House on the Lagoon (25 page)

Quintín gave his mother all the money he had saved from working at Mendizabal & Company, and he asked her to buy me an engagement ring. Rebecca went to see Doña Salomé Beguin, the Arab woman who sold jewelry in Old San Juan, and she picked a beautiful almond-shaped solitaire for her oldest son. It was an uncomfortable piece of jewelry; the diamond was razor-sharp, and it snagged my nylons every time I put them on. One day I was playing tennis with Quintín when the racket hit the back of my hand and the diamond split in two. I was terribly upset, thinking it might be a bad omen, but Quintín reassured me that his love would last forever, even if diamonds did not.

Quintín and I were married in June 1955, after two years of courtship. The ceremony was in the Church of San José in Old San Juan, the oldest church on the island—and still one of my favorites. I’ve always liked the way it sits unassumingly in a corner of the square, its simple colonial façade rising like a whitewashed wave against the blue of the sky. There are no Conquistadors buried there; Ponce de León, whose house is just down the street from the church, is buried in the Cathedral of San Juan, several blocks away.

We had wanted a small wedding, but it didn’t turn out that way. Quintín and I had invited very few people: my Antonsanti aunts and cousins from Ponce, whom I hardly saw any longer; Aunt Hortensia, Carmita’s sister, in whose house I used to stay when I came to San Juan on visits; Norma Castillo, my ballet teacher; and several of my friends from the Kerenski Ballet School, among them Estefanía Volmer, who came to the wedding in a semi-transparent shocking-pink gown, her breasts trembling under the delicate gauze. Esmeralda Márquez, who was still one of my best friends, hadn’t been invited, but she sent us a beautiful present, a Madeira lace tablecloth I still use for formal dinners. Quintín, for his part, had invited several of his friends from Columbia University, as well as his Rosich cousins from Boston, but, unfortunately, very few of them could make the trip to the island.

Rebecca insisted that the reception be held at the house on the lagoon, on Pavel’s golden terrace, and she asked us to let her take care of the festivities. She drew up a list of guests, and before we knew it, we had a full-blown affair on our hands. Rebecca invited all her San Juan socialite friends, Buenaventura’s cronies from the Spanish Casino, and his diplomatic and business relations. Ignacio added a good number of his artist friends. Patria and Libertad wanted to have a good time also, so they asked several of their teenage friends. In all, almost three hundred guests were invited, and we had no choice but to accept graciously.

Rebecca seemed always to be in a bad mood and hardly ever spoke to me; it was as if she was jealous of our happiness. I didn’t have much time to worry about it, however, because I was in a whirlwind. I had finally shut down the house in Ponce, and had moved to San Juan for the wedding. My dress was taken care of; I was to wear Abuela Gabriela’s Chantilly lace gown and her point d’esprit veil, which Aunt Hortensia had graciously lent me and Doña Ermelinda had secretly altered in Ponce to fit me. My bouquet had been decided on also: a wreath of coffee blossoms from Río Negro—Abuelo Vicenzo’s farm in the mountains—where Mother’s family still owned a plot of land. But I had to see about my trousseau, and make a list of the presents that began to arrive by the dozen, so I could later write thank-you notes.

With the money he had inherited from Madeleine Rosich, Quintín bought a small apartment with a view of the ocean, in one of the new buildings of Alamares, and we went shopping together for all the things we would need: sheets, towels, dishes, kitchenware. We furnished it in part with the pieces I brought from the house in Ponce. My books were the first thing I unpacked; I lined one of the back rooms of the apartment with them, making it my study. Then I put Father’s rocking chairs and settees in the living room, their crests gaily decorated with hibiscus, lilies, and bougainvillea. One of his wonderful marble consoles found a place in our dining room. When Quintín and I looked at ourselves in its beveled mirror, we felt truly happy. We embraced and kissed in front of it, as if sealing a pact. Having our apartment ready meant we would finally live our own lives and be able to get away from the house on the lagoon.

The day of the wedding, we rode to church in Buenaventura’s silver Rolls-Royce, with Brambon at the wheel, wearing his black twill uniform. Abuela Gabriela’s dress fit me like a glove and Quintín looked like a storybook prince, dressed in tails and wearing his father’s silk top hat. Rebecca had kept it all those years in her closet, wrapped in tissue paper, so her sons could wear it on their wedding day. As we walked down the aisle together, I couldn’t help thinking of Father, of how much he would have enjoyed being there with me. Abby would have liked to be at my wedding, too, but only if I had been marrying someone else. She wouldn’t have wanted to see me marry Quintín.

After the ceremony, we drove back to the house on the lagoon for the reception. The house looked beautiful. The terrace’s handrail had been decorated with a garland of white orchids, and tables for the guests had been set near the water. Petra herself had baked the wedding cake, a three-tiered fountain covered in icing, with two sugar doves drinking at the top. The morning of the wedding, she called us into the kitchen and showed us the cake before anyone else saw it. “Love is the only Fountain of Youth,” she said to Quintín and me, her smile a half-moon shining on her face. “That’s the secret Rebecca will never learn.”

Buenaventura had decided that only Codorniu champagne would be served at the reception—the brand he imported from Spain—and the waiters hovered over the tables, pouring glass after glass for the guests. He had made his toast to the bride and groom and the orchestra had begun to play
Tú y yo,
the elegant nineteenth-century danza Quintín and I were supposed to dance together, when from under the golden terrace a whole string of rowboats floated out, lit with paper lanterns and full of people singing, accompanied by guitars. It was a serenade Petra and the servants had organized in our honor.

As the celebration continued, Quintín and I were absorbed in our own little world. We sat quietly next to each other, drinking champagne from the same glass, holding hands and feeling a little like strangers at our own wedding. We were counting the minutes until everything would be over and we would go to the airport, board a plane to New York, and from there fly to Paris. The terrace gleamed before us like a golden stage, and all of a sudden it made me think of Rebecca and her unhappy performance as Salomé. Rebecca had wanted to be a writer and a dancer, but she became neither, because of her unhappy marriage. I swore I wouldn’t let that happen to me.

C
OMPARED TO THE MENDIZABALS
, my family was little more than middle-class. The Antonsantis’ inheritance was negligible next to the kind of money the Mendizabals had, and they probably would have preferred that Quintín marry a girl from one of San Juan’s old, established families. Abby’s side of the family, of course, didn’t count. Buenaventura and Rebecca never mentioned the Monforts; even though they were landowners, they were too controversial for comfort.

In the eyes of Rebecca and Buenaventura, I was overeducated and far too Americanized. Sending me to study in the States had been my parents’ great mistake; I had evidently enjoyed too much freedom during my years at Vassar. Patria and Libertad would both go to a finishing school in Switzerland after graduating from high school. Rebecca herself had studied only as far as her freshman year, marrying Buenaventura when she was sixteen. A university diploma was a sign of prestige, but it was also a subtle threat. A woman’s education was supposed to be an asset; she could bring up her children better and it would give her the opportunity to help her husband at social gatherings. A degree from La Rosée in Switzerland would have been much more appropriate. Not only would I have learned to be a polished hostess; I would have made friends among the children of European royalty. Being an orphan, on the other hand, and not having anyone but Quintín in the world was a point in my favor because it cast me in a vulnerable light. His parents could adopt me without reservation; I was to be part of the Mendizabal clan and participate in all their activities.

During the first months of our marriage, I got to know the Mendizabals better. Dinner was a very important occasion for Buenaventura, and the dining room was the most prominent room in the house. Up to forty guests could sit at the mahogany table, which had griffin feet and gargoyles carved at each end. The chairs had leather seats and backrests embossed with helmets of Spanish Conquistadors. At one end of the table, under the rug, there was a butler’s bell that rang in the kitchen, so Rebecca could silently summon the servants.

Meals took forever, but Sunday dinners were the worst of all. Sometimes the family would sit down at two o’clock, and at five we’d still be there, like birds glued to a branch. I was very much in love with Quintín and wanted his parents to like me. But, still, it took all my willpower not to get up in the middle of the meal and run out to the garden to do a couple of jumping jacks, or simply to take a breath of fresh air. After a few months of this, however, I found a way to make dinners more bearable. I would simply sit there and closely observe everyone, finding out as much as I could about the Mendizabals by listening to the stories they all told me.

My own family’s foibles were well known to me. Abuela Gabriela had been a feminist to the point of fanaticism; Abuelo Vicenzo had been a womanizer; Abby was a bit of a political radical; Carmita had been a compulsive gambler; Father, a born loser. Now I would get to know the Mendizabals’ shortcomings.

Buenaventura’s bad temper was legendary. Everybody in the house on the lagoon was afraid of him. One Sunday morning the whole family went to Mass and afterwards out to lunch. When we got back to the house, we heard an infernal noise coming from the second floor. Buenaventura and Quintín ran upstairs and found the plumber, his face red with indignation and dripping with sweat. He had been unclogging one of the toilets when the family left for church. Everyone had forgotten about him. When he finished his job, he discovered that the gate at the top of the stairs was locked and he couldn’t get out. All the windows had grilles on them, so he couldn’t jump out, either. He called for help, but none of the servants in the cellar heard him. After two hours, he became desperate and began to bang the gate with a pair of pliers. When he finally saw Buenaventura and Quintín coming, he began to swear: a veritable stream of foul language spewed from his lips. Rebecca, Patria, and Libertad covered their ears and began to scream. Buenaventura was furious. He opened the gate with his key—which hung at the end of a gold chain attached to his belt—and escorted the man down the stairs and out of the house. He paid him his fee, asked him for a receipt, and when the plumber was about to leave, Buenaventura punched him and knocked him out cold. He couldn’t just let his wife and daughters be insulted like that in front of everybody, he said.

Buenaventura was always trying to win me over in his rough, unsophisticated way. “I’m over sixty and I feel as if I were made of iron,” he said to me one day, as Petra brought in dish after dish of ham shank, rice with sausage, and pigs’ feet stewed with chickpeas. “Never pay attention to what doctors say; greasy food is really very good for one’s health.” He couldn’t understand why I was so particular about what I ate. “You’ll have to train that queasy stomach of yours,” he’d say to me. “People from Extremadura are primitive and hardy. They like to eat hearty foods because when grease burns it gives off energy, in business as well as in bed.” He was proud of his teeth, and he liked to boast he’d been to the dentist only once in his life and didn’t need a single filling. “When one is born with delicate teacup teeth like you, it’s a bad sign,” he’d say to me in jest. “It means the genes have degenerated and their owners have become too civilized.”

Buenaventura was semiretired, and as Quintín gradually took over the business, he began to go to the office only in the mornings. He had a small dock built under the terrace, and he kept a fifteen-foot motorboat there. Sometimes in the afternoon he would invite me to go for a ride through the mangrove swamp. We would cross Alamares Lagoon, and once we entered the bayous, he would cut the motor. We’d slide silently beneath the green maze. The mangrove swamp went on for miles, spreading lazily across the horizon, seemingly without end. Buenaventura would pilot the boat from the stern, and I would lean over the prow, taking in all the beauty and mystery of that strange place. From time to time I warned him that the water was too shallow, that there was danger of running aground. “These channels are frequently used for smuggling by the people from Las Minas,” Buenaventura told me on one of our trips, pointing to a nest of huts on our right. “That’s why I always carry a .42 caliber gun hidden in the first-aid kit under my seat.” He never mentioned the fact that once he had used the swamp’s intricate waterways to bring his own merchandise illegally into the island.

After cutting across Morass Lagoon, we would usually head for Lucumí Beach. For twenty minutes we could hardly breathe, floating over the stinking brown quagmire. Then suddenly the muddy water would clear and at the end of the mangroves we could see the white surf of the Atlantic roiling in the distance. The beach was spectacular, all golden sand dunes with miles of elegant palm trees weaving in the wind.

There were usually several black women waiting for us on shore. Tall and strong, with onyx-black skin, they bore a striking resemblance to Petra, and I wondered if they were related to her. But I never dared to ask. They always seemed to know in advance we were coming and they seldom spoke. The minute we arrived, they started cooking for us on their coal furnaces, silently dropping the batter for the fritters into black kettles full of boiling oil. Later they offered us fresh coconut water, which Buenaventura spiked with a shot of illegal
pitorro
rum.