Soon the sky was shrouded with a mantle of clouds, and tiny featherlike snowflakes began to caress Blanca’s cheeks. “You look even more beautiful under the snow than under the stars,” Jean-Baptiste whispered in her ear as they flew past Lyon at a hundred kilometers an hour. “Ma rose de neige.” And Blanca was so much in love and at the same time so afraid of what Jean-Baptiste might think if he found out her coat was made not of ermine but of marabou feathers that she didn’t dare tell him how cold she was.
The snow kept sifting over them like flour. “Now I know how angels feel on their way to heaven,” Blanca Rosa said. She gazed admiringly at Jean-Baptiste, who reminded her of a prince in his black astrakhan coat buttoned up to the chin and his Russian-style hat. Then something strange happened: Blanca didn’t feel cold anymore. Instead a fiery blaze began to burn her insides. She wanted to make love to Jean-Baptiste so badly she wished her breasts, her abdomen, her thighs were made of snow so she could melt in his arms.
They drove on until they reached Avignon and stopped there at a little café by the side of the road to have a cup of coffee and a croissant. Blanca could hardly get out of the car; she was stiff and her legs were numb. She felt terribly sleepy and kept stumbling on her silver heels. Jean-Baptiste had to help her to a chair. When Blanca asked if there was a ladies’ room, a dirty-looking peasant hunched over a glass of wine pointed toward the back of the establishment, where there was an outhouse. Blanca gave up the idea of visiting it. Jean-Baptiste went, and when he came back to the car he rolled up its canvas cover. Blanca got in and fell into a deep sleep.
They arrived in Nice around four in the afternoon, the day after the ball. They took a suite in the Hôtel de Paris, the best in town. The hotel was right next to the Palais de Jeu and from their window that evening Blanca could see men in elegant tuxedos and women in long, glittering evening gowns stepping out of their cars and going up the casino’s marble stairway.
When Blanca lay down on the bed she was shivering, whether from the chill of the trip or from the desire that raged inside her she didn’t know. Jean-Baptiste undressed her slowly, blowing away the last snowflakes that clung to her marabou coat. Then he removed her Venus chiffon dress. When Blanca was totally naked she looked like an alabaster statue lit from within, her skin glowed so unnaturally. They made love passionately, then fell into a deep sleep. When Jean-Baptiste woke the next morning, the sun was streaming into the room and Blanca Rosa lay motionless by his side. She looked even more like an alabaster statue, but she wasn’t lit from within any longer. She had died of hypothermia during the night.
Back in Paris Don Esteban had gone without news of his granddaughter for twenty-four hours and was almost beside himself. He had searched for her, room by room, at Versailles and had finally returned to the Crillon without her. When Blanca was still missing the next morning, he informed the police and a search was begun. The following evening Don Esteban received a telegram from Jean-Baptiste at the hotel, informing him of Blanca Rosa’s death. Don Esteban immediately took a train to Nice.
On his arrival, he went straight to the police station, where Jean-Baptiste, the prefect of police, and a pathologist were waiting for him. “Je suis désolé, Monsieur,” the young man said as he tried to embrace Don Esteban, tears streaming down his face. But Don Esteban pushed him away. He had never gotten angry at anybody; he was a peaceful man. But he felt a noose of rage tighten around his throat when he saw the French count.
Blanca Rosa had died of overexposure during the night because she had driven almost all the way from Paris to Avignon in Jean-Baptiste’s Alfa Romeo with the canvas top rolled down, the prefect of police explained to him. Don Esteban was incensed. He picked Jean-Baptiste up by the lapels of his coat and threw him against the wall. He threatened to call a lawyer and press charges against the young man. His granddaughter was a minor and Jean-Baptiste had carried her off from Versailles by force. But the prefect of police explained he couldn’t do that, because Jean-Baptiste was the great-grandson of one of France’s grands maréchals. Don Esteban clenched his fists and hung his head. At home he was an hacendado; the police wouldn’t have dared ignore him. But in France he was an eccentric old man from an impoverished Caribbean island raving about an unfortunate accident that had happened to a young couple in love.
Don Esteban went to the morgue to identify the body and then to a nearby chapel to pray for Blanca Rosa’s soul. He somehow managed to stay in control through the day. When he came back from the cemetery, he went to his granddaughter’s hotel. He gave the concierge a twenty-dollar bill, asked for a key to her room, and gave orders to keep Jean-Baptiste and the reporters away. News of the unusual death had made the local papers, and a photograph of Blanca Rosa dancing with the French count at Versailles was published on the front pages.
Don Esteban locked himself in the room and began to pack his granddaughter’s belongings methodically, making sure nothing was left behind for the reporters to pick over like crows. When he finished, he sat down on the double bed to rest for a minute. He could tell Blanca had lain there because a few strands of her hair still clung to the linen pillowcase. He slipped his hands beneath it and felt something curly with the tips of his fingers. Underneath were the false eyelashes Blanca Rosa had worn at the Versailles ball and had taken off before she died.
That insignificant detail made Don Esteban break down. The sensation of his granddaughter’s golden eyelashes on his fingertips was too much for him.
He began to wail, pitifully calling out his granddaughter’s name. “Blanca Rosa, my angel, what have I done to you? I should have sold not just my best farm but all my farms and my sugar mill as well, to buy you the warmest ermine coat in France. I wanted to save money, and God has punished me for my miserliness. He lent me your presence for a few years, but I didn’t know how to take care of you, and he’s called you back to His side.”
He got up from the bed and knocked over two lamps, threw a chair out the window, swung at the crystal chandelier with his umbrella. In five minutes the place was a shambles. The hotel authorities rushed in and he was driven to the police station, where he was pronounced unbalanced.
Don Esteban was consigned to an institution at Aulnay-sous-Bois, an asylum run by Carmelite nuns. For a week he lay in bed as if he were dead. The nuns held his head up and fed him little spoonfuls of broth and recited the Rosary by his side. One morning he got up at daybreak and looked out the window of his cell. A wonderful peace emanated from the cloister, from the fishpond in the middle of the vegetable garden, from the gnarled olive trees planted around it. He listened to the nuns singing matins, their voices echoing like distant bells from the chapel. He recovered gradually and began to go to Mass every morning. He had never been devout, but his granddaughter’s death had changed him.
When he felt strong enough, he returned to Guayamés. The Carmelite nuns had an old, dilapidated convent on top of a hill there, and Don Esteban began to visit them. The nuns did a lot of humanitarian work. They had a hospitalillo, a dispensary where they gave out food and dressed the sores of the needy. They usually had six or seven people in a special wing of the convent where they cared for the terminally ill.
Don Esteban donated money to have the convent’s facilities restored. One Sunday he brought the nuns a case full of good things to eat: a canned Danish ham, a roast beef, a smoked salmon, which he knew they couldn’t afford. He was sitting in the portería waiting for the nuns to open the door—no men were allowed into the convent except for its benefactor—when the Rivas de Santillanas’ black Packard arrived at the convent’s door and Tía Artemisa stepped out. She was bringing the nuns a basket of fresh fruits and vegetables from Emajaguas’s garden.
Tía Artemisa was attracted to Don Esteban the minute she saw him. His back was straight and he wore his silver hair carefully combed to the side. He was polished and urbane in his perfectly cut blue linen suit. His slender face and hands gleamed like a spirit’s in the half-light of the portería.
Tí
a Artemisa had heard about Don Esteban de la Rosa but she had never met him. She knew that he was a widower and that he lived alone in the family’s old mansion on Crisótbal Colón Avenue, in the center of town, because his son and his only granddaughter had passed away. Don Esteban’s father was a widower also. He had worked hard all his life and had retired to live in Europe on the income provided by the central Santa Rosa. He had left Esteban at the head of the mill, not wanting to be bothered with any of its problems. Don Esteban sent his father a generous amount every month so the old man could live with dignity.
The Santa Rosa was on the outskirts of Guayamés. It was one of the few sugar mills owned by the local hacendados that were still grinding cane and making money. Not a lot of it, but enough to let Don Esteban live reasonably well and pay for his father’s expenses. The reason for the mill’s success was that all the cane-producing farms belonging to Don Esteban were adjacent to one another. Once the cane was cut, it could be transported to the mill along the farm’s interior roads rather than on the highway, which was heavily trafficked, full of twists and turns, and capable of sending trucks keeling over like overstuffed dinosaurs. The Santa Rosa had an excellent manager, a German who had lived on the island for more than twenty years and married a girl from Guayamés. Don Esteban never had to visit the mill at all.
Don Esteban was a very cultured man who knew a little of everything. He wasn’t an architect, but he understood the laws of perspective, volume, and depth. He wasn’t a painter, but he could extemporize on Renaissance painting. He wasn’t a mechanic, but he could take his Buick’s engine apart and put it back together again in no time at all. He was, in short, a dilettante who was totally inept at anything that had to do with making money but an expert at spending it. People in Guayamés were fond of him because he was very affectionate, but they knew he didn’t like to work. They laughed at him behind his back and said he was like the Indian chief’s son who loved to drink cane juice but wouldn’t cut a stalk. Since his granddaughter’s tragic death, Don Esteban had worked even less. He had become very pious and was always alone.
After meeting Don Esteban at the convent’s portería three Sundays in a row, Artemisa decided to help the Carmelite nuns at the convent in Guayamés. They had asked her to assist with their nursing work. It would be a good experience, she said. Her mother believed her, but Miña knew she was lying. “You’re in love with Don Esteban de la Rosa and you’re figuring out how to catch him,” she said. “You can’t fool me, Artemisa. Your mother didn’t name you after the goddess of the chase for nothing.”
“Goddess of the chase, goddess of the chase,” Felicia, Miña’s parrot, screeched, swinging from one leg to the other inside her wire cage.
The following Sunday when Tía Artemisa met Don Esteban at the convent, she invited him to come to dinner at Emajaguas, and Don Esteban accepted. Artemisa knew Valeria would like him. He had money, he had an aesthetic sensibility, and he was a good man, the three prerequisites Abuela required of her daughter’s suitors. But what was even more important, Don Esteban was an hacendado. Tío Venancio was a lawyer, Tío Antonio was a doctor, Aurelio was an engineer. Abuela Valeria’s three sons-in-law all had respectable careers, but they were in a different category. Don Esteban owned a sugar mill and more than three thousand acres of land; he belonged to the almost extinct criollo sugar aristocracy. Valeria was sure that, wherever he was in heaven, Alvaro would be very pleased with Artemisa’s future match.
Abuela Valeria invited Don Esteban for dinner on another occasion. That afternoon she assembled everybody at Emajaguas and told them they had to make Don Esteban “declararse”—ask Tía Artemisa for her hand. Gela, the cook, baked a guinea hen in passion-fruit sauce for him; Dido, who was home on a visit, recited Neruda’s poetry from Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada—“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”—at dinner; Lakhmé wore her flame-colored skirt with coins at the hem and did a belly dance to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade. Then everybody disappeared and left Don Esteban and Artemisa sitting by themselves on the living-room sofa. But Don Esteban didn’t get the hint. After a few minutes, he kissed Artemisa’s hand and politely said good-bye.
They went everywhere together: to Mass and Holy Communion in the morning, to the slums to do charity work and to the monastery to help out the nuns in the afternoon, to the movies in the evening. Don Esteban was a respectable older gentleman, so Abuela Valeria didn’t think Tía Artemisa needed a chaperon; they always went out by themselves. But months went by and Don Esteban didn’t make his move.
Don Esteban’s mother had enjoyed diamonds, and when she passed away Don Esteban had inherited them. He traveled to New York and sold Harry Winston, the Fifth Avenue jeweler, all her diamonds but one, a perfect blue-white three-carat solitaire. Harry Winston paid half a million dollars in cash for the gems—a substantial sum at the time—and Don Esteban put the money in a safe-deposit box at the bank, together with the perfect diamond he didn’t sell. When he started going out with Tía Artemisa he took the diamond to Guayamés’s best jeweler and asked him to set it in a magnificent platinum mounting. He planned to give it to Artemisa as an engagement ring, but he kept postponing the date.
After Blanca Rosa flew back to God, it was as if a mantle of sadness had fallen over Don Esteban. Every time he saw something white—a feather, a white ribbon, a bit of lace—he thought of her, and because there were so many white things in this world, Blanca Rosa was always before his eyes. He talked to Tía Artemisa about his granddaughter: how much Blanca had cried when she was a year old and had stuck a piece of string up her nose, giving her a mysterious fever no one could cure, how she had slipped on her new shoes when she was two and had fallen headlong down the stairs and had to be taken to the hospital to have stitches in her forehead. Artemisa was very perceptive, and it didn’t take her long to realize that something was terribly wrong. Don Esteban’s heart was locked up tight against her because Blanca Rosa in her marabou coat was sitting on top of its lid. Her ghost needed to be put to rest.
One day Don Esteban told Artemisa he had decided to invest the cash from his mother’s gems in the stock market. He didn’t need the money, he said. He had a generous enough income from the Santa Rosa to send money to his father and live comfortably on what was left, but he wanted to do something that would keep him occupied. He thought playing the stock market was a good idea. He telephoned Pablo Urdaneta, a stockbroker from Guayamés who was a friend of his, and told him he wanted to see him. He had half a million dollars in cash in the bank, he said, and wished to invest it in something humanitarian.
Pablo Urdaneta knew that Don Esteban’s son had been killed in the war, and he also knew that Don Esteban had become very religious since his granddaughter’s death and was always doing charity work. When he got Don Esteban’s telephone call he came running to the house carrying a large suitcase in his hand. Don Esteban invited Urdaneta to sit down in the living room. His friend put the suitcase on his knees, pushed the bronze springs on each side, and opened the lid slowly, as if he were about to show Don Esteban something very precious. Out came a captain’s billed cap with a shiny leather visor, an infantryman’s cap with a pair of tiny bronze rifles pinned in front, and a khaki shirt with epaulets and brass galloons.
Urdaneta handled the items delicately, almost as if they were sacred. Then he spread them out on one of Don Esteban’s marble-topped tables. “Believe it or not, these items were made by Puerto Rican women to be worn by American soldiers fighting in Europe during the war. But now the war is over and we have no more government contracts; our seamstresses are dying of hunger. We need money to get started, so we can buy them sewing equipment and form a new company. This is a worthy cause, Don Esteban. Instead of investing in the stock market, put your money in the Puerto Rican needle industry. You’ll be giving our seamstresses jobs and you’ll be doing your patriotic duty.”
Don Esteban stared at the uniforms and thought of his son who was buried in Normandy in an army un
iform made by Puerto Rican hands. He got up from his chair, went to his study, and came back with a leather case full of money. “You may go ahead and invest this cash in the Puerto Rican needle industry in my name,” he said solemnly.
Two months later, Urdaneta came to Don Esteban’s house again. He told him that the needle industry had taken a dive and that clothes made on the island weren’t sought after anymore. The Taiwan market had just opened, and the Puerto Rican industry just couldn’t compete with the Chinese. In Taiwan, women didn’t earn a minimum wage, had never heard of social security, medical insurance, or the right to go on strike. Taiwan was an investor’s paradise, but it was hell for those poor women. Would Don Esteban consider investing in the Chinese needle industry? Maybe he could help the needle-workers there and at the same time recover a part of what he had lost. Urdaneta would need an additional five hundred thousand dollars if Don Esteban was interested.
Don Esteban thought about it for a few days. He didn’t have the money, but he knew the bank would lend it to him if he put up the central Santa Rosa as collateral. He hated to think he had lost such a large amount of money—half a million dollars—in such a short time. But he took a loan for another half a million from the bank, called up Pablo Urdaneta, gave him the cash, and told him to invest it in Taiwan. When two weeks went by and Don Esteban didn’t hear from Urdaneta, he telephoned his brokerage firm and was told the broker didn’t work there anymore. He had taken the money and vanished from the island.
Eccentric Neighborhood Page 6