House on the Lagoon (4 page)

The Spanish Casino was an important institution, because it was where young people from the better families got to know each other. Quintín told me how, the same year Buenaventura arrived on the island, the Casino was planning its most splendid carnival in years. Rebecca, Quintín’s mother, was to be crowned Queen of the Spanish Antilles. Rebecca was sixteen years old, the beautiful daughter of prosperous parents, and the committee unanimously chose her to be queen. When it came time to find a king to escort her, however, things did not go so well.

The committee was made up of a group of middle-aged ladies who were the organizers of many of the balls given in the city. They were responsible for preparing the lists of eligible young men who could be partners at such events. In the case of the Spanish Casino’s king, for example, they would visit the elegant mansions of Alamares, sit on the terrace drinking coffee, and from there look over the children of the family. As soon as they saw a teenager with down on his cheeks who might serve their purpose, they would ask his parents to let him meet the future queen, to see if she liked him and if they looked well together.

It usually took only one or two visits with a lanky young man in tow to get the job done, as at their tender age girls weren’t that particular about their escorts. More often than not, they were more interested in the coronation gown, train and crown, and all the paraphernalia that being carnival queen entailed, than in their pimply sixteen-year-old escorts. For the parents of the young man, on the other hand, to have their son accepted as king was a privilege not easily refused. Once he was chosen, the young man’s family became members of the exclusive Spanish Casino without the steep entrance fee.

Quintín chuckled every time he told me how the ladies of the committee had an especially hard time with Rebecca’s escort, because his mother knew exactly what she wanted. An only child, Rebecca had been thoroughly spoiled. The ladies of the committee brought half a dozen candidates to her door who were unceremoniously “beheaded,” as Rebecca kept shaking her golden curls. This one reminded her of a lily of the valley and might wilt at the first sign of heat; that one was sinewy and athletic but had a nervous tic; this one was a ninny who slobbered compliments in her ear whenever she danced with him; and that last one was as brawny as a bull but just as thickheaded. What she wanted was an intelligent king.

She wanted a true monarch, one who could subdue her with a single glance. A sovereign with shoulders spread like infantry battalions, strong cavalry thighs, and eyes so blue they made you want to sail out to sea. A real commander in chief, who would raise her slumbering regiments at a command. She wanted a prince who longed for the whole of her: her marzipan throat and her cream-puff shoulders, her coconut-custard breasts, her dainty rice-and-cinnamon feet, and her delicate ginger pussy; one who would eat her, lick her, nip her, and drink her, and then grind her into powdered sugar in his arms. Not a trace would be left of the porcelain doll her parents kept hidden in her silk-lined boudoir at the end of the bedroom corridor, where neither the dust nor the noise nor the heat of the street could harm her, and where every night her bed was a dark whirlpool of loneliness into which she plunged, weighed down by icy sheets.

Exhausted from her endeavors, Dona Ester Santiesteban came to Rebecca’s house one last time with a photograph of a dark-haired young man in a red-velvet frame under her arm. He was broad-shouldered and stood very straight, and he wore a black
sombrero Cordobés
on his head, of the kind people wore at
corridas de toros
in Spain.

“The young man is perfect for the part,” Doña Ester said. “He’s twenty-three years old and recently arrived from Spain. His family is not too well off, but he has all sorts of papers which say he’s from a good family, and I thought you might be interested in meeting him.” She said nothing about his good looks on purpose, because she feared Rebecca might repeat her litany that good looks were not all that important, compared to what was inside.

Doña Ester was Don Miguel Santiesteban’s wife, and the couple had emigrated to the island from Extremadura thirty years before. During his first night in San Juan, Buenaventura slept in Don Miguel’s warehouse at La Puntilla. During the next couple of weeks the old gentleman did everything he could to help him find a job, but there were so many immigrants in the city that it was no simple task.

He invited Buenaventura to lunch at his house, and the young man made a good impression on Doña Ester. He had dark hair and blue eyes, but she felt sorry for him because he was so awkward and looked so lost. All during the meal he stared at his food, not knowing which silver fork to use. He overturned the wine goblet and dropped his knife several times, so that it clattered against the rim of the plate. Doña Ester asked herself how he would manage to get ahead in the finicky island society and on that very day began to teach him that gentlemen didn’t eat chicken with their fingers, stood up to help a lady with her chair whenever she rose, didn’t barge ahead through a door in front of her but opened it courteously, and other basic rules of etiquette. When dinner was over, she asked him to stop by the studio of the family photographer to have his picture taken.

Doña Ester planned to send the photo to Angelita and Conchita, Buenaventura’s maiden aunts in Extremadura, so that they might see their nephew was doing fine, in spite of the mosquitoes and the bad drinking water. But when she came back from Rebecca’s house after the girl had rejected the fourth would-be king, the first thing Doña Ester saw in her living room was Buenaventura’s portrait on the marble-topped table, waiting to be mailed to Spain. She dropped her handbag on one of the Victorian rocking chairs, gave a deep sigh, and said to herself, “Here I am, searching all over town for a scrawny teenager for Rebecca, and the King of Hearts is sitting on my drawing-room console all the time.”

Rebecca chose him as her official escort the next day, even before seeing him in the flesh. Buenaventura went to visit her and kissed her hand; he was a fast learner of the ways of kings. On the day of the coronation ball he escorted Rebecca to the throne with perfect decorum, and on their wedding day a month later he walked her down the aisle, her hand poised on his arm light as a heron’s wing. In his black tuxedo and silk top hat he not only looked like a patrician, he behaved like one. His courtly demeanor, the elegant way he carried himself, seemed to say: “Here is someone who did not learn the rules of etiquette yesterday, but sucked them with his mother’s milk.”

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
this century, our island acquired an unexpected strategic significance for the admiralty of the Third Reich. Being a history fan, Quintín was very well informed about that period of our past, and would tell me about it when we were first married. They were exciting times, and I liked to hear him talk about Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, for example, who insisted, during endless royal audiences at the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II, that Puerteriko be made a German naval base, which would secure the commercial routes to the Antilles and to the Gulf of Mexico. “If they had made El Yunque, the highest peak on the eastern coast, a nest of Krupp artillery cannons as they had planned,” Quintín said, “it would have helped them considerably in their aim to acquire greater control over the Panama Canal, which was becoming more and more important for the American fleet. An open sea lane from the Atlantic to the Pacific would have permitted them to come and go as they pleased between California and the East Coast.”

I found the whole matter fascinating. The result of von Tripitz’s plans for the Caribbean was a German siege of the island, and in 1917, the year of Buenaventura and Rebecca’s wedding, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by hungry sharks. German submarines were everywhere and, as they sailed in and out of the crevices of the Puerto Rico Trench, were perfectly visible when they surfaced. People made a hobby of watching them come up from the deep from the rooftops of Old San Juan, using the same binoculars they used at the horse races.

Our strategic importance became evident, and the United States began to establish new military bases on the island, quartering thousands of American soldiers among us. Despite their presence, ships continued to sink in front of the city, taking with them to the bottom of the sea drums of gasoline, rolls of paper, bags of salt, rice, beans—all the things that began to disappear from our shops. People survived thanks to the emergency programs of the U.S. government, which sent us war rations along with the soldiers.

San Juan merchants started to count their assets in rubber tires, gasoline drums, and pounds of salt pork, and Buenaventura Mendizabal was one of them. Every cellar in the city became a dry-goods warehouse where things that were indispensable for survival were hoarded. The people bore their adverse destiny patiently. They were used to tightening their belts on empty stomachs and they survived in spite of everything, killing hunger with
carajitos,
shots of rum in their coffee, and sweet-potato skins boiled with orange leaves for their midday meal. Children went barefoot, their heads full of lice and their bellies swollen with parasites. When they ran down the street, their souls barely clung to their bones, like fragile kites made of tissue paper.

B
UENAVENTURA INHERITED A SPANISH
coat of arms from his ancestor, Don Francisco Pizarro, depicting an armed warlord beheading a hog with his short sword. “The Pizarro Mendizabals had always been successful merchants before they turned into soldiers,” he said to Rebecca on the day of their wedding. “Before they sailed off to Peru during the Spanish Conquest, their business had been selling smoked hams, which they peddled with great flair all across Castile.” And as he spoke, he slid a heavy gold ring, emblazoned with that uncouth heraldry, on her finger.

Things went well with Buenaventura after the marriage. He was doing good business selling water, and Don Esteban Rosich, his wife’s grandfather, was proud of him. Don Esteban was in the shipping business and decided to help his grandson-in-law by making him a present of two small steamships of eight thousand tons each, so that Buenaventura could transport his provisions from Spain to the island. Rebecca christened them herself, the S.S.
Patria
and the S.S.
Libertad,
breaking a bottle of champagne on the side of each ship and toasting the future of Mendizabal & Company, her husband’s newly established enterprise.

My future father-in-law wasn’t as intelligent as Rebecca believed him to be, but he had an unfailing commercial instinct. “These are difficult times, my dear,” Buenaventura would say to Rebecca. “No business is foolproof except in food, because, no matter what happens, people always have to eat.”

In 1918, when German submarines laid siege to our city and people were literally dying of hunger, Buenaventura decided it was the right moment to expand his business. So he bought a shipload of dried codfish in Newfoundland, which he somehow managed to get through the blockade. When he put the fish on the market, it sold out in less than a week. The fish fillets were thick and lush, their juices stored under a layer of hardened salt which protected them from the rain and the flies and preserved them from rot. They had, furthermore, a sky-high protein content which began to work wonders on the starving population. All through the mountains, one could see peasants boiling codfish slabs with green plantains,
yuca
and taro roots, in large tin cans poised over an open fire, under the shade of mango trees.

Buenaventura discovered that cod actually saved people’s lives, and on top of this, it was excellent business. He bought it dirt cheap: for a ten-pound package of cod he paid one American cent to the Canadian company, Viking Co., and he sold it for ten cents a pound. Business was so good that soon after a second shipload managed to slip into port, he made Rebecca a splendid gift for their wedding anniversary. He bought her a white Packard, which she named Dulce Sueño in honor of the
paso fino
horse that won the trophy that year at the racetrack.

A windfall like that couldn’t last forever. Soon other wholesalers were buying cod by the shipload in Halifax and squeezing it past the German submarines. Buenaventura saw danger coming, and he wrote to Viking Co. asking them to identify his product by stamping each crate with the seal of Francisco Pizarro. But they refused to comply. “No cod is better than the next cod, and to distinguish yours from the rest would go against our company policy,” the president of Viking Co. replied dourly.

Competition was fierce, but Buenaventura’s ships always managed to dodge the German U-boats, and he sold more cod than the others. At first, people thought it was just happenstance. If Buenaventura’s lucky star made it possible for him to marry an heiress a month after his arrival on the island, his ships could very well wiggle out of the range of German guns and cross the blockade unscathed.

Bit by bit, however, people began to suspect foul play. Rumors flew that Buenaventura’s Spanish friends, who traveled everywhere as tourists on his ships, were not ordinary passengers. The minute his ships landed, they would go wandering around the island, making detailed maps of the major roads and bridges and taking note of the radio-transmission towers. Once the ships unloaded their merchandise, they would board them immediately and sail home with the documents.

One day, something very odd happened after one of Buenaventura’s ships docked. He always drove out to the wharf to wait for the ships to come in after they’d been sighted from El Morro’s lighthouse. On that day, the minute the gangplank was lowered and before anyone got off, a huge Doberman pinscher trod gingerly down the incline, sniffed his way to where Buenaventura’s black Packard had driven up, and jumped in as he opened the door. Buenaventura was curiously nonchalant about the whole thing. He never asked who had sent him the dog or where and when it had gotten on board. He named it Fausto, and from then on, it slept at the foot of his bed.