House on the Lagoon (29 page)

was hardly noticeable; the servants sprinkled it with water and swept it carefully every day. Petra had furnished it with an old set of wicker furniture which had originally been used at the house and which Rebecca had discarded. Her wicker peacock throne was an important feature of the sitting room. Every night she would sit on it, wearing her brightly colored bead necklaces and bracelets. She would listen to the servants’ complaints, and give them advice.

One by one, the servants would come and sit next to her on a low stool, pouring out their grievances in a whisper. If Rebecca had had a tantrum, for example, and given Eulodia hell for dropping a wineglass on the floor, Eulodia was to be patient with her and say nothing; Rebecca wasn’t completely in control of her nerves. If Rebecca had ordered Brunilda to iron her new evening gown and had not bothered to take off the designer tag, and Brunilda was shocked to see the dress had cost five hundred dollars when her own salary was eighty dollars a month, Brunilda was to keep quiet about it. Rebecca was Buenaventura’s wife, and she had the right to spend whatever she wanted on clothes, which were an important symbol of her husband’s position in the world.

At the center of the common room, a door had been cut into the dirt wall. It dated back to Pavel’s time; you could tell because of its Gaudiesque design. It was decorated with tendrils and leaves of a fantastic vegetation. It led to a dark tunnel into which twenty cells opened. The cells had earthen floors and no windows; they were ventilated by grilles imbedded into the top of each end wall. Originally, the rooms had been intended for storage: for wine, codfish, or Buenaventura’s precious imported hams. When Buenaventura moved his merchandise to his warehouse on La Puntilla, however, the storage rooms had been turned into servants’ quarters.

There must have been two dozen servants living in these cells when I visited the cellar the first time, and they were all related to Petra Avilés: Eulodia, Brígida, and Brunilda, her three nieces; Confesor, Buenaventura’s tailor, who was Petra’s nephew; Eustasio, the gardener, who was her cousin; Eusebia, Rebecca’s seamstress, who was Petra’s sister; Carmelo, the farmhand, who was her brother; and Brambon, her common-law husband, who was the chauffeur—among others. They got along very well together, and there were rarely arguments among them.

Buenaventura liked to bathe in the fresh spring water because he was convinced it kept him young. Every time he stepped in, he felt as if he shed years. Pavel had designed a marvelous underground chamber for the spring, decorated with a mosaic of indigo waves, and golden dolphins playfully chasing each other around. A bronze door, beautifully decorated with seashells and stars, opened onto it from the right side of the common room. Buenaventura had always liked this grotto and left it standing when he tore down the rest of Pavel’s house. The servants bathed in a cement trough that had been built adjacent to it, which was also fed by the underground spring.

The cellar had a third door on the left, which opened onto the kitchen. From it one could step out into the yard, hidden from the avenue by a tall hibiscus hedge. This was where the family laundry was hung to dry after Brígida and Brunilda had scrubbed it on a rough stone slab. On the right side of the cellar, another door opened onto an enclosed patio where the animals were kept. Buenaventura’s Doberman pinschers were there in a large cage. Fausto, the original black male who had mysteriously arrived from Germany on one of Buenaventura’s ships, had long since passed away. But Buenaventura had paired him off with a handsome bitch before he died, and now he owned two black Dobermans: Fausto and Mefistófeles, who were the apple of his eye. Buenaventura also owned a cow, which was milked for him every morning; a dozen chickens, which laid fresh eggs for his breakfast; and a pigpen, from which Petra chose Buenaventura’s beloved pigs’ knuckles and ham shanks every week.

There was only one cage which didn’t belong to Buenaventura and his family—where the land crabs were kept and fattened up. The crab cage was made of wood and it was on stilts. A large stone sat on the lid to keep the crabs from pushing it open. Brambon, Petra’s husband, had made the cage himself. Land crabs proliferated in the mangroves and had to be hunted down periodically by the servants, especially when it rained and the water in the mangrove swamp rose a few inches closer to the house. Otherwise, they would soon be seen scuttling down the cellar corridors and even climb up the terrace’s iron beams. Fortunately, Fausto and Mefistófeles would sniff the crabs out and rip off their claws, so the crab population was kept under control.

Land crabs were considered black people’s food at the house on the lagoon; no one in the Mendizabal family would have been caught dead eating them. But the servants loved crab. Petra said the crabs reminded her of warriors in full armor, and she swore they made people brave. Every Saturday night the servants would sit around a table in the cellar in front of what looked like a heap of blue cobblestones. Except that the cobblestones had spiny legs, huge claws, and eyes that stood out like red seeds on top of their heads. Then they would take a mallet, crack open the cobblestones one by one, and pry out the sweet white flesh with a fork.

Petra’s room was the first one on the right at the end of the cellar’s underground tunnel. The walls of her room were lined with bottles and jars filled with strange potions and herbal unguents. She always knew what remedy to prescribe for each ailment: orange leaf tea for nervous disorders, rue for menstrual pains, aloe for insect bites, witch hazel for ear inflammations or sties.

Petra ran Buenaventura’s bath with perfumed bay leaves every day, and once every two or three months she boiled all kinds of roots which she said had magical powers and poured the liquid into the grotto’s blue basin before Buenaventura stepped in. Buenaventura was convinced Petra’s baths helped him do good business, especially when a price war was taking place at Mendizabal & Company. If he was trying to defeat his competitors from California, for example, who had slashed the price of Green Valley asparagus, he would take one of Petra’s baths and his white asparagus from Aranjuez would miraculously begin to sell. Suddenly there would be a fad for them in the capital, and people would start eating rolled white asparagus sandwiches, white asparagus casseroles with cheese, lobster and white asparagus bisque. Buenaventura would make several thousand dollars overnight.

The servants respected Petra, and it was through her that order was established and maintained at the house. Petra was Buenaventura’s marshal; everything he commanded was done by her. The servants considered Rebecca second in authority; before they did what she asked, they always checked with Petra. They were grateful because it was thanks to Petra that they had managed to leave the stinking quagmire of Las Minas in their rowboats and could live in relative comfort under Buenaventura’s roof.

Petra always gave special attention to Quintín, although she made it clear that his privileged status depended on his carrying out Buenaventura’s wishes. Buenaventura, as the years went by, felt a growing sympathy for the Independentista cause, and once had secretly donated money for it. He had lived on the island for many years, he’d say, longer than he had lived in Spain, and it was difficult for him to accept the fact that his adopted country was only partly self-governed. Not to be able to trade with other countries, for example; not to have a say in the election of the President; not to go to war with another country if the need arose—these were difficult things for him to accept as a proud descendant of the Conquistadors.

Quintín had been partial to statehood since he was a child—because of his closeness to his grandfather Arrigoitia. Arístides had taught him to admire the United States as one of the few true democracies in the world, and he believed the island had the right to become part of it. “We were invaded by the United States in 1898; and twenty years later we were given American citizenship without anyone asking our opinion about it. The United States made a commitment to us at that time, and now they must honor it.”

When Quintín made his First Communion, his grandfather put Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in a little gold frame and gave it to him as a present to keep in his room. When Quintín graduated from high school, Arístides’s gift was Toqueville’s
Democracy in America,
and a volume of Thomas Jefferson’s memoirs. Quintín read the books attentively, and his admiration for the United States grew ever more.

As a young man, Quintín loved to talk about these things at dinnertime, when the whole family gathered together. He maintained that the closeness of our island to the United States in the last fifty years had Americanized us even more than we realized. We should be able to vote for the President and pay federal taxes like the other American citizens—neither of which had been permitted us—and go on fighting for freedom as brave American soldiers had done in World War II. To do these things, he insisted, we had to become a state in the Union.

The minute Quintín brought up these subjects at the table, tempers would flare and Petra would have to intervene, chiding Quintín for being disrespectful to his father. “Are you a brave warrior like your father, or are you a ninny?” she would ask him, holding her head up high. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of independence and would like your country always to remain a ward of the United States.” And as long as Quintín kept quiet, Petra would forgive him.

The servants never used the front door of the house on the lagoon. Only the Mendizabals’ relatives and friends came in through the Gothic granite archway Buenaventura had had brought from Valdeverdeja. Periodically, the servants went to visit their families in the slum, and they left the house by the back way, journeying to Morass Lagoon in rowboats. The food they ate was brought directly from Las Minas; it was never bought at the market. There was a constant flow of boats laden with fresh fish—blue sea bass, red snapper, yellowtail—as well as native fruits and tubers—mangoes, oranges, mameys, taro root, manioc,
yuca,
all still covered with fresh earth and smelling of the mountains—part of the servants’ daily diet.

It was in one of those rowboats from Las Minas, laden with fruits and vegetables, that Carmelina Avilés arrived one day at the house, when she was a year old. She was brought there by Alwilda, Petra’s granddaughter, who was lame in her right leg. Alwilda’s mother, whose name had also been Carmelina Avilés, never came to work at the house on the lagoon. Carmelina was Petra’s youngest child, and she had died in a bar in Las Minas when she was nineteen, knifed by her lover after Alwilda was born. Alwilda hardly remembered her. She had been brought up by her paternal grandmother, and when she was a baby she had had infantile paralysis. Their house, like most of the houses in Las Minas, was a wooden shack built on stilts, the stinking waters of Morass Lagoon flowing slowly beneath it.

Alwilda’s grandmother raised carrier pigeons on her tin roof and chickens in a nearby coop. There were no telephones in Las Minas—people used the pigeons to send messages from house to house over the canals, and paid the old woman for the service. Alwilda sold the eggs in the city. This income, together with her grandmother’s social security, was enough for them to survive. One day when Alwilda went to town to pick up her grandmother’s social-security check at the general post office in Old San Juan, a sailor followed her and invited her for a drink at a bar near the waterfront. Alwilda was only fourteen, and she said no. The sailor followed her as she limped back to the slum, and after she hailed a boat at the dock he knocked the boatman down and pushed off into the swamp. He raped Alwilda under the mangrove bushes, rowed back to the dock, and disappeared. Alwilda never knew his name or where he was from; all she knew was that he was a brute and that he was black as night. His skin had been even darker than hers.

Alwilda discovered she was pregnant and decided to have the baby. She took care of Carmelina until she began to walk and then realized she wouldn’t be able to keep her. Alwilda moved with difficulty and Carmelina never stayed still; there was no way she could follow the baby around the house. One day she had fished Carmelina out of the mud just in time, after she had fallen off the balcony. It was then that Alwilda thought of her grandmother, Petra Avilés. She decided to take Carmelina to her. Petra had given food and shelter to so many of her relatives in Buenaventura’s house nobody would notice if she took a tiny baby under her wing.

As Alwilda’s boat reached the pier, the boatman cried for her to bend over, because the iron beams of the terrace were lower at the entrance to the cellar and one of them might hit her head. Alwilda did as she was told, and when she looked up and saw the servants’ common room, she let out a gasp of wonder. It was decorated with potted ferns and gay crepe-paper flowers in vases, several old wicker rockers and a dining table with chairs. At the end of the pier she saw a large black woman she supposed was her grandmother waiting for her on a dilapidated high-backed chair. Several green Cobras burned around her to keep the mosquitoes away. Petra was an impressive figure. She was fifty-eight years old, but her arms looked as strong as mahogany beams and her hair was charcoal-black. As Alwilda limped toward her with Carmelina in her arms, she wondered what she was supposed to do, whether she should kiss her on the cheek or get down on her knees to kiss her hand.

Alwilda had dressed Carmelina in her best clothes: a pink organdy dress with ruffles at the neck and hem. But she hadn’t had time to bathe her; she had been afraid of missing the boat that came every afternoon to the Mendizabals’ house from the slum. She drew near and was about to put Carmelina on the ground so she could embrace her grandmother, when Petra made her stop right there.

“Don’t sit her on the floor. She’s an Avilés and should be conscious of her rank,” Petra said in a deep voice.

Alwilda murmured an excuse and put the child in Petra’s lap. “She’s the first of your great-grandchildren,” Alwilda said. “Her name is Carmelina, just like your daughter’s, but I’m afraid her skin is darker than Mother’s.” Petra looked at the child in wonder. Carmelina was a beautiful baby—as black as ebony, with large, amber-colored eyes and a dainty little nose which looked as if it had been chiseled in onyx.