Eccentric Neighborhood (43 page)

contemplando

cómo se pasa la vida

cómo se viene la muerte

tan callado.

—
JORGE MANRIQUE
,

“
Coplas a la muerte de su padre
”

T
HAT NOVEMBER AURELIO RAN
for governor against Fernando Martín a second time and was defeated once more. Martín’s popularity was overwhelming: he had dominated island politics for twenty-four years. Mother gave a sigh of relief. She didn’t mind Father’s obsession with politics as long as his chances of winning were nonexistent. I suspect Father himself was relieved. Running against Martín had become something of a futile effort, like trying to bring down an elephant with an air rifle. Nobody expected Father to win, but in the meantime they admired him for his heroic attempt.

Over Christmas vacation I met Ricardo Cáceres, a young man from a good family in San Juan. Ricardo was studying business administration at Cornell University, and he would soon be graduating. He planned to work with his father in the family’s insurance company. Father and Mother couldn’t find anything wrong with him.

Ricardo was serious and determined. He wasn’t a playboy or a candidate for some fledgling political post, like so many of the young men I had met during the past few summers in La Concordia and San Juan. Ricardo and I went out a few times during our short stay on the island, and after we returned to our respective colleges in the States, he came to Saint Helen’s to visit me several times. At the end of the semester he proposed to me. It was spring, just before graduation, and we were taking a stroll around the campus. The flower beds were full of tulips, but they hadn’t bloomed yet. A few days later all of them would open, and the campus would look as if hundreds of elves were clapping.

Ricardo had just given me his Cornell ring, and I put it on my finger.

“Will you marry me after we graduate?” he asked.

“Will we live in San Juan?”

“Of course. That’s where Father’s business is.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, without looking at him.

Holding hands, we walked silently to a far corner of the campus, where a complicated hedge of boxwood was pruned to perfection. I took a deep breath. I wondered why I loved the smell of boxwood; I suppose it made me feel at home—trapped in a beautiful labyrinth. We kissed passionately behind some bushes. My life had no direction, but with Ricardo maybe I’d melt right off the surface of the earth.

Ricardo was very traditional: he wanted a wife with whom he could enjoy sex, a woman who would bear his children and take care of his house. He definitely was not the intellectual type. I agreed about the sex, but I wasn’t sure about the rest. I kept my thoughts to myself, however, and pretended to be exactly what Ricardo had in mind.

During that last Christmas vacation in Las Bougainvilleas I had told my parents: “When I graduate from Saint Helen’s College in June, I want to go on studying and get a doctorate in English literature. I’ve applied to Harvard and I think I have a good chance of being accepted.” It was late Sunday morning and we were sitting out on the terrace. We had just come back from Mass and were waiting for Tío Damián and Tía Agripina, who were joining us for lunch. The scarlet bougainvilleas were in full bloom and the wall around the garden was covered with an exuberant mantle. Father was feeding his nightingale some grapes and was standing next to the large aluminum cage with his back to me. He said nothing.

I thought it was about time a Vernet–Rivas de Santillana girl had her own career. Abuela Valeria had grown up illiterate because of Bartolomeo Boffil’s selfishness, and for that reason she had insisted on her daughters’ having a university education—an extraordinary thing at the time. But it seemed that their education was an end in itself; marriage was the only possible career for women. Even Clarissa, who had been such an enthusiast in her defense of women’s education when she was at the University of Puerto Rico, had given up in the end. And in Father’s family it was even worse. Tía Amparo had gone only as far as high school and Tía Celia had become a nun to pursue a career as social worker disguised as missionary.

More than twenty years had passed since Tía Celia’s rebellion, but things hadn’t changed at all. The idea of a single girl from a good family finding a job and living by herself in a place like New York or Boston and earning her own salary (without becoming a nun) was out of the question. My doctorate was the only way to postpone my return to La Concordia and escape my family’s influence.

“What on earth do you want to go on studying for?” Mother answered with a little laugh as she took a sip of her vermouth. “You don’t have to work, you don’t need the money! Don’t tell me you prefer New York’s grim weather to our sunny Decembers! Maybe if you wanted to study something practical like accounting, nursing, or even agronomy…But literature is different: you can read all the books you want in your father’s library. You’ve been away from home for eight years now, dear. It’s time you spent some time with us.”

She said it with affection; I realized Mother had missed me, and for a moment I was almost convinced that she wanted me by her side. But our disagreements had been going on for too long, and I was unable to feel sorry for her. I remembered a story I had read long ago called “The River’s Orphan.” In it a little girl’s mother drowns herself in a river. Every day the girl goes to the riverbank and stares into the water, hoping her mother will come back. The little girl sees only herself, but as time goes by she resembles her mother more and more. Finally she is sure her mother has returned because the image in the water looks just like her, and she reaches out her hand to help her mother back to shore. But the little girl loses her footing and falls into the river and drowns. I was terrified the same thing might happen to me. Mother needed help, but so did I.

When I saw there was no alternative but to come back home and live with my family, I accepted Ricardo Cáceres’s proposal of marriage. At least I would be warden of my prison and live in my own house. The wedding took place in August at the cathedral in La Concordia. We had a reception at the house on Avenida Cañafístula, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. I didn’t love Ricardo. He had no imagination or artistic sensibility. But he was my door to freedom from Mother’s hell.

A few weeks after we were married, Mother sent me four myrtle bushes she had planted herself in empty yellow-and-brown Café Yaucono cans. “Myrtle summons the spirits; when it blooms, ghosts like to gather around it, especially when the rain lets up at night. I brought some of these myrtle bushes with me from Emajaguas when I married your father, and I thought you’d like to plant them at your new home,” she had scribbled on the back of a used envelope. “Plant them near your open window or on your balcony. That way you’ll be able to smell them at night, and they’ll give your house a cozy, lived-in feeling.” I did as Mother suggested.

Clarissa liked Ricardo. They were both born under the sign of Capricorn, and they got along famously from the start. Ricardo had a strong character and Mother respected that; she felt I needed someone who would keep me in check. The only thing she didn’t like about Ricardo was his teeth, which were crooked and much too large for the narrow arch of his mouth. Rather than hurt Ricardo’s feelings by telling him he should do something about them, she wrote him an anonymous note in her beautiful Palmer script, suggesting that he see an orthodontist. Ricardo didn’t say anything to me about the note, but he saw a dentist a few weeks later. A month after he got the note, we went to La Concordia to spend the weekend. When we arrived, Ricardo kissed Mother on the cheek and then smiled widely, a shiny stainless-steel smile. Mother burst out laughing. She knew
he
knew who had written the note.

Mother enjoyed making fun of the American First Ladies with Ricardo. Behind Father’s back they compiled an album with photographs from the newspapers. Mother liked Mamie Eisenhower because she was thrifty and never hogged the limelight the way Jackie Kennedy did. She liked Mamie’s little straw hats with their white point d’esprit veils floating above her head, and whenever Mother traveled to the States she wore hats just like them. Lady Bird Johnson she disliked the most; she insisted she had no table manners. Whenever Lady Bird was photographed eating, she’d be caught with her mouth wide open, sometimes even sticking a fork into her mouth with a piece of steak at the end, which Mother found disgusting. Once she cut out a photograph of Lady Bird and taped it to the wall next to her bed, it made her laugh so much.

A year after Ricardo and I were married, I went on a cooking strike. “I’m tired of cooking Spanish food. It’s too complicated and it takes too much time. From now on,” I said to Ricardo one evening, “we’re going to eat more Italian and American food: things like spaghetti or broiled steak and mashed potatoes.” I would be in graduate school soon at the University of Puerto Rico, and that’s all I’d have time for. I’d already signed up for three courses. Ricardo didn’t answer but simply went on eating his
bacalao al pil pil
—codfish fried in parsley, one of the delicious recipes his mother had given me—and dipping his bread in the garlicky oil.

The following evening I boiled some spaghetti and made a plain marinara sauce for it, practicing for my upcoming university days. Suddenly, Ricardo took his plate of spaghetti and threw it against the kitchen wall. “I don’t like my spaghetti al dente,” he yelled as I sat openmouthed, watching the vermicelli in red sauce trickle down the yellow wallpaper like a Jackson Pollock painting. “And I don’t want my wife chumming around with male students half her age. You should have asked me before you signed up for those courses.”

I still didn’t know my way around Ricardo, or if there
was
a way around him. I lowered my head and didn’t answer.

I soon realized that Ricardo was a violent, intractable man. If I contradicted him, he yelled and threatened to hit me. But I really grew afraid of him when he began to collect hunting rifles and spend all his free time oiling and cleaning them on the front porch of our house. He had picked up hunting as a hobby and often traveled to Santo Domingo with his friends on birding expeditions.

We remained married for nine years. I did a lot of serious thinking during that time. I realized the folly of deluding myself into believing I could acquire a career by osmosis. We weren’t living in England, where the nobility inherited their power by divine right. In Puerto Rico the most I could aspire to be as Father’s daughter was carnival queen. Worst of all, I began to feel I had been used. I was thirty-one years old, my self-respect was in shreds, and I had nothing to be proud of. And I was married to a man I hated and feared.

I wanted to get a divorce but I had no money of my own and was too proud to ask my parents. I also feared having to live under the same roof as Mother. First I had belonged to Father and now I was Ricardo’s. That’s why women understood the politics of colonialism so well: if you treat them well, feed them, clothe them, and buy them a nice house, they won’t rebel. Except that hatred keeps smoldering inside them.

I chose Ricardo’s physical threats over Mother’s psychological battering and decided not to get a divorce. I stayed home, took care of my children, and gave them as much affection as I could. I also read voraciously. I never gave up hope of going back to the university to get a doctorate in literature. But I lived in constant fear that my sons would grow up to be as belligerent as their father. There was simply no way out of the situation. I struggled to keep all the balls in the air while trying to appease Ricardo. In the eyes of San Juan society, I was the perfect wife.

In the meantime, in 1966, something unexpected had happened. Fernando Martín, feeling very sure of himself, announced that a plebiscite would be held so that Puerto Rico could approve commonwealth as its definitive status. Tío Venancio decided the Partido Republicano Incondicional wouldn’t participate. The party’s constituency had been decreasing steadily, and he was afraid it might be completely wiped out. Father was incensed. Venancio was more concerned about the party and his own position as president than about statehood—
el ideal
. For the first time in his life he fought openly with Tío Venancio. Statehood
had
to be an option at the polls.

He broke with Tío Venancio’s Partido Republicano Incondicional and founded his own political party, the Partido Estadista Reformista, which pledged to defend statehood in the plebiscite. In a single year he put together a successful campaign, paying for much of it out of his own pocket.

The plebiscite was a momentous event. The outcome showed the island to be equally divided between those for statehood and those in favor of commonwealth status. All those years the island had been voting for Fernando Martín and against Tío Venancio, not against statehood, as his opponents insisted. Aurelio ran for governor again the following year, but this time it was different. Fernando Martín had retired. The polls indicated that the Partido Estadista Reformista had a good chance of winning. Free of Tío Venancio and of the
colmillús
shadow, Father was running on his own.

Aurelio was having the time of his life. More and more, he enjoyed mixing with the crowds, listening to their grievances and taking note of their needs and wants. He chose the
almácigo
tree as a symbol of his party, a happy choice. In pre-Columbian times the
almácigo
represented the home: the Taíno Indians used its bark to cure all kinds of ills and sometimes thatched their huts with it. He was convinced that life couldn’t hold defeat or failure.

As soon as speculation about a possible victory for Father began to spread, Mother became ill. She complained of a sharp pain in her chest that made breathing difficult. A thorough medical examination revealed that her childhood
soplo
, the little murmur in the aorta, had gotten worse. At the same time she had developed calcification of the arteries, and this made her situation very dangerous. Her brain was slowly being deprived of oxygen, and she could have a hemorrhage at any moment. The heart specialist ordered her to remain in bed, inside an oxygen tent.