House on the Lagoon (16 page)

Arrigoitia then went behind his troops to tell the governor over the field telephone that everything was under control but that he thought it was a mistake to prevent the march. The governor told Arrigoitia he was a jackass and that it wasn’t his job to think: his orders were to get the job done. Arrigoitia went back to the front lines and ordered the captain of the Nationalist troops to move out, but he refused to budge.

Many of the cadets couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old, and they looked straight at Arrigoitia, as if daring him to fire. The fake arms made them look even more like unruly children playing at war. Arrigoitia began to perspire and swore several times under his breath. “This absurd mission had to be in Ponce, the hottest town on the island,” he grumbled. “You could fry an egg on the pavement right now, and my uniform is soaked.”

Arístides couldn’t bear it any longer. His heart racing, he went over to one of his aides and told him to take his place at the head of the troops. He walked down Marina Street and entered the Chapel of the Servants of Mary. He was a friend of the nuns at the convent; it would be a good place to lest. It was quiet inside; a single votive candle glimmered in a red vase that hung from a silver chain, and several nuns were kneeling in prayer before the Holy Sacrament. Arístides sat down on a bench and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he wasn’t sure how much time had gone by. It was so peaceful that for a moment he thought what was going on outside was a nightmare. The white sphere of the Sacrament, exposed in a monstrance surrounded by golden rays, gazed at him serenely and seemed to be saying, “What will all this matter thirty, fifty, a hundred years from now, Arístides? Why are you in such anguish? Kneel in front of me and entrust me with your suffering.”

Arístides took off his white cap with the golden eagle on it, knelt, and began to pray. Gradually he calmed down; the governor’s insult didn’t sting so much anymore. He still had hopes that at the last moment someone would give way—either the cadets or Winship, and that nothing would happen. Shooting children wasn’t going to solve anything, especially on Easter Sunday, a day of peace.

As the pressure eased, his mind began to wander, and he looked around the beautifully decorated chapel. He admired the white orchids the nuns had gathered in vases around the Tabernacle. They were his favorite flowers because they made him think of Madeleine. The delicate froth on the lip of the blossoms reminded him of the golden down on her mound of Venus. Governor Winship was single, maybe that was why he was so stern and cold-blooded. He was a lot like Pedro Albizu Campos. Both were fanatics in the service of a cause, and it was so much more pleasant to serve a beautiful lady.

When Arístides Arrigoitia walked out of the chapel, his aide was waiting for him at the door, holding a yellow telegram in his hand: Governor Winship’s order to attack the Nationalist cadets. Arístides walked to the front of the line of his men and gave the command to fire.

S
EVENTEEN PEOPLE DIED IN
Ponce, mostly teenagers, and dozens of demonstrators were wounded. The island’s press was ordered to protect the governor’s public image and Chief of Police Arrigoitia was blamed for the decision to open fire on the unarmed cadets.

Don Esteban Rosich was ninety, and he never recovered from having his son-in-law publicly accused of murder. A few months later he had a heart attack and died. Madeleine took his body back to Boston on one of the Taurus Line steamships. She was fifty-three, and for a long time she had debated whether to go back home or not. Now that her father was dead, she finally made up her mind. She would never come back to the island—and I never got to know her, except through Quintín. She spent the rest of her life in her family’s brownstone on the North End.

Arístides Arrigoitia lived by himself in the country house in Guaynabo. He could not stand the white orchids in the nursery at the back of the garden, and one day he dowsed the plants with gasoline. Then he went back into the house, took his white gala uniform out of the closet, and his white jacket with the gold epaulets and his cap with the eagle on it, and put them alongside the orchids. Then he set fire to the whole thing. As he walked away from the blaze, he thought he heard Madeleine cry out, lamenting as she always had that God had condemned her to be as frail as an orchid when she had a soul as sturdy as a man’s.

His loneliness was a torment to him. He had broken with his longtime friends because Madeleine didn’t speak English, and once she was gone, her friends—the couples with whom they played bridge every Friday evening—never called back. After the Ponce incident, people looked at him as if he were a monster. Even Governor Winship refused to see him at the Governor’s Palace. He was officially accused of ordering the attack, and was tried and found guilty. Soon after that, he was dismissed as Chief of Police. Fortunately, he wasn’t sent to prison. He was from too good a family for the law to be applied literally, so he was put under house arrest. After the first year of the sentence, he was able to slip out of the house often, in spite of his detention officers’ surveillance.

Arístides put the Guaynabo country house up for sale and asked the parole authorities to let him move to a smaller house in Puerta de Tierra, the barrio where he was born. He sold the Taurus Line and put all the money in Rebecca’s name; he could live well enough on social security. Rebecca had two children and the money would permit her to be independent of Buenaventura if she ever needed to be.

Puerta de Tierra was where the main gate to the citadel of Old San Juan had once stood, and part of the city walls. They had been torn down a hundred years earlier to make way for Ponce de León Avenue, and a lower-middle-class barrio sprang up in the area. Arrigoitia liked living there; it reminded him of Quevedo’s famous sonnet
“Miré los muros de la patria mía, si un tiempo fuertes, ya desmoronados”
(I looked upon my county’s bastions, once proud and strong and now fallen into ruin), and he would meditate on the fate of empires. If the Spanish empire had fallen despite its might, something similar might happen to the United States one day. He would be terribly sorry to see it; he still admired the U.S. enormously. But then what had happened to him wouldn’t seem so shameful.

Arístides began to take long walks around Old San Juan. He had always loved the city, and now it was all he had left. His hair had turned almost completely white; he let it grow long and stopped shaving, so people wouldn’t recognize him. Every day he walked up Fortaleza Street and bought the newspaper from the vendor at the corner of González Padín, where the sea breeze was as stiff as on the deck of a sailboat. The sidewalk was steep, and walking up its slant gave one the feeling of rolling through waves. The wind blew his hair about and invigorated him as if he were setting out on a trip. He cut across Plaza de Armas, where there were always beggars sitting on the edge of the Fountain of the Four Seasons, and doled out a few quarters from his pocket. Then he walked up Cristo Street and entered El Morro fort. There he truly felt at ease—he loved to sit on the ground and watch the children fly their kites like colorful pieces of glass set against the sky; he petted the dogs which came up to smell his baggy pants and unkempt shoes.

He went down to the Paseo de la Princesa to watch the sun set over the boats of the old fishermen who still ventured out into the bay every day at five in the morning and came in at eight with their catch. Usually there wasn’t much to sell—a couple of red snappers; a spiny
chapín,
good for only one
empanadilla;
a black moray eel, still staring ferociously with its beady eyes. The endless traffic of huge ocean liners coming into the bay had done away with most of the fish, and the beach was dotted with plastic bottles, disposable diapers, and all sorts of trash. But Arrigoitia didn’t look down at the polluted beach at his feet; he gazed toward the horizon, where the sea melted into the sky and you could set out in any direction you pleased. At the water’s edge there was nothing to hold you back; nothing to remind you that you had lost everything and that people laughed at you wherever you went.

There was something special about living in a seaport. It was as if the sea were constantly licking your wounds, telling you not to worry, not to feel disappointed. The world was out there; life and love were promises glinting on the tips of the waves. You just had to find a way to reach them. You didn’t need money for a boat ticket or anything like that; you could travel with your imagination, the sailboat of the soul.

During one of his strolls down Luna Street, Arrigoitia saw a pink house with a curious sign over its door. The house was at the less reputable end of the street, near San Cristobal fort. It was a dilapidated neighborhood occupied by lottery vendors, prostitutes, the owners of the small
cafetines
and
bares
of Old San Juan. Arrigoitia stopped to read the sign: “Visit Tosca the Soothsayer and find solace.” Below, there was a hand with the palm divided into five sections: “emotion,” “self-respect,” “energy,” “inner strength,” and “the spirit.” Over each finger was a picture of an African saint: Elegguá, Changó, Obatalá, Ogún, and Yemayá. The Anima Sola stood at the center of the palm, a naked soul surrounded by a circle of flames.

Arístides identified himself with the Anima Sola. He pushed aside the curtain of colored beads and entered a dark hallway. “Please take off your shoes before you come in,” said a voice from the end of the hall. It was a young voice, and there was a light-hearted sound of water coming from the cool interior. “Now take off your tie and jacket,” said the voice. Arístides looked around him, wondering how she could tell what he was wearing in the dark. There was a small altar at the end of the hallway decorated with papier-mâché flowers, with a picture of the spiritualist Allen Kardec, and over him a full moon surrounded by seven stars. He walked toward it and put his shoes, tie, and jacket on a bench in front of the altar. A door opened and a beautiful mulatto girl in a flowered robe entered the hallway.

“The full moon is the godmother of all
mayomberas
,” she said, taking him by the hand. “She gives power and light to those who worship her, and helps them to find the road.” And she made him kneel in front of the image. Then she led him into a small room at the back of the house. There was no furniture; they sat on the floor, on worn velvet cushions. An incense burner released a single spiral of smoke into the room and the water in a fish tank bubbled in the corner.

Tosca lowered her head and placed her hands before her in prayer. She had flowing dark hair which hid her face when she looked down, so that Arístides felt that he was staring into the shadows. “You don’t have to say anything,” she said. “Simply turn your thoughts loose, let them fly toward me.” Arístides was sitting in front of her. He gave a deep sigh. “Everybody has abandoned you: your wife, the governor, your friends,” Tosca whispered, still holding her hands in front of her forehead like a chapel of slender fingers. “But you mustn’t worry about it, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve had many terminally ill visitors who were worse off than you are.”

Tosca took Arístides’s hand gently and followed the lines of his palm with the tip of her finger. She began to talk in a funny voice, as if reading from a book. “You had a good marriage for many years,” she said, still holding his hand. “But your father-in-law died, and he left orders in his will that he should be buried far away. Your wife didn’t want to be parted from him, so she took his coffin back home with her. Your daughter, the apple of your eye, is married to someone you dislike and you hardly ever see her. Loneliness can be harsh punishment, and you haven’t done anything to deserve it.” When Tosca finished, she lowered her hands slowly and gazed at him intently. Arístides just sat there, his head slumped on his chest.

“I came to see you because I want to kill myself and I don’t have the courage,” he said. “I’ve been accused of a crime I’m not guilty of.” Tosca looked sadly into his eyes. At fifty-nine, Arístides was still handsome, with long silver hair and an imposing physique. “You’ve always wanted to be a good man,” she said. “But one man’s good is another man’s evil, and you never made up your mind about what’s good for
you.
You shouldn’t kill yourself until you find out.” And she put her hand on his thigh and bent over to kiss him on the mouth.

Arístides closed his eyes. He felt as if he were dissolving into thin air, like the incense burning on the small lamp next to Tosca. All of a sudden he sensed Madeleine was near; he could almost smell her favorite orchid perfume, her peach-like cheeks. He let Tosca press him down gently on the cushions strewn over the floor. He didn’t offer any resistance as she took off her clothes and lay naked alongside him, silent and still. Her dark skin was like quail’s flesh; it was tender and at the same time tasted of wilderness, of tangled bushes and acid earth. Arístides closed his eyes and penetrated her to the farthest corner of her being. When he lay back on the bed, exhausted, he had forgotten all about Madeleine and her peach-like cheeks. He was amazed at how relaxed he felt. “Thank you, Tosca,” he said to her. “You know how to soothe a man’s soul.”

Before he left, Tosca said to him: “Madeleine’s road was very different from yours. Come and see me once a week and I’ll show you.” She was right. After making love to his wife for thirty-seven years within the holy bonds of matrimony, loving Tosca was a liberation. Sex with her was a mystical experience, inseparable from finding one’s spiritual way in the world. Arístides began to spend more and more time with her and was truly happy for the first time in his life.

The detention officer followed Arístides to Tosca’s house. He didn’t report the visits to his superiors, but he told Rebecca all about them. Rebecca was furious when she found out about her father’s love affair with the soothsayer; she couldn’t forgive him for taking a colored mistress. When Arrigoitia came to visit the house on the lagoon, he would sit for hours on the terrace waiting to see Rebecca, but she never appeared. Even Buenaventura, in spite of his antipathy toward Arrigoitia, was more humane. He thought the affair with the soothsayer was picturesque, and healthy besides.