Eccentric Neighborhood (23 page)

Santiago wanted his four sons to be engineers so they could operate a large foundry. He tried to kindle in them an interest in science. Adela, on the other hand, wanted her children to learn to play musical instruments. She made Ulises play the flute, Roque the viola, and Damián the violin. Amparo, Celia, and Aurelio took piano lessons. She hired the best piano teacher in town, Monsieur Guillot, and would sit next to the children for hours as they practiced their scales.

For a while, the six Vernet children played as an ensemble at Adela’s kermesses. La Concordia was a very musical place at the time. It had only fifty thousand citizens, but there were sixty small orchestras playing in its numerous social clubs. Opera and zarzuela companies came from Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris to perform at its famous Athena Theater, and Adela went to listen to all of them. She would get dressed in one of her black muslin Statue of Liberty robes, pin a black ostrich feather in her hair, and make Chaguito tell all his friends he was taking her to the theater to see
The Merry Widow
or
La Verbena de la Paloma
, although it was really she who was taking him. And because she had a very good ear, the next morning she would sit at the piano and play and sing for her children all the songs she had heard at the theater.

F
OR A LONG TIME
Aurelio couldn’t make up his mind whom he wanted to be like, his father or his mother. Both Chaguito’s and Adela’s families had known hard times. Chaguito’s family had lost everything because of the Cuban War of Independence. Forced to hide in the attic, he had survived by sheer willpower. And so, when Vernet Construction finally opened its doors and he had to struggle to make it a going concern, his determination to succeed could sometimes be mistaken for indifference toward others. It wasn’t that he was greedy or anything like that. He simply had no time for compassion for those who were as unlucky as he had been.

Abuela Adela, by contrast, had known beauty and privilege in Guadeloupe. Because of this, she never became hardened. Instead, she shared in her neighbors’ suffering and believed in goodness. Aurelio looked up to Chaguito and understood his struggle to make Vernet Construction a success, but he was secretly on Adela’s side.

Aurelio toyed for a while with the idea of becoming a seminarian. He loved to go to Mass on Sundays, and one day he told his mother he wanted to become a bishop when he grew up. “How would I look dressed in purple silk, with an amethyst on my finger?” Aurelio joked. But Adela wasn’t amused. “If you want to become a bishop, first you’ll have to become a priest,” she told him sternly. “But in order to be anything at all in this world, the first thing you have to do is love Christ and follow his example.”

Abuela Adela believed that Jesus Christ was the only true God and that “He was above all things.” Tía Celia used to tell the following story in illustration:

“When I was four years old,” Tía Celia said, “Theodore Roosevelt visited the island. It was 1917, so he wasn’t President anymore. He came to our house in the mountains for a picnic because he wanted to discuss public works for the island. Adela had put together a wonderful lunch in the garden and at the last minute she remembered our dog was named after Teddy Roosevelt. She didn’t want to be embarrassed by any of us calling Teddy in front of Mr. Roosevelt, so she had the dog locked up. When the President came, he brought his family with him, including several of his grandchildren, and we played among the hydrangeas and the rose bushes. One of Mr. Roosevelt’s grandchildren was very conceited; the fact that his grandfather had been President of the United States had gone to his head. He kept going on about how his grandfather had done this and his grandfather had done that, until finally I tweaked his ear and told him to shut up because his grandfather wasn’t any better than my father. And to prove it, I let Teddy loose, and we all began to run after him, calling his name at the top of our voices, supposedly trying to catch him. Everybody found out our dog was named after the President. That night, after Mr. Roosevelt had gone back to town, Mother made me kneel facing a corner in my room for an hour as punishment for what I had done.

“‘His grandson said Mr. Roosevelt was better than Father,’ I told Adela sullenly. ‘I had to do what I did!’

“‘Christ is your only true father,’ Mother told me. ‘He’s greater than your father
and
greater than the President. You had no reason to do what you did.’”

As a master Mason, though, Abuelo Chaguito convinced Aurelio that the Catholic religion was a thing of the past. Freemasonry was the modern way of helping humanity. At the same time, it could help the island become a part of the United States. To be a Freemason was to be of service to the people.

When Aurelio turned sixteen he was accepted at Northeastern University. As soon as Chaguito heard the news, he took him to the Adelphi Masonic Lodge and made him take the apprentice’s oath. Many notable men in history had been Freemasons, and their names were inscribed in gold around the walls of the main hall: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Mozart. Aurelio felt terribly proud as he stood under the Masonic triangle and compass in the white-columned gallery and swore to serve his fellow human beings. All the things Abuela Adela wanted him to do—go to Mass every day, gain indulgence by reciting the Rosary to the Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of La Concordia, who stood on a little shelf in her bedroom, offer his discomforts in sacrifice for the souls of unrepentant sinners—seemed like a lot of nonsense to Aurelio after that. At Northeastern, students didn’t pray in the hallways, as Adela wanted him to do. If you believed in science and the modern world, you couldn’t believe in God—it was as simple as that. And Aurelio wanted to be modern, agnostic, and American, so he could serve his fellowman.

S
OON AFTER HE ARRIVED
on the island, Abuelo Chaguito became friends with one of La Concordia’s most prominent personalities, Alfredo Wiechers, better known as Bijas, because his red hair reminded everyone of the red
bija
with which Taíno Indians dyed their bodies. Bijas was a Freemason, like Chaguito, and they met at the Adelphi Masonic Lodge. They had a lot in common. “Architects and engineers are natural-born Freemasons because they are builders,” Chaguito told Bijas. “That’s why Freemasonry evolved in northern Europe from the medieval guild of stonemasons.”

Bijas was the son of a German merchant who had been the Prussian consul in La Concordia around 1895, before the Americans landed at Guánica. Bijas graduated from the Special School of Architecture in Paris in 1896 and won the gold medal in his class. From there he went to study in Barcelona with Enrique Sagnier, the famous art nouveau architect. When the hacendados of La Concordia learned of Bijas’s admirable skills, they wrote to him in Barcelona and asked him to return home because they needed someone like him to design beautiful homes for them.

Bijas was extraordinarily productive. In eight years he filled the town with his handsome buildings. He designed the Adelphi Masonic Lodge, the Athena Theater, the Rose Hotel, as well as dozens of private homes. Bijas made a lot of money and was soon a citizen of means. He became the darling of La Concordia and was wined and dined by the bourgeoisie. He and his father were among the prominent men who remonstrated with the American commandant when Chaguito and his fellow firemen were imprisoned for disobeying army orders.

In 1918, things were going relatively well at Chaguito’s foundry. Abuelo decided to embark on a side venture. Buying an empty lot on Calle Fraternidad, he asked his friend Bijas to design a vaudeville theater, the Teatro Estrella, where one could see silent films as well. Up to then, films had been shown under a tent in the Plaza de las Delicias, where Aurelio used to play the piano for five cents and get to see the films for free. One Saturday afternoon Bijas came to the Vernet Construction offices on Calle Virtud. Aurelio was fifteen and happened to be there that day. Chaguito made Bijas sit at the sketching table where he himself worked every day for hours, carefully drawing the conical wheels, crowns, and rollers for the machinery that he advertised in mechanical catalogs and later cast at the foundry. But Bijas worked in a totally different way. He took a pencil and a large sheet of paper and, without using a ruler or a protractor, began to draw the Teatro Estrella’s façade. His hand flew over the sheet, filling in all the details of a building that existed only in his imagination, but annotating with mathematical precision its exact measurements. That moment was a revelation for Aurelio. He saw the wonder of being able to imagine something completely original, of being able to bring it out from within, without any reference to the external world. Chaguito could never have done that.

“That’s very nice,” Chaguito said as the architect went on drawing. Chaguito was looking over Bijas’s shoulder, and he was shivering with excitement. But he didn’t want Bijas to know how much he admired him. Bijas was sketching in the theater’s roof, which had to be much higher than the roof of a house to accommodate the movie screen. “Remember, the walls are of brick, and a roof that high can be dangerous if there’s an earthquake. Wouldn’t it be wise to reinforce it with an iron beam?”

“That’s the difference between you and me, Chaguito,” Bijas said sadly, shaking his head. “You’re an engineer, and engineers always have to be practical in order to head off catastrophe. Beams, steel columns, girders are all your specialty. But architects are dreamers, and we know that the real strength comes from within. You know how I hate beams. But I’ll reinforce your theater with an iron girder, just to please you.” And he drew a pediment on the building that looked like a garland of daisies.

During the First World War an atmosphere of xenophobia had developed in La Concordia. Everyone with a German name was seen as a possible traitor, and the Wiechers family was no exception. Bijas’s father and mother had gone back to live in Hamburg, but he had stayed on. He had been born in La Concordia; it was his home, where he made his living. People gossiped and began to make him feel uncomfortable. They stared at him every time he went out, and the FBI had him followed. Bijas tried to win the agent over by lending him a pair of binoculars that could be used in La Concordia’s port, where there was a constant lookout for the U-boats that circled the island. Wiechers forgot that the binoculars were a German brand, Zeiss, and his gift only made matters worse.

The war was almost over and Wiechers felt relieved to have weathered the crisis, when a formidable earthquake shook La Concordia, sending many buildings to the ground. Thanks to the iron girder, the Teatro Estrella remained standing. But Bijas’s beautiful art nouveau house, which had a pink pergola on the roof where one could sit and see as far as the Plaza del Mercado Isabel Segunda, partially collapsed. His family ran out into the street in time, and fortunately nobody perished. People insisted he had it coming—it was his punishment for being a spy. Bijas suffered a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t sleep at night, thinking the roof was going to collapse on his head. He was institutionalized, and when he came out he never drew plans for another building again. He made his living drawing pastels and watercolors, which he sold for practically nothing. Once he drew a special one of Chaguito, dressed up in his fireman’s uniform. Underneath it he wrote, in a shaky hand: “In La Concordia, firemen will always be heroes.”

Bijas finally couldn’t take the gossip any longer. He sold his half-ruined home with all the furniture in it, and left with his family for Barcelona. Four years later Chaguito received a letter from him saying he was bankrupt and asking for a two-hundred-dollar loan. With the letter came a package wrapped in brown paper. In it were the Zeiss binoculars Bijas had lent the FBI agent, which the government had returned to him once the war was over. He wanted Abuelo Chaguito to have them as a keepsake. Chaguito sent him the two hundred dollars, and that was the last he ever heard of his friend.

I
NEVER KNEW ABUELA
Adela. She died in 1930, the year my parents were married at Emajaguas. But Father had a picture of her in our house in Las Bougainvilleas, an oval medallion of a dark-haired beauty dressed in black tulle with a fresh rose pinned to her breast. It was the only picture on his dresser, and he used to brush his hair and put on his coat and tie in front of her every morning. I also know how much Father loved her because once he showed me a linen handkerchief yellowed by age that he kept wrapped in tissue paper inside the small steel vault in his closet. “This handkerchief holds your Abuela Adela’s last tears,” he said to me. “Before she died, I dried her eyes with it.”

Tía Amparo talked to me a lot about Abuela Adela when she came to visit us. “She was very perceptive,” Amparo said. “Adela could tell more about people by how they looked than by what they said. If a man’s shirt was buttoned wrong or if the shirttails were hanging out of his pants when he went by her house, Adela knew that he had made a bad investment. If a woman let her slip show or put on her makeup too heavily, Adela knew she was depressed and her husband was unfaithful. Chaguito couldn’t understand how she did it; it was as if Adela could read people’s minds. He even went so far as to accuse her of listening in on her neighbors when she sat outside the dark confessional at La Milagrosa, waiting her turn. But he was wrong. Your grandmother loved people; that was her secret.”

One day something terrible happened. Ulises was six years old and he was playing in the empty lot next to the house, where he found a half-f can of gasoline. He wanted to build a bonfire to cook marshmallows, so he put some sticks together and soaked them with gasoline. Then he dropped a match on the pile. The blaze sprang up so high his clothes caught fire. He ran into the house screaming and Adela threw a basin of water over him. The doctor came and gingerly took off Ulises’s clothes. His body was covered with second-degree burns. He had less than a twenty-five percent chance of surviving, the doctor said. Adela washed Ulises’s blisters with distilled water, spread salve on them, rolled him in a blanket, and put him to bed. Nothing more could be done but to pray.