House on the Lagoon (38 page)

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced I had to help Margarita find a good husband. And without her mole she would have a much better opportunity. A few weeks later I mentioned the operation to her. At first she was adamant and wouldn’t even consider it. “The mole has always brought me good luck,” she said. “I’m never conscious of it, and if someone really wants to be my friend, it doesn’t bother them.”

“But what would you do in New York?” I asked. “Carmelina can work as a model, waitress, hotel maid, whatever she wants; but I don’t see you doing any of those things.” On the other hand, if she made a good match in San Juan, she could have her own family. “Once you have your operation,” I said, “we’ll introduce you to some of our friends—there are many nice young men in San Juan, and eventually you’ll find your other half.” Margarita laughed. “Mother was like you,” she said. “She also thought the operation would help me to find a husband, but we never had enough money for it.” And then she whispered, “Are you sure it’s possible? Do you think I can be like other girls and find someone who can love me?” I didn’t reply; I simply took her in my arms.

When Petra found out that Margarita was to have her birthmark removed, she was very upset. She was first and foremost a medicine woman and was genuinely concerned about Margarita’s well-being. She went to her room, knelt on the floor in front of Elegguá. “Olorún, ka kó koi ké bé! Holy of Holies,” she prayed. “Please have pity on the poor girl. The mole sitting on her forehead protects her from the evil eye. The day they take it out, the same thing will happen to Margarita that happened to the warrior who slew the dragon in the mountains and took a bath in its blood. A mango leaf clung to his back and the blood didn’t get to it, and that’s where the enemy struck.”

When I heard Petra’s prayer, I began to worry, but all the arrangements had been made. Quintín and I took Margarita to the hospital; she went into the operating room and was given anesthesia. No sooner was the mole removed than she went into convulsions, and a few hours later, bizarrely, she was dead. The doctor’s official report was that she had died of advanced bilharzia—a parasite common in mountain rivers which enters the body through the soles of one’s feet. It lodges in the liver, the doctor said, and isn’t noticeable until many years later, when the person is already near death. But we knew better at the house.

Uncle Eustaquio came down from the hills and insisted on taking Margarita’s body with him to Río Negro; Quintín and I paid for the burial expenses. I was overcome with grief. Uncle Eustaquio had entrusted Margarita to me, and I hadn’t known how to care for her.

T
HE LAST FEW DAYS
, Isabel had been almost cordial toward Quintín. She was affable at dinnertime and one night she began to discuss with him Choderlos de Laclos’s
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, which she had been reading. She found it fascinating. The literary convention of the letters exchanged between Monsieur de Valmont and Madame de Merteuil was particularly effective. The characters communicated indirectly, through a delayed echo. “Between the writing and the reading of a text, things change, the world goes round, marriages and love affairs are made and unmade. Wasn’t all storytelling, in a sense, like that?” Isabel asked, as she took a sip of wine from her glass. “Each chapter is like a letter to the reader; its meaning isn’t completed until it is read by someone.”

So she knew he knew about her manuscript and was deliberately teasing him, taunting him! His only recourse was to play along with her, try to get the upper hand at her own game.

“Literature
is
fluid,” Quintín admitted, “like life itself. History, on the other hand, is something very different. It is also an art, but it deals with the truth. As a record of human endeavors, history is unalterable. A novelist may write lies, but a historian never can. Literature never changes anything, but history can alter the course of events. Alexander the Great identified himself with Achilles, for example; he became invincible and almost conquered the world. Therefore, history is much more important than literature.”

Isabel looked at him with her flint-black eyes. “I don’t agree with you at all, Quintín,” she said. “History doesn’t deal with the truth any more than literature does. From the moment a historian selects one theme over another in order to write about it, he is manipulating the facts. The historian, like the novelist, observes the world through his own tinted glass, and describes it as if it were the truth. But it’s only one side of the truth, because imagination
—
what you call lies
—
is also a part of the truth. Like the dark side of the moon, it’s no less real because it can’t be seen. Our veiled passions, our ambivalent emotions, our unaccountable hates and preferences can best be understood through novels, and heard across the centuries. But I know you’ll never agree with me, so we may as well drop the subject.”

But Quintín wouldn’t give in. He wanted to bring the conversation back to Isabel’s manuscript, make her admit she was writing it, but he didn’t know exactly how. “A novel can also be a form of escape
—
a way out of a desperate situation,” he went on. “It’s like a bottle with a message in it, thrown into the sea to be picked up by a tourist on a faraway beach.”

“And it can also be a Molotov cocktail,” Isabel retorted, evidently annoyed. Quintín laughed nervously at her joke, and an uneasy silence hung between them.

In spite of their disagreement, that evening Isabel approached Quintín tenderly, apparently bent on reconciliation. He gave in and that night they made love, after almost two months. Petra had gone for a week to her granddaughter Alwilda’s house in Las Minas, and took her two great-nieces, Georgina and Victoria, with her. Willie was in Florida, spending a week with one of his friends from Pratt Institute. Only Brambon was in the house, and he never came up from the cellar.

It was a moonless night, and the sky was a dome of fiery pinpoints above their heads. It reminded them of their nights in the garden
o
f the house on Aurora Street in Ponce. They undressed in the dark and walked hand in hand out onto the terrace. A cool breeze rose from the lagoon as Isabel mounted him, wrapping her legs around his thighs, her skin like warm marble. She clasped her hands behind his neck and began to sway back and forth slowly, pulling him toward oblivion.

Q
UINTÍN BLAMED ME FOR
Margarita’s death, in spite of the fact that he was the one who had suggested the operation in the first place. If I hadn’t asked him to help Uncle Eustaquio, he said, we would never have brought Margarita to the house and she wouldn’t have died. Not only had I lost a cousin who was almost like a daughter, I had to renounce my own world all over again. Now I would have no one to talk to about my childhood home and about the memories we shared.

We all cried for her. Manuel kept asking for Margarita and missed her at night; Petra and Eulodia kept mentioning all the things she had done to help out at the house. Carmelina, on the other hand, was angry and dry-eyed; she kept whispering half-crazed things under her breath, reproaching Margarita for having gone off by herself, leaving her behind. I felt crushed by the loss, and by the emotional turmoil around me.

The consequences of Margarita’s death went beyond anything I could ever have imagined. After my return from the funeral at Río Negro, Quintín began accepting invitations to all kinds of parties, which I didn’t have the least desire to attend. “I’m tired of so much praying and crying!” he said. “I don’t want to see any more long faces in this house because of Margarita Antonsanti’s death. Good sailors prove themselves in bad weather, like Buenaventura used to say, and we have no alternative but to outlast the storm!”

A month after Margarita’s burial, Quintín suggested we go on a picnic to Lucumí Beach, and asked Petra to make the arrangements. Petra was seventy-six and hardly did any work at the house. But when Quintín asked her to do something, she threw herself into it, heart and soul.

Quintín ordered the best wines and delicacies from Gourmet Imports. Petra cooked up a caldron of
arroz con gandules,
pickled a pig that would be roasted in plantain leaves at the beach over an open fire, and tied a dozen live crabs to a long pole that Brambon carried across his shoulders on a boat all the way to Lucumí Beach. Six crabs hung on each side, so he’d be able to keep his balance; they were to be stewed on the beach. Crab had always been Quintín’s favorite food—he had acquired the taste as a child, when Rebecca had exiled him to the cellar—and he hadn’t had any for a long while; all of a sudden he had a craving for them.

We set out for Lucumí at eight in the morning in Quintín’s forty-foot Bertram yacht, the
Buena Ventura,
which he kept moored at the pier under the house. There were seven of us—Petra, Brambon, Eulodia, Carmelina, Manuel, Quintín, and myself. We motored through the maze of mangroves, skimming over Morass Lagoon and holding our breath to avoid the stench, and arrived at the beach after an hour-long trip. Manuel and I sat on a dune under an open parasol, almost wilted by the heat. It felt strange to visit that beach again after so many years. The last time I had been there with Buenaventura, I had discovered the Mendizabal Elementary School full of blue-eyed black children.

The place was just as beautiful as ever: the same green light filtering through the nearby mangroves, the same aquamarine waves licking the sugar-white sand, the same surf rolling in the distance like snow. And sure enough, several black women soon ambled up through the bushes, their heads wrapped in gaily colored turbans, and began to give Petra and Eulodia a hand with the food. But it was strange: every time they crossed in front of Petra, they would do a little step, almost like an obeisance, as if performing a dance in her honor.

The women went immediately to work: they put the wine bottles in buckets of ice, spread several tablecloths on the sand, and set out the food. They brought some tin cans from the bushes, made a fire with dry palm fronds, and started dropping the crabs one by one into the boiling water. I sat on the sand and watched them dejectedly. I felt so melancholy I could hardly look at the food. But Quintín was in a good mood. He joked with Petra and Eulodia, and asked the women of Lucumí to tell him stories about Buenaventura’s youth. When lunch was finally served, he ate almost half a dozen crabs and drank a whole bottle of wine.

I lay down under a palm tree next to Manuel to take a nap, and Quintín went off by himself. Petra, Brambon, and Eulodia went with the Lucumí women into the bushes, and I assumed they would visit the nearby village. Carmelina stayed behind on the beach, sunning herself in a two-piece bathing suit made of a rough brown cloth. She had a beautiful body, and the coconut oil she had rubbed on herself made her skin gleam like dark mahogany. I could see why Quintín was always comparing her to a Nubian fertility goddess. She looked sad, though. All through lunch, she had been silent; she hadn’t taken part in the servants’ animated conversation. I knew she was thinking about Margarita, and I felt sorry for her.

After a while Carmelina got up and went into the water; then she vanished into a thicket of mangroves. I closed my eyes and dozed off; I didn’t see or hear anything for more than an hour. When I saw Carmelina again, she looked her usual self. And it wasn’t until afterwards that I found out Quintín had followed her into the mangroves.

We got back on the boat a little later and made the trip to Alamares Lagoon without mishap. But that night Carmelina disappeared from the house. She waited until everybody was asleep and slipped out in an old rowboat that was kept moored to the cellar pier. She took all her clothes with her, as well as our sterling-silver Gorham water pitcher. She didn’t say anything to anyone or leave any message. When Petra discovered that she had left, she sank to her knees on the floor, letting out a wail that shook the walls of the house. It was like watching a mountain crumble.

R
OUGHLY NINE MONTHS AFTER
the picnic at Lucumí Beach, we were having guests for dinner and I went down to the cellar to see about our stock of wine. Petra was in the servants’ common room with a beautiful mulatto baby on her lap. She was sitting in her old straw peacock throne, and as she rocked the baby, she said softly, “You got your skin from the Avilés side of the family and your eyes from the Mendizabals. But you have nothing to lose, because you won’t be long for this world. Everything’s ready for your last bath,” she went on. “I’ve boiled the bay leaves with rue and rosemary and poured them in the grotto’s blue basin. In a few minutes I’ll take you to Buenaventura’s spring, and your soul will follow the water’s route back to its origin, just like your grandfather’s did when his time came.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What are you talking about, Petra?” I asked. But she was distraught and didn’t seem to notice me.

I called Eulodia and Brambon. “What’s Petra saying?” I asked. “I can’t understand what she’s mumbling under her breath. And I’d very much like to know who brought this baby into the house.” Eulodia bent her head, not daring to look me in the eyes.

“Carmelina arrived the night before last, Isabel,” she said sadly. “She was in labor. The baby was practically peeking out from between her legs when she was carried from the boat and brought to the cellar. A few minutes later she silently gave birth. Petra herself delivered the baby in her room, and we helped her as much as we could. It all had to be done so fast—she cut the umbilical cord with a heated kitchen knife and tied a knot in it with a plain wrapping cord. We had no time to come upstairs and tell you. And now Petra wants to drown the baby in the underground spring, so no one will know about it.”

“And where is Carmelina?” I asked.

“She left this morning,” Eulodia said. “She was so weak she could hardly walk, but she said she couldn’t stay here. She asked the boatman to take her to Las Minas, where she’ll stay with a cousin for a few days. She’s flying back to New York next week and wanted to leave the baby in Petra’s care. She said she didn’t want it—its skin is too light. She’s been living with some of Petra’s relatives in Spanish Harlem for the last nine months and returned to the island only a couple of weeks ago.”