House on the Lagoon (13 page)

Abuela had Abuelo buried under the copse of trees where they used to take walks holding hands. She locked herself up in her room and was so torn with grief she didn’t even try to find out the reason for her husband’s murder. She was told by Uncle Orencio the foreman had killed him because he was drunk. Her daze lasted for weeks; she couldn’t concentrate on the legal matters that needed her attention. Uncle Orencio saw his chance; his brother hadn’t drawn up a new will after the wedding, so Orencio claimed ownership of the entire property. A month after his brother’s death, Orencio gave Abuela her three cows and title to the five wooded acres with the dolphin fountain and the copse of trees where Lorenzo was buried, and told her to leave the farm.

Abby moved to San Juan, but she didn’t go back to live with her father. She rented a small house in Trastalleres and there her son, Carlos—my father—was born in 1904. I was born there, too, twenty-eight years later, and I remember clearly what the house was like. It had a corrugated tin roof which glinted in the sun, a small balcony in front, and walls painted fern-green. The roof made the house hot as a frying pan in the summer, but when it rained, it was wonderful; you felt you were sleeping under a waterfall. Abby had wanted it this way, because it reminded her of life in the mountains.

The house was behind the city’s foundries, a place that hadn’t been developed yet, and there was enough land so she could fence in her cows. She set up a small business making curd cheeses wrapped in plantain leaves which she sold from house to house, and later began making delicious desserts which she sold to the local fancy restaurants on a weekly basis. Her specialties were “ladyfingers,” “coconut kisses,” and “guava meringue on custard,” a dessert she proudly renamed “floating island” in homage to Puerto Rico. She hired several women to help her and soon had a successful business. She brought Father up by herself, and sent him to an artisan’s school, where he learned cabinetmaking. Later, Father set up his own furniture business, using wood from the trees on the five acres of land next to my uncle’s farm.

Uncle Orencio died peacefully in bed when I was three years old. I remember it clearly because it was the same day Abuela Gabriela came from Ponce to force Mother to abort the baby, and it all happened because Abby went to my uncle’s funeral. I never met Uncle Orencio, but I felt as if I had known him all my life. I used to picture him in my mind every time a truck full of wood arrived from the mountains. The logs looked like sawed-off limbs and I always imagined they were his butchered remains; that was the fate he deserved for having robbed us of our inheritance.

I
N THE DAYS FOLLOWING
his discovery of Isabel’s manuscript, Quintín was able to confirm his suspicion that she was writing a novel. Whenever he telephoned the house from the office, the maids would answer that Isabel was busy in the study and had given orders not to be disturbed. She spent the day writing and seldom went out of the house; she had stopped seeing her friends and no longer did errands such as picking up his suits at the dry cleaner’s or going to the market. She sent the maids, instead.

Quintín was worried. He wanted to know what else Isabel had written, but though he checked several times behind the Latin dictionary, he didn’t find any more pages hidden there. The tan folder lay undisturbed, as if Isabel hadn’t realized someone had tampered with it.

Quintín wanted to know why Isabel was writing a novel. To escape from reality? Was the novel a panacea for a secret discontent he hadn’t detected? He had felt secure in his marriage until then; it never occurred to him that Isabel might be unhappy. For twenty-seven years they had had a good marriage, in spite of the tragedies that had sporadically visited them. He admitted he was a bit strait-laced; he had to be, it was the only way he had been able to make a success of Gourmet Imports. He had started from scratch, with the odds stacked against him; his brother and sisters had bitterly opposed him from the beginning. But he had been loyal to his principles. There was a true and a false, a right and a wrong in
his
mind. Isabel was different, though. “Nothing is true, nothing is false, everything is the color of the glass you’re looking through” was one of her favorite sayings
—
which she had picked up from a famous Spanish baroque poet. This was what distinguished the historian’s point of view from that of the writer.

Isabel had become more and more inaccessible. When he came back from the office in the afternoon, she hardly spoke to him. They usually had dinner early, and afterwards would sit out on the terrace and read awhile, enjoying each other’s company. Once a week they would take in a movie or go visit friends. Lately, however, she would say she was tired and didn’t want to go anywhere; she’d usually go to bed early or sit by herself reading in the study. If Quintín asked her if something was wrong, she’d shake her head and not answer.

A week after his first find, Quintín got lucky again. It was six o’clock in the morning and Isabel was still asleep. None of the servants had come up yet. Quintín went into the kitchen to browse through the
Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book,
which Rebecca had inherited from Madeleine Arrigoitia; he was looking for a recipe for rum punch. It was the Fourth of July, and he was giving a party for his employees at Gourmet Imports. When he took the book down from the shelf in the pantry, another tan folder fell out. Quintín put it back in its hiding place and took down the recipe for the punch. He could hear Eulodia coming up the pantry’s back stairs and he didn’t want to arouse her suspicions. He had breakfast by himself on the terrace and went off to the office. That night, however, he got up at two in the morning and went silently to the pantry to look for the manuscript. Sitting on one of the kitchen stools, he began to read. This time the manuscript was headed: “Part Three: Family Roots,” and it included just three chapters.

Quintín read with amazement what Isabel had written in Chapter 9, where she described their love affair in Ponce, after they were engaged. She revealed secrets he wouldn’t have whispered to anyone. How could she be so callous? They were both so young, so much in love! He was pained at her shameless depiction of how they would meet in the garden of the house on Aurora Street in Ponce, and later in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York; he felt embarrassed as well as betrayed. Quintín’s face went red with shame. Just thinking what people in San Juan would say if the manuscript was ever published made his head reel. It didn’t matter that twenty-eight years had gone by; Isabel had no right to bare these secrets to the world.

Quintín was less and less amused by Isabel’s novel. It would be better to do away with it now than when she finished writing it. He got up from the stool and went to the kitchen sink to burn the pages he held in his hand. But as he was about to touch the match to the bottom of the first page, curiosity got the better of him.

He sat down again with the manuscript in his lap and took a deep breath. He had to cool down, to keep his Mendizabal temper under control. He decided the best thing was to create a distance between what he was reading and his own personal feelings, and he would do that by adopting a critical attitude. He would read the manuscript as if he were a conscientious literary critic; after all, literature, like history, had to be well written. Style was enormously important. He had never been a passionate reader of novels, but he had to admit this one was riveting; he hated and at the same time loved reading about his family and about himself. It gave his life more substance, made it more interesting. But he also found it humiliating to see its events tarnished by embellishment or downright falsehoods.

The manuscript had its good points. Isabel’s chapter about Buenaventura’s arrival in San Juan, for instance, had a nice flow to it, even if it was too historical, borrowing from the factual material he had provided her. In these last three chapters she struck out more on her own. But melodramatic phrases like “When I met Quintín, my heart was thrown into turmoil; I lived at the very center of desire” made him laugh aloud, they were in such bad taste.

Worse still was the way the manuscript was tainted with feminist prejudices. Obviously, Isabel wanted to be in tune with the times, but really, it was deplorable. Feminism was the curse of the twentieth century! He could see it at Gourmet Imports, where there were more women employed than ever before. Though, it was true, never at jobs where important decisions were made. His accountants at Gourmet Imports were women, even his comptroller, a good-looking mulatto who was full of energy and often worked late. But his sales managers, his sales representatives, his vice president, were all men.

What was happening at Gourmet Imports wasn’t unique. The same thing was occurring in private businesses all over the island; his friends at the Sports Club said so. At the investment firm Barney and Shearson; at Green Vale Real Estate. Even the government was besieged by skirts! The Secretary of Education was a woman, the Secretary of Acueductos y Alcantarillados
—
the Water and Sewer Authority
—
as well. Quintín was a fair man; he thought women should have equal legal rights. But he believed men had an ingrained fortitude that was indispensable for leadership.

Was Isabel writing this novel because she wanted to have control over their lives? She was imposing her opinions and making the decisions; creating or destroying characters (and reputations!) at will. But she was neither discreet nor diplomatic enough. She liked to play with a loaded deck, often pointing a finger at the male characters. The Spanish Conquistadors, for example, were scavengers; Buenaventura, a spy and a brute; Milan Pavel had ended up a drunkard; Don Vicenzo Antonsanti, Isabel’s grandfather, was a stud who lived for the thing between his legs; Orencio Monfort, her great-uncle, had been responsible for her grandfather’s violent death. Well, there were good men and bad men in the world, and the same was true of women.

The women in the novel, on the other hand, were all portrayed
a
s victims. Isabel’s account of how Doña Gabriela Antonsanti
—
her maternal grandmother
—
had forced Carmita to abort her baby was a dreadful story. Quintín had never heard it before and was unpleasantly surprised. He was a religious man and abortion was a mortal sin; he was amazed Isabel should have kept this from him. Finding her mother in such a sorry state must have been a traumatic experience for Isabel as a child. He felt sorry for her, but that didn’t excuse her airing family skeletons which had been hanging peacefully in the closet until now.

Her story of Doña Valentino Monfort was simply wrong, as maudlin and juvenile as a Corín Tellado romance. If Isabel were to say what her grandmother was really like when she lived in the mountains of Adjuntas, she’d have a much better chapter. Here Doña Valentina was a do-gooder, and he knew better. But it’s always more interesting to write about evil than about goodness, as Dante well knew when he wrote his
Inferno,
an instant bestseller, while
Paradiso
was never read by more than a handful of people. Merchants in Florence must have been well educated, very different from those in San Juan today, Quintín surmised in a mental footnote. If I had written this novel, I would have followed Dante’s example and explored some of the more controversial aspects of Isabel’s grandmother.

In fact, just for the hell of it, he would. He would prove to Isabel that he could tell his own story, which she might take to be a delusion, a voluntary misinterpretation of facts, but which he knew to be the historical truth. Give her a taste of her own medicine, and see how she felt, reading about her own family. Quintín considered this for a moment. Then he opened a drawer in the pantry cabinet, took out a pad and pencil, and began to write with almost manic intensity.

“Isabel has inherited many of Doña Valentina Monfort’s traits; she shares her grandmother’s fantasies of social justice and independence for the island, as well as her Corsican bad temper. Corsicans have the typical personality of the colonized, envious of other people’s successes and prone to inferiority complexes. Many of those who support political independence for the island today are of Corsican descent. There was a large Corsican immigration during the nineteenth century. Thousands came and settled in the steep hills of the interior where few had dared venture before. They developed a burgeoning coffee industry, cruelly exploiting their workmen.

“Doña Valentina Monfort was a classic example of the Nationalist Independentista syndrome. As soon as she married Lorenzo Monfort, one of the Monfort twins from Adjuntas, she saw herself as a Jacobin, red bonnet on her head and razor-sharp scythe in her hand, singing the
Carmagnole
down the mountains of Adjuntas. During the year and a half that Valentina spent in the mountains she didn’t just help out in the elementary school at Caracoles; she actually founded the Independentista Party in the shantytown next to the farm. She was an active campaigner, collecting funds and making incendiary speeches whenever she had the chance. I got to know her well during my visits to Isabel at the house on Aurora Street, and I never saw eye to eye with her.

“The Monfort twins were notorious in Adjuntas because of their violent family history. I remember hearing people talk about them years ago. One of my salesmen at Gourmet Imports heard their story during one of his business trips there. He still visits Don Alvarado’s grocery store monthly to replenish his stock of goods
—
usually rice, beans, and codfish, because it’s a very humble establishment
—
and he heard Don Alvarado tell the story himself.

“Don Alvarado is a trustworthy man. He has been our customer for over twenty years and has unfailingly paid his bills. I’ve gone by his place a couple of times. There must be a thousand little stores like Don Alvarado’s
colmado
on the island. They’re practically an institution with us. They are always perched on a bend of the road leading in or out of the nearest hill town, a mango tree with a wooden bench next to them, a greasy window covered with flies and the remains of a roasted pig. Usually the head is the only thing left, a pole sticking out of its mouth. And next to the
colmado
sits
t
he eternal
cafetín,
with pints of rum on the shelves, two or three tables covered with oilcloth, and a sign that says ‘No women or dogs allowed,’ or ‘Forbidden to talk about politics or religion,’ nailed to the wall.