Eccentric Neighborhood (31 page)

Martín was an astute politician. He realized that it was important to mix with the people, that the years of preaching politics across the family moat, as the wealthy hacendados had done, were over. Instead of relying on the radio and newspapers, Fernando Martín got on a mule and rode out to spread his word to the common people. The parallel with the Gospels was well thought out: Christ rode on a mule into Jerusalem; Martín rode on a mule into the mountains at the heart of the island. He sat down with the
jíbaros
in their huts and drank their bitter sugarless coffee. He slept in their ragged hammocks and drank their illegal
pitorro
rum. The Partido Democrático Institucional was the workers’ party and they should “lend” him their vote. “Your vote is the same as your machete; it’s your manhood,” he told them. “No pair of shoes, no three-dollar tip, no bottle of rum can ever buy it. Whoever sells his vote to the hacendados instead of wielding it to defend himself is selling his soul.” And in 1946 Fernando Martín’s broomlike mustache swept the island. He won the election by an overwhelming majority.

Father was crushed, but Tío Venancio told him, “It doesn’t matter. We’ll win the next one. But we must go on fighting to help the sugar industry. If we’re poor, the United States won’t want us as a state. We must make the sugar mills prosper, because that way the whole island will thrive.”

Aurelio’s heart was in the Star Cement plant and he didn’t think the sugar industry was very important anymore. Industrialization, Fernando Martín’s goal, was more up his alley. But he didn’t contradict Tío Venancio. Secretly he admired Martín for defending the peasants’ right to vote. In the past, when election time came around, many peasants sold their votes. And Martín was right to blast the Incondicionales for their corrupt practices—for locking up the peasants in cattle pens on election day, for example, and handing each of them a bottle of rum. When nothing else mattered but the fire in their veins, the peasants were made to file by the ballot box, which was placed at the end of the same mud path the cattle used when they were led out into the open field. There the peasants were made to vote with an X under the Incondicional symbol. But Father was convinced that Tío Venancio had mended his ways and that the party’s corruption was a thing of the past.

Father knew all about Fernando Martín’s campaign; he read
El Bohío
—the Partido Democrático Institucional newspaper, which Martín himself wrote—and even went incognito to a few of Martín’s rallies. When Martín won the election in 1946, Aurelio was almost glad, in spite of the fact that Martín didn’t believe in the concept of a commonwealth. “Economic progress is not the most important thing in this world, you know,” Father reproached Tío Venancio once. “Individuals are much more important. And if they’re hungry and sick, we have to help them first.” But Venancio got very angry every time he heard Fernando Martín spewing fire and brimstone against the sugar industry.

Tío Venancio and Father saw each other frequently at Emajaguas and they remained close political allies. Mother and Tía Siglinda, moreover, were very close. Venancio was pleasant; he was always cracking jokes and making people laugh. It was hard for Father not to like him, even if he didn’t always agree with his shady political maneuvers. We all knew that Venancio had done a lot of good things as mayor of Guayamés.

Venancio kept the Partido Republicano Incondicional’s machinery in good shape, constantly oiling and tightening its nuts and bolts. “Knowing how to win your followers’ loyalty is the most important aspect of a politician’s career,” Venancio often advised Aurelio, and Venancio certainly knew how to do that; he kept tight control over his party’s budget. Every four years the government gave each party a certain amount of money for the political campaign, and Venancio doled out every cent of this kitty to his followers, not always justly.

Most Incondicional voters were faithful to Venancio because of the beautiful way he spoke Spanish. He would climb the platform and open his arms wide, his three-carat diamond ring glinting on his little finger, and begin to extol the need for loyalty to “the cause of statehood.” “
Amigos y compatriotas
,” he would say, “
hay que saber sacrificarse por la causa
”—and immediately the crowd would fall silent.

But Tío Venancio never bothered to explain the exact meaning of “the cause of statehood.” Unlike my father, he had never read Thomas Jefferson, much less Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Venancio hardly spoke English at all. That was what was hilarious about it. He wanted Aurelio to join the party because Aurelio was fluent in English. He alone could travel to Washington and talk to the senators and representatives the way Fernando Martín did about Puerto Rico’s serious problems.

I
MAY AS WELL
admit it: I was in love with Father from the instant I was born. When they brought me out of the delivery room and put me in his arms, I must have looked at him with adoring eyes, because he said: “Elvira looks just like a
Virgencita!
How wonderful that now I’ll always have someone to love!” From that moment on, I unwittingly became Clarissa’s rival.

I was always my father’s daughter, and I always wanted to be like him. When I was on vacation from school at the Sacred Heart I’d go with him to the office at Vernet Construction, sit next to his desk on a swivel chair, lick his stamps, serve him cold water from the cooler in Dixie cups, and put his paper clips in order, arranging them by size. I didn’t care what I did, as long as I was near him. I preferred it a hundred times to staying home with Mother or playing with girls my own age.

Clarissa always made it clear that I was born solely as a result of Father’s whim. After my brother Alvaro’s birth, Father had to plead with her to have another child. Clarissa was perfectly happy with my brother; she didn’t want another pregnancy. She had a delicate frame, and being pregnant with Alvaro was torture for her, physically as well as psychologically. “A balloon with legs! Who wants to feel like that?” she complained to Father. “A pregnant woman can’t sleep or walk. She can only roll around!” Finally she relented, perhaps because Father continued to mourn for Abuela Adela and she felt sorry for him. One year after Alvaro, I came along.

Mother was always pointing out to strangers how much I resembled the Vernets. I had inherited their clumsy way of moving and was always overturning the milk at the table, spilling gravy on my dress, or stumbling on the pavement when I walked down the street. And every time I had one of these little accidents, Mother shook her head disapprovingly and said, “Just like your father!” Alvaro, on the other hand, was perfect in her eyes. He looked a lot like Mother: he had her chiseled nose, marble forehead, and smooth ivory skin. When I came along looking just like Father, with my bowler forehead and ruddy skin, the die was cast. There was no getting away from him.

Father saw me as an extension of himself. I could do no wrong because I was what
he
would have been if he had been born a girl. Through me he could embrace more of life, experience it vicariously.

Father loved his Bechstein, and he’d play it for hours at a time. Listening to Father, I was sure that music was all about seduction. He made me fall in love with him the same way he wooed Clarissa. As I stood next to him, my eyes barely above the keyboard, I could see his hands flying like eagles above the clouds. Right then and there, an invisible thread spun out of those musical notes and wound itself around my heart.

The black keys held all the sadness in the world. They were high and narrow and delicate as coffins and made me feel balanced on the edge of the world before I fell asleep at night. The white keys, by contrast, were all happiness, flat and sunny like the flagstones in the middle of our garden, which flew under my feet when I ran to meet Father as he came in the gate for lunch.

The Bechstein grand had traveled to New York from Germany on the
Hindenburg
. The idea that our piano had floated all the way from Germany to America on a hydrogen-filled balloon and then traveled by ship to the island fascinated me as a child. I imagined being curled up in its belly as it drifted across the Atlantic, and I loved to pretend to crawl under its black folds as Father’s music engulfed me.

Father studied music because of Abuela Adela. He never became a professional musician, but he played the piano for her every day of his life. It was his secret way of keeping alive the illusion, like a tiny flame about to go out, that one day he would become a pianist and make her happy.

For Abuela Adela, music was like religion. “Listening to music,” she told Father, “is like dropping a plumb line down the well of your soul. It’s the only way to keep in touch with God.” Her dream of salvation began at a very pedestrian level: in her insistence that Father practice his scales every day on the Cornish upright piano at the house on Calle Esperanza.

When my parents got married there were very few phonographs in La Concordia, and they were of the kind you had to crank up before they scratched out music on a Bakelite disk. Our house was always full of music. Mother knew how to play the piano, too. But she played only for pleasure. She never tried to become a serious musician like Father.

Once, when I was six years old, Father stood me on the piano bench and opened the lid, which spread its huge black wing over our heads. Propping it up on a varnished pole that ended in a bronze nib, he showed me the piano’s insides. A horizontal harp lay inside the box, and it had dozens of strings ending in little green felt-covered hammers that looked like tiny birds. Each bird was connected to a different musical key. One pressed a middle C and the corresponding hammer pecked at a string that sang C for a long, long time, almost for as long as a finger wanted.

I studied the piano for eight years but I could never play as well as Father. Clarissa sat next to me every day to supervise my lessons, making sure I learned my Czerny arpeggios by heart. But if I made the same mistake twice, she would pinch my arm or pull out a tuft of my hair, so that by the end of the lesson my arms were black and blue and my braids were in tatters.

A
BUELO CHAGUITO LIVED IN
a house across the street from ours in Las Bougainvilleas and I visited him there until he was seventy-five years old. By that time he was deaf and walked with a cane, but he still had a merry glint in his eye and enjoyed sharing a good laugh.

There must have been a lot of the Abuelo Chaguito I knew and loved as a child in the spunky seventeen-year-old Santiago Vernet who arrived in La Concordia in 1896. The same subtle laughter, the same mischievous wink in the eye. Was his Cuban accent more pronounced when he arrived on the island? Fifty years later he still had it and would use words I’d never heard before, like
congrí
, instead of
arroz con habichuelas
, for black beans and rice, and
fruta bomba
instead of
lechosa
, our name for papaya. And I remember his telling me that I should never, ever say “
Qué vaina
!” because in Cuba it meant something terribly indecent, especially if said by a woman. I knew it referred to the flame tree’s seed pod, but many years later I found out it also referred to a woman’s vagina.

Chaguito loved animals. When he traveled to South America to assemble the crushing mills that were cast at Vernet Construction he brought back monkeys, sloths, and once even a baby jaguar. He raised sheep on the cheddar-colored hill where Vernet Construction dug its lime for the cement plant, and on my eighth birthday I asked him for a lamb. He immediately had one bathed, combed, and perfumed and brought it to my birthday party with a red ribbon tied around its neck. But when Serafina grew up and became a ewe, butting everybody who got in her way, Mother decided to make a stew out of her. Abuelo immediately came to our house to rescue her, and she went back to the lime quarry. “You must never eat a friend,” he said. “Serafina made you happy; we must pardon her.”

Chaguito fed Siegfried and Gudrun pieces of bread dipped in his own
café con leche
every morning, and the dogs spattered everyone at the table when they leapt up to catch them. Often he had ticks crawling up his pant legs. Unlike him, Abuelo Alvaro had always worn clothes that were freshly starched and pressed, and he was a little distant from everyone.

Abuelo Chaguito played a special role in my childhood. When Tía Celia left to study in the States and became a missionary, Chaguito was terribly distressed because Celia was the happy-go-lucky one in the family and always made him laugh. They shared an impish sense of humor that none of the other Vernets had. So when all my cousins went to boarding school in the States, Abuelo asked my parents not to send me.

We spent a lot of time together. Chaguito loved dominoes and taught me how to play. He often took me with him to his house in the mountains, which had a strawberry patch in the back, and we ate freshly picked strawberries together. He carried a picture of me standing in a field of blue agapanthus in his wallet; he didn’t carry photographs of any of his other grandchildren. He told me that when I was born he insisted I be named Elvira. That had been his mother’s name, and he felt bad because she had died in Cuba without his ever having seen her again. But after I grew up, I hardly ever went to visit Chaguito. It must have broken his heart, but he never complained. He was my first abandoned lover.

There was a reason, as there always is. In 1951, when I was in the eighth grade at the Sacred Heart, my life had become full of the normal activities of girls my age: going to parties and picnics, visiting girlfriends, talking about boyfriends, but also attending ballet classes. One day Chaguito went to see me dance at the Athena Theater and realized I was serious about ballet. He knew me better than my parents and he was terribly upset. “She’s stubborn; she wants to be a dancer and she’ll find a way to do it. You have to do something to stop her.” My parents immediately took me out of ballet school.