House on the Lagoon (14 page)

“What really happened to the Monfort twins was this: Lorenzo and Orencio were equally ambitious and tight-fisted. The San Antonio coffee farm, which ceased to exist around the turn of the century, wasn’t the affluent establishment Isabel has romantically made it out to be but a run-down mountain ranch. The brothers didn’t live in a balconied two-storied mansion, but in a low wooden shed they built themselves. The place was no more than a hovel. It had earthen floors and walls made of rough boards they had hewn out of nearby trees with their own saws. There was practically no furniture and there were no sanitary facilities. A latrine stood outside the house, and if it rained, one had to get wet to use it. The brothers bathed in the nearby river and slept in identical iron cots in a large barnlike room divided by a sheet hanging from the ceiling.

“They guarded their privacy jealously. The farm was perfect for illegal deals: bootlegging, rustling, and in times of political unrest
—
the Independentista uprisings which periodically shake the island
—
smuggling and storing arms. They were each other’s worst enemy but had established a precarious truce between them in order to survive. Unfortunately, they had inherited the property equally, and each owned exactly the same amount of land. Neither had enough money to buy the other half and no stranger would have been interested in buying the godforsaken place.

“The brothers had also inherited the same fiery temper. They were both redheads
—
Isabel is a redhead, too, by the way, although until I discovered this manuscript I never suspected she had a violent nature
—
and at night their heads would flame on their pillows like twin bushes of anger. When Lorenzo arrived at the house with Valentina, Isabel’s grandmother, riding on the rump of his horse, the truce between them ceased to exist. The marriage took Orencio by surprise. He never expected it. His younger brother was a weakling in his eyes; he couldn’t have convinced a beautiful girl like that to come out to the boondocks with him unless she had her own reasons. And Orencio soon believed he had found out what they were.

“Orencio moved his iron cot to the other end of the barn, as far away as possible from the flimsy sheet that served as a divider and kept the passionate newlyweds to themselves. Nights were a torture to him. The heaving and sighing went on for hours; and he couldn’t sleep out in the open because of the frequent rains. One day Lorenzo went on a trip and Orencio stayed behind on the farm. It was a warm day, and Valentina had removed her clothes to take a nap. There wasn’t a breath of air, and the mosquito net hung over the bed like a cloud of heat. Orencio crept under its folds. The rough feel of the hands on her body, the arms covered with red down were so familiar Valentina mistook them for Lorenzo’s. She later claimed she had been half asleep and hadn’t noticed the difference, but Orencio insisted she had known all along.

“When Lorenzo came back from his trip, Orencio demanded they share Valentina, because she had given herself to him. Lorenzo was afraid to say no. If he refused, he would have to leave and it would cost him the farm. An uneasy truce was reached which lasted a few months, but Valentina couldn’t hide her preference for Lorenzo. She loved him and saw him as her legitimate husband, despite the fact that he had betrayed her when he had accepted this unholy arrangement. At night when she went to bed with Orencio, instead of responding to his caresses, Valentina would simply lie there under the mosquito net, a log floating on the tide of sleep. That was why Orencio Monfort ordered the foreman to chop off Lorenzo Monfort’s head, and not for the puerile reason that Isabel gives in her novel.”

Quintín was almost finished with his story when he saw a light under the kitchen door. He stuffed the pages into his pocket and put Isabel’s manuscript back into its tan folder and hid it behind the
Boston Cooking School Cook Book.
He had changed his mind about letting Isabel read his version of things.

H
E WAS SEVEN YEARS
old. Quintín remembered it clearly. Don Esteban Rosich was still alive, and he enjoyed having the family over for turkey. Don Esteban must have been almost ninety, but he was very sociable, and Quintín was his favorite grandson. He insisted that Quintín was a big boy now, and when dinner was over, he told him he could sit with them out on the terrace. Madeleine served him his apple pie à la mode, and Quintín sat down in his grandfather’s white Thonet rocking chair to eat contentedly.

Quintín loved his grandmother’s pies; nobody made them like that; the crust was so light it melted on your tongue before you closed your mouth. It was one of the reasons he liked to visit the country house in Guaynabo, another being the grass-covered slope behind the house, where he could slide as fast as lightning on his red sled all the way to the fern-shadowed creek at the bottom of the hill. His grandparents’ house was the only one he knew where people celebrated Thanksgiving. None of his friends had heard of it or understood what the word meant. They pronounced it “San Gibin,” as if in honor of an obscure Catholic saint. They knew nothing about the Puritans, Plymouth Rock, or the four wild turkeys of President Washington. In fact, as there were very few turkeys on the island and no one ate them on that day, Madeleine’s fowl was a large hen, fattened especially for the feast.

Quintín finished his apple pie and began slowly swaying to and fro, leaning as far back as he could in the rocking chair that reminded him of a bicycle with huge wheels on its sides. He liked to listen to grownup talk, and the family forgot all about him.

Don Esteban, Quintín’s great-grandfather, never saw eye to eye with Buenaventura, and there were always fireworks when they got together for cigars and after-dinner drinks. Usually they ended up talking about the island’s disquieting political events. “Autonomists are all Independentistas in disguise,” Don Esteban said to Buenaventura. “They’ll argue about the moral virtues of being an independent nation, while they profit shamelessly from the wealth of the United States. Let’s see what they do after Senator Millard Tydings presents his bill calling for immediate sovereignty for the island.”

“A barking dog never bites!” said Arístides, with a reassuring smile at Madeleine. “I don’t believe anything serious will come of it. The Nationalists are trying to intimidate the United States into giving up the island, and Senator Tydings has fallen into their trap. But it’s just a lot of propaganda, and the other senators know better!”

They were talking about Millard Tydings, a senator from Maryland who was a personal friend of Governor Blanton Winship. Tydings had introduced a bill in Congress which proposed independence for Puerto Rico in a matter of months, freeing the United States from the official guardianship of a possibly mutinous island.

Governor Winship was incensed by the latest shootout of the Nationalist Liberation forces of Pedro Albizu Campos, during which several police agents had been murdered. Pedro Albizu Campos was the son of an
hacendado
from Ponce and of a mulatto woman; he had studied law at Harvard, where he became friendly with Irish nationalists. He believed the Irish had won their independence through the “blood sacrifice” of the martyred Catholic rebels executed after the Easter Rebellion of 1916, and he thought Puerto Ricans could do the same. He came back to the island, founded the Nationalist Party in 1932, and began a frontal assault on what he termed “American Imperialism.” Albizu maintained that Puerto Rico had been illegally ceded to the United States by Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War, since in 1897 we had been granted autonomy by the Spanish courts. He named himself President of the Republic of Puerto Rico and began publicly to harangue the masses, encouraging them to fight the “invader” by every violent means possible. Four years later, in 1936, he was arrested and tried for sedition.

“Nombrare il Diabolo e vederli venire sono due cose molti diversie:
Calling the Devil and watching him come are two very different things,” said Don Esteban, shaking his head. “People on this island were given a great gift when they were made American citizens nineteen years ago. They should be going to Washington on their knees, to persuade the Senate that Puerto Rico should be made a state as soon as possible, instead of bickering about when or even if they should ask for statehood. Now we’ll see what happens with the Tydings Bill!”

“I’m not as afraid of Pedro Albizu Campos as of Luis Muñoz Marín,” said Arístides. “That young politician is a smart one; he wants us to achieve the maximum degree of independence through negotiation, using autonomy as a stepping-stone to a Nationalist Republic. It was all done in Ireland fourteen years ago; there’s nothing new under the sun.”

Buenaventura blamed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s supposedly socialist measures for the divided opinions on the status of the island. “That man is a turncoat,” Buenaventura said. “He betrayed his own class when he made us pay income tax, and no one who’s anybody in Puerto Rico is going to want the island to be part of the Union as long as he’s President. We might as well stay as we are now, don’t you think?”

Don Esteban didn’t reply. His father had been an anarchist laborer in one of the marble quarries of Bergamo, in northern Italy, and he felt a great admiration for President Roosevelt, precisely because he had passed a law that made everybody pay taxes on their income. He didn’t want to discuss President Roosevelt with Buenaventura.

“Taxation is a mistake. In Valdeverdeja no one ever paid taxes and the town always had enough money for public works,” Buenaventura went on morosely. Whenever he mentioned his hometown, he became nostalgic and pulled more deeply on his cigar. Don Esteban looked at him disapprovingly. He knew that, in spite of his complaints, Buenaventura hardly paid taxes at all, because he charged cash for most of his merchandise and never declared his real income. “I don’t see why we should give those lazy representatives in our local legislature a third of our hard-earned money,” Buenaventura added, extending his arm to flick a sliver of red ash into a flowerpot.

“Well, there’s no need to worry about independence for now,” said Arístides. “I’m a friend of several Statehood Republican Party leaders, and they assure me the Tydings Bill isn’t going anywhere. Taking our citizenship away from us would raise an outcry and make the United States look like a bully. They are in a difficult position—they’re not sure they want us, but they can’t let us go.”

Rebecca sat demurely in the chair next to Buenaventura, drinking iced lemonade and listening absentmindedly to all that was said. Madeleine, however, was all pins and needles when she heard this kind of talk. She took out a handkerchief from her sleeve and began to dab at her forehead with eau de cologne. “God have pity on the people of this island if they ever take away their American citizenship!” she said to Buenaventura in English. “Chaos will reign and no one will know what to do. I was born in Boston; I could never live in a foreign country.”

Don Esteban looked despondently at his daughter. He had to admit she was right. If the island were ever made a republic, they would have to sell the Taurus Line and go back to Boston. Still, there was very little they could do to prevent it. Politics on the island were a complicated affair; it was better to keep a low profile and not get mixed up in any of it. In any case, they didn’t really have to get involved. Don Esteban’s son-in-law, Arístides, was an officer in the police force, even though only part-time, and he took care of them very effectively. He saw to it that their businesses were never unduly investigated for back taxes by the Departmento de Hacienda and that their homes were under adequate police protection.

Don Esteban had been very upset when he found out Buenaventura had beaten Rebecca because she had danced for her friends in a risqué evening gown. He went to visit her and he was shocked: Rebecca had a blue ring around her right eye and several cuts on her brow. He insisted Rebecca leave Buenaventura and come to live with her own family again. But this time Rebecca didn’t go back to her parents as she had when they went to live in Atlanta. Instead, she became pregnant with Ignacio.

It was almost as if, taking her penance to heart, Rebecca was determined to prove she had more willpower than anyone else. One can be a rebel by being obedient; in fact, absolute obedience can be the most perfect kind of rebellion, as saints who embraced the hairshirt under silk garments discovered long ago. Rebecca’s metamorphosis was something of the kind. Before, she admired Oscar Wilde and Isadora Duncan. Now she went to Mass and to Communion daily. She was one of those people who, if told by the Pope they should be poor to save their souls, the next day give everything away and go barefoot to attain their goal. But it was also as if she were acting out a role onstage. In the thirty-seven years she had lived, she had given several very intense performances. Now she was set on being the perfect wife.

The house on the lagoon was always spotlessly clean. Industriousness became the Mendizabal family’s supreme virtue, and no one was ever supposed to be sad. Order and discipline were very important. One day Rebecca went down to the cellar, where the servants lived, and made inquiries as to who was married and who was not. She found out Petra and Brambon had been living in sin for years, and she was horrified. Rebecca made them dress up as bride and groom, got them a marriage license, and took them to see the judge. Petra and Brambon did everything she told them, as if it were all a game. They thanked her for the wedding gifts, drank champagne, and ate a slice of wedding cake, but the next morning they secretly went back to the civil court and asked the judge to divorce them. They had been married a long time ago, in a voodoo ceremony in Guayama, and were afraid the legal marriage might put a hex on them.

When Ignacio was born, Rebecca took care of him herself. She was almost fanatical about it: she bathed him, fed him, and wouldn’t let anyone else near him. On the other hand, she began to neglect Quintín again. He was born in the old house, and his mere presence reminded her of a different time. In Pavel’s time she often went down to the cellar to drink water at the spring or to take long baths. She wrote poetry and her house had been full of her friends. But since Buenaventura’s beating, she hadn’t gone down there once. Precisely because she didn’t want to remember, she hardly ever asked to see poor Quintín. Petra and Eulodia kept Quintín with them in the kitchen. They would sit him down on a red stool and give him a bowl of green beans to snap, or in front of the revolving ice-cream maker and let him pour the rock salt on the crushed ice.