She was brought up practically a prisoner, never permitted to go out of the house by herself to visit the neighbors and always accompanied by a chaperon. At home she was taught the arts of embroidery and music by a governess; she could sing in French, English, and Italian and play the piano beautifully, but she couldn’t read or write. Her father had forbidden the governess to teach her how, so when Valeria turned sixteen she was still illiterate. This way, Bartolomeo hoped, Valeria would have no alternative but to stay at home and take care of him in his old age.
Valeria sometimes went to Guayamés to visit her sister Antonia, who had married a man of means and lived in a beautiful house at the entrance to town. Bartolomeo had had no misgivings in letting Antonia leave; it meant one mouth less to feed. The youngest daughter was the one who was supposed to stay home and take care of the widowed father.
Abuelo Alvaro met Abuela Valeria during one of her visits to her sister. When he heard her sing and play the piano, Alvaro immediately fell in love and asked her to marry him. But she refused. “I can’t get married, because I can’t read or write,” she said tearfully. “What will you do when I sign the marriage license in front of the judge with an X? You’ll be so ashamed of me you’ll change your mind.”
Alvaro answered, laughing, “That won’t make any difference to me at all. If you can cook as well as you can sing, everything will turn out all right.” And that very afternoon they eloped, asking a judge in Guayamés to marry them.
Bartolomeo found out the next day. Rumor has it he ran to his son-in-law’s house and tried to batter down the door with the butt of his rifle. When Antonia and her husband refused to open it, he began to hurl insults at them, calling them scoundrels and panderers until he was so beside himself he suffered a heart attack and died. Clarissa didn’t believe the story at all, and she found out what really happened. Bartolomeo was caught in a shoot-out with the American coastal patrol, which kept a stricter eye on his coconut groves than the Spanish Guardia Civil. When Bartolomeo died, Valeria came into a third of his fortune, and her inheritance made it possible for Alvaro to consolidate his economic situation.
The first thing Valeria did when she could afford it was to have the schoolmaster from Guayamés’s public school come to her house and teach her to read and write. Soon she became a passionate reader. She practically devoured the best Latin American novels of her time, Jorge Isaac’s María; Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab; José Marmol’s Amalia. Sometimes she read them out loud at dinnertime for the family’s benefit. Alvaro, by contrast, didn’t care for literature at all; novels bored him, and he preferred books that dealt with life as it really was. After their wedding, Valeria refused to make love if he didn’t read at least one novel a week, and in this way she managed to educate him.
Guayamés is surrounded by lush green hills where the last of the Taíno Indians lived before they were wiped out by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Its houses spill into one another without order or logic, as if huddled together for protection. The streets are narrow and cleave to the uneven terrain like ribbons of red mud; many are named for the Taíno Indians: Calle Guajira, Calle Urayoán, Calle Guaquiminí. On top of a nearby hill, overlooking the town like a huge white fowl spreading its wings, sits the cathedral, one of the oldest buildings in Guayamés.
The climate is unusually humid and rain falls in pellets that melt before they reach the ground. The frequent rains, as well as the tranquil atmosphere, bring out the vivid colors of the landscape: the limpid blue of the sky, the soft moss-green of the hills, the hard beveled green of the sugarcane fields. Perhaps for this reason a romantic imagination, an acute aesthetic sensibility, and a deep love of nature are common among the inhabitants of Guayamés.
During the rainy season, the town was relatively safe from the storms that uprooted trees and left the hills strewn with gabled tin roofs that had whirled away from outlying houses like saws in the wind. December meant the family’s return to Emajaguas for the zafra—the Plata’s sugarcane harvest—and over the next six months the rains were sparse and the breezes cool. April brought scattered showers (“Las lluvías de abril caben en un barril,” as Abuelo Alvaro used to say), May brought thunderstorms (“Las lluvías de mayo se las bebe un caballo”), and June, July, and August were dry as cane husks (“Junio, julio, y agosto, marota seca para los cerdos”).
The children began to arrive in quick succession, Clarissa in 1901, Siglinda in 1902, Artemisa in 1903, Alejandro in 1904, Dido in 1905, then Lakhmé in 1923, when Abuela Valeria was thirty-nine years old. Lakhmé was the baby of the family, and Abuela spoiled her because of it.
As the children were born and as Abuelo Alvaro prospered, he added several rooms to Emajaguas and modernized the kitchen and bathrooms. The children didn’t go to public school, as they did in Guayamés; they took lessons with a tutor, a skinny, bald rural teacher who drove from town every day in his horse and buggy. This meant they could spend the afternoons horseback riding or swimming in the river; they didn’t have to wear uniforms or even shoes. I suppose that’s why, when Mother talked to me about her childhood at Emajaguas, it was as if she remembered a lost paradise, a timeless place where days and nights chased each other merrily around on the tin sphere of the grandfather clock that stood against the dining room wall.
Emajaguas was built on stilts, and the living quarters were entirely on the second level. The first level was used as Abuelo Alvaro’s office and also served as a garage. Fresh straw rugs gave it a grassy country smell. All the windows were louvered and painted turquoise-blue, so that when one looked out, the waters of the Guayamés bay seemed to flow into the rooms. A wide granite stairway led from the front of the house to the palm-lined driveway, which descended to the main road bordering the seashore. At the back, a narrow balustered stairway painted white led from the kitchen to the garden and the fruit orchards.
A steep wall circled the ten-acre property, which included mango, soursop, and grapefruit trees, a tennis court, and a pond with goldfish. A half dozen geese patrolled the garden like a row of noisy midget soldiers. There was a well-stocked library (the pride of Abuela Valeria), a grand piano in the living room, a record player, and all kinds of table games for rainy days. There were so many things to do at Emajaguas that one rarely went into town. It was only a fifteen-minute walk to Guayamés following the road by the sea, but hardly anyone ever took it.
The house had two natural boundaries that separated it from the outside world: the Emajaguas River on the right (more a creek than a river except when the heavy rain turned it into a dragon’s tail of mud) and the public road. Four feet beyond the highway, the land fell away abruptly and the sea battered the rocks that had been placed there as a barrier. In spite of them, the waves ate away an inch or two of the highway’s foundation each year.
When my brother, Alvaro, and I were children and we used to visit Emajaguas with our parents, our car had to draw up as close to the cliff as possible in order to turn into the driveway. I was always afraid we would fall into the water, and I’d shut my eyes in terror. At night I had nightmares that the sea was creeping closer and closer and that one night it would reach up to grab Emajaguas by the roof and drag us down to its depths.
There were four bedrooms and three bathrooms in the house. One bedroom had been Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria’s and was connected to the bathroom by a narrow inner hallway that always smelled of Hamamelis water, an astringent made of witch hazel that Abuela Valeria dabbed on her face with cotton every night before going to bed. Everything was white in this bathroom, and it was so large that as a child I used to get the words bathroom and ballroom mixed up. There was a cast-iron tub with griffin’s feet, a shower with a halolike nozzle, and a cylinder with rings that sprayed at you from every direction when you stepped inside naked. The shower had American Standard star-shaped spigots of stainless steel. These must have been mixed up in the installation, being labeled (logically in Spanish, but incorrectly in English) C for hot water and H for cold. Ab
uela Valeria, who didn’t speak English, assumed that C was for caliente (hot) and H for helada (freezing), because in the States cold water was always ice-cold. A squat square tub, a baño de asiento, sat in the corner. It was ideal for reading, and it was there that Abuelo Alvaro devoured from María, Sab, and Amalia the morsels Valeria fed him to whet his appetite every night before making love.
Tío Alejandro’s bedroom was next door to my grandparents’, in the right wing of the house. It was spacious and had a four-poster canopied bed, its own private bathroom, and a bay window that opened onto the garden.
The other two bedrooms were in the left wing of the house. There my aunts and my mother had slept long ago. These rooms shared a bathroom, a small, low-ceilinged cabinet that Abuelo had built under one of the gables. Later, when the grandchildren came to visit at Christmas, they slept in this wing of the house. Since the bathroom could hold only one person at a time, there was often a cramped line of little boys and girls in front of the door nervously crossing and uncrossing their legs.
Almost every room at Emajaguas had its own skylight. Skylights were a way of saving money: one didn’t have to turn on a light except when it began to get dark. But they also gave the rooms a special atmosphere. There is a dreamlike quality to a room with a skylight; it eliminates the passing shadows of the world outside, the swish of headlights on the road, the streetlights coming on at dusk. A room with a skylight gives one a sense of security. Nothing bad can happen there; there’s no reason to be afraid of what the future might bring.
The skylights of Emajaguas were always located in strategic places: over the dining room table, for example, or above the bathtub, where sunlight fell directly on the naked body. At the Sacred Heart in La Concordia the nuns taught us that looking at yourself in the mirror without clothes on was a cardinal sin. Girls were supposed to be ignorant of their bodies—the little bushes of hair beginning to sprout in unexpected nooks, the bulbs pushing out in flat places, and all kinds of fluids beginning to run—and modesty was an important part of being a decent person. Thanks to Emajaguas I always laughed at all that. I loved to stand in the bathtub under the skylight without a stitch on. By the time I turned twelve I knew my body’s secret places by heart: a nest of downy fleece growing here, a delicate pink halo appearing there. I grew up liking the way the creamy curve of my breast melted into my belly and, when I bent my elbow, how the hidden part of my underarm resembled a freshly baked loaf of bread. At Emajaguas I could caress and touch myself at will. Exposed to the light of day, my body was innocent and had a life of its own; shame and sin meant nothing to me.
I was thirteen when I discovered the answer to the age-old enigma of how we arrive in this world. One morning at recess one of my girlfriends, María Concepción, came over excitedly to where I was sitting with a group of other students. She said she wanted to tell us a secret, so we rallied around her in the school yard, as far as possible from the vigilanta, the lookout sister. “I found out where babies really come from!” María Concepción said. “They don’t come from Paris on the wings of Jesusito at all, like the nuns say!” Then she proceeded to describe the biological process of copulation and birth, leaving out none of the details. A naked man and a naked woman in bed, kissing and caressing, the man putting his penis into the woman’s third hole. (Was there a third hole? I wasn’t aware there was one until then. “It’s between the ass hole and the piss hole, you nitwit!” María Concepción whispered, pinching my arm.) And that was the hole the baby came out of nine months later. I was shocked.
It was Friday and that afternoon we left for Emajaguas, where we would spend the weekend. As soon as we arrived, I went to Mother’s room to ask if what María Concepción had said was true. Mother was taking a shower, and I knocked on the bathroom door. She didn’t turn off the water but over the shower’s din asked me what I wanted. I opened the door a crack and poked my head in. I could see Mother’s shadow: she was standing naked behind the shower curtain—the skylight a rectangle of light above her head—and steam was coming out from the top.
“Mother, is it true that babies are born only after a man puts his penis inside a woman and pisses on her, and nine months later the baby comes out a third hole that only women have?” I shouted. A silence followed, during which the shower’s din became a roar. “Yes, it’s true,” Mother answered. “And please close the bathroom door, because I’m getting a draft.”
A few months later I got my first period, and I went back to Mother’s room. I showed her my panties and she didn’t say a word. She went to the closet and took out a box of Kotex and a little pink elastic belt. “Here, put one of these on. And don’t change it unless you have to, so you make the box last.” That was the last time she ever talked to me about sex or babies.
There was only one room in Emajaguas that didn’t have a skylight: the toilet. One relieved oneself in total darkness, hidden from the eyes of the world as well as from one’s own. Shitting and pissing had to be performed in secret, so as not to offend the aesthetic sensibilities that prevailed in the Rivas de Santillana family.
THREE
The Sugar Sultan
ABUELO ALVARO WAS TALL and very good-looking. He reminded you of a Moorish sheikh, with his love for paso fino horses, his well-tended cane fields, and his house that resembled a harem with Abuela Valeria, Clarissa, and my four aunts all bustling about like partridges. The female sex also prevailed in the third generation: there were seven girls and only two boys among the Rivas de Santillana grandchildren.
Sugar planting was Abuelo Alvaro’s passion. “Sugar,” he would say, “was a gift from the Arabs, who brought the first cane stalks to Europe from faraway Malaysia. For a long time it was a luxury as rare as musk or pearls, but the Moors had a sweet tooth like you, and they became expert sugar planters. Once sugar spread to the south of Spain, the Moors took it with them to the Canary Islands, and from there Crisótbal Colón brought some stalks to America aboard one of his ships. When he arrived on our island, the first thing he did was plant a stub of cane at the mouth of the Emajaguas River, just around the bend from our house. It’s because Crisótbal Colón planted our first cane stalk that the sugar from the central Plata is the sweetest in the world.” No one believed him when he said things like that, but they loved to hear his stories.
Abuelo Alvaro had other exciting tales. “Long ago,” he’d say, “our island was a peak as high as the Aconcagua, a mountain in the Andes, part of a very rich country that sank to the bottom of the ocean during a formidable earthquake. We were the only speck of land left from that magnificent El Dorado, and for that reason the Spaniards named us Puerto Rico, ‘rich port,’ although our island is actually very poor.”
Alejandro loved to hear about Miguel Enríquez, a black shoemaker turned pirate who almost became governor in the eighteenth century. The girls preferred José Almeida, the Portuguese corsair, who sheathed his galleon with copper plates inside and out to protect his beloved Alida Blanca from cannonball fire after she decided to join him at sea. When she died he buried her in a glass casket on the island of Caja de Muertos and would visit her there every year. The girls cried on hearing this, and Abuelo Alvaro gave them his huge linen handkerchief, smelling of orange blossoms, to dry their tears.
Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria had been reared in a subsistence economy. The arrival of the Americans on the island triggered an economic crisis. The new American banks didn’t trust the local hacendados and denied them credit. The local planters had no money to replant the cane fields, and the banks refused to issue them loans. The only way they could raise money was by selling a part of their farms to finance their harvests, so that each year they had less land to plant and produced less sugar, until they finally had to close down their mills. This happened to many hacienda owners in the Guayamés valley.
Abuelo Alvaro was deeply nationalistic. He always thought of himself as Puerto Rican, in contrast to many of the island’s other hacendados, who retained their Spanish, French, or British citiz
enship even after the Americans arrived. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of sugar production, many of the rich criollos had moved to Paris, Barcelona, or Madrid, where they lived a princely life. They usually left their mills in the hands of a nephew or a son, who would send the income on to Europe. This was never true, however, of Abuelo Alvaro, who reinvested every penny he had in the central Plata and owned five thousand acres of the most fertile land in the valley.
When the criollo hacendados began to sell their farms, Abuelo Alvaro wouldn’t part with a single acre. Instead, he was always on the lookout for more land, either purchasing it from those neighbors who were in a tight situation or renting it from those who had already sold their mills. Another way of acquiring land was by marriage, and Abuelo Alvaro had hopes that one day Alejandro would marry the daughter of a rich hacienda owner from Guayamés. His daughters should marry into landowning families also, because those families would be his allies; but this wasn’t as important as Alejandro’s making a good marriage.
On one rule, however, Abuelo Alvaro was adamant: both Alejandro and his sisters had to “marry white.” Marrying mixed blood was the one sure way of losing one’s foothold on the already shaky social and economic ladder of Guayamés’s plantation society. Even recent immigrants, therefore, were looked on more kindly than many of the local suitors who courted the hacendados’ daughters. Modern urban life permitted a great deal of socializing between peoples of different backgrounds, and the inevitable liaisons that resulted were regarded by the hacendados as highly undesirable. “Peninsular, penniless, but white” was the proud motto many of them adopted when they described their daughters’ fiancés. And these young men had one advantage over the pampered sons of the hacendados: they were used to hard work and willing to do whatever was necessary to get ahead. They were welcomed in the best social circles on the island and were soon whispering niceties in the ears of the hacendados’ daughters.
Eccentric Neighborhood Page 2