House on the Lagoon (3 page)

A tall man with a large mustache, wearing a tuxedo and top hat, was sitting next to a large-bosomed lady carrying a wide-brimmed hat with a silk cabbage rose pinned on the side. Buenaventura found out from his chatty neighbor on the sidewalk that they were the governor and his wife. A detachment of cadets marched behind the Marine band, wearing red caps with patent-leather visors and carrying their rifles on their right shoulders. They marched down Ponce de León Avenue to the beat of Sousa’s
Semper Fidelis.
Buenaventura liked the music immensely; he found it so inspiring he almost went two-stepping along behind them. Any nation that marched to that kind of music was bound to be optimistic, he thought. He would like very much to belong to it. The scathing heat, the screaming children—none of it would matter as long as he could be part of the brave and the free.

His native land was very different. Spain was a decaying country; its buildings were crumbling with age and everything seemed outdated. In Valdeverdeja, water was still sold house to house from earthenware jars hauled by mules, and the villagers went around in two-wheeled carts pulled by donkeys. It seemed to him that his countrymen had been disenchanted with the world from the time of Segismundo, Calderón de la Barca’s hero, and that skepticism had sapped their spirits. They didn’t believe in anything anymore—not in the values of patriotism, not in the dogmas of faith. Religion was no more than a convention of respectability. But here the young men were full of spirit as they marched down the avenue; he could see it in their eyes, which shone with enthusiasm every time the cry “God bless America and America will bless you!” was heard from one of the bystanders.

Buenaventura was still standing there watching the parade when someone announced through a loudspeaker that all citizens over twenty-one were expected to sign up as volunteers in the U.S. Army. Tables would be set up at the end of Ponce de León Avenue once the festivities were over. Suddenly people began to run here and there, calling to one another excitedly. Buenaventura thought that, despite all the hoopla about the new citizenship, the natives wouldn’t risk their skins for it, and would run home and hide under the bed. But the reverse happened. In no time at all, there was a line of several dozen young men eagerly waiting to sign up beside Uncle Sam’s portrait, and in less than three hours the quotas were filled.

“They must have good reason to leave. I’m beginning to suspect famine on this island has been even worse than in Valdeverdeja,” he wrote to a friend in a letter he sent home the next day. “I’m amazed at the eagerness with which the young men of San Juan lined up to board the
Buford,
the military transport ship anchored at the wharf. In Extremadura it’s not surprising if people want to sign up in the Spanish Navy. Land there is dried-up leather, and everyone wants to leave. But this place is as green as the Garden of Eden, and no one can go hungry. One has only to squat by the roadside and shit a few guava seeds, and in no time a full-blown tree is growing there, laden with fruit and flowers. Puerto Rico must have been a miser’s paradise in days gone by, and who knows but it may still be so today.”

Buenaventura had acquired an accountant’s certificate in Spain, but it didn’t do him much good here, because it didn’t conform to federal standards. It was proof of his experience, though, and he went searching for work in the city’s commercial district with his certificate in his pocket. As he passed by the wharf, he saw a ship loaded with casks of rum which were being thrown overboard by the crew in view of a group of government officials. He asked what they were doing and they said the cargo’s owner was abiding by the Dry Law, which had just been imposed on the island. Buenaventura marveled that the islanders should want so fervently to be good American citizens. They had been drinking rum practically from the cradle, and he didn’t see how giving up liquor was going to make them better citizens.

Farther down the street, he came to an open circular building, a wooden arena with bleachers all around, where a cockfight was about to take place. People were placing bets and yelling, ready to pit two cocks against each other. Two men blew mouthfuls of rum into the birds’ beaks to make them more aggressive, and everyone was drinking openly. Apparently, rum was not forbidden at cockfights. The men were affixing razor blades to the spurs of the struggling fowl and they glinted in the sun like tiny scythes.

Buenaventura had seen plenty of bullfights in Valdeverdeja. But when the men let the cocks loose and one of them in a minute trailed its innards in the sawdust, he suddenly felt like vomiting and had to leave. That evening, when he arrived at his lodgings, he wrote another long letter to his friend back in Extremadura. “Here islanders have kept many African rites alive. It’s going to be difficult to teach the Congolese and Yorubas the good manners of the
Mayflower
.”

To a cousin in Madrid he remarked: “Soon this place will be a fakir’s paradise, where everybody will live on air. The present war in Europe has made the economy more precarious, but the main concern of the islanders is to prove to the United States that they can be good American citizens. Their most popular refrain at present is ‘Food can be as effective as bullets.’ They have tightened their belts dramatically, cutting down on their intake of flour, sugar, rice, and milk, and donated the proceeds to the troops fighting overseas, so that American soldiers will be better fed.

“The sale of Liberty Bonds has been extraordinarily successful, and even public-school children have bought some of them with their penny savings. Although hungry and often dressed in rags, these islanders have managed to purchase twelve thousand three hundred and eighty-three dollars in bonds, their contribution to the defense of the powerful nation that has adopted them. Sometimes they’re so generous they remind me of Don Quixote.”

B
UENAVENTURA DIDN’T HAVE A
cent to his name when he arrived in the city’s old port, but he wasn’t exactly destitute. He had his good looks, and he brought with him an old parchment in which his family pedigree was inscribed. This moth-eaten document claimed he had the right to a title from his great-grandfather, a descendant of Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru.

At the time of his arrival, our bourgeoisie all descended from one exuberant family tree, and everybody was kin to everybody else through this or that offshoot. If you wanted to know who someone’s relatives were, you only had to visit your grandmother slumbering in her rocking chair, wake her up, and ask her to whisper you her secrets. Since colonial times, a clean lineage was worth a family’s weight in gold. In every town, marriages were carefully inscribed in two books, which were jealously guarded in the parish church. They were called the Bloodline Books by Spanish priests. Originally, they had been instituted to keep the blood free of Jewish or Islamic ancestry, and separate records of all white and nonwhite marriages were kept in them.

Even though Quintín pretended not to share such absurd prejudices, I always suspected he felt the same way as the rest of his family. When he fell in love with me, this wasn’t a problem, since my lineage was clean. But Quintín’s hidden feelings would surface later, and create tension between us. In any case, at the time of our engagement, very few of our friends or relatives thought differently, which must be counted as a point in Quintín’s favor.

When the Americans arrived on the island, the Bloodline Books were abandoned. Priests became poor and many of their records perished in random fires or during fierce island hurricanes, when the wind blew away many a leaky parish roof. But the Books disappeared also because the practice was considered unworthy of American citizens. For this reason, it was useful to have a grandmother you could ask about bygone days; she usually remembered how the Bloodline Books had read and knew exactly who might have hidden stains in his or her pedigree.

Keeping track of these things was getting to be more and more difficult, Rebecca, Quintín’s mother, confessed to him. As the new habits of democracy gradually took over, unsoiled lineages were becoming almost impossible to find. With the exception of exclusive gathering places like the Spanish Casino, anyone who could pay for it could go to the Tapia Theater, the Palace Hotel, or the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, and there were absolutely no racial restrictions on who could apply to the recently founded State University in Río Piedras, which was paid for with American dollars. The warm tropical breezes, the swaying palm trees, the waves which sighed and gave way to festoons of foam on the beach—everything on the island contributed to the loosening up of old Spanish customs, and eventually people forgot about the Bloodline Books.

A balmy climate can be a dangerous seductress, Rebecca used to say to Quintín, and before long the sons of the well-to-do began to eye the bare arms and shoulders of the beautiful mulatto girls, who, following the American custom, went everywhere unaccompanied and worked where they pleased. The beauty of the quadroons, which until then was a hidden treasure, was suddenly discovered by the young men of “good families,” and there was a veritable epidemic of racially mixed liaisons on the island.

A few well-to-do families, those who were really wealthy, like the Mendizabals, stubbornly kept to the old Spanish ways and countered the loosening up of mores with an even stricter code of behavior for their children. They urged them to be extremely careful of their friends and advised them to ask for last names, so their parents could check on pedigrees.

These families were also influenced by our new American citizenship, but in a very different manner. Rebecca often told Quintín how in the past many of their friends’ families had traveled by steamer to Europe for the holidays, and only a few had ever set foot in the United States. Most were born in the Old Country and still had relatives there; others owned property which had belonged to their ancestors; some even cherished the dream of returning one day, though in the end few did so.

Once they became American citizens, rich families traveled often to the United States and began to send their children to first-class universities on the East Coast. Reaching the mainland at that time involved a complicated voyage by ship and train; airplane travel wasn’t commercialized until the end of the twenties. Pan American Clippers, which were amphibious at the time, would land in San Juan Bay, fly from there to Port-au-Prince, and then on to Santiago de Cuba and Miami. Before the Pan Am Clipper, one booked a steamship from San Juan to Jacksonville and there boarded a Pullman coach on the Florida railroad line to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, or New York. As trains had coal engines and no showers, it didn’t matter how light the color of your skin was. By the time you arrived at your destination, you were black as soot from head to toe.

It was during these trips to the United States that well-to-do families began to realize some surprising facts which reaffirmed their belief that the old ways were still the best, and that it was important their children abide by them. When they boarded the train at Jacksonville, for example, they learned that black passengers couldn’t travel in the same Pullman coaches as whites. As long as the train traveled through the South, Negroes had to use a different bathroom and go to a different restaurant car. This was an alarming discovery and at first these families were so amazed they couldn’t believe their eyes. It would never have happened in their country, they thought, where everyone could eat or make water in the same place. The concept of equality under law, which the new democratic regime supposedly had brought to the island and which they had so earnestly embraced because they wanted to be good American citizens, was interpreted very differently on the mainland.

The situation caused Puerto Rican visitors considerable distress. Even though they were Caucasians, their skin was never as white as that of the Americans milling around them; it had a light olive tint to it, which made them suspect in the eyes of the conductor when they were about to board the first-class coaches to New Orleans, for example, or in those of the concierge when they were about to check into the Plaza Hotel or the Sherry Netherland, once they had arrived in New York. At those moments they were very conscious of what they wore, and realized that wearing a genuine pearl necklace or carrying an authentic alligator bag on your arm made a difference when you stepped into an elegant hotel lobby, especially if one “came from down South.” People looked at you with respect. For this reason, once they set foot in the continental United States, the well-to-do families from the island never spoke Spanish but always addressed each other in perfect English.

Back home, on the other hand, when a son or a daughter from one of our better families was being courted or about to become engaged, mothers would visit their confessors and ask them in secret if the old Bloodline Book from their particular parish by chance still existed, because they needed to see it. They would wipe the cobwebs off the covers, blow the dust from the parchment pages, and peruse them carefully until they verified the spotlessness of the suitor’s stock. Until this was done, permission for the marriage was withheld. Since they were now part of the United States, they told themselves, this was the only way to ensure that their grandchildren would be accepted at the best universities on the mainland, or that they could travel first-class by train or boat all through that great country, just as they had been used to doing in Europe.

As a result of this close scrutiny, it was becoming more difficult for the daughters of the bourgeoisie to find appropriate husbands. American young men, although desirable from every point of view—they were fair-skinned, well educated, and often connected to the prosperous sugar refineries on the island—were a tricky business. More than once, engagements were dissolved literally at the church door, when, arriving from the mainland for the wedding, a suitor’s family might find the bride’s hair to be suspiciously curly or her skin to have a slight cinnamon hue. They would point out these details to the bridegroom and decry the reliability of the Bloodline Books, cautioning that they could be altered or false, that it was better to trust your own eyes. The engagement would be broken off and the family would return to the mainland en masse, taking along the repentant suitor. This kind of unfortunate occurrence was much rarer when the fiancé was from Spain. Spanish immigrants were usually more lenient than Anglo-Saxons about exotic physical traits. Colonized by the Moors for seven hundred years, they were less suspicious of olive skin or curly jet hair.