Eccentric Neighborhood (3 page)

When my brother, Alvaro, and I were children and we used to visit Emajaguas with our parents, our car had to draw up as close to the cliff as possible in order to turn into the driveway. I was always afraid we would fall into the water, and I’d shut my eyes in terror. At night I had nightmares that the sea was creeping closer and closer and that one night it would reach up to grab Emajaguas by the roof and drag us down to its depths.

There were four bedrooms and three bathrooms in the house. One bedroom had been Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria’s and was connected to the bathroom by a narrow inner hallway that always smelled of Hamamelis water, an astringent made of witch hazel that Abuela Valeria dabbed on her face with cotton every night before going to bed. Everything was white in this bathroom, and it was so large that as a child I used to get the words
bathroom
and
ballroom
mixed up. There was a cast-iron tub with griffin’s feet, a shower with a halolike nozzle, and a cylinder with rings that sprayed at you from every direction when you stepped inside naked. The shower had American Standard star-shaped spigots of stainless steel. These must have been mixed up in the installation, being labeled (logically in Spanish, but incorrectly in English) C for hot water and H for cold. Abuela Valeria, who didn’t speak English, assumed that C was for
caliente
(hot) and H for
helada
(freezing), because in the States cold water was always ice-cold. A squat square tub, a
baño de asiento,
sat in the corner. It was ideal for reading, and it was there that Abuelo Alvaro devoured from
María
,
Sab
, and
Amalia
the morsels Valeria fed him to whet his appetite every night before making love.

Tío Alejandro’s bedroom was next door to my grandparents’, in the right wing of the house. It was spacious and had a four-poster canopied bed, its own private bathroom, and a bay window that opened onto the garden.

The other two bedrooms were in the left wing of the house. There my aunts and my mother had slept long ago. These rooms shared a bathroom, a small, low-ceilinged cabinet that Abuelo had built under one of the gables. Later, when the grandchildren came to visit at Christmas, they slept in this wing of the house. Since the bathroom could hold only one person at a time, there was often a cramped line of little boys and girls in front of the door nervously crossing and uncrossing their legs.

Almost every room at Emajaguas had its own skylight. Skylights were a way of saving money: one didn’t have to turn on a light except when it began to get dark. But they also gave the rooms a special atmosphere. There is a dreamlike quality to a room with a skylight; it eliminates the passing shadows of the world outside, the swish of headlights on the road, the streetlights coming on at dusk. A room with a skylight gives one a sense of security. Nothing bad can happen there; there’s no reason to be afraid of what the future might bring.

The skylights of Emajaguas were always located in strategic places: over the dining room table, for example, or above the bathtub, where sunlight fell directly on the naked body. At the Sacred Heart in La Concordia the nuns taught us that looking at yourself in the mirror without clothes on was a cardinal sin. Girls were supposed to be ignorant of their bodies—the little bushes of hair beginning to sprout in unexpected nooks, the bulbs pushing out in flat places, and all kinds of fluids beginning to run—and modesty was an important part of being a decent person. Thanks to Emajaguas I always laughed at all that. I loved to stand in the bathtub under the skylight without a stitch on. By the time I turned twelve I knew my body’s secret places by heart: a nest of downy fleece growing here, a delicate pink halo appearing there. I grew up liking the way the creamy curve of my breast melted into my belly and, when I bent my elbow, how the hidden part of my underarm resembled a freshly baked loaf of bread. At Emajaguas I could caress and touch myself at will. Exposed to the light of day, my body was innocent and had a life of its own; shame and sin meant nothing to me.

I was thirteen when I discovered the answer to the age-old enigma of how we arrive in this world. One morning at recess one of my girlfriends, María Concepción, came over excitedly to where I was sitting with a group of other students. She said she wanted to tell us a secret, so we rallied around her in the school yard, as far as possible from the
vigilanta
, the lookout sister. “I found out where babies really come from!” María Concepción said. “They don’t come from Paris on the wings of Jesusito at all, like the nuns say!” Then she proceeded to describe the biological process of copulation and birth, leaving out none of the details. A naked man and a naked woman in bed, kissing and caressing, the man putting his penis into the woman’s third hole. (Was there a third hole? I wasn’t aware there was one until then. “It’s between the ass hole and the piss hole, you nitwit!” María Concepción whispered, pinching my arm.) And that was the hole the baby came out of nine months later. I was shocked.

It was Friday and that afternoon we left for Emajaguas, where we would spend the weekend. As soon as we arrived, I went to Mother’s room to ask if what María Concepción had said was true. Mother was taking a shower, and I knocked on the bathroom door. She didn’t turn off the water but over the shower’s din asked me what I wanted. I opened the door a crack and poked my head in. I could see Mother’s shadow: she was standing naked behind the shower curtain—the skylight a rectangle of light above her head—and steam was coming out from the top.

“Mother, is it true that babies are born only after a man puts his penis inside a woman and pisses on her, and nine months later the baby comes out a third hole that only women have?” I shouted. A silence followed, during which the shower’s din became a roar. “Yes, it’s true,” Mother answered. “And please close the bathroom door, because I’m getting a draft.”

A few months later I got my first period, and I went back to Mother’s room. I showed her my panties and she didn’t say a word. She went to the closet and took out a box of Kotex and a little pink elastic belt. “Here, put one of these on. And don’t change it unless you have to, so you make the box last.” That was the last time she ever talked to me about sex or babies.

There was only one room in Emajaguas that didn’t have a skylight: the toilet. One relieved oneself in total darkness, hidden from the eyes of the world as well as from one’s own. Shitting and pissing had to be performed in secret, so as not to offend the aesthetic sensibilities that prevailed in the Rivas de Santillana family.

A
BUELO ALVARO WAS TALL
and very good-looking. He reminded you of a Moorish sheikh, with his love for
paso fino
horses, his well-tended cane fields, and his house that resembled a harem with Abuela Valeria, Clarissa, and my four aunts all bustling about like partridges. The female sex also prevailed in the third generation: there were seven girls and only two boys among the Rivas de Santillana grandchildren.

Sugar planting was Abuelo Alvaro’s passion. “Sugar,” he would say, “was a gift from the Arabs, who brought the first cane stalks to Europe from faraway Malaysia. For a long time it was a luxury as rare as musk or pearls, but the Moors had a sweet tooth like you, and they became expert sugar planters. Once sugar spread to the south of Spain, the Moors took it with them to the Canary Islands, and from there Crisótbal Colón brought some stalks to America aboard one of his ships. When he arrived on our island, the first thing he did was plant a stub of cane at the mouth of the Emajaguas River, just around the bend from our house. It’s because Crisótbal Colón planted our first cane stalk that the sugar from the
central
Plata is the sweetest in the world.” No one believed him when he said things like that, but they loved to hear his stories.

Abuelo Alvaro had other exciting tales. “Long ago,” he’d say, “our island was a peak as high as the Aconcagua, a mountain in the Andes, part of a very rich country that sank to the bottom of the ocean during a formidable earthquake. We were the only speck of land left from that magnificent El Dorado, and for that reason the Spaniards named us Puerto Rico, ‘rich port,’ although our island is actually very poor.”

Alejandro loved to hear about Miguel Enríquez, a black shoemaker turned pirate who almost became governor in the eighteenth century. The girls preferred José Almeida, the Portuguese corsair, who sheathed his galleon with copper plates inside and out to protect his beloved Alida Blanca from cannonball fire after she decided to join him at sea. When she died he buried her in a glass casket on the island of Caja de Muertos and would visit her there every year. The girls cried on hearing this, and Abuelo Alvaro gave them his huge linen handkerchief, smelling of orange blossoms, to dry their tears.

Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria had been reared in a subsistence economy. The arrival of the Americans on the island triggered an economic crisis. The new American banks didn’t trust the local hacendados and denied them credit. The local planters had no money to replant the cane fields, and the banks refused to issue them loans. The only way they could raise money was by selling a part of their farms to finance their harvests, so that each year they had less land to plant and produced less sugar, until they finally had to close down their mills. This happened to many hacienda owners in the Guayamés valley.

Abuelo Alvaro was deeply nationalistic. He always thought of himself as Puerto Rican, in contrast to many of the island’s other hacendados, who retained their Spanish, French, or British citizenship even after the Americans arrived. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of sugar production, many of the rich criollos had moved to Paris, Barcelona, or Madrid, where they lived a princely life. They usually left their mills in the hands of a nephew or a son, who would send the income on to Europe. This was never true, however, of Abuelo Alvaro, who reinvested every penny he had in the
central
Plata and owned five thousand acres of the most fertile land in the valley.

When the criollo hacendados began to sell their farms, Abuelo Alvaro wouldn’t part with a single acre. Instead, he was always on the lookout for more land, either purchasing it from those neighbors who were in a tight situation or renting it from those who had already sold their mills. Another way of acquiring land was by marriage, and Abuelo Alvaro had hopes that one day Alejandro would marry the daughter of a rich hacienda owner from Guayamés. His daughters should marry into landowning families also, because those families would be his allies; but this wasn’t as important as Alejandro’s making a good marriage.

On one rule, however, Abuelo Alvaro was adamant: both Alejandro and his sisters had to “marry white.” Marrying mixed blood was the one sure way of losing one’s foothold on the already shaky social and economic ladder of Guayamés’s plantation society. Even recent immigrants, therefore, were looked on more kindly than many of the local suitors who courted the hacendados’ daughters. Modern urban life permitted a great deal of socializing between peoples of different backgrounds, and the inevitable liaisons that resulted were regarded by the hacendados as highly undesirable. “Peninsular, penniless, but white” was the proud motto many of them adopted when they described their daughters’ fiancés. And these young men had one advantage over the pampered sons of the hacendados: they were used to hard work and willing to do whatever was necessary to get ahead. They were welcomed in the best social circles on the island and were soon whispering niceties in the ears of the hacendados’ daughters.

Abuelo Alvaro managed to solve his cash problem when it was time to plant his new harvest by leasing small parcels of farmland to the U.S. naval base at La Guajira. But Abuela Valeria, like many of her landowning friends from Guayamés, never got over her terror of falling into bankruptcy. This was why she was so frugal. In her kitchen, for example, nothing was ever thrown out. The squeezed grapefruits were boiled with sugar and made into compote, the water from the boiled grapefruits was made into
refresco de toronja
, the beef bones were dropped into the bean stew, and the chickens were cooked whole, yellow claws sticking out nonchalantly from the elegant china soup tureen when the maid brought it to the table.

Abuelo Alvaro liked to drink wine with his meals, and at the back of the house there was a huge pyramid of empty bottles stacked in perfect order, neck-to-neck and back-to-back. Every single bottle that was drunk at Emajaguas found its way there: Liebfraumilch, Bolla, Saint Emilion, Riesling, Veuve Cliquot, Dom Pêrignon. Some of the labels must have dated from at least twenty years before. Abuela Valeria simply couldn’t bring herself to throw them out when she learned that Abuelo Alvaro had paid for one of them what one of his workers made in a month.

Abuelo Alvaro didn’t believe in buying anything on credit. He looked down on people who owed the bank money and saw them as weak and unscrupulous. A man should be able to tighten his belt and do without for a month rather than take a loan from the bank. Each time Abuelo bought a new car he paid for it in cash and put the old one away instead of trading it in. The carriage house at Emajaguas looked like a transportation museum: there was a horse-drawn carriage with patent-leather mudguards, a two-wheeled chaise, a black Packard from the twenties with gray cartouche seats, a navy-blue Lincoln Continental from the fifties, and a silver-gray Cadillac from the sixties, Abuela Valeria’s last car before she passed away.

Whenever Clarissa talked to me about Abuelo Alvaro, three things came to her mind: the small key with which he wound the grandfather clock in the dining room every morning, the gold wedding band he used to twirl on the dining room table, and an impressive switchblade knife with a mother-of-pearl handle he showed her once in the privacy of his wardrobe. The blade had something written on it—a mysterious series of numbers that read something like: R 4–24 L 6–32 R 3–22. She could never remember exactly what they were.

For a long time Mother wondered why Abuelo had shown the folding knife to her. The first time she was ten years old, and she thought he had wanted to amuse her. She had probably been pestering him, asking him questions about pirates and lost treasures. But once in a while he would take it out of his own accord, push the secret knob, and make the blade spring before her like a silver tongue. “When you grow up, I want you to have it,” he told her when she was fifteen. “I always carry it with me when I ride out to oversee the farms, and if anyone attacks me, I’ll slice his jugular vein in two.” Clarissa had no idea what “jugular vein” meant, but she knew it must be something very serious. When she asked Abuelo, he said: “It’s a vein in our necks and it goes straight to the heart. If it’s cut, life floods out of you and cannot be stopped.” Clarissa was horrified. It amazed her that her father should have enemies who wanted to kill him.