Flight of the Swan

by Rosario Ferré

  The other two performances of our Ballets Russes scheduled at Teatro Oliver had to be canceled. Doña Basilisa cried her heart out, and Ronda did her best to console her. She didn’t mention that Bienvenido was missing, and her parents weren’t even aware of it. Bienvenido was like the sea, here one day and in San Juan the next. And she wanted to be free to act as she saw fit the following weeks. We waited at the house for three days, but since we had no news of Madame, Don Pedro offered to pay for our train tickets, and we returned to San Juan.

  Ours was a sad little caravan as we boarded the second-class car. Molinari brought up the rear, swooping behind us like a vulture and picking up costumes and slippers, whatever was left behind. None of the girls wanted to be near him; they kept skipping ahead, so I had no alternative but to sit next to him. He stank of camphor and stale clothes, and he looked at me menacingly, but I wasn’t afraid of him. I only had to think of the muzhiks at home, or of Rasputin, the czarina’s lover—who was a neighbor of my father’s in Minsk—to feel that, by comparison, I was safe by his side. I was a muzhik myself. I could make pacts with the devil also.

  Molinari accompanied us all the way to San Juan and then he too disappeared.

  33

  WHEN I THINK BACK to those days, I still marvel at the intensity of Madame’s feelings, at the total surrender of which she was capable. Only a woman approaching the barren steppes of middle age does insane things like that: give everything up for a young rascal she has just met. After struggling all her life to transform herself, from the daughter of a washerwoman on Kolomenskaya Street into the Maryinsky’s prima ballerina, how could she throw away her life that way? Maybe she was tired of her fame, bored with The Dying Swan’s, agonizing over a world that had been mercifully wiped out. But if you ask me, it was desire that was mostly to blame for her fall. As Sappho, the great poet, said, desire is catching; it makes our legs give way and loosens our limbs, just as the mortal blow of a spear doubles up a seasoned man in battle. Pity the blow, which I had received from Madame but could never return in kind, so that I was condemned to see her harnessed to Diamantino Márquez like a swan to a ballroom tiger.

  After swearing she’d live free of lust, a vestal virgin devoted to the spiritual glories of ballet, Madame had fallen for a two-bit hacendado with heroic ambitions. Everything she had promised about the body being the harp of the spirit, the medium through which we achieved oneness with nature, was nonsense. It was simply a way to keep us in line so we would dance for practically nothing and not make trouble for the company. The body was the body and pleasure was pleasure, and Giselle shedding tears at her lover’s star-crossed grave was a frothy white lie. We had sacrificed everything for Madame, led lives of hunger and sacrifice so she could go on impersonating the Dying Swan all over the world. But if Madame could fall in love, so could we. We weren’t going to swallow the story of the happy demoiselles embracing prudish spinsterhood any longer.

  After our return to San Juan, Juan Anduce and I kept on seeing each other at La Nueva Suela. Juan didn’t speak any Russian, but he spoke English quite well. “It doesn’t matter that you are Russian and I am Puerto Rican, or that you are large, white, and blond and I am slender and dark-skinned, my duck. The important thing is that we are both tender-hearted and fight for the common good,” he’d say, winking at me puckishly. He called me his duck because I was always running after Madame, who was the swan. I had never fought for anything in my life, but I liked to hear him say that. No one had ever noticed I was tender-hearted before, or that I sacrificed my life for others. I liked Juan.

  Juan answered all my questions about the island: about its mountains, its rivers, the towns that peppered its valleys. He loved to talk about the capital more than anything. “San Juan is a very old city,” he told me once. “Centuries ago, it made the English and the Dutch green with envy. They sat on their ships looking at its sparkling ramparts, its houses and churches full of gold and silver, and they drooled. It had an incalculable mercantile value; it served as safe harbor for hundreds of merchant ships which plied the ocean between America and Europe. At the end of its deepest cove there was a huge fortress with four solid towers with battlements on them—Santa Catalina—where the gold from Mexico, the fabulous situado that was shipped every year to Madrid, was kept. At night, a pale glow could be seen rising from its towers miles away.”

  He also loved to talk about the bay, about its many lagoons, linked to each other by mangrove labyrinths and whispering canals. “White herons, pelicans, falcons, manatees, and turtles inhabit them,” he said. “When the first Spaniards arrived, they decided to settle around it. The bay was more valuable than the whole island put together and well worth fighting for. It had an abundant fresh water supply, deep coves, and easy access to the land from several points. Best of all, it was easy to defend from enemy ships because the smaller island, where San Juan was located, served as a natural barrier.

  San Juan Bay is guarded both by El Morro Castle and El Cañuelo Fort, which make it almost impossible for an enemy ship to enter it. As you sail in, it widens on either side like the hips of a beautiful woman and ends in San José Lagoon, El Caño de Martín Peña, Los Corozos, and Piñones. These canals are completely free territory, a no-man’s-land. They are always in motion, and will change overnight in accordance with the tides. It was here the cimarrones, the escaped slaves like my grandmother Zambia, hid when they fled the whistling whips and the sniffing dogs of their masters.

  “Zambia escaped from her master’s house, and she went through a terrible experience. For many years under the Spaniards, we suffered a cruel embargo, and no foreign ships were allowed into our bay. All trade had to be done with Spain, and as it was having a great deal of difficulty with its colonies in South America, Spanish ships never stopped in Puerto Rico. People survived because they could grow their own food—manioc roots, yuccas, plantains—and there was plentiful cattle, but they lacked two things which were vitally important: cloth and steel.

  “My grandmother Zambia was a beautiful woman, and when she ran away and had to make her way through the mangroves, her dress ended up in shreds. She made a shift out of a burlap sack for herself and wore it resignedly for a year, until the day she met my grandfather, Ezequiel Carabalí, a handsome fisherman, who made a living selling fresh water to the smugglers’ ships that hid in the estuaries of the bay. When Ezequiel saw her, he fell in love and asked her to marry him. Zambia was the happiest woman on earth, but she swore she wasn’t getting married in a burlap sack.

  “One day Zambia swam absolutely naked to one of the Dutch ships, called out for help as if she were drowning, and was brought on board by the sailors. Using sign language, she begged them to give her a piece of cloth and a few knives, because she was getting married soon and had absolutely nothing to wear. The sailors called the captain, who, amazed at Zambia’s beauty, fell in love with her also. The handsome captain took her to his cabin, made love to her with Zambia’s consent, and later had her put in a rowboat dressed in a beautiful robe and with several knives as a present. Zambia hid the robe and the knives, and kept the secret from Ezequiel.

  “On the day of the wedding Zambia appeared dressed in an elegant silk gown at the door of her palm-thatched hut in the mangroves. Ezequiel asked no questions—he knew Zambia and her rebel ways; she never let anyone tell her what to do—but when they entered the church in Martín Peña, unfortunately there was a guardia civil there. The guard became suspicious that a black woman should be marrying a poor fisherman in such an elegant gown, and made her a prisoner. Zambia was taken to El Morro Fort, made to confess under torture that she had acquired her dress from a Dutch ship, and condemned to two hundred lashes in San Juan’s Plaza de Armas. Before her punishment, Zambia was taken around San Juan on a mule, naked from the waist up and with her hands tied with rope. A town crier preceded her, announcing that she was being punished because she had ‘obtained illegal cloth from a smuggler’ and was being made an example to all those who thought they co
uld do the same. While the ride through the town lasted, the neighbors could add their own whipping to the official punishment and many did so, beating Zambia with brooms and dry twigs as she went by, so afraid were they that they might be accused of the same crime.

  “Just think of it, Masha! Because of what happened to my grandmother Zambia, the poor women on the island wore their clothes until they were in tatters and rich women left their robes to their descendants in their wills, as part of their inheritances. Which may be another reason why Sanjuaneros are so crazy about clothes. They still haven’t gotten over their old deprivation.

  “After the public disciplining in San Juan was over, Zambia and Ezequiel went back to their palm-thatched hut in the mangroves and never visited the city again. My mother, Altagracia Carabalí, was born nine months after her parents’ marriage. She was black but had blue eyes, a fact that Ezequiel never noticed because, fortunately he was color-blind. Mother wasn’t happy living there, however, and when she was old enough, she emigrated to Cayey to work at the tobacco plantation where she met my father.”

  When Juan finished his story he blushed a deep red, so ashamed was he of his grandmother’s follies. But I embraced him, and assured him that I admired Zambia and would have done the same.

  Another time Juan told me the story of how the Americans conquered the city San Juan. I was very interested, since everyone on the island had a different version of the event. Some said the Americans had come to save the island from backwardness and Spanish tyranny; others that they were carpetbaggers and buccaneers.

  Juan’s tale about the marines’ arrival was by far the most interesting, since he had been visiting his grandmother at the time in the mangroves and was an eyewitness of the event. “Eleven warships appeared on the horizon,” he recounted, “and stood a few miles away from the city walls. It was still dark, and the ships bobbed up and down in the mist, unseen by the sentinels of El Morro Fort. As the sky lightened, the destroyers became perfectly visible from the rooftops, but nobody was afraid of them. For hundreds of years pirate after pirate had tried in vain to occupy us: Sir Francis Drake and that scoundrel Captain John Hawkins, the first to bring a shipload of African slaves to America, were soundly trounced by El Morro’s cannons; George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, perished near San Jeronimo’s Fort. They all spent their ammunition in vain. The Spaniards had invested millions of maravedies strengthening the city’s fortifications, so we weren’t at all worried when this new pirate, Admiral William T Sampson, and his fleet appeared on the horizon.

  “At dawn we were awakened by a barrage of cannon shot the likes of which we had never heard before. Luckily, American guns were so powerful that, although many shots were fired, most flew over the city. San Juan’s buildings are built very low—ancient Spanish law required that they not be more than two stories high, so that cannonballs would sail over the houses when fired by ships out at sea. Even so, many in the city perished. The population had to run for cover, most of them barefoot and still in their nightclothes, toward the hills of Miramar. We managed to survive.

  “Admiral Sampson’s bombardment lasted six hours, but the city, bobbing up and down in the distance, kept friskily cleaving the waves as in a game of tagalong. Sampson strode up and down the deck of the U.S.S. Mississippi, ordering more and more cannon fire, but no evidence of impact was perceived, no raging blazes were seen to fill the horizon with mournful curtains of smoke, no fiery orange tongues ate away at the lush greenery that peeked over the formidable battlements. Sampson was baffled. He didn’t believe in magic and he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He had never visited San Juan; he didn’t know there was a bay behind the city and that its waters were swallowing up all his fire and brimstone without a belch.”

  “Whoever insists that the Americans’ arrival was not a military intervention is pissing outside the pot!” I burst out when I heard Juan’s story. “The invasion of Puerto Rico by the Americans was like cooking beans. First you softened them by pounding and boiling them in water. Then you added the bloody tomato sauce and finally the bacon. A perfect recipe!”

  34

  JUAN’S FAMILY HAD A tobacco plantation in Cayey which went under. His relatives had been tobacco growers for generations, as his ancestors on his father’s side were descendants of the Taino Indians. Every Taino head of family grew a tobacco plant in his backyard and smoked a handful of rolled-up leaves after each meal. After the Americans arrived on the island, American Cigar, General Cigar, and Consolidated Cigar all established huge warehouses in the central valleys and most of the local planters who had grown tobacco since Spanish times were wiped out. But Juan’s family knew so much about tobacco, they managed to survive.

  Tobacco was a very delicate crop, it was the spoiled brat of agriculture and required constant tending. They weeded it and pampered it, watered and stroked it like a baby. The seedlings had to be planted by hand, one by one, and it was a backbreaking job, but the Anduces did it as a family and didn’t mind. The tender saplings needed to be protected under huge mosquito nets so the fleas wouldn’t eat the leaves or the pegas—fat green worms—nibble the stems, and the Anduces did it with such love that their tobacco plants were always the lushest of all. At night their valley seemed to be peacefully asleep, spread out under the billowing folds of netting. But nothing could have been more deceptive.

  A savage price war broke out in 1902 between the Anduces and the American corporations, and fire ravaged Don Aníbal Anduce’s largest warehouse. Arson was suspected, but no proof was found. Don Aníbal still had three more warehouses full of tobacco leaves, and they were near his house. Every day he supervised the work himself, and he often sent his children, Juan and his two brothers, to scout around after dark. One night when Juan’s brothers were scouting and Juan was home asleep, tragedy struck: the boys were knocked unconscious by a band of hooligans and left inside one of the palm-thatched barns, then it was doused in gasoline and set on fire. Juan woke up to the most terrifying howls he had heard in his life. Convinced a wild animal was devouring his family, he ran out of the house with a shotgun, only to find his father and mother on their knees, pounding the earth with their fists, the charred corpses of his two brothers still smoking at their feet.

  Juan’s father never recovered from the tragedy, but he refused to die until he had put his remaining son through school literally puffing on cigar smoke. It also helped that Don Aníbal had married Altagracia, the black woman from the mangrove swamp who was so strong, she could wash the laundry of an entire family in one afternoon and still have enough energy to iron it, fold it, and take it back to her clients on a tray balanced on her head. Thanks to his mother’s efforts and his father’s last tobacco warehouse, Juan bought a ticket and traveled by steamer to New York. He made his way on foot to Harlem and found a job as a dishwasher at a deli. The next day he registered at New York University.

  He studied at the university for two years. Then his father died and he had to return to the island, because his mother had to file for bankruptcy. But Juan was from hardy stock. He told Altagracia not to worry; he would take care of everything. He took her to live with his grandmother in the mangroves, and after tying his clothes in a bundle which he slung on his back, he boarded the California, an American steamship. He was contracted to work for the Tampa Tobacco Company and planned to work his way to Florida.

  “When we neared the Cuban coast we stopped at Daiquiri,” Juan told me, reminiscing about one of the saddest moments of his journey. “Around midnight, a fat American came aboard and picked out two hundred and fifty men who were traveling on deck because we had no money to pay for a cabin. From then on, each time we stopped at a coastal town, a blustering entrepreneur would board the ship late at night and pick out the strongest and healthiest among us to go to the tobacco fields, until only I and several other black men were left on board. At last we arrived in Florida. I managed to jump ship, aided by a kitchen hand who was putting a wicker basket full of dirty tablecloths to be washed on
shore. The basket was hardly heavier than before I got in, I had lost so much weight.

  “The ship’s captain had informed us that in the U.S. it was illegal to bring workers in on contract, but I knew better. The rest of the men were contracted, but we were not allowed to go ashore because our skin was black. As I abandoned ship, I looked back and wondered what would happen to those poor men left on deck, most of whom were too weak to run away. And I remembered how those who had died during the journey were thrown overboard in sacks.”

  Juan finally arrived back in New York, and his knowledge of cigar manufacturing led him to look for a job as an overseer at a small tobacco factory on First Avenue and Thirtieth Street. It was called El Morito. Like many tobacco workshops at the time, it was a meeting place for immigrants, anarchists, and revolutionaries. As the workers stripped the tobacco leaves, chopped them up for cigarettes, or rolled them up for cigar “tripe,”—the gut or inner lining—they sat at long tables at the head of which an official read to them. The books chosen by the tabaqueros for their distraction were often indirectly of a political nature: Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed or Notes from Underground. No tobacco worker ever fell asleep listening to them.