Antonio Torres was shorter than Tía Dido and bald, but she was taken with him from the start, mesmerized by his beautiful Spanish. He spoke perfect Castilian, and Tía Dido found listening to him a delight. She couldn’t detect a single mistake. He spoke as if he tasted every word, savoring it to its very marrow. When she listened to Antonio, Dido wanted to become a Spanish word, caressed and licked by his tongue.
He didn’t swallow his final ss or garble his rs, as Puerto Ricans did. He pronounced his cs as precisely as castanets, curling the tip of his tongue against his teeth. Clarissa couldn’t see what Dido found so attractive in Antonio. She looked for other things in men, like good manners.
The day after the reading Antonio went by the Pensionado Católico, the dormitory for out-of-town girls, and asked for Dido. She came down from her room to the reception hall, and he invited her to go for a ride on the trolley to El Morro, the Spanish fort in Old San Juan. The trolley had all its windows open and a soft breeze blew in from the sea as they traveled down Ponce de León Avenue. It was old and uncomfortable, and the seats were made of wooden slats, but neither of them noticed, so entranced were they by each other’s company.
After three months of courting, Antonio knew he should propose marriage to Dido. But he couldn’t bring himself to. In his opinion, Dido had one defect: when she was with other people she was painfully shy; she hardly spoke at all. But when she was with him she couldn’t stop talking, and it was always about poetry. It bored him no end.
Antonio didn’t have anything against poets. In Moguer, he told Dido during one of his visits to Emajaguas, he had many writer friends. But in Spain wives stayed home taking care of their children, and husbands didn’t like their women traipsing about giving poetry readings or publishing poems in which they bared their intimate feelings to the world. What would Antonio’s friends in Moguer say when they heard his wife was a poet? Gossip would roll in waves all the way from the island to the mother country.
Tía Dido was never as liberated as Tía Siglinda, but she was fairly outspoken. One afternoon she told Antonio: “We love each other; why don’t we get married? I’m sure Mother will like you because she likes Spaniards. Even if you have no money you’re bound to make some one day because you’re white and hardworking.”
Antonio hedged. “Let’s get to know each other better before we take that step,” he answered diplomatically. Tía Dido was downcast, but she didn’t let Antonio’s temporizing quench her enthusiasm. Every day she wrote a new poem and added it to her manuscript as the vine adds a grape. Unaware of the negative effect her poetry was having on her sweetheart, she was keener than ever to become a poet.
Six months went by and it was already spring; school was over before the lovers realized it. Dido finished her junior year at the university and came back to Emajaguas. Antonio traveled from San Juan to Guayamés every weekend to see her. But he still hadn’t asked Tía Dido for her hand. Every time he came to visit, Dido would sit with him on the terrace and read him a new poem. But as soon as she began to read, Antonio closed his eyes, and before she was finished he’d be snoring loudly. Clarissa spied on them from the window that opened onto the terrace and had to admit the situation did not look good.
During summer vacation Tía Dido told Valeria, “I’m not going back to the university next semester, Mother. I’m tired of so much studying; I want to take a year off.” Abuela was upset, but Dido was twenty years old; she couldn’t force her to go back. Dido had decided to intensify her marriage campaign. She asked Gela to teach her how to cook and Miña how to wash and iron men’s shirts. She spent hours in the kitchen learning to make chicken with rice, guinea hen stewed in red wine, and piononos, ripe plantain pies fried in batter; and every time she ironed one of Tío Alejandro’s shirts, she went around the house showing it to everybody, proudly holding it up on a hanger.
One day Antonio announced that Juan Ramón Jiménez, his poet friend, had come to the island on a visit and that he was bringing him to lunch at Emajaguas the following week. Everybody was terribly excited. He and Juan Ramón would drive from San Juan to Guayamés in the morning, Antonio said, and return to the capital that same day. Tía Dido almost fainted when she heard the news. Juan Ramón was like a god to her; the tiles of Emajaguas’s floor weren’t good enough for him to step on.
Dido had the furniture in the sitting room polished and fresh flowers put in vases; she spent a whole week planning the menu. Having heard that Juan Ramón loved seafood, she asked Urbano to have his father-in-law, Triburcio Besosa, bring his best catch to the house. Triburcio brought a basket full of the most exotic shellfish: river prawns, crayfish, lobster. This wasn’t going to be one of Valeria’s spartan meals. Dido was going to prepare a bouillabaisse that would have made even Lady Lent’s face turn purple.
When Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio arrived at Emajaguas in Antonio’s blue roadster, the whole family was waiting for them at the door. Aurelio was already Mother’s beau, and he drove up from La Concordia for the occasion; Tía Siglinda and Tío Venancio came from Guayamés. Artemisa, who was still unmarried and living at the house, and two-year-old Lakhmé were also present. Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria gave the visitors a warm welcome.
Juan Ramón was very aristocratic-looking: he had large, soulful eyes and a high-domed brow. He had very little hair on his head, but he made up for it with a jet-black goatee so meticulously groomed it shone as if it were carved in onyx. He looked like a modern version of one of El Greco’s apostles, and it was easy to imagine the Holy Spirit’s gift of language hovering above his head in a tiny flame. Everyone at Emajaguas had read Juan Ramón’s poems, and the sisters all brought him copies of his books so he could autograph them. His poems were full of the romantic mysticism of Castile, with windswept towns and black-clad women whispering behind latticed windows.
When lunch was finally announced, the poet presided at the head of the table, with the family reverently seated around him. Tía Dido herself brought in the trays of food, helped by Artemisa. When Miña protested, Dido explained that in Spain, when an important guest came for dinner, he was served by the daughters of the house and no servants were allowed into the dining room. In any case, Dido didn’t want Miña to carry the soup tureen to the table. She was afraid Miña might drop it in Juan Ramón Jiménez’s lap, so angry was she at Dido’s leaving the university because of Antonio Torres.
When the steaming tureen was passed around the table and Juan Ramón lifted its lid, he almost swooned from the delicious aroma that wafted out. Juan Ramón served himself a generous portion and then passed the tureen around.
Tía Dido hardly dared look at her idol, who had tucked a napkin around his neck and was attacking the bouillabaisse with gusto, noisily sucking on the prawns and prying the mussels open with his long, almond-shaped nails, then washing it all down with wine. She sat next to Antonio, her head lowered shyly, and delicately sipped at the broth.
Juan Ramón loved oysters, and a veritable duel of shell sucking broke out between Antonio and his friend. Antonio would squirt fresh lemon juice on the live oyster, which curled up the little black flounce of its edge when it sensed the acid, then throw his head back to let the oyster slide down his throat. Juan Ramón would laugh uproariously and immediately do the same. In less than ten minutes, they had downed a dozen oysters each.
The family watched in amazement. They couldn’t believe that such a glutton could be the author of such spiritual poems as “Mariposa de luz” or that he could write about the burning cinders of the soul hovering around the heart of the rose.
When lunch was over, Juan Ramón sat back in his chair, a satisfied look on his face. “My friend Antonio here tells me you’re a poet,” he said to Tía Dido with a condescending smile. “I’d be more than glad to read some of your poems. Would you have a copy of them I could look at?” He really hated to read the work of other writers, but the lunch had been so good he felt it was the least he could do to repay his hosts. Poor Dido got up from the table a
nd, with trembling hands and knees, went to her room to get her poems.
Juan Ramón retired to one of the guest rooms for a nap, taking Dido’s manuscript with him. When he came out an hour later, looking refreshed and ready for the long drive back to San Juan, he returned the poems to Dido. “I’ve written a little something on the last page, to let you know what I think. But please don’t read it until I’m gone,” he told her as he warmly said his good-byes.
Tía Dido took the manuscript from him reverently and didn’t look at it until she went to bed that night. “Your voice is as sweet as a nightingale’s,” Juan Ramón had written on the last page. “But the best nightingales—the true ruiseñoras of this world—sing their love songs in secret. I’m sure my friend Antonio will marry you if you do the same.” Tía Dido read Juan Ramón’s advice and cried herself to sleep that night.
“You’re a nincompoop and a loser!” Clarissa told Tía Dido angrily the next morning when she read what the poet had written. “At least your namesake got to be queen of Carthage before she committed suicide over that thickhead Aeneas. But you’ll never be anything other than an excellent cook.”
Tía Dido took Juan Ramón Jiménez’s suggestion and kept her love songs a secret from that day on; she put her literature books away and never wrote another poem. Antonio married her in the Guayamés cathedral the following month and took her to live with him in San Juan.
NINE
The Snow Rose
TÍA ARTEMISA WAS THE tallest of all the aunts. She was so tall my cousins and I teased her that she had her feet firmly planted on the ground but was always bumping her head against the clouds. Tía Artemisa, like Tía Dido, lived for the imagination, but of a different kind. She was always dreaming of Jesusito, who lived in her heart.
She was a keen businesswoman, and she was also very religious. Thanks to her unusual combination of financial savvy and religious devotion, she almost landed one of the richest men in Guayamés, Don Esteban de la Rosa, the owner of the central Santa Rosa. The story of their romance was one of the most picturesque I’d ever heard.
Tía Artemisa fell madly in love with Don Esteban de la Rosa in 1947, when she was forty-four and regarded by everybody as a spinster. In contrast to my other aunts, who loved beautiful things and were always buying expensive baubles to adorn themselves, Artemisa dressed in black from head to toe and never wore any jewelry except for a perfect three-carat solitaire that shone, night and day, on her finger.
Tía Artemisa was as intelligent as Tía Dido, but she didn’t finish her studies at the University of Puerto Rico either. She only went as far as her junior year. She was beautiful and charming, but she had one flaw, her religious fanaticism.
Swearing in front of Tía Artemisa was absolutely out of the question because she would immediately pull a long face and make you feel ashamed. Once, during Christmas dinner at Emajaguas, little Lakhmé made a joke. Saint Tecla, she said, was at death’s door and Saint Peter and her friends were kneeling around a hole in the clouds looking down, waiting for her soul to come out of her body and begin to rise toward heaven. Saint Tecla’s spirit finally went forth and began its ascent through the clouds, but she had been so saintly in life that she rose higher and higher and soon passed Saint Peter and kept on going. When Saint Peter saw this he called out: “Saint Tecla, please! Say a couple of carajos so you’ll stop soaring and stay down here with us!” Saint Tecla did and came tumbling back to Earth. Artemisa was furious and made Abuela Valeria take Tía Lakhmé to the bathroom to wash her mouth out with soap and water.
Everybody in the family liked Don Esteban and hopes were high that he would marry Artemisa. He was a widower and had had a tragic life. His wife had died of breast cancer when she was still relatively young, and his only son, Valentín, had been killed at Saint Laurent, during the invasion of Normandy. Valentín’s remains had been buried in a cemetery in Calvados, and Don Esteban wasn’t able to visit his grave until two years later.
Don Esteban’s sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Blanca Rosa, was the apple of his eye. Blanca, Valentín’s only daughter, was one of the beauties of Guayamés. She was blond and blue-eyed, and her skin was so white her friends called her the Snow Rose. Don Esteban didn’t want Blanca Rosa to marry any of the local young Turks, so in 1946—a year after the war was over—he decided to travel with her to Europe and introduce her to some young men of good standing. They flew on a Pan American Clipper from San Juan to New York. There they boarded the Gloucester, a luxury steamship of the Grace Line, and landed in Le Havre at the end of November.
Don Esteban rented a limousine with a chauffeur, and he drove south with his granddaughter down the Normandy coast to visit the cemetery where Valentín was buried. The weather was misty and cold, but the landscape was beautiful. Trouville-sur-Mer; Deauville; Fleurie: the towns that Don Esteban had read so much about in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and that the Impressionists had painted so many times went flying by before his eyes. Many were being reconstructed after the terrible damage the war had inflicted. Debris littered the dunes on the beach and signs were posted everywhere warning of land mines and forbidding people to walk along the shore. They finally reached Omaha Beach. Don Esteban hadn’t said a single word the whole time, but he felt in control of himself. His son had died a hero’s death defending his country, the United States. Valentín was thirty-five, in the flower of his youth. Now he would never grow old, would never experience sickness or grief. When Don Esteban thought about it that way, he was almost glad a piece of German mortar shell had flown through the air and embedded itself in Valentín’s brain.
They passed the cemetery’s gate and the marble sculpture of an angel carrying a fallen soldier in his arms. Ten thousand limestone crosses stood on the rolling green meadow like gulls poised for flight, several Stars of David interspersed among them. The steel-gray waters of the English Channel glinted restlessly in the distance. Don Esteban took a deep breath and got out of the car. In his pocket he carried the small map the army had sent him with the exact location of his son’s grave. He took Blanca Rosa’s arm and together they began the long walk to where Valentín’s cross stood.
They reached Paris that evening and drove to the Hôtel Crillon. Soon they were installed in a beautiful suite with a view of the Place de la Concorde. Blanca Rosa was to attend the Christmas ball at Versailles in a few days—the first such ball since before the war. She had brought a trunk full of clothes with her, and Guayamés’s best dressmaker had designed her a beautiful evening gown for the ball. But Blanca Rosa needed a winter coat, and since it was always warm in Guayamés, winter evening coats were not for sale. So Don Esteban asked the dressmaker to sew Blanca Rosa a coat made of marabou feathers, which were very fashionable at the time. “I would like to buy you an ermine cape with a hood,” he joked the day he gave her the feather coat, “but I would have to sell my best farm to pay for it. Marabou will have to do. The feathers are very fine; they come from Africa and only brides wear them.” Blanca loved the coat. She didn’t know what ermine looked like, but it couldn’t be as soft and beautiful as marabou.
The night of the Versailles ball Blanca met a French count, Jean-Baptiste de l’Abbaye Richey, great-grandson of one of France’s grands maréchals. Jean-Baptiste asked her to dance, and they sailed together across the parquet floor. The air around them swirled with laughter; champagne flowed from dark green bottles like liquid happiness; the chandeliers were hives ablaze with excitement above their heads. But they didn’t notice a thing, because they had fallen in love.
By the time the orchestra began to play “La Vie en Rose,” they had decided to elope. They would drive from Versailles to Nice that very night. It was the middle of December, and although Blanca Rosa knew she looked very attractive in her silk chiffon dress, she was amazed that, with so many beautiful girls at the ball, Jean-Baptiste should have eyes only for her. “You look like a Venus draped in alabaster folds, and I love you more than my life,” he whispered, drawing her close. Blanca Rosa b
elieved him.
At midnight Jean-Baptiste took her by the hand and they slipped away unnoticed. Blanca Rosa threw her marabou coat over her shoulders and ran with Jean-Baptiste down the hall of mirrors, crossed the military court in front of the palace, silver heels flying over the stone slab floor, and got into Jean-Baptiste’s red convertible Alfa Romeo.
“Is that coat warm enough?” Jean-Baptiste asked her dubiously as they got in the car.
“Of course it is,” Blanca answered, smiling, not wanting him to think she was a small-town girl. “It’s tropical ermine. Father gave it to me as a present to wear at Versailles.”
The car took off like a bullet in the night. Soon Blanca Rosa felt the knife of the wind fly by, but Jean-Baptiste put his arm around her shoulders and pointed to the dome full of stars. “There must be thousands, but you’re more beautiful than all of them, because you fell from a tropical sky,” Jean-Baptiste said. Blanca snuggled close to him. Orion was flying above their heads, arms and legs spread wide against the sky, wearing four stars on his belt and three on his dagger, as he always did. Orion made Blanca Rosa think of Don Esteban. All of a sudden she missed him and was sad to think how distressed he must be, not knowing where she was.
“Can we stop at the next gasoline station, so I can call my grandfather?” she asked Jean-Baptiste. “He must he terribly worried.” But at that hour of the night all the gasoline pumps were closed. Around four in the morning, as they were nearing Nevers, Blanca tried again, but Jean-Baptiste didn’t think it was a good idea to call. “We still have too many hours to go before we get to Nice,” he said. “Your grandfather could warn the police, and they’ll send a patrol to stop us before we reach the hotel. Let’s wait until tomorrow, so we can spend the night in each other’s arms.” Blanca looked up at Orion and sighed. It made her feel better that he was looking after her from up there.
Eccentric Neighborhood Page 5