House on the Lagoon (47 page)

We still hadn’t heard from Manuel and the police had no clues as to his whereabouts. Every time I looked at his photograph, I cried. There was nothing I could do but mourn. By chance, Willie ran into his brother in Old San Juan one afternoon, and he told me about it. Manuel didn’t want Quintín to know; he made Willie promise he wouldn’t tell us. Willie was afraid of the police, and with good reason.

“Are you all right?” Willie said, embracing his brother. “Where have you been? We’ve been worried sick.” Manuel’s greeting was warm. He had lost weight and his coal-black eyes stood out even more in his gaunt face. Thankfully, there were crowds of people in the street, so it was easy to escape notice. Willie asked Manuel to have a beer at a small bar nearby. They took a table at the back, an electric fan whirling slowly above their heads, and ordered hamburgers and Budweisers.

“I don’t have an address,” Manuel said. “Every night I sleep at a different house. That’s the best way to keep the police from finding me. But things are going well for our cause; independence may stand a chance, after all.”

Manuel sat in the shadows, looking attentively at his brother. “Are you sure this is what you want to do? Why don’t you leave the AK 47 now, before it’s too late?” Willie asked. “They had no right to make you take part in the strike and insult Father.” Manuel laughed at his brother’s naïveté. “No one made me join the strike, kid; I organized the whole thing myself. We’re not children anymore. I’m a Puerto Rican and Father thinks he’s an American. He’d have us speaking English and forget we ever spoke Spanish. He thinks that way he could peddle his hams more efficiently on the mainland.”

“You mustn’t talk like that about Father,” Willie reproached him. “We all have our faults—Father, too—but he loves you.”

“I’m not being disrespectful toward Father!” Manuel replied, nettled by Willie’s words. “I’m doing exactly what he taught us when we were children. Remember how he used to say we had to be like the Conquistadors and not let anything stand in our way if we wanted to achieve something? That’s what I’m doing now. Only he wants statehood and I want independence.”

When he saw Willie’s anguished expression, Manuel let up. He examined his brother’s swollen eye, the face that was still black and blue around the temple. “It’s just like them to do that. They never pick on the strong ones, only on the weak.”

Willie took a swallow of beer and shifted around in his chair. He didn’t like his brother to think of him as weak. “Another thing,” Willie said. “I’m not going back to Pratt for now. I’m studying at the University of Puerto Rico and working with Father part-time. He’s given me your old office, the one with the moth-eaten tapestry of Valdeverdeja hanging on the wall.”

Manuel put down his beer. “Has Father brainwashed you about carrying on the Mendizabal family tradition and all that crap? No one should inherit Gourmet Imports. All private property belongs to the state.”

“Petra told me Father made a new will, and that he’s going to leave all his money to a foundation,” Willie said. “In any case, I don’t care. I’m not thinking of the business but of helping Father.” Manuel didn’t believe what Willie told him. He got up angrily, overturning his chair, and walked out of the bar. A few days later Willie found a note stuck to the windshield of his beat-up Toyota. “Gourmet Imports is a Fascist institution!” it read. “If you go on working there, you’ll be sorry.”

Perla was Willie’s great consolation in these troubled times. Unlike Coral, she didn’t go in for ideologies; she hated it when Coral talked about politics. She came to see Willie every day at the house and told him about her nursing work, which she was more enthusiastic about than ever. She was visiting the slums, where there were many abandoned children and where drugs were a problem. “Boats from Colombia come at night and drop packages wrapped in plastic in the water when the current from Morass Lagoon is coming in,” Perla told him. “They float right up to the wooden huts lining the shore. The people there have lookouts who pick them up—there are waterproof flashlights in the plastic—and deliver them to the drug moguls. But some of it always trickles down. There are hundreds of drug addicts in Las Minas; getting high is almost a rite,” she added, shuddering. “They share the same spoon to mix the heroin with water, the same candle to heat it up, the same rubber band tied around the upper arm, the same needle to inject themselves.”

There was a medical dispensary in the slum, and Perla was going there daily. She had a delicate constitution but a strong will. Like Doña Ermelinda, she wasn’t afraid of anything. She twisted her long black hair into a braid, put on a pair of beat-up Levi’s and a T-shirt, and walked fearlessly through the labyrinth of shacks. She helped out in any way she could, counseling patients on how to deal with addiction, on how to find moral support in meeting with other people who were also addicted. The saddest were the children. Sometimes a skeleton of a woman would walk into the dispensary carrying a baby in her arms, place the child on the floor, and walk out. “They leave them at the dispensary and never come back,” Perla told Willie with tears in her eyes.

Willie began to visit Las Minas with Perla in search of abandoned children. “If I were old enough, I’d take this one home with me,” she said to Willie one day, holding up a black baby who was so thin he looked as if he had the bones of a sparrow. They found him in an abandoned shack, asleep under old newspapers. Willie’s heart went out to Perla. She was the only one who understood Petra’s message.

Four days before the plebiscite, tragedy struck. Terrorism had been escalating on the island: a navy bus was blown up in Sábana Seca, killing two sailors and injuring nine others. Soon after, an ROTC vehicle was gunned down at the UPR campus. Governor Rodrigo Escalante swore he would find the culprits, and ordered the National Guard to comb the housing projects for Independentista suspects. Armed with machine guns and rifles, they were stationed at the entrance to the city’s slums, and would frisk anyone coming in or out. One day, Perla’s car broke down and she had to take the bus from San Juan to Las Minas. As she was getting out at the stop in Barrio Obrero, a shootout between a National Guard patrol and a crowd of slum dwellers erupted. Perla was hit in the head and was killed instantly.

E
SMERALDA AND ERNESTO FELL
to pieces; they seemed to age drastically in a matter of weeks. There had been so much pain in our family: Abuelo Lorenzo, Ignacio, Father—all had suffered violent deaths. But this was different. Perla was only sixteen, she’d hardly lived at all. I went to the hospital and saw her before they took her to the morgue. Esmeralda had brushed her long dark hair and arranged it around her pearl-white face. There was no justification, no pardon for people who committed crimes like that.

The ballistics experts couldn’t say for certain if the stray bullet had come from the slum crowd or from the National Guard. Esmeralda and Ernesto were so distraught they couldn’t care less who was at fault. But Quintín was sure Perla had been killed by a terrorist bullet, perhaps from the AK 47 itself. “You have no evidence,” I said quietly. “It could have been one of the gangs of drug traffickers that run wild in the slum.” But Quintín refused to listen.

All the way to the cemetery, Quintín kept repeating that the Independentista terrorists had killed Perla. We were standing around the coffin as the priest read the
responso,
when Coral arrived. She wore a black leather miniskirt, with patent-leather boots hugging her thighs, her red hair worn Afro-style. She began to cry as they lowered her sister’s coffin into the earth, but she managed to get hold of herself to read a poem she had brought with her:
“El llamado,”
by Luis Palés Matos—the poet Rebecca’s artist friends had admired long ago. It was beautiful, about death being a call we must all obey in the end. But Quintín found it disrespectful, because Palés Matos was a well-known Independentista writer. “You shouldn’t be here,” he told Coral. “The AK 47 killed your sister, and you’re one of them. That makes you an accomplice in her murder.” Coral looked at him in horror and fled.

But no one else thought Coral had anything to do with what had happened to her sister. Not all Independentistas were terrorists; there were plenty who were law-abiding and wanted to attain independence through peaceful means. Esmeralda and Ernesto, for example, both sympathized with political self-determination though they never admitted it publicly.

The day after Perla’s funeral, Coral moved from her parents’ house without telling anyone where she was going. I was sure Coral had gone back to Manuel—wherever he was—and that he would take good care of her. He could comfort her better than anyone.

The plebiscite took place on November 7, two days after Perla’s funeral, and as the results began to come in, Quintín grew more and more belligerent. The polls had shown that statehood had a small advantage over the other options, but at the last minute the voters had changed their minds. Commonwealth got forty-eight percent, Statehood forty-six percent, and Independence four percent. The combined votes of Commonwealthers and Independentistas made it impossible for Puerto Rico to ask for statehood.

Quintín was stunned; he felt sure the island was on its way to independence. “Statehood lost because of fear,” he insisted. “The Independentistas’ terrorist campaign reaped excellent results—people were afraid to vote for statehood.” The island was poised on the brink of disaster, he said. If we persisted in “our collective madness,” one day Congress would tire of the whole thing and take away our American citizenship. When I heard him talk like that, I simply got up and walked out of the room.

The night of the plebiscite, Governor Rodrigo Escalante went on television, his white mane ruffled like a fighting cock’s, blue shirt soaked in perspiration. He was standing on a platform at the New Progressive Party’s headquarters and below him a crowd of ten thousand people frantically waved American flags. He looked more than ever like a Latin American
cacique
as he thundered against his enemies and accused them of stealing the elections. “The result of the plebiscite is a declaration of war,” he said. “From now on, Statehooders will have to be more careful than ever.” They had been threatened and bullied by the Independentistas and their Commonwealth sympathizers, he said, but even so, Statehooders had respected the law. It would be different now. Statehooders were going to take measures they should have taken long ago. The party members gathered beneath the platform cheered wildly. Outside, you could hear automobiles ceaselessly honking their horns as they cruised up and down San Juan’s avenues with the Puerto Rican flag waving from their windows. They were the victors that night, Commonwealthers and Independentistas.

A few days after the plebiscite, several caricatures were published in the nation’s newspapers.
The Washington Post
ran a drawing of a little mustachioed Latin lover in bed with a huge Statue of Liberty, and underneath them the caption: “Why get married when we can continue to live together?” Quintín took the caricature as an insult to the Puerto Rican people. We were living in adultery with the United States, and Commonwealthers were abetting our illicit status. He was furious.

Governor Escalante told his followers there would be a confrontation and they should prepare for a full-fledged conflict on the island. Quintín took his words literally. He set aside a room in the house and turned it into an arsenal of firearms. He went to Gourmet Imports at night and patrolled the warehouse aisles himself to make sure there hadn’t been any sabotage. At home he stood guard at the study’s Art Nouveau windows, staring out toward the lagoon with a gun in his hand. He’d be delighted if Manuel came to visit, he said: he’d get what was coming to him.

Little by little, I became a different person. I had lost my old spunk and could stand up to Quintín less and less. He blamed me for everything. What had happened in our family was all my fault, he said, because I had taken Manuel and Willie to Esmeralda’s when they were children. If Manuel hadn’t met Coral, he wouldn’t have become an Independentista terrorist, the strike wouldn’t have taken place, and Willie wouldn’t have been hurt. I listened with bowed head. All my Corsican fighting spirit went up in smoke.

After Petra died, Brambon, Eulodia, Georgina, and Victoria left us, and I could only get part-time help. The new women who came to work during the day were not dependable; I had to do half the work at the house myself, because Quintín was afraid they might damage his art. I wasn’t writing anymore and that also depressed me. Quintín, of course, didn’t notice. He wanted everything to be as perfect as when Petra was alive. I was so afraid of him I went around on tiptoe and never dared mention our sons.

W
ILLIE’S HEALTH TOOK A TURN
for the worse after Perla’s death, and he was having epileptic fits again. I spent as much time as I could with him. He was on heavy doses of medication and had stopped going to the university or to work. It was dangerous for him to drive a car or even cross the street, and though I drove him to class, the university didn’t want to take responsibility for him.

Our doctor said there was a good possibility that Willie would get worse. To a large extent, his illness was emotional; the best thing would be to send him away so he could forget Perla. If he stayed home, he had little chance of recovering. But Quintín was unmoved. He refused to let us travel anywhere. He saw Willie as an invalid—the best thing would be to institutionalize him, and there was an excellent hospital for epileptics in Boston.

It was then that I resolved to leave Quintín. It had taken me twenty-seven years to find out that Abby had been right from the start: our marriage was a terrible mistake. He would put Willie in an institution over my dead body.

I gathered up my courage and went to see Mauricio Boleslaus at his gallery in Old San Juan. I told him there was something urgent I needed to discuss with him. He ushered me into his private office, which opened onto a small inner patio with a stone fountain in the middle and a large
yuca
plant in the corner. Dark rings circled my eyes, but Mauricio didn’t ask any questions. He sat down in front of me, folded his hands in his lap, and smiled.