House on the Lagoon (15 page)

That Thanksgiving Day in 1936, as Quintín remembered it, did not have a peaceful ending. After Don Esteban’s speech on the blessings of American citizenship, Buenaventura kept a hostile silence. Just before he left the house, however, he decided to get even. “I heard that the Taurus Line had a very good year, Don Esteban,” he said as he was going out the door. “I want to congratulate you. Profits are much higher here than in Boston, thanks to our new coastal trade laws, which force the island to ship everything through the mainland. Before, we could ship directly to Spain, and Mendizabal & Company was doing good business. Now things have changed and it’s
your
turn. American, Spanish, who knows! At this rate, we’re never going to make up our minds what we’d like to be!”

Arístides was furious. He was sure Buenaventura had meant to insult Don Esteban and the United States. He took hold of him by the lapels of his jacket and pushed him unceremoniously out the door.

A
RÍSTIDES ARRIGOITIA LIKED TO
take part in the military maneuvers the police held in San Juan, and, being an officer, he always marched at the head. When he became bored with his office job at Taurus, he joined the police force full-time. He didn’t get paid much, but he didn’t need the money. His wife was rich enough for both of them, and he wanted instead to serve the community. The only thing that saddened him was that he was fifty-eight and had little chance of becoming police chief because of his age. It was during one of those marches, in January of 1937, that Governor Blanton Winship first saw him.

Winship was impressed by Arrigoitia’s physical appearance. He was tall and muscular; his back was broad as an oarsman’s, and when he wore his white gala uniform, silver saber at his side, he looked like an admiral who has just stepped off his ship. Governor Winship also liked to dress in white. He wore a white linen suit, carried a gold pocket watch in the vest under his jacket, and sported a panama hat on his head. He was always smiling; he looked like a benign Southern grandfather.

Most American governors before him had led carefree lives at the Governor’s Palace—better known as La Fortaleza of Santa Catalina. It was true, language isolated them; very few people spoke English on the island, in spite of the ordinance that everything should be taught in English at school. Besides, governors usually had a difficult time understanding the Byzantine convolutions of the local political scene. In 1936 there were four parties in
Porto Rico,
as the American governors had officially rebaptized the island: the Union Party, which stood for autonomy; the Statehood Republican Party; the Socialist Party, temporarily affiliated with the Republican Party because the labor movement was fiercely pro-statehood; and the Nationalist Party, which fought for independence. The first three parties had representatives in the local Chamber, but as they were usually embroiled in bloody combat for federal funds, the governor and his executive cabinet tended to look on them as a troublesome lot.

The governor was appointed by the President and had absolute powers. He, in turn, appointed the executive cabinet and the senators. The members of the House of Representatives were elected locally, but they could only advise the governor and had no clout. A civil servant, the governor was usually named to the post to repay a political favor at the level of national politics, making his involvement with events on the island frequently halfhearted. It was the executive cabinet that really ruled. The governor rarely went out of the mansion and preferred to exercise his authority from there, keeping his distance from the local population.

The last appointee before Governor Winship who had tried to be a de facto governor and got involved in risky island affairs was Emmet Montgomery Riley. Riley was born in Kansas City. He came from a humble background—his father had been a farmer and he was a real-estate agent before going into politics. He was a Mennonite and an authentic reformist, in favor of the Temperance Law, banning cockfights, and jailing all prostitutes. He found out most marriages on the island were common-law marriages, because the Catholic Church charged an absurdly high sum to perform the ceremony, so he ordered an army of Mennonite ministers to visit the hills. Everyone wanted to get married for free by the plainly dressed men from Kansas with black homburgs on their head, and didn’t mind if they were also baptized, because they got free Bibles. They could attend services in the modest white-steepled churches that were cropping up all over the hills. This unnerved the members of the local bourgeoisie, who were all Catholic. They began to undermine Riley’s reputation, spreading rumors that he was a bigot and a religious fanatic. They renamed him the “Marriage Monkey” and the “Mule from Kansas City.”

Riley was equally disgusted with the local bourgeoisie. He thought it was a disgrace to live in opulent mansions, be served by an army of servants, and travel to Europe every year, when ninety percent of the island was illiterate and lived at a level of poverty that would have horrified people in Kansas. In the Sunflower State, where cattle, wheat, and sorghum were the main sources of income, land was distributed a lot more fairly. There were no throngs of peasants in rags who worked in the fields for a few cents a day.

Every time he drove out of the city to the countryside, Riley was shocked by what he saw. The peasants lived in thatched-roof huts and languished without work during the “dead time,” the months between harvests when the sugarcane fields lay fallow. So Riley tried to make the local sugar planters pay their workers better salaries. He also set out to force the huge American sugar mills like the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company to do the same. But the businessmen banned together and defeated his efforts in Washington. Riley became despondent; he stopped driving out to the hills to see how he could help the starving peasants and rarely left the Governor’s Palace, just as his predecessors had done. Francisco Oller, the famous Puerto Rican painter, did a portrait of him around that time—now unfortunately lost—in which Riley is standing on the ramparts of La Fortaleza in a plain black suit, his fair hair blowing in the wind, and a sad look in his eyes. A few months later President Harding ordered Riley to leave the island.

Governor Winship was very different from Governor Riley. He had been a planter himself in Virginia and got along splendidly with the local
hacendados.
He enjoyed cockfights,
paso fino
horses, roast pork, and green bananas pickled in onion and garlic. In spite of being a Protestant, he was frequently asked to be godfather to the children of the local gentry and often suggested picturesque names for them, half English half Spanish, such as Benjamin Franklin Pérez Cometa or George Washington Cerezo Nieves. He had faith in tourism and, to promote it, commissioned a photographer to do an album of the island’s natural wonders, paying for it with his own money. When the album finally came out, it was an instant success—especially on the mainland. The photographer obeyed Winship’s orders and captured the island in all its splendor: there were angel-hair waterfalls, cotton-candy clouds, sugar-white beaches, cows pasturing up and down velvet-green hills—and not a single starving peasant to mar the beauty of the landscape. Everyone who saw it thought the United States had done well in acquiring a Caribbean island that looked like Switzerland but where everybody spoke Spanish and ate rice and beans.

The year 1937 was a fateful one for the island. When the Nationalist terrorists intensified their attacks, trying to intimidate the United States into making Puerto Rico independent, Winship was approached by the local sugar-mill owners and other well-to-do citizens, and was asked to put a stop to the bloodbath. Arrigoitia was among the citizens who visited Winship at the Governor’s Palace, and he later told Quintín about it. Bombs were going off all over the city, and at night one could hear machine-gun bursts, fired from black Oldsmobiles with “Nationalist hoodlums” at the wheel, as the official news report put it. Statehooders, Autonomists, and those who believed in independence had been playing at make-believe politics for years when Pedro Albizu Campos appeared in their midst, dressed in black and spewing fire and brimstone, like the Devil himself.

Governor Winship never did things by halves, and when he realized what was happening, he put Nationalists and independence sympathizers all in the same boat. The Nationalist Party was outlawed. People who wanted the island to acquire independence by peaceful, democratic means were also placed on the subversive list and hunted down mercilessly.

The governor invited his longtime friend, Elisha Francis Riggs, to visit him at the Governor’s Palace. “Up to now,” he told him, “patrol officers here only know how to direct traffic; they’re not prepared to fight a gang war. The local police force has to undergo a total reorganization. I want it to become part of our armed forces—and I need someone who has my utmost confidence to put this into effect. I believe you’re the right person for the job.”

Riggs was a war hero; he’d been decorated during the First World War and was chief of operations for the Russian field mission in Petrograd. He accepted the post and was most effective: he armed the police force with the latest artillery weapons and trained them at Fort Buchanan, a new military camp. He was so successful at turning them into professional soldiers that a year after his arrival he was gunned down by the Nationalists on Sunday as he was coming out of church.

Winship was incensed, but he kept his anger under control. A few months later he summoned Arístides Arrigoitia to the Palace. They were sitting out on the terrace at La Fortaleza, accompanied only by an aide and two of Winship’s bodyguards. “The Nationalists who murdered Colonel Riggs are still on the loose,” Winship said icily. “I’ll make you chief of police if you promise to catch them.” Arrigoitia looked at him in surprise. There had never been a Puerto Rican chief of police before. But he took the offer to be a proof of confidence and he was flattered; the governor evidently considered him a friend.

“Puerto Ricans are loyal American citizens, and we’re just as upset about Riggs’s assassination as you are,” he said to Winship energetically, getting up from his chair to give his words more emphasis. “What happened was your fault; we wouldn’t have any of these problems if we were a state. Congress is taking too long to decide our status.” Winship’s bodyguards, alarmed by Arrigoitia’s excitable stance, slid their hands under their jackets, but Winship signaled them to ease up. Arrigoitia excused himself and sat back down sheepishly. A servant offered him a mint julep; he took it from the tray with a trembling hand.

The sun was just setting on the bay and a white passenger ship sailed silently before them, about to pass through El Morro’s channel. Winship looked out toward the blue hills of Cataño, surrounded by lush cane fields. “I’m a lover of the land, Arrigoitia; and your island is very fertile. I admired it from afar, when I lived on my tobacco plantation in Georgia, and I still do. I feel I did the right thing in accepting President Roosevelt’s appointment as governor. We can teach your people to take care of the land: how to make it more productive with modern methods. But you’re a different country from us. It’ll be much better for you if you stay as you are, enjoying the protection of the American flag but keeping your own personality. To do that, we must fight terrorism together. That’s why I’m offering you the appointment of chief of police.”

Arrigoitia felt discouraged, but he didn’t want Winship to see that. He said he’d think about the offer and politely took his leave.

When Arrigoitia left, Governor Winship commented to his aide: “These people understand each other better than we understand them. I have a feeling that appointing an honest Puerto Rican to be chief of police is going to be the solution to our problems with the Nationalists.”

Don Esteban Rosich heard about Governor Winship’s offer, and he told Arístides: “Don’t accept. You’ll be pitting brother against brother. You’ll never be able to live it down.” But the governor’s offer was too big a temptation for the ex-salesman from La Traviata. He thought it the perfect chance to prove to Winship that he could trust Puerto Ricans, that they were loyal American citizens, so he took the job.

During the next few months Arrigoitia had to hunt down a specific number of Nationalists a day, put them in prison, and let Governor Winship have a count. These expeditions made him unpopular, but Quintín’s family refused to believe the ugly rumors that were circulating. On Easter Sunday, the Nationalist Liberation Army announced that it was going to hold a march in Ponce and that they would be unarmed. Pedro Albizu Campos was in jail, and the march was supposed to be a peaceful protest against his sentencing. The Nationalist Party was officially banned, but Ponce’s mayor was a liberal, and he told the Nationalists they could hold their march if they were respectful of the law. He issued them a permit. Governor Winship was immediately suspicious and ordered an investigation. His spies furnished him with contrary facts: the long-awaited Nationalist revolution to bring down the colonial government was to begin that day.

When Easter Sunday arrived, Chief of Police Arrigoitia was ordered to stop the demonstration, and he traveled from San Juan to Ponce to carry out the command. The Nationalists purposely sent their youngest cadets to march, as well as nurses and old men. Arrigoitia telephoned Governor Winship, who was dug in with a group of officers near the hill town of Villalba to wait for the coup, and told him the evidence furnished by his agents was all wrong. There were no bazookas, rifles, or machine guns in sight in Ponce, he said. But the governor didn’t believe him. He insisted the Nationalist terrorists had sent their women and children to the fake parade as a cover. Armed men were probably hiding on the rooftops or in the branches of Ponce’s many trees. There might even be terrorists hiding under the manholes in the streets of the town.

Early that morning the cadets started to arrive from all parts of the island. They stood four abreast, in military formation, down the middle of Marina Street. The men wore black cotton shirts and white pants and the nurses wore white uniforms with a red cross on their caps. Some of the cadets carried wooden rifles on their shoulders—they trained with them in their makeshift military camp—and others carried fake swords hanging from their waists. Chief Arrigoitia deployed his police troops, and the two armies faced each other across twenty feet of pavement for over an hour. Ponce’s mayor realized a bloodbath was imminent and announced on the loudspeaker that he was canceling the permit to hold the march, but the cadets pretended not to hear.