House on the Lagoon (7 page)

Rebecca hated the place. The monks had whitewashed the cells and fixed the leaky roof, but there was no heating system; they still relied on braziers to heat the rooms. The walls and floors were so cold Rebecca swore a white mist breathed out of them at night. The first time she stayed at the abbey, she was so chilly she slept fully clothed in the cell adjacent to Buenaventura’s and refused to take a bath the whole week they spent there.

Ten years had gone by since Rebecca’s wedding, and she was no longer as much in love with Buenaventura, but she liked being married to him because he was a powerful man. When they attended parties in San Juan together, the minute the orchestra began to play a paso doble—
The Kiss,
for example, which went: “A kiss, in Spain, is carried by a woman deep in her soul!”; or
My Tawny Beauty:
“Step on my cape, my tawny beauty, and the imprint of your foot I’ll carry in a locket deep in my heart!”—Buenaventura would walk over to Rebecca in his silk tuxedo and puckered shirt, and ask her to dance. Rebecca’s misgivings would all melt away as she sailed across the crowded dance floor in Buenaventura’s arms, the envious looks of her friends falling by her side like dead birds.

By the time Rebecca was twenty-seven, she had begun to tire of Buenaventura’s stubborn disregard for her artistic vocation. They had lived in their new house for two years and she had been a model wife, but Buenaventura hadn’t let her hold a single artist’s soirée. Pavel hardly dropped by anymore and Rebecca had no one to talk to. She didn’t have any children and she was bored to death.

Pavel visited Rebecca often during the construction of the house on the lagoon, but once the family moved in, he stopped coming. In the past year he had been ill and withdrawn. A rumor was going around that people who lived in the houses Pavel built went gradually out of their minds. The Behn brothers, for example, the owners of the local telephone company—known in San Juan as “los hermanos Brothers”—were so happy with their beautiful house at the entrance to Alamares that they refused to go out and took care of their business by telephone instead. Eventually the brothers went bankrupt and the government expropriated their company; the house was torn down. The Calimanos, powerful hacienda owners from Guayama, began to spend their days planting water lilies in the Japanese pond at the back of their house and stopped ordering the modern crushing mills and flywheel gears necessary for their business. They produced less and less sugar and their house was also torn down. The collapse of sugar in the world market—in 1920 a ton of sugar was worth $235.87 and by 1926 it was worth $83.31—put pressure on other sugar barons, too, and they no longer commissioned lavish homes from Pavel.

To forget his woes, Pavel began to drink a purple liquor made from sugar beets which he distilled himself in the cellar of his house. His grandmother had made it in Czechoslovakia when he was a child, and now he drank it to feel closer to his Czech roots. He stopped working and became a recluse. He built a moat around his rural-style cottage on the outskirts of San Juan, so no one could approach it from the street.

One morning Pavel, half drunk, stepped into his car to go downtown, but the car wouldn’t start. He opened the hood and tried to get the motor going, but nothing happened. He stood in front of the car, cranking it over and over, thinking it wouldn’t budge. But the car suddenly shot forward and crushed him against a telephone pole. People were afraid of his bad luck and no one went to his funeral; he was carted off, unaccompanied, to the Municipal Cemetery. Rebecca was the only person who put flowers on his grave.

Soon after Pavel died, Rebecca decided she couldn’t bear to live with Buenaventura any longer. She approached him, head hung low, her blond curls almost hiding her face, and told him she was leaving him. Governor Horace Towner, who was a friend of Don Esteban Rosich, had offered her father, Arístides Arrigoitia, an office job in Atlanta, and she had persuaded him to accept. Her mother, Madeleine Rosich, had always wanted to go back to the States. They would take Don Esteban with them, as he was well on in years. They would be living in a house with a pillared portico at the end of an avenue of ancient mahogany trees. Buenaventura couldn’t believe it. It had never crossed his mind that Rebecca might desert him.

“And what will we do with our beautiful house?” was the only thing that occurred to him to say. “Frankly, I don’t know,” Rebecca replied sadly. “For all I care, you may use it as a warehouse for your precious hams and your cursed codfish.” And she went on packing the flowing robes, the dancing slippers, and the books of poetry into her suitcase.

When Buenaventura found himself alone, he fell ill. For the first time since he arrived on the island, he didn’t have the energy to get out of bed. He stayed there all day like a beached whale, not shaving, not even dressing for breakfast. He couldn’t stand living in Pavel’s house, where everything reminded him of Rebecca. A week later he got out of bed, took a bath, dressed, clipped the tufts of hair growing out of his ears, and traveled to Atlanta to ask her forgiveness.

On the day Buenaventura arrived, Rebecca found that she was pregnant. She didn’t want the child to be born without the father’s knowing about it, so she told Buenaventura the news. He was exultant. He apologized for everything and promised Rebecca she could have all the artistic soirées she wanted if only she would return to the island with him. Rebecca consented. Her mother and father were happy with the decision—they had hoped the rift would be temporary—and a few weeks later the whole family boarded the ship back to San Juan. Rebecca returned triumphant on Buenaventura’s arm, and from that day on she reigned as undisputed mistress of the house on the lagoon.

B
UENAVENTURA WAS SO HAPPY
he wanted to please Rebecca in everything. She could invite as many artists as she wanted to her cultural gatherings, which would alternate with Buenaventura’s diplomatic meetings. Dressed in elegant gowns and velvet suits, Rebecca’s friends came at least one evening a week to the house, to lounge on the terrace and discuss poetry, art, and music until the early hours of the morning. They made fun of Buenaventura’s acquaintances—the businessmen, lawyers, and politicians he invited to dinner, who dressed in dark suits, had generous paunches, and ate with napkins tucked under their chins. But Buenaventura didn’t mind.

Rebecca wrote poetry every day. She visited the spring in the cellar and drank its waters, convinced that they nourished her inspiration. Her friends wrote poetry also, and they read their compositions aloud to each other on the terrace, commenting on them and making suggestions. They read books on modern art and became politically conscious. They admired Luis Palés Matos, the son of a white
hacendado,
who in 1929 had published a collection of revolutionary poems titled
Tún tún de pasa y grifería
in which black ethnic roots were regarded as fundamental to Puerto Rican culture. The bourgeoisie was scandalized, but Rebecca’s friends fell in love with the poems, which echoed with the mysterious rhythms of Africa. Rebecca was so proud to have these meetings in her own home that she kept her racial prejudice in check and never complained when her friends recited Palés’s poems.

Thanks to these
rendezvous
—the cultural and the diplomatic—Buenaventura and Rebecca got along better than they ever had in eleven years of marriage. Rebecca was content and didn’t even notice when Buenaventura brought Petra Avilés to work for them at the house. Brambon, Petra’s husband, moved in with them, too, and the couple installed themselves in the cellar. Petra worked as cook and Brambon became Buenaventura’s chauffeur.

Petra’s ancestors were Angolan, and when people told her she was strong as an ox she would smile and say that was to be expected, her ancestors drank ox blood. She was six feet tall and her skin wasn’t a watered-down chocolate but a deep onyx black; when she smiled it was as if a white scar slashed the darkness of the night. She wore brightly colored seed necklaces around her neck and steel bracelets on her wrists, and she went barefoot, so the only thing you heard when she walked into a room was her bracelets tinkling like spearheads. Petra was born in 1889 in Guayama, a town famous for its sorcerers and medicine men, and her parents had been slaves. As slavery was abolished in 1873, she was born free.

Petra’s grandfather, Bernabé Avilés, whose African name was Ndongo Kumbundu, was born in Angola. Petra herself told Manuel and Willie Bernabé’s story when they were children, and it would make their hair stand on end. Bernabé was chieftain of a tribe living in Bié Plateau, an area six thousand feet above sea level and one of the richest in Angola, when one day Portuguese traders raided his tribe and made him a prisoner. He was taken to the port of Luanda and put aboard a ship that landed in nearby St. Thomas. That same year he was brought to Puerto Rico in a small frigate and sold to Monsieur Pellot, a sugarcane hacienda owner in Guayama, which had lush cane fields all around it.

The black insurrection of Saint-Domingue at the beginning of the nineteenth century had kept Puerto Rico in constant fear of slave revolt. Saint-Domingue had been burned to a cinder, and practically no sugar was being produced there. This had caused sugar production to increase on the other islands, and many new slaves had been brought to the plantations. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the black slave population in Puerto Rico totaled almost one-fourth of the inhabitants. The neighboring St. John and St. Croix had had horrendous slave insurrections and became floating torches, their white populations mercilessly slaughtered with sugarcane machetes.

Slaves from Angola, Kongo, and Ndongo shared fundamental beliefs and language, part of a rich culture. They had their own religion, and their chieftains were spiritual leaders whose duty was to look out for their people. They believed in Mbanza Kongo, a mythical city of ivory minarets surrounded by a forest of date palms, with an underground river flowing beneath the city. The river separated the world of the living from the world of the dead, and was both a passage and a barrier. In Mbanza, each tribe had its own street and the inhabitants lived in peaceful coexistence; the fields of corn, wheat, and cereal around it belonged to everyone. The duty of every Angolan chieftain was to turn his own village into a Mbanza Kongo.

Bernabé had been chieftain of his tribe, and when he first arrived in Guayama, he couldn’t understand why all the land on the island belonged to a few white
hacendados
dressed in white linen suits, with panama hats on their heads, when the rest of the population lived in abject poverty. Nor could he understand why he was baptized into a religion where God was called Jesus, when he had always prayed to Yemayá, Ogún, and Elegguá, whose powerful spirits had guided him, helping him heal the people of his tribe. But what had really overwhelmed him was that he was forbidden to speak Bantu with the other Angolans and Kongos living in La Quemada.

Bernabé, like the rest of the adult
bozal
slaves recently arrived from Angola, spoke Bantu. But if anyone was caught speaking it, even if he was speaking only to himself, he would be punished with fifty lashes. Bernabé had a terrible time accepting this. One’s tongue was so deeply ingrained, more so even than one’s religion or tribal pride; it was like a root that went deep into one’s body and no one knew exactly where it ended. It was attached to one’s throat, to one’s neck, to one’s stomach, even to one’s heart.

Bernabé was as black as midnight, and he was very intelligent. Five years after his arrival there was a false rumor that Spain had granted freedom to the slaves in its colonies but that the news was being kept from distant towns like Guayama, which were cut off from the rest of the world. Bernabé got wind of the rumor and began to organize a rebellion, swearing that if freedom wasn’t granted to them the slaves of La Quemada would fight to the death. He spoke secretly in Bantu with the other
bozales
and was able to plan an uprising without any of the criollo slaves—many of whom were loyal to their master finding out about it.

The uprising was to take place on New Year’s Day, the only time slaves were allowed to leave the hacienda and celebrate in the town square, where they danced the
bomba
to the rhythm of African drums. Bernabé had organized his men into three groups. One group would go to the square to dance the
bomba
in front of the Casa del Rey, which served as an armory—where the Spanish militia kept its rifles and swords. This would create a diversion, so the militia wouldn’t notice anything was amiss. The second would set fire to the cane fields nearest to La Quemada, on the outskirts of town. And the third would be lying in wait behind the shrubs of sea grape by the road, to intercept the people of the hacienda, who on that morning would all be in church. When they came out of Mass the fire would be going full blast and they would run back to La Quemada. The slaves would ambush them. Bernabé had given orders that they were to take Monsieur Pellot and his family prisoner, without harming them. The Pellots would serve as hostages until the slaves got the mayor to declare officially that they were free. By that time, the
bomba
dancers would have stormed the armory and taken the rifles of the Spanish detachment, to give the abductors of the Pellot family the necessary support.

Bernabé crouched silently behind the sea grape shrubs, trying to make himself invisible. He had seen the first wisps of smoke rising like black strands of hair against the blue of the sky, when Conchita, Monsieur Pellot’s twenty-year-old daughter, came galloping up the road on her mahogany-colored mare. Evidently she had overslept and her family had left her behind. She woke and saw the fire and was on her way to warn the family. But she didn’t get more than a mile from the town. The slaves sprang on her like cats and made her a prisoner; but her horse got away.

When the riderless horse arrived at the church, the people of the town summoned the militia, marched to La Quemada, and were able to put out the fire. The revolt was aborted. Nothing happened to Conchita Pellot. The
bomba
dancers never had the chance to attack the armory, and the slaves were herded back to the hacienda and locked up in their quarters. With the help of the
becerrillos,
the fierce hunting dogs trained to follow a slave’s scent, the conspirators were rounded up. Five of them received a hundred lashes each; but Bernabé, the leader, was sentenced to a special punishment, as an example for the rest.