House on the Lagoon (37 page)

I looked at him in dismay. “Why?” I asked. “You know I want a large family. Besides, kids are healthier when they grow up together.”

Quintín got up from the couch and began to pace morosely in front of me. “That’s precisely what worries me, Isabel,” he said softly. “I don’t want a big family. I’m tired of siblings flying at each other’s throats. I simply couldn’t take it if it happened to us.”

“And what if our second child were to be a girl? I never had any sisters and I would love to have a daughter; she’d keep me company.” But Quintín wouldn’t even consider it. “You know how much I love you, Isabel; you’re the most important person in my life. But if you get pregnant a second time, I’ll have to ask you to get an abortion; I’m simply not going to go through the same anguish I went through with Ignacio all over again.”

I know I should have been angry with Quintín when he said that, but instead, I was terribly sad. All of a sudden I saw myself when I was three years old, playing with my dolls under the terebinth tree behind the house at Trastalleres. I could hear Mother’s cry again as she fell on the bathroom floor. I swore I would never have an abortion.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL THREE
years after Ignacio’s death that Quintín began to feel guilty. I couldn’t understand why he had such a delayed reaction; maybe it had to do with loneliness. Quintín had always been a loner. He’d go fishing in his Bertram yacht early in the morning, with Brambon accompanying him once in a while, or he’d play tennis at the Sports Club with casual acquaintances, but he’d never get together with them off the court. He had no social life; the family had always been his whole world. The Mendizabals were a clan; they hated and loved each other, but for them the rest of the world didn’t exist. And all of a sudden the clan had vanished into thin air. Strange as it may seem, Quintín began to miss them. He would go whole nights without sleep and spend hours wandering about the house without turning on the lights. One Sunday when we were at church, I overheard him talking to the priest, asking him to say a Mass for Ignacio’s soul.

The only thing that eased Quintín’s melancholy was his art collection. He stopped going to the office and would spend hours sitting in front of his Carlo Crivelli Madonna, which hung in our living room, over our blue damask sofa. It was a traditional composition: the Virgin in profile, hands piously folded in prayer, surrounded by a colorful garland of fruits and flowers. The Madonna had a serene beauty: her face, especially her high forehead and her temples, seemed almost translucent, as if chiseled in alabaster. In the months that followed, Quintín went through a second religious conversion. He bought many paintings with spiritual themes, which he found consoling and inspiring. He would stand before these paintings for hours, meditating on the suffering allotted us in this world. “We are all born on Christmas Day,” he would say to me, “and in the end we are all crucified.”

Margarita Antonsanti arrived from Río Negro at the house on the lagoon on May 15, 1965. I’ll never forget the date. Quintín was working in the garage, fastening the last glass globule to our new crystal chandelier, which was to be hung in the living room. When Quintín saw Margarita get out of the car, he was amazed. She had delicate Renaissance features and wore her hair in golden tresses fastened around her head, exactly like the Madonna in his painting. Quintín opened the door of the car and greeted her cordially. But he had only seen her in profile. When Margarita stepped out and he saw her face, he was so horrified he dropped the globule he was holding on the floor, and it broke in two. On the right side of Margarita’s alabaster forehead, half an inch above the perfect arch of her eyebrow, she had an oval-shaped birthmark out of which grew a glossy black lock of hair. Margarita was conscious of the strong impression she made on strangers. She didn’t dare return Quintín’s greeting; she simply turned around and carried her old suitcase up the stairs.

Margarita was my second cousin and she was nineteen. Her father, Uncle Eustaquio, and my mother had been first cousins, and her parents had come to visit us in Ponce when I was a child. When Grandfather Vicenzo Antonsanti sold his coffee farm in Río Negro, Uncle Eustaquio’s father—my great-uncle—continued to live there. At first Uncle Eustaquio—a widower—had been lucky not to have sold his part of the farm. Three years before he came to see me at the house on the lagoon, Uncle was visited by a group of scientists from the mainland who said they were interested in buying the farm to build a giant ionospheric observatory on it. The topography was just right, they said; the mountains rose all around, forming the rim of a perfect hollow. A mesh radar could be built at its center, aimed at the stars. The radio observatory would be the largest in the world, and its mission would be to discover whether or not there was intelligent life somewhere in the universe other than on Earth.

Uncle Eustaquio was a hardworking farmer and his coffee farm provided him with a reasonable income. But he found the idea of listening to the stars fascinating. He refused to sell his land to the scientists, but he was willing to lease it to them for five years. He was thrilled that such an important experiment could be performed on his own farm, and he could go on growing his coffee shrubs under the observatory’s radar; it would shield his crop from the sun, but wouldn’t prevent the rain from getting to it.

The ionospheric observatory was built, and Uncle Eustaquio couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw how large it was. It was as if the astronomers had hung a huge mosquito net over the entire forest. But he soon realized he had made a mistake; his coffee shrubs produced fewer and fewer beans. Nobody could explain why the radar was affecting the crops, but Uncle Eustaquio was losing money and had to take out a loan from the bank. The following year he couldn’t pay it back, and had to request a second loan. When he realized he was going to lose the farm, he came to San Juan to ask Quintín if he could tide him over for the third year of his contract. He had no money to pay us interest, but he could send us Margarita, his youngest daughter, who could work for us, and we wouldn’t have to pay her anything.

“This could be your chance to atone for what happened to Ignacio,” I told Quintín after hearing Uncle Eustaquio’s story. “If you can save an old man and his family from bankruptcy, maybe God will forgive you and you’ll be able to sleep again. A good deed will make amends for your sin.”

Quintín lent Uncle Eustaquio the money, and Margarita came to work for us. She was a high-school senior at the time and had to leave school, but it was only temporary. She would go back to school as soon as her father had repossessed the farm. I wasn’t going to let her work for us gratis, in any case; I opened a savings account under her name, so she could use the money to go to the university. If Quintín was doing as much for Carmelina, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t help out Margarita, who was from my side of the family.

Margarita became like a daughter to me; having her around the house was a pleasure. Her smiling face brought me fond memories of mountain outings and family picnics. But the real reason she made me happy was that I finally had someone to talk to. I was from Ponce and didn’t have many friends in San Juan. Quintín and I had gradually grown apart. It was as if we stood on opposite shores of the lagoon, and no matter how we shouted, neither could hear what the other one was saying. I felt very lonely sometimes.

Margarita changed all that. She brought me news of my cousins who were still living in Río Negro, and of relatives in Ponce. We talked about books and music, gossiped to our heart’s content. I could tell Margarita about my fears and hopes almost as if she were an adult. Her dreadful birthmark made her aware of other people’s needs, made her more compassionate and sympathetic than anyone I had ever known. After so many years living in the midst of people who were loyal to the Mendizabals, I felt I now had someone I could trust.

Margarita was educated and had been brought up to be a lady. I thought she would do an excellent job of caring for Manuel, and soon after she arrived I suggested to Quintín that we put her in the small bedroom next to our son’s, where Carmelina had been sleeping. Carmelina could go back to the servants’ quarters.

From the moment Margarita arrived at the house, Petra declared war on her. She was polishing silverware in the pantry when Margarita walked up the stairs with her suitcase in her hand. “That must be the new girl, just arrived from the country,” Petra said to Eulodia. “With that hairy cockroach sitting on her forehead, nothing good can come of this.” She was furious when she found out that Margarita was to sleep in Carmelina’s room and that she would be taking care of Manuel. Now Carmelina could go to school in the morning and clean house in the afternoon.

“Margarita isn’t a servant,” I explained to Petra a few days later, when I couldn’t bear her long face anymore. “She’s my second cousin. She’s only spending a few months with us and has generously offered to teach Manuel to read and write, as well as help take care of him.”

Margarita was able to smooth things over between herself and the servants. She was modest and good-natured; when Petra railed against her, she humbly accepted the scolding and asked to be forgiven. She took excellent care of Manuel; she was patient, and didn’t miss an opportunity to teach him manners. She washed and ironed his clothes, cleaned his room, and kept his toys in place. Two months after she came to us, Manuel had learned to read.

I soon discovered there was something special about Margarita. Her presence in a room had a calming effect. If Quintín had a marketing problem at the office, Margarita would walk in and he would think of a solution. If Petra was making a soufflé and Margarita came into the kitchen, the soufflé would be perfect; if she came into the study when I was trying to write, the sentences would fly from my typewriter as if by magic.

Carmelina was nineteen, the same age as Margarita, but they were very different. Margarita was ethereal-looking—tall and willowy; Carmelina had a sensuous body, “with rounded hips that moved like caldrons on the stove,” as Quintín would say. Margarita’s skin wasn’t white. It was more the color of sandalwood, as is often the case with people from the mountains.

Margarita wore her hair carefully braided; Carmelina’s stood like an unruly halo around her head. Margarita washed her face every day with soap and water; Carmelina loved perfume, creams, and powders, and she was always filching them from my bathroom. Margarita wore modest cotton frocks and Carmelina liked brightly colored T-shirts and Levi’s. “You’re a timid turtledove, and I’m a black swan,” I heard her say to Margarita once. “We were brought to this duck pond by mistake, and one day we’ll both fly off and be free.”

Carmelina was quick-tempered and high-strung; she often talked back to Quintín and to me. Petra said we shouldn’t mind; she blamed it all on the bolt of lightning that had fallen near her crib when she was a baby. Petra was immensely proud of her great-granddaughter and she admired her independent spirit, the way she spoke “of the ways of whites,” as opposed to “the ways of blacks.” When I heard her talk like that, I wondered if somehow she remembered Patria and Libertad’s silly prank, when they had painted her all white and she almost died.

Carmelina hated what she called “white man’s food,” like T-bone steaks or coq au vin; she enjoyed pork chops and
mofongo,
green plantain mashed with pork rind. She loved crabs, and one of her favorite pastimes was setting traps for them. She built the traps herself—a small wooden box with a sliding lid in front, held by a wire which came in at the back, with a piece of ham dipped in honey attached to the end of the wire. She knew crabs loved honey and were carnivorous—something unusual in crustaceans. She liked to watch them seize the sliver of ham with a claw, as the lid in front of the trap suddenly fell.

Carmelina and Margarita became good friends in spite of their differences. Carmelina was carefree; she was always singing romantic songs as she dusted the furniture and mopped the floors. She was never put off by Margarita’s deformity. She was used to seeing worse in Las Minas, she said, which was full of maimed veterans of the Vietnam War. On Sundays the girls went to the amusement park or would board the ferry that crossed from San Juan to the town of Cataño every fifteen minutes. For ten cents they could ride the waves for half an hour and dream of sailing one day to distant shores. Margarita would then reminisce about the coffee farm where she was born, and Carmelina would relate how her lame mother had been raped by a black sailor and how she had been brought to the house on the lagoon after being fished out of the mud in Las Minas. She wasn’t going to be like her mother, though.
She
was never going to have children. When she graduated from high school, she was going to move to New York, where she would become a black fashion model for
Ebony
or
Jet,
one of the black magazines she had seen at the drugstore.

Margarita listened and agreed. She was never going to get married or have children, either; besides, no one would ever want her, because of her ugly mole. Her father had said she’d better get used to being single, because she was going to stay at home in Río Negro and take care of him when he got old. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to do that. With Carmelina by her side, she wouldn’t be afraid to live in New York. Leaning on the boat’s railing at dusk, the girls looked at the receding lights of the city and dreamed of the day they would leave for New York together, have their own apartment, and live their own lives. I worried about this close friendship, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

One day Quintín came into my room and pronounced it “unwise” for Manuel to go on looking at Margarita’s deformity. “The beautiful and the good should always go together,” he said, “and with her around, Manuel will take ugliness for granted. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to have her operated on? Of course, she’s your relative. I’ll leave it up to you.”

I smiled at Quintín’s puerile reasoning, but I thought the operation wasn’t such a bad idea. I was concerned about Margarita’s future. Her dreams of going to live in the States, which she had confided to me one night during one of our tête-à-têtes, seemed not only impractical but risky. Margarita had led a sheltered life—as Uncle Eustaquio’s favorite daughter—and she wouldn’t know how to fend for herself in the urban jungle, as Carmelina undoubtedly would. Carmelina was streetwise and resourceful; no one could put anything over on her. But Margarita was not cut out for a life of adventure and danger. She would be much happier in her own home, with a husband and children.