House on the Lagoon (43 page)

She got up from her chair and went to look at the family photographs, which stood in silver frames on the desk: Buenaventura as a young man recently arrived from Spain, with his
sombrero Cordobés
jauntily perched on his head; Rebecca as Queen of the Spanish Antilles, wearing her crown of pearls; Arístides Arrigoitia as chief of police, standing next to Governor Winship at a reception in the Governor’s Palace; Arístides in his gala uniform, with Quintín sitting on his knees as a child. Coral picked up a photograph of Willie and Manuel when they were children and looked at it closely. They stood smiling under a palm tree at the entrance to Alamares High School, Manuel’s arm affectionately draped around Willie’s shoulders.

I broke down and opened my heart to her. “It’s sad, isn’t it? For the first time in their lives, Manuel and Willie have stopped talking to each other. We haven’t heard from Manuel since the day he left the house; he hasn’t come to see us once. Is he all right? Is he living in Las Minas with you because of his Independentista friends?”

“Manuel and I are living in Las Minas because we
want
to, not because we have to,” she told me sternly. “The slum is part of our way of life now. We believe that, if one wants to change the world for the better, one must become part of the proletariat. Manuel hasn’t come to see you because he hasn’t had the time; when he gets out of Gourmet Imports he works until late at night at the Party’s headquarters. But he’s happy; now he has something to live for.”

I had heard from Esmeralda about Coral’s radical political ideas, so it didn’t surprise me to hear her talk like that. To appease her and try to win her over, I told her that in my youth—before I met Quintín—I had worked with Abby in the slums of Ponce, teaching poor children skills like sewing and photography to help them survive in the world. “I’ve never reproached Manuel for being an Independentista,” I said. “I think Quintín made a terrible mistake.”

Coral burst out laughing. “I know all about you, Isabel, and your ‘liberal’ ideas. Manuel talks about them all the time. But this house, the life you lead, is a complete contradiction of them. All private property is the result of theft! You’re nothing but a sellout and a sham.”

Q
UINTÍN WAS WORRIED. THE
private detective he had hired told him that Manuel was in serious trouble. He had left the house and was living with Coral in Las Minas; they had joined an Independentista terrorist group called the AK 47. Statehood was ahead in the plebiscite polls and the Independentistas were sure to carry out violent reprisals before the voting took place.

But Quintín was even more concerned about Isabel. Isabel had become very depressed and hardly went out at all; she sat in the study for hours gazing out toward the lagoon.

Quintín felt guilty because once he had discovered the manuscript, instead of being understanding and patient with Isabel, instead of talking to her about how she was being poisoned by Petra’s gossip, he had gotten angry and thrown in some disparaging remarks about Isabel’s family. It had been a stupid mistake not to try to approach her once he had found the novel. They should have brought things out into the open and confessed their worries to each other.

Since Quintín had gone into the study the last time, there were four new chapters in Isabel’s manuscript. This made eight chapters in all he hadn’t read. In spite of the doctor’s recommendation, Quintín tore through them. “The Forbidden Banquet,” Quintín had to admit, was surprisingly faithful to reality. The affair with Carmelina Avilés
had
happened; there was no way to deny it. For seventeen years Quintín had paid the price; Isabel had never let him forget it. She had had the moral upper hand in their marriage for years, and he had been smothered in guilt. What did one do in a situation like that? The spirit was strong but the flesh was weak, and Quintín was neither the devil Isabel portrayed in her novel nor the angel she wanted him to be. He was simply a man, and temptation was always present in a man’s life.

Quintín’s heart was pounding. After the trouble with Carmelina, he had tried to be a loving husband, a good father, a good provider. He had even adopted Willie without being sure he was his child, just because Isabel had asked him to. After all, Carmelina had left the house immediately after their encounter and had lived in New York for almost a year. She was nineteen years old then and could have had any number of lovers. But Quintín knew that Petra would have testified against him in court and he couldn’t stand the thought of a public scandal. What hurt him the most, though, was that Isabel wouldn’t forgive him. So he gave in, and they took in Willie, as they had taken in Carmelina herself many years ago.

Isabel had always been partial toward the child. Her love for Willie was almost an obsession; she grew incensed if she thought Willie was being slighted in any way. She was capable of insulting strangers in the street and even her own friends if she thought they were being prejudiced. Quintín had to be on his guard and try to be as fair as Solomon to escape Isabel’s ire. He had come to terms with the situation easily enough when the boys were young; he was sincerely fond of Willie. But he couldn’t deny he loved Manuel more, because he was his own flesh and blood.

Quintín tried to go on reading, but he began to feel ill. His head was reeling and he couldn’t breathe. He loved Isabel above all else; the thought of losing her was unbearable. She
had
to believe him rather than Petra.

He put the manuscript down and made up his mind to give Isabel an answer. He would write down his version of what had happened
w
ith Carmelina. The trouble was, he knew he couldn’t write as well as Isabel could. His efforts at correcting her were puny and sketchy by comparison. He could write with ease about Doña Valentina Monfort, about Margot Rinser, adorning the facts here and there, because those people weren’t important to him. But how did one put one’s personal tragedies down on paper for all to read? How did one say one’s heart was breaking without sounding melodramatic? If only he was able to write about himself, to confess what he really felt at that moment, his shameful passion for a woman who had betrayed him
—
but he couldn’t do it. He felt beaten. All he could manage was a dry summary of what had taken place.

Quintín took out his pencil and began to write on the back of one of Isabel’s pages:

“The day of the picnic at Lucumí Beach, I was making a great effort to appear gay and lighthearted, but that was far from the way I really felt. Margarita’s tragedy had affected all of us. Manuel needed cheering up, and so did I. Isabel didn’t make the least effort to lift the family’s spirits. For days, she was resentful and distant. If I tried to comfort her, she would push me away with a hand as cold as ice. I got only despondent looks, gloomy unresponsiveness, irritable answers to my questions.

“Crab is an aphrodisiac
—
anyone who has had it knows that
—
and that day at the beach I had washed down half a dozen with a bottle of cold Riesling. All of a sudden, the combination of the crab’s strong taste and the wine’s delicate bouquet made me inexplicably happy. For the first time since Margarita’s death, I managed to dispel the ominous cloud I had been living under. I got up from the sand dune where I was sitting and looked over at Carmelina, who was swimming at that moment toward the mangroves. What took place between us was something no one, not even God Almighty, could have prevented.”

A
T FIRST MANUEL JOINED
the Independentista Party just to please Coral, but his resentment toward his father radicalized him. Every evening I imagined them lying on Alwilda’s old mattress in the little wooden house built on stilts, listening to the waters of Morass Lagoon drifting by under them. Knowing Coral, I suspect they probably didn’t talk about love or about their plans for the future, as lovers usually do, but mostly about politics.

“The plebiscite will cause a crisis on the island. We must stop being Hamlets and make up our minds to
do
something,” Coral proclaimed to Manuel one day. “Only radical action can change the dangerous course our island is on right now.”

The political struggle
was
escalating, and we were all surprised when the polls showed statehood ahead by a slim majority—it had forty-nine percent of the vote. Commonwealth had forty-seven percent, and independence four percent. But polls were not to be trusted; voters were fickle, and the situation could change from one day to the next. Commonwealth and independence sympathizers warned against losing our culture and our language if we became a state in the Union. Statehooders wielded economic arguments; their advertising campaign was like a barrage from a machine gun that fired coins at you. The island at present received eight and a half billion dollars in federal funds and with statehood it would receive three billion more; the benefits of social security and of national health programs would be double what they were. Even after paying federal taxes, which the islanders didn’t do under their commonwealth status, they stood to gain enormous economic benefits, four to five billion additional dollars, under statehood. “There’s no stopping statehood now,” the radio and television blared. Coral and Manuel thought it was a losing battle—independence didn’t stand a chance, and even commonwealth, which had been the island’s status since Luis Muñoz Marín’s time, was threatened.

As more and more voters lined up behind statehood, the atmosphere in San Juan grew volatile; disputes took place everywhere. Our current governor, Rodrigo Escalante, was a white-maned politician who spoke in favor of statehood with the hysterical fervor of an Evangelical minister. Governor Escalante was nicknamed the Silver Cock by his enemies, and he had taken the insult as his trademark. He spoke English with a thick Spanish accent and had a white American rooster brought to all his political rallies. He announced that if statehood should win by 51 percent
The Star-Spangled Banner
would be our national anthem and the American flag our flag.

Governor Escalante was famous for his strict measures against dissenters. He thought it was his duty to impose discipline on the land, so voting would take place in an atmosphere of law and order. When a strike broke out at the University of Puerto Rico, he sent in paratroopers, and several students were killed.
El Machete,
the Independentista newspaper, went up in flames one night, but no one was caught or punished for it. The police made a list of all citizens with Independentista leanings, identifying them as subversives despite the fact that the Independence Party was recognized legally and would take part in the referendum. Having an Independentista come to one’s house for a visit was dangerous; it put one on the list as a sympathizer. Homes, telephones, and cars of Independentistas were bugged. Every once in a while, a band of brigands would surround one of their houses at night and beat whoever tried to leave or go inside. In August, three months before the plebiscite was to take place, Coral convinced Manuel to join the AK 47. We found out about it later from the reports of the private detective Quintín had hired to keep track of Manuel’s activities.

The AK 47 held study sessions in the slum, in a shack near Alwilda’s. Manuel and Coral began to go to them regularly in the evening. Most of the members were young and very serious about their studies. They had to learn Chairman Mao’s
Red Book
by heart, read and discuss Karl Marx’s
Das Kapital,
as well as Albizu Campos’s incendiary speeches. Manuel was a slow reader and had a hard time sitting still for so many hours, trying to understand those boring texts, but with Coral by his side helping him, he eventually made progress.

They also studied civil and economic reports which detailed the island’s soaring rate of drug abuse, twenty percent unemployment rate, thriving black market, illicit minimum wage, and the shameful condition of public schools and municipal hospitals. In the AK 47’s opinion, these ills were the result of the island’s colonial status, which led to a confused sense of identity and a lack of self-respect.

The impending plebiscite was the moment for the AK 47 to show that the spirit of independence wasn’t dead on the island, that there were still people who shared in its dream. Puerto Rico should be a socialist republic, loosely structured on the Cuban model. For the past twelve years, the country had been politically split almost down the middle. Fear kept it balanced on the edge of a knife. Voting by halves, after all, was a way of not making up one’s mind. Fear of what, Manuel asked the AK 47. Fear of choosing a definite path, they said, of leaving the collective schizophrenia behind. The confusion as to whether we were Puerto Rican or American, whether we should speak Spanish or English, had gotten the better of us and turned our will to mush. That was why, when election time came around, half the country voted for statehood and half for commonwealth or independence—the country could not make up its mind what it wanted to be. Now that there was finally going to be a plebiscite, it was the duty of the AK 47 to give the country a definitive push, so it would find the courage to vote for independence.

When Manuel and Coral heard these arguments, they were convinced the AK 47 was right. They threw themselves feverishly into their work: they raised money, helped organize strikes, sold
El Machete
on street corners, waving it above their heads like a flag as they forged their way on foot through traffic.

They wanted an island where everyone could be free—from drugs, from ignorance, from poverty—where no one would sleep in beds with embroidered linen sheets and pillows of swan feathers like those in the house on the lagoon, while others had no sheets at all. And even more important, they wanted a country where waving one’s flag and singing one’s national anthem was not a crime, where one could confidently fall asleep with the windows open and no one would batter down one’s door. And as everything was fair in love and war, the members of the AK 47 told them, and they professed a true love for their country and for the proletariat to which they now belonged, all methods were valid to reach their goal. Manuel and Coral thoroughly approved.