House on the Lagoon (10 page)

When I met Quintín, my heart was thrown into turmoil; I lived at the very center of desire. Everything around me was confusion; only meeting Quintín in the garden in Ponce or in our hideaway in New York would soothe me. Nor did the powerful attraction I felt for Quintín ebb after the sad episode of the tenor’s suicide.

Quintín was very good-looking; he had inherited Buenaventura’s swarthy Spanish looks. He had broad shoulders, a young bull’s neck, hazel-green eyes, and hair black as a raven’s wing, carefully combed back and dabbed with eau de cologne. The only thing that worried me was his fiery temper. The moment I saw him on the verge of anger, I’d shake my head and refuse to look into his eyes. This was to be our secret signal. Quintín had lived in terror of Buenaventura’s ferocious temper, and our signal was a way of preventing his own anger from surfacing. It proved effective for a while; Quintín would laugh and forget what he was angry about. In fact, it brought us closer.

“Life is like a war,” Abby would say to me when I was growing up. “The longer we live, the more scars we carry around with us. There’s a maimed veteran hiding inside each of us; some have lost an arm, others a leg or an eye; we’ve all been buffeted by life’s blows. We can’t grow our missing limbs back, so we have to learn to live without them.”

I believe my mother, Carmita Monfort, was responsible for my hidden wound, though she was not aware of it. When I was three years old, something dreadful happened which I’ve never been able to forget. At the time we were still living in Trastalleres—Father, Mother, Abby, and I. Trastalleres was a lower-middle-class suburb of San Juan, and it was there that Carmita became pregnant for the second time. I have a blurred recollection of the day. I was playing with my dolls under the terebinth tree which grew at the back of the house and I could feel the noonday sun on the nape of my neck. Mother’s bathroom window was high over my head and it was open; I couldn’t see her but I heard her cry out. I dropped my dolls and ran to the other side of the house, went up the stairs, and flung open the bathroom door. She was lying on the floor unconscious; a pool of blood lay on the white tiles like lacquer.

Mother’s parents, Doña Gabriela and Don Vicenzo Antonsanti, were both from Corsica, where, according to my grandfather, there was only the sea, the soaring cliffs, and mountains covered by scrubby vegetation pared down by goats. When they were in their twenties, Gabriela and Vicenzo came to our island to visit relatives who lived near the town of Yauco. They fell in love with its velvet-green mountains, which harbored valuable coffee shrubs beneath a canopy of
guamá, yagrumo,
and mahogany trees. Gabriela and Vicenzo were first cousins, and to get married they had to get a Papal dispensation. Once that problem was taken care of, they were married and they worked hard as a team. Soon they owned a prosperous coffee farm on the outskirts of Yauco, where they lived.

Abuela Gabriela was a beautiful woman, but beauty was unfortunately her nemesis. There was very little to do in the mountains, and Abuela had a hard time keeping Abuelo’s mind off his favorite pastime. He loved guava shells with goat cheese, and Abuela would prepare them for him almost every day. When she boiled the guavas, the aroma would fill the whole house and waft in and out through the windows. Abuelo could smell it before he got off his horse. The moment he climbed the stairs, he would start peeling off his clothes and chase Abuela through the house until they wound up in bed. Abuela Gabriela’s skin was a delicate guava pink, and when they made love he nibbled playfully at her breasts and felt himself to be more and more potent. Abuela finally realized the guavas were an aphrodisiac and stopped cooking them, but it was too late. For six years in a row she had a baby every year. Abuelo was delighted with his wife’s productiveness, which he saw as a gift from God. “My wife is so fertile,” he would say to his friends, “that I just have to sneeze by her side once, and nine months later she’s as big as a pumpkin. But I don’t mind it at all, because being so close to nature is one of her many charms.”

Abuela Gabriela did her duty and lived with a clear conscience. In their seventh year of marriage, Vicenzo was still moonstruck every time he came near her, but she couldn’t stand it anymore. She chose to fall out of favor with God rather than lose her inner peace. That December she pushed Vicenzo out of her room before she turned into a pumpkin again.

It wasn’t an easy victory; she had to fight for her bed as if it were a castle under siege. Vicenzo importuned her nightly with his poems and serenades, standing like a lovesick calf by her locked door, but Abuela was proud of her Corsican blood and withstood his assaults with an iron will. “If this goes on for one more day, the cradle will be my tomb,” she cried to Vicenzo. She pleaded with him to accept chastity as a way of life, but it was no use. When he insisted she honor a husband’s prerogatives, Abuela rose up in arms. Like a mountain-born Lucretia, she defended her celibacy with brooms, dust mops, and even kitchen knives. When in the dead of night she saw Abuelo’s shadow creeping silently near her bed, she sat up, knife in hand, and cried out at the top of her lungs: “Get out of here, Vicenzo; this is my private bastion! From now on, whoever tries to climb these ramparts will end up in one of Río Negro’s ravines.”

It was a struggle for both of them. They still loved and needed each other. Abuela Gabriela didn’t want to exile Abuelo from her side; she tried to convince him that true love didn’t dwell in the bottom half of the body but in the mind, and that a chaste embrace could be as effective an antidote for incurable wounds as a lustful one. But Abuelo wouldn’t give in. His eyes would fill with tears, he would look at her reproachfully, and then would try to kiss and embrace her. When he finally realized that she meant what she said, he tried to practice continence for two weeks, but on the fourteenth day he felt as if he were burning in hell. He stole out of the house and went off to the nearest town.

Abuelo began to visit two mistresses in Yauco once a week, and no one thought him the worse for it. “Only the exercise of nature’s most elemental pleasure can reconcile a man to the suffering of this world,” he said to the priest of the town, who was one of his best friends. When he went to confession, the priest didn’t make anything of his new situation and gave him absolution anyway. Soon both of Abuelo’s mistresses became pregnant. Abuela was so relieved that it was someone else’s task to give birth, nourish, and bring up the new babies that she gave them both her blessing. She attended the christenings and had Abuelo recognize them as legitimate.

Not long after she chose a celibate life, Abuela stopped going to church. She would lie alone in bed at night and miss Vicenzo terribly. Instead of praying to the Virgin Mary, whose image stood in a corner of her bedroom on a little shelf surrounded by candles, she would reproach her for allying herself with St. Peter and St. Paul, and with the Fathers of the Holy Church, who were all unfair to women. St. Paul had told his male brethren it was better to marry than to burn; but he had no palliative for his female brethren, who would burn whether they were married or not.

Abuela was a sensual woman and had enjoyed sex with her husband; abstention was torture. She resented the fact that a woman’s fertility should condemn her to loneliness. She consulted with the midwife, who told her menstruation would last only twenty years, and at the end of that time she would be able to live a normal life, free from the terror of becoming pregnant every time she made love.

Abuela simply had to be patient and wait it out. In time she pardoned not only Abuelo for his sexual dalliances, but also St. Peter and St. Paul for being so unrelenting. But it wasn’t until she was able to forgive herself that she was finally at peace. Sexual sins were not important, after all; what really counted was shared responsibility and companionship, and even though they slept in separate beds, she went on living with Vicenzo on excellent terms. When Abuela was finally blessed with menopause, she let Abuelo climb back into her bed, and they began making love with the same gusto as at the beginning; he still preferred her to either of his mistresses. Abuelo and Abuela got along very well after that. When he sold the farm in Río Negro and moved to Ponce to open his coffee warehouse, Abuela went on being his business partner and worked side by side with him for many years.

Abuela kept only one secret from Abuelo during all this time. When her six daughters were born in Río Negro, she swore to herself she wouldn’t let them undergo her terrible trial. She made them promise they would have one child every five years, and they would surreptitiously do everything to prevent consecutive pregnancies. “An only child is portable,” Abuela said to them. “The mother may carry it with her everywhere. But two babies are a powerful link in the iron chain with which men tie women down and make them their prisoners.”

This was the promise Carmita was supposed to keep and recklessly broke three years after I was born. When Abuela learned her daughter had become pregnant a second time, she traveled from Ponce to San Juan with the midwife to remind Carmita of her pledge. Abby was away at the time; she had gone to visit her nephews in Adjuntas because Father’s Uncle Orencio had just passed away. If Abby had been home, none of this would have happened. Abuela Gabriela, left to her own designs with my mother, forced her to drink some brew to terminate the pregnancy. But it was so strong it caused hemorrhaging.

When I ran into the house and saw Carmita unconscious on the floor, I was terrified. I couldn’t understand what Abuela Gabriela was whispering about with the midwife, but I knew something

dreadful had happened. I saw Abuela and the maids carrying Mother to bed, then scurrying about to change the bloodstained sheets and take them to the laundry house in the garden. Then I heard Abuela say to Mother that she mustn’t worry, that something at least four moons old had fallen into the toilet bowl, and how relieved she should feel. A little later the doctor was smuggled into the house through the back door, so the neighbors wouldn’t see him. When Father came back from his workshop that evening, the crisis was over and Mother was lying neatly in bed, simply getting over a bad headache.

I remember feeling both excited and afraid. I was part of an adult plot, a secret female conspiracy which Abuela Gabriela said would be of benefit to me when I grew up, so I did my best to say nothing to Father. The whole thing would probably have blown over if Mother hadn’t developed a serious infection (the pregnancy was too advanced and complications set in) and was unable to have any more children. This was a hard blow for Father, who never found out about the miscarriage but eventually discovered that Carmita was sterile.

Year after year Father had hoped for a son. Carlos was an orphan, and he felt that not having a father was the saddest thing that could happen to a child. He planned to do many things with his son and teach him to grow up to be a fine young man. Carmita was silent when she heard him talk like that, but she became more and more depressed.

Abby and I talked this over many years later and she told me what had happened. When Abuela arrived from Ponce, she convinced Carmita that every woman had the right to determine what took place in her own body, and that she would be able to take good care of her second child only when the first one—meaning me—was grown enough so that it wouldn’t be a constant worry. Carmita had gone along with the abortion. Then the unexpected had happened.

Carmita suddenly felt guilty; something had been uprooted from her heart that she hadn’t known was there. A mantle of affection had already wrapped itself around the faceless baby in her womb. A deep sadness came over her, and one day Abby discovered that all the knives had disappeared from the kitchen drawer, the scissors from her sewing box, the pruning shears from the gardener’s tool box, and Father’s razor blades from the medicine cabinet. She went looking for Carmita and found her in the sewing room, where she spent her mornings after Father went to work.

Carmita was sitting in front of her black Singer sewing machine, the one decorated with gold miniature roses that Father had given her for her last birthday. She had put the knives and scissors in a row on the table, next to her needles and spools of thread, and was staring at them intently. When Abby came into the room, she looked up at her in a daze. “I know there’s something important I have to do with these knives and scissors, Abby,” she said, “but I can’t remember what.” Abby was terrified; she made a thorough search of the house and put all sharp-edged objects under lock and key until Carmita came out of her depression a few months later.

All of a sudden it was as if Carmita weren’t there anymore. Her eyes grew absent and her black clothes, wet with tears, were always cold when I hugged her. It was as if she lived in a perpetual mist. She wouldn’t let me kiss or embrace her, because I reminded her of the dead baby.

Q
UINTÍN’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER DON
Esteban Rosich was Italian by birth. He lived in Boston for many years and was naturalized in 1885. One day—it must have been around 1899—he walked with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Madeleine, into La Traviata, a store in Old San Juan. Spread over several polished mahogany counters were rolls of imported silk from France, lace from Portugal, Belgium, and Venice, colorful linens from Ireland. Arístides Arrigoitia, Quintín’s grandfather, worked in La Traviata as a store clerk. He was twenty and had a difficult apprenticeship: the store’s owner had a habit of kicking him in the shins every time he found mouse nests in the goose-down pillows at the back of the shop. But the real reason he hit him was that he hated foreigners. He saw them as leeches who took income away from Puerto Ricans, and he employed them only because they worked for half the pay. Arístides was an affable young man and made the most of his unpleasant job. Elegant ladies who led an active social life in San Juan came to shop in La Traviata almost every day, looking for the laces and silks that their fashionable couturiers would make into beautiful gowns. Arístides knew their tastes by heart.