Eccentric Neighborhood

by Rosario Ferré

  When Ulises grew up he enjoyed selling as much as he did making love. “Both activities are an affirmation of life,” he’d say, “from both you derive the thrill of conquest. When you fuck, you vanquish by will; when you sell, you conquer by wile.” Abuelo Chaguito agreed with Tío Ulises in this respect; they both saw doing business as a kind of game in which the better team always won. Later, when Aurelio and his brothers were all back from their studies in the States, Vernet Construction became a team with four players, and Abuelo Chaguito was its captain. Their game was hardball: the winning team got everything and the losing team got nothing. It was sad, but those were the rules.

  Aurelio, my father, was so softhearted he couldn’t see a dead dog lying in the road without getting out of his car to bury it, and if the dog was hurt he’d take it home and nurse it back to health. Once he was driving home late at night from one of his jobs installing machinery at a sugar mill when he saw two drunks slashing each other with their machetes. Father got out of the car and stood between the struggling men. They didn’t want to kill a stranger, so they had to stop fighting.

  He was sentimental and romantic and tried to win Adela’s heart by learning to play the most difficult piano pieces. In 1916, when he was thirteen years old, he played Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso in a high school competition. Several students were participating, and his cousin Mariana Pasamontes was one of them. Mariana was eighteen, and she was a much more advanced student than Aurelio. Aurelio gave a commanding performance the day of the competition and won first prize. But when the principal came on stage to present him with a medal, he said he didn’t want it. He asked that the medal be given to Adela instead.

  Aurelio was something of a child prodigy, but his precociousness was due to his desperate effort to catch up with Tío Ulises. He skipped eighth grade and graduated from high school at sixteen, at the same time as Tío Ulises. They both went off to study in Boston and finished in record time, each with a college diploma under his arm—but Father also had a master’s degree. Tío Ulises was full of fun; he liked to drink and dance and go to parties. He had half a dozen girlfriends and knew all the artists in La Concordia, but Father never had any fun.

  While the brothers were in Boston they lived together at 22 Kingsbury Street, in a boardinghouse near Fenway Park. After school Aurelio worked as a waiter at a coffee shop on Huntington Avenue, near the Boston Conservatory of Music. Ulises got a job at a hardware store on Commonwealth Avenue. Being a born salesman, he immediately began to make more money than Aurelio. Every week Father received a letter from his mother telling him not to abandon the piano but to study at the conservatory no matter what the cost; his weekly letter from his father told him to quit the piano and do his best to get through Northeastern in three years.

  Aurelio would go directly from his classes to the piano and practice two hours every day. Then he would work at the coffee shop and study for his engineering courses until two in the morning. During his senior year he signed up for a course in circuits and devices and then forgot all about it. He didn’t go to a single class. When he was notified that the exam was the next day and that if he didn’t pass it he would fail the course—which meant he wouldn’t graduate—he pulled an all-nighter, took the exam the next morning, and just squeaked by. He didn’t know what the word tired meant. He was like a little lead soldier, always marching across the battlefield.

  Scrimping and saving, Abuela Adela and Abuelo Chaguito managed to send Roque and Damián to study at Northeastern too. Roque studied civil engineering and Damián chemical engineering, but as students they weren’t as good as Ulises and Aurelio. Roque was a slow learner and he had to cram for hours in order to pass a course; Damián was very intelligent but he was sensitive and sometimes got so nervous when he had to take an exam that he panicked and flunked. Adela had to keep writing them letters giving them moral support. She also threatened not to let them come home for summer vacation unless they passed their courses.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Obedient Giant

  IN 1926, TÍO ULISES married Caroline Allan, a platinum-blond Boston heiress whom he’d met while studying at the university. Abuelo Chaguito was too busy to go to the States and Abuela Adela wasn’t feeling up to traveling alone, so Aurelio was the only family member who attended the wedding. He was Tío Ulises’s best man and had to pawn his wristwatch—Adela’s graduation present to him that summer—to rent tails for the ceremony.

  Caroline came to live with the family at the house on Calle Esperanza, and she was like a daughter to Abuela Adela. For two years she kept Adela company and was a great help; Adela’s health was already fragile and she couldn’t move about easily. Caroline was Tía Celia’s best friend, and Caroline taught her perfect English. Adela felt sorry for Caroline for having married Ulises, the rascal of the family. She wished she had married my father instead, but Aurelio was already in love with Clarissa. Mother was a little stern for Adela’s tastes, and she was always going on about the Rivas de Santillana as if they were God’s gift to humanity.

  In 1925, the year before she married Tío Ulises, Caroline had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe. Her family had a “cottage” called Valcour in Newport, near The Breakers, the Vanderbilt mansion. Valcour had sixteen bedrooms, six bathrooms, a swimming pool, and a tennis court. The bathtubs ran both salt water and fresh water, hot or cold. The family also owned a yacht, the Cormorant, which sailed to the Bahamas every summer.

  “Why would an heiress marry an odd little mustachioed Latin lover and come to live on an exotic Caribbean island where half the population goes barefoot, doesn’t have enough to eat, and lives in palm-thatched huts with no sanitary facilities?” I asked Tía Celia once. “To run away from her family, of course!” Celia exclaimed.

  Caroline was madly in love with Tío Ulises. This was something I found extraordinary because Ulises was far from good-looking. He was short, and his close-set eyes, fleshy cheeks, and thick mustache made him look like a satisfied beaver. But I suppose it is true that a man as passionately in love with life as my uncle Ulises could make a woman feel rapturously happy.

  As long as she had her beloved Ulises at her side, Caroline didn’t mind sharing the only bathroom in the house with eight other family members, having the dogs’ ticks crawling up the legs of her bed, or passing the serving dishes around the table at dinnertime. She was a moonlit beauty who appeared cold and aloof on the surface. But her heart was a regular little volcano in a constant state of eruption. Like Abuela Adela, she was a woman with a mission, but hers was women’s suffrage. When she learned that women in Puerto Rico could not vote, she was horrified. In the States, women had secured the franchise in 1920, thanks to the Nineteenth Amendment.

  For two years Caroline worked with the suffragettes in La Concordia, organizing meetings in support of women’s right to equal pay and employment opportunities as well as to the vote. When Tía Celia began to talk of going to Nepal to be a missionary, Caroline gave her her full support. “The Vernets talk a lot about justice,” she said to Tío Ulises once, “but Amparo has studied only as far as high school. And Celia wants to be a missionary, but Chaguito won’t let her. What kind of justice is that? Where is the equality the Vernets are always touting?”

  As soon as my uncles returned to La Concordia, they went to work at Vernet Construction with their father. Adela wasn’t sorry to see Ulises become a businessman—he had commerce in his blood. But Aurelio was different. It made her cry to see how he never had time to sit down at the piano to play even a short little danza like “No me toques” by Morel Campos, which made her wish Chaguito were tickling her and they were sweethearts again.

  The twenties were a very difficult time on the island. Sugar prices plummeted after the First World War and Puerto Rican coffee couldn’t compete with Colombian, which sold for half the price on the mainland. In 1929 the Wall Street crash sent the economy reeling. But the island had already suffered another, even more severe blow: in 1928 San Felipe had struck.r />
  San Felipe was a flying sawmill that mowed down everything in its path. It arrived from the south and left through the north with winds so strong that anemometers were bent out of shape. None of Adela’s prayers worked, not even the novenas to San Antonio and Santa Agata, two saints who scare off rain because they like cats. Nobody was prepared for the catastrophe: communications were completely inadequate, and people had no way of knowing a hurricane was coming. My grandparents had to rely on the avocado tree in their garden, which plopped unripe fruit to the ground when there wasn’t a trace of wind. Suddenly the sky began to grow black and before long everything on the island was being shooed like a stray dog across the Caribbean. Even furniture had to be tied down if you didn’t want to find your living room rocker, your kitchen stove, and even the roof of your house hanging from a mangrove in Florida.

  On Calle Esperanza they were just as unprepared as everywhere else. Luckily the storm came in September and Tío Roque and Tío Damián were home for summer vacation. Ulises and Aurelio helped Abuelo Chaguito board up the windows and doors at the last minute. But when the hurricane began to blow full blast and the corrugated tin roof began to wobble like a kettledrum, Adela panicked and started to scream. Chaguito ordered his four sons to climb up to the attic and nail the beams of the ceiling to the walls of the house. The hurricane passed and Chaguito was euphoric. “Thanks to me, catastrophe was avoided!” he bragged with his usual modesty. Adela always wondered how close she had been to seeing her four sons fly off, hanging on to the roof’s wooden rafters.

  For months after San Felipe, the poor of La Concordia survived on flour, margarine, dry crackers, and powdered milk doled out by the U.S. Army. Over 10,500 residents were homeless. There was no gas, electricity, or running water. The sugar, coffee, and tobacco planters, who lost all their crops, usually had their machinery repaired at Vernet Construction, and when San Felipe flattened the island they delayed their payments even more than usual. Tío Ulises and Father had a terrible time bringing home enough money to meet the payroll. Aurelio spent most of the week on the road, driving from one hacienda to the next down winding back roads. He often had to sleep in the family’s old Model T. Once he woke up with a cow sticking its head through the window to lick his cheek.

  The large American sugar mills—Eastern Sugar, Guánica Central, and Aguirre—owned forty-six percent of the sugarcane-producing land on the island, but they refused to buy machinery from the Vernets. Abuelo Chaguito would rail against them in disbelief: “We’re American citizens, just like they are! We could repair and even build all the equipment for their mills at Vernet Construction!” But when he approached them, they always said the same thing. “Of course you could repair the mill’s evaporator. But how long would it last? We’d rather ship it to the States and have it repaired there to make sure it won’t break down again.” Chaguito refused to believe Americans could be so unfair. But since he couldn’t speak English and had to talk to the sugar-mill managers through an interpreter, there was no way he could convince them to the contrary.

  Once Ulises and Aurelio came back from the States, however, things began to change. They were fluent in English—with a Boston accent, to boot—and made a good impression on the American managers, who began to give Vernet Construction the contracts for repairs of the mills’ machinery and even to buy equipment. But then San Felipe struck, and the Americans couldn’t afford to buy any new machinery.

  To make matters worse, the only way Abuelo Chaguito could calm his anxiety was by spending money. Adela would yell at him that there was a boiling cauldron in hell just for him, full of all the gold he had wasted in his life. But it was as if it were raining in Hades.

  First it was parrots. Every week Abuelo Chaguito brought home a new one, and soon he had a collection. They were beautiful and shone like jewels inside their cages at the back of the garden. But they were also nasty and tried to bite Adela every time she fed them.

  “How can anything so beautiful be so vicious and make such an infernal noise?” she asked Chaguito, putting her hands to her ears to fend off the screeches and hoots. “If you bring one more of those devils dressed up in colored feathers to the house, I swear I’ll wring its neck and drop it into the soup pot.”

  But Chaguito went on with his extravagant hobby. He bought an emerald-green yellow-nape parrot from Venezuela for fifty dollars, then a red, green, and gold macaw from the Amazon for a hundred, and a deep-blue cockatoo from Paraguay for two hundred and fifty. Chaguito loved to tame them. He would let one out of its cage, perch it on his gloved hand, and take a large walnut from his pocket. The parrot would inspect it suspiciously, turning it this way and that on the tip of its beak, then crack open the shell and remove the sweet, crumbly meat with its tar-black tongue. Chaguito scratched its head as it ate, softly calling out, “Piojito, piojito,” until the parrot became drowsy and stopped wanting to bite him.

  “Taming parrots is simply a struggle of wills,” Chaguito would tell Adela. “I love to see how they lose some of their fierceness every time I feed them a nut.”

  But Abuela Adela had really begun to worry long before, when Chaguito started collecting automobiles. In 1907 Don Rafael Escribá, the owner of the Ridruejo sugar mill in Caguana, had offered to pay for a major repair to his evaporator with his two-year-old black Reo instead of cash. Chaguito was particularly attracted by the Reo’s canvas top and the wooden spokes on its wheels. So he brought home the Reo. Then in 1908 Don Marcelino Marfisi had wondered if he could pay for a new tahona with his blue sports Parry, which had patent-leather mud guards and bright steel spokes. It was practically new but Don Marcelino had almost perished when the car went off the road. Chaguito loved it. He could repair the damage at the foundry for nothing at all, and he accepted it as payment for the tahona. In 1909 he had repaired the cogwheel at the Antonsanti sugar mill, and instead of the thousand dollars they owed him, they asked if they could settle the account with a brand-new fire-engine-red Stutz Bear Cat. Mr. Antonsanti wanted to get rid of it because the price of sugar had dropped even more and he couldn’t meet his payments. Again Chaguito accepted the deal.

  Until then, Abuela Adela had behaved like an obedient giant. She was always asking Abuelo Chaguito how much she should spend on the house. When Chaguito gave her fifteen dollars and told her to buy enough food to last the family a whole month, she never complained. Abuelo Chaguito was older than Adela, and he had the wisdom of experience. The minute Chaguito walked into the house at the end of the day, Adela would stop whatever she was doing—whether teaching Tío Ulises to read or giving Aurelio a bath—and run to make him feel at home. She’d take his jacket and hang it up, put his straw hat on the stand, and demurely ask if he needed anything.

  Chaguito would tell her to bring him his slippers and a glass of iced lemonade and would walk out onto the terrace complaining about the heat. By the time he reached the shade of the mahogany tree at the back of the garden, where he loved to sit reading the newspaper, Ulises and Aurelio would be flying down the street like a pair of barefoot devils, because they knew she wouldn’t be paying attention to them for the rest of the afternoon.

  But the night Abuelo Chaguito drove the Stutz Bear Cat to the house, honking its silver horn all the way down Calle Esperanza from a party at La Concordia’s casino, Adela reached the end of her tether.

  It was two in the morning and she was sitting next to Damián, who was lying in bed with an asthma attack, when Abuelo Chaguito stepped gaily into the room all dressed up in his fireman’s dress uniform. Tío Damián’s chest was covered with a cheesecloth smeared with benjuí, a black unguent that was applied hot to make breathing easier, and Santa Ursula was beside Adela on a chair. Abuelo Chaguito was thinking how lucky he was to have such a wonderful wife who could bring up his children, cook, and clean on practically no money at all. He was feeling very affectionate. “And how is my Statue of Liberty tonight?” he said, drawing near to give her a kiss on the cheek. But Adela turned her face away.

 
“How much did that piece of junk cost?” she asked, looking angrily out the window at the Stutz parked across the street.

  “One thousand dollars. But you wouldn’t understand, dear,” Chaguito added diffidently. “A Stutz is a collector’s dream. It’s worth every penny.”

  Adela got up slowly from the bed and towered over Abuelo Chaguito. “Do you mind showing me the palms of your hands?” she asked in a controlled voice. There was an uncomfortable pause, but Chaguito decided to humor her. He spread his hands in front of him, palms upward, and gave a nervous little laugh. Adela examined them carefully. “That’s funny. I don’t see a hole in either one. And I’m sure there must be one because I’ve never met a wastrel like you in all my life. Tomorrow you’re going to take that nickel lobster back to Mr. Antonsanti and ask for the money he owes us, or else you’ll have a taste of Santa Ursula like everyone else in this house.”

  Abuelo Chaguito gave in and returned the Stutz to Mr. Antonsanti the next day, asking to be paid in cash. From then on, none of my grandfather’s smiles and tricks did him any good. Adela took the helm and managed the family budget. And if something ever went wrong, she had only to grab hold of Santa Ursula, the walls of the house would begin to tremble, and Abuelo Chaguito, as well as everyone else, would run for cover.

  THIRTY

  Tía Celia’s Blue Doll

  WHENEVER ABUELA ADELA FELL ill, Aurelio would take her place at the head of the table. He was worse than a drill sergeant. Abuelo Chaguito was so busy he often didn’t get home until after dinner. Tía Celia told me a story about Father once that gave me an idea of what he was like at the time.

  Meals at the house on Calle Esperanza were very different from the lavish dinners at Emajaguas. The Vernets always ate plain fare: steak and onions, French-fried potatoes, corn on the cob, fried eggs over white rice, and guineitos niños—baked baby plantains. Everything, though, was served in generous portions. Seafood and salads were luxuries that didn’t give you the calories necessary for hard work. (Aurelio had never tasted an oyster or a shrimp, much less a lobster, until he met Clarissa.)