexpectedly whirled her around. Doña Ermelinda’s face had turned gray. Several people began to laugh, pointing to the thick mat of hair that rose from her head, and some began to make unkind comments. But Doña Ermelinda didn’t bat an eyelash. She stared right back at them, stood up proudly from the Spanish Conquistador chair, and shook her head vigorously, to make her wild curls stand out even more. Then she walked over to Esmeralda, took her by the hand, and they walked out of the house together, heads held high.

That sad event, which gave the San Juan social set something to gossip about for months, had serious repercussions in the Mendizabal family. Ignacio was furious at his mother for having shamed him. He began to court Esmeralda openly, in defiance of his parents’ prohibition. If he persisted in seeing her, they told him, they would cut off his monthly allowance and refuse to pay for his airplane tickets to fly home from school on vacations. But Ignacio wouldn’t listen.

Doña Ermelinda came every so often to the capital, to purchase the tulles and silks she needed to create her debutante gowns, and when Esmeralda was home from school in the States, she would accompany her on those trips. Usually they stayed overnight at a small but very nice house overlooking the bay in Old San Juan. During the rest of that summer vacation, they stayed there several times. Ignacio would come to the Márquezes’ pink house in the evenings, stand under Esmeralda’s balcony, and sing her romantic songs with a guitar trio accompanying him. He spent a fortune on these serenades, and on the bouquets of gardenias he sent up to her door every night. But Esmeralda never opened the balcony’s louvered windows to see who was singing. The insult to Doña Ermelinda’s pride had been so great she would feel vindicated only if Esmeralda roundly rejected Buenaventura Mendizabal’s heir.

A few days before he left for school in September, Ignacio came to our new apartment to talk to Quintín in private. “You have to help me make Mother apologize to Doña Ermelinda,” he said. “It’s the only way she’s going to let me see Esmeralda again.” Quintín was sitting at his desk reading Suetonius’
The Scandalous Lives of the Caesars.
He looked up from his book and said, with sadness, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, Ignacio.” But Ignacio. insisted, and he wouldn’t leave.

Finally Quintín got tired of Ignacio’s pleading and decided to stop beating around the bush. “You can’t go out with Esmeralda Márquez, because she’s part black. Father and Mother will never stand for it,” he told him point-blank. They were sitting in the living room, and Ignacio was incensed. (And so was I, but I was too afraid to say anything.) Ignacio gave Quintín a violent shove, so he stumbled and fell. Quintín got up from the floor and slapped Ignacio, and his gold-rimmed glasses went flying across the room. It took all my levelheadedness to make them stop the fight.

Some weeks later Esmeralda was engaged to Ernesto Ustariz. Ernesto was head over heels in love with Esmeralda, and he had convinced his father to pay for Esmeralda’s education at the Fashion Institute. As soon as they were married, they would move to New York, where Ernesto planned to enter New York University Law School. They set the wedding date for November in San Juan, because Doña Ermelinda wanted all of San Juan society to attend. Ignacio, Quintín, and I were invited to the reception at Alamares’s poshest hotel. After the wedding, the newlyweds would spend the night in Doña Ermelinda’s pink house on the bay before boarding a plane for New York, where they would honeymoon.

Ignacio left for Florida State University at the end of September and was back on the island two weeks later. He wasn’t feeling well, he said, and wanted to take the semester off. The day of Esmeralda’s wedding, Ignacio woke up sick. He suffered from asthma, and the emotional stress of the past week had induced a serious attack. He could scarcely breathe and went around the house on tiptoe, with an inhaler in his hand, as if walking underwater. He was by turn furious at Esmeralda and terribly unhappy. After lunch he went to a bar in San Juan to try to forget his woes. Rebecca insisted we all ignore him. He was only seventeen, and would eventually get over his silly obsession.

That evening we went to the wedding together. Ignacio had had more than a few drinks and was strangely silent. He said a courteous hello to Esmeralda and her mother on the receiving line, as if nothing had happened between them. At three in the morning, however, when Quintín and I were ready to go home, we couldn’t find Ignacio anywhere. Finally we had to leave the hotel without him.

Quintín was worried about his brother, but there was nothing he could do. When we got to our apartment, we went directly to bed and fell asleep.

It must have been four in the morning when the phone woke us up. Quintín answered. It was Rebecca. “Ignacio is being held at the police station,” she said, almost spitting out the words. “After the wedding he drove over to Doña Ermelinda’s house and began to fire at everything in sight. I’d like to know why you left him behind at the reception and came back by yourselves. After all, he’s your younger brother, Quintín, and you’re responsible for him!” Quintín could hear Buenaventura in the background, his voice cracking with worry as he tried desperately to get a lawyer at that hour.

Quintín got out of bed and hurried to the police station. I called Rebecca and told her I was sorry; we had looked all over the hotel for Ignacio, but he had simply disappeared. She was terribly angry. “You may know a lot about books, young lady,” she almost hissed, “but you know very little about responsibility and respect!”

It wasn’t until later that I found out what had happened. Ignacio had gone to the wedding armed with Buenaventura’s gun, waited until the bride and groom left the hotel for Doña Ermelinda’s house in Old San Juan, and emptied it point-blank at the door. The newlyweds fled into the bathroom at the back of the building, but not before a bullet came through the front door and seriously injured Esmeralda’s little finger. When he heard her scream, Ignacio stopped firing and collapsed on the sidewalk. The noise woke up the whole neighborhood; lights went on in the houses nearby, and not five minutes had elapsed before a police siren was heard.

Quintín got his brother out on bail that morning, and Ignacio never mentioned Esmeralda’s name again. He went back to college the following semester and finished his four years at Florida State University. But he never fell in love again. When he came home for vacation, he enjoyed taking his fifteen-foot sailboat out on Alamares Lagoon all by himself. He named the boat
La Esmeralda
and insisted that sailing was the only love of his life.

T
HE CELLAR OF THE HOUSE
on the lagoon mesmerized me from the beginning. It dated from the days of Pavel, when Rebecca was a very different person from what she had become when I met her. The cellar gave the house much of its mystery, the feeling that events weren’t always what they seemed but could have unexpected echoes and repercussions. My own house on Aurora Street had no cellar. Ponce’s soil is dry and hard, very different from the swamps of the north, and its basalt foundations make digging into it almost impossible. At the house on Aurora Street, events were easy to classify: there was a right and a left, a front and a back to everything—there was little room for ambiguity or doubt. But at the house on the lagoon, things were often misleading.

The first thing that caught my eye when I entered that strange world were the huge steel beams that supported Pavel’s golden terrace. They jutted out majestically from the walls of the house, all rusted and half eaten by the salt air. Even though they weren’t supposed to be seen, they had an Art Nouveau elegance which seemed almost organic, as if Pavel had designed them to blend in with the nearby mangroves. The area under the terrace was used as a common room by the servants, and it was here that they ate, smoked, and sat talking and relaxing after work. The dirt floor