House on the Lagoon (11 page)

Don Esteban was a widower. He had decided to retire to the island for reasons of health, after making a fortune selling Italian shoes in Boston. He also owned a steamship company—the Taurus Line—which did a lot of business between San Juan, Boston, and New York, and he could easily go on supervising it from the island. Don Esteban had arrived in San Juan only a month before and had purchased a country house in the blue hills of Guaynabo, because he liked the cool temperatures there. The house had a sloping tile roof, wooden rafters, and a brick chimney—built to please the fancy of the previous owner, a rich islander who dreamed of owning a home in the snow-covered hills of Maine.

Don Esteban took his daughter to La Traviata so they could buy linens for their house.

“How may I help you, sir? We have some beautiful new merchandise just arrived from Europe,” Arístides said, smiling, as Don Esteban strolled in, silver cane in hand. He spoke perfect English, and Don Esteban was taken by surprise. At the time, almost no one in the city could speak English.

“What part of the States are you from, young man?” he asked pleasantly. Arístides’s blond hair and easygoing manner misled Don Esteban into thinking he was an American. “I was born right here, sir,” he said, politely pulling out a chair for Madeleine. “My parents immigrated from the Basque provinces just before my birth.”

Quintín used to talk to me about Don Arístides often, because he was very fond of him. In fact, there has always been a photograph of him in a silver frame on our library table. He never met his grandfather on the Mendizabal side of the family; Buenaventura talked to him about his ancestors from Extremadura, but they were always heroes, not flesh-and-blood people. Don Esteban, on the other hand, was a lovable old man, with pink cheeks and snow-white whiskers on either side of his face.

Arístides was tall and robust; Quintín said he looked like a peasant from the Pyrenees. Don Esteban immediately took a liking to him. He identified with people who came from humble backgrounds and had learned to make a go of it in a difficult situation.

“Il piacere e mio,”
Don Esteban said in Italian, and asked Arístides where he had learned to speak English so well. “The American nuns from the School of the Annunciation were my teachers, sir,” he replied. “They taught us it would be our duty to speak English when we knocked on the doors of heaven, asking to be let in.” Don Esteban and Madeleine burst out laughing. They knew he was poking fun at a comment the governor had made recently in the local press. The governor had decreed that English be mandatory in all the island’s schools, and four thousand copies of Appleton’s
First Reader in English
had been handed out to schoolchildren. Both Don Esteban and Madeleine thought it was preposterous to make children take all their classes in a language they couldn’t speak. “Of course, this means we’ll be an educated people when we get to heaven, even if we don’t understand what God says,” Arístides added with a wink at Madeleine.

Arístides knew he had made a good impression and decided to take advantage of it. He brought out a roll of ivory Alençon lace to tempt his customer into buying it; it would make a beautiful gown. “I need a roll of plain white percale to have a dozen sheets made for our new house,” Madeleine said in a no-nonsense voice, vigorously shaking her head. “We never attend formal parties.” Arístides brought out a roll of fine Belgian linen and showed it to her. “You should have sheets made of this,” he said. “It’s impossible to sleep on anything else on this island. At night it gets so hot that cotton sticks to you like sour gum. That is, unless one sleeps in the nude. Then it doesn’t matter what kind of sheets one sleeps on.”

Madeleine stared at him unabashed. She was a forthright young woman with few inhibitions, in spite of having been brought up by the nuns. “I wouldn’t mind sleeping in the nude,” she replied in a lilting voice, “but only on sheets that have my initials on them.” And she asked Arístides if he knew someone on the island who could embroider them for her. “At the convent next to the Church of Our Lady of Miracles, of course,” he answered courteously. “I can take you there myself tomorrow if you like. The nuns are friends of mine.”

A year after her visit to La Traviata, Madeleine walked down the aisle of the Church of Our Lady of Miracles carrying a beautiful bouquet of white orchids, and returned on her husband’s arm. Don Esteban gave them his blessing. He was going to need a young man like Arístides to help him manage the offices of the Taurus Line, he said, and Arístides was very sociable and knew a lot of people in San Juan.

Arístides’s father was born in Bilbao, and worked as the head chef at the Spanish Casino—where his granddaughter was to be crowned Queen of the Spanish Antilles seventeen years later. Arístides’s mother died when he was a child, and his father sent him to the orphanage in Puerta de Tierra, which was run by American nuns. Before the Marines landed in Guánica in 1898, there were practically no schools for children on the island; the orphanage at Puerta de Tierra was an exception. By the time Don Esteban had settled in Guaynabo, however, there were six hundred public schools, all of them built by the American government.

The school Arístides attended as a child was run by an order of missionary nuns who did valuable work in San Juan. It was because of the nuns of the Annunciation that Arístides admired the United States so much. They were very good teachers and were careful to instill in their students a true civic spirit. The history of the United States was taught thoroughly at their school, yet Puerto Rican history was never mentioned. In the nuns’ view, the island
had
no history. In this they were not exceptional; it was forbidden to teach Puerto Rican history at the time, either at private or at public schools. Can history be so dangerous as to be revolutionary? I’ve often asked Quintín that question, but he never answers me.

The nuns of the Annunciation taught Arístides that the island had begun to exist politically when the American troops landed at Guánica. President Wilson had said so himself in a speech in 1913. “The countries the United States have taken in trust, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, must first accept the discipline of law. They are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice.” It was for this reason that Arrigoitia had so loyally embraced the ideals of Republicanism and American democracy.

As Arístides grew up, the world seemed to endorse the lessons he had learned from the nuns. His employer at La Traviata exploited him, something the American government would never have done. Arístides tried to get a job at the post office before he took the one at La Traviata. Postal officials were highly regarded; they got paid the federal minimum wage, which very few people earned on the island; obtained health insurance and were given a paid two-week vacation each year. But he had no luck. He never forgot the painful lessons he had learned at La Traviata. “The day we become an independent nation,” he would tell Quintín years later, “the local bourgeoisie will throw the more recent immigrants off the island and take away our rights and properties. We owe everything we have to the American Constitution, and for this reason you should cherish and defend it.”

After Madeleine and Arístides were married, they stayed on in the Guaynabo country house with Don Esteban. Arístides was a capable man. After his marriage he went to work in his father-in-law’s steamship company, but he also joined the local police force as a part-time volunteer officer. He had a mystical approach to politics and saw Puerto Rico’s becoming a part of the United States as almost a religious crusade. Arístides found his father-in-law very congenial. Don Esteban was getting on in years and somebody had to take care of him, so there was no sense in their moving away. Madeleine kept house like no other woman Arístides had ever met. She brought two
jibaritas
from the mountains of Cayey to help her keep the country house spick-and-span, and taught them to mop the floors with Clorox, disinfect the toilet bowl, and scrub the bathtub. In the kitchen, her pots and pans were so bright they shone like silver, hanging on the wall. Quintín says he never saw anything like it. The contrast between Madeleine’s and Petra’s kitchens always impressed him as a child. In Madeleine’s kitchen there was an electric stove and one could eat off the floor with a spoon, the tiles were so clean. But food had no taste at all: it was always honey-glazed baked chicken, Idaho potatoes with a dab of Brookfield butter, and “squeezed cloud juice”—Madeleine’s euphemism for plain tap water—in one’s glass. In Petra’s kitchen, on the other hand, there was a coal stove with burning cow dung, and cockroaches often dove merrily into the stew, but everything tasted like a
pio nono,
like a bishop’s fancy blessed with a fresh sprig of basil.

At first Madeleine was afraid to have children. She dreamed of returning to Massachusetts someday, where she had had a happy childhood. A baby would be a powerful reason to remain on the island, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to establish herself permanently where she felt a little bit like a stranger. Don Esteban still owned a beautiful turreted brownstone near Boston Harbor, in the Italian quarter of the city, and he decided not to sell it in case Madeleine might someday want to go back.

Madeleine enjoyed sports. She played tennis every afternoon on the military base nearest to Guaynabo. Island women never played any sports at all, so she played with the young recruits at the base, which gave tongues something to wag about. She was an admirer of Helen Wills Moody, the first American woman tennis player to become nationally famous. Madeleine was tall and willowy, wore her skirts much shorter than women on the island, and was always in a hurry to get where she was going. She loved taking long walks by herself or driving out to the mountains in her father’s Reo, looking for wild orchids, which she would bring back with her to town.

Orchids were her hobby and she bred cattleyas, laelias, and phalaenopsis in a nursery Arístides had built for her behind their country house. Madeleine grafted them herself and created extraordinary specimens; some looked like pink-legged spiders, others like golden scorpions or blood-speckled butterflies. She liked the sense of privacy the nursery gave her; it was so quiet under the protective green canopy it felt almost like being in the mountains: one was at peace and in total control of one’s self. Arístides enjoyed orchids, too, but for other reasons. He found them erotic and liked to collect them because they made him feel as if he were surrounded by beautiful women. A few years after they were married, he bought a farm high up in the hills of Barranquitas, where he bred orchids by the dozens.

Madeleine never learned to speak Spanish. She spoke English at home with her father and with her husband, and sign language with everyone else. Even thirty-seven years later, when she finally returned to Boston, she still couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, though she understood most of it. When Arístides’s friends invited them to their house, she suffered. For the first ten minutes, everybody in the room tried to be polite and spoke mincingly in English so as not to exclude Madeleine from the conversation. Slowly but surely, however, a bit of juicy gossip would slip out, or a risqué joke or expression which could only be rendered in Spanish:
“Estaba más jalao que un timbre e guagua”
(He was as drunk as a skunk); or
“Eramos demasiados y parió la abuela”
(There were already too many of us, and then Grandma got pregnant). Then everyone would jump in, speaking Spanish like mad. They would slap each other on the back, laugh and curse and jabber away like magpies, as if they wouldn’t be able to talk again for the next fifty years. No one listened to what his neighbor was saying; people spoke for the pleasure of hearing themselves speak.

Madeleine cringed and began to inch toward the wall. She felt like a soldier caught in the cross fire, bullets whistling this way and that over her head, while she was unable to fire a single salvo. It was as if Spanish were the only way to assert one’s presence in the room: if you didn’t speak it, you simply didn’t exist, you were completely invisible. One’s tongue was almost a magic peduncle with which one reached out to touch one’s neighbor. One groped around with it to examine a face, tweak a nose, or poke into someone’s eyes and ears. Madeleine, accustomed to her peaceful life surrounded by orchids, shuddered when people were milling around her or anyone tried to touch her. Soon she was next to Arístides, pulling him by the elbow and then nudging him toward the door. Only when they were outside did she feel safe again, in control of her own mind and body.

The result of these unhappy episodes was that Arístides’s friends slowly withdrew. They didn’t want to seem impolite to Madeleine, but they couldn’t help it. The uncomfortable situation only repeated itself again and again. So they stopped inviting them to their homes, and loneliness closed in around the young couple like an iron hoop.

Quintín’s mother, Rebecca, was born two years after Arístides and Madeleine’s wedding, and this helped the marriage considerably. Arístides had wanted to have children right away, but Madeleine forced him to observe the rhythm with steely determination. The rhythm, in the opinion of the nuns of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, was God’s law. One wasn’t supposed to use anything that thwarted Him—like prophylactics, creams, or vinegar sponges—which were all
contra natura,
preventing life from engendering. If one wanted not to have children, one made love only on those days when the egg had already been discharged from the uterus, flowing down the tide of life. The trouble was, one never knew for sure when this happened, and making love became as dangerous as ducking bullets. The only safe time was during the six days following menstruation, but this wasn’t always easy to observe. Once Madeleine and Arístides were spending a long vacation on the Barranquitas farm, where there was very little to do. On the seventh day they made love, and Madeleine became pregnant.

When the nuns at Auxilio Mutuo Hospital asked Arístides to come to the nursery so he could meet his daughter, he was amazed at what he saw. Thanks to her long walks, Madeleine had an easy delivery and the baby’s face was neither red nor swollen. She had Madeleine’s peach complexion and upturned nose, with a delicate golden fuzz on her head. Wrapped in her pink embroidered blanket, she looked like a little rosebud with petals still curled tight. “You never would have guessed she’s the granddaughter of a Basque highlander,” he said to the nun who held her in her arms. And kissing her on the forehead, he added, “Now I can sleep soundly, because I know I’ll have someone to take care of me in my old age.”