When Brunhilda found out about this, she stopped laughing. “So that’s the way things are going to be!” she fumed at Abuelo Chaguito. “I guess I’ll just have to go back to work.” And she opened up a pastry shop in the house at 13 Calle Esperanza.
Soon Brunhilda became famous in La Concordia for her wedding cakes. Every young lady of social standing wanted a Brunhilda original at her wedding. There were golden ziggurats all over the house: on the heavy oak table in the dining room, on the marble-topped sideboard, on the delicate oval end tables in the living room, even on the piano bench—six- and seven-tiered constructions that Brunhilda said were her palaces of love. The cakes were covered with satiny icing and decorated with bouquets of roses sprinkled with silver globules, glass lakes with swans skimming the surface, stairways beneath arches braided with ribbons, extravagant gazebos where white doves kissed and nuzzled, just as Chaguito wanted to do every night—except Brunhilda now kept him at bay. And on the base of each cake Brunhilda wrote with a frosting nib trailing creamy sugar mixed with egg white: “Love is a wicked poison and also a divine balm. Its antidote is unknown, but only thanks to love does man survive.”
To please her clientele in La Concordia, Brunhilda added a special detail to each cake, a reproduction of one of the beautiful buildings the citizens were so proud of, baked separately and then covered with icing: the Athena Theater, the casino, the Adelphi Masonic Lodge, the cathedral, the firehouse. Before the bride and groom sliced the first piece of wedding cake with a silver knife, they had to take the building off the top and eat it piece by piece until not even a crumb was left. This architectural cannibalism of his beloved city almost made Chaguito cry. He thought Brunhilda was purposely ridiculing his respect for a city that had been built as a monument to individual entrepreneurship, and he wondered what his long-gone friend Bijas, the architect, would have said if he had seen such a sacrilege: La Concordia’s beautiful buildings crumbling under the dainty teeth of young brides and grooms. But by now Brunhilda had her own money—she was paid hundreds of dollars for each cake—and Abuelo Chaguito couldn’t remedy the situation.
THIRTY-FOUR
The Kingdom of Cement
ALMOST NO ONE ON the island remembers the thirties anymore, los años de las vacas flacas—the years of lean cows. But Father never forgot them. He was always looking to save something for hard times. “El que guarda siempre encuentra”—“He who saves always finds”—was one of his favorite sayings, which was very different from Tía Artemisa’s “El que da lo que tiene a pedir se atiene”—“If you give away what you own, one day you’ll have to beg.”
In 1932 San Ciprián left the island’s coffee industry in ruins. The forests of mahogany, oak, and yagrumo trees that served as a canopy for the delicate red coffee beans were decimated, and the mountains looked as if they had been blasted by a bomb. Coffee never recuperated, but although the sugarcane fields around La Concordia were flattened, that industry soon began to revive. La Concordia’s merchants and hacendados were a tough breed, and they immediately set to work to rescue their crops.
First they set fire to them. Then they planted new seeds. A year later, the rustling cane stalks were almost ready for cutting again. Orders for the crushing mills and the evaporators used to process molasses into sugar began to pour into Vernet Construction. Father was relieved, but Fernando Martín, the leader of the Partido Democrático Institucional, was furious. He had believed that San Ciprián, coming four short years after San Felipe, was sugarcane’s coup de grâce, that the yerba del diablo, or devil’s weed, had been stamped out for good. The island would finally rid itself of the absentee sugar consortiums, as well as of the exploiting criollo hacendados. But the weed was springing up again all over the island.
Fernando Martín was still a fledgling politician then, but he had a lot of influence in Washington. He supported the Costigan-Jones bill, which set a quota on sugar-producing mills—domestic and foreign—and was particularly onerous for the Puerto Rican sugar industry. In February 1934, the U.S. Congress made the bill law. Father himself told me the story.
The Partido Republicano Incondicional—Tío Venancio’s and the sugar barons’ party—was in power. But although the crisis in the sugar industry had eased and the cane fields were producing again, sugar prices kept falling drastically in the States. Shiploads were imported from Cuba, which was thirteen times larger than Puerto Rico and produced much more sugar. To make matters worse, Hawaii, though thousands of miles away, was not so far that it couldn’t compete with us, and soon it added to the avalanche. Sugar beets, moreover, were now produced by the ton in Louisiana. The United States was awash in sugar.
Many years later, when the Vernets had established themselves, Abuelo Chaguito used to say with relish that the Costigan-Jones law had been to the Puerto Rican sugarcane aristocracy what the guillotine had been to the French. In 1933 sugar production on the island had reached 1,101,023 tons, but the quota for 1934, imposed by the Costigan-Jones law, was 826,000 tons. This was a hard blow for La Concordia, where sugar was everything.
The American consortiums that had taken over the sugar-producing industry in Cuba, as well as those in Louisiana, were a lot more powerful than the mainland owners of Aguirre, Eastern Sugar, and Guánica Central, so their sugar quotas were much higher. In Cuba, Fulgencio Batista had just come to power, and he promised to let the United States build naval bases on the island if Cuba’s sugar quota was respected.
Vernet Construction immediately began to feel the pinch. Aurelio, Ulises, Roque, Damián, and Abuelo Chaguito went spinning around the island trying to get the sugar barons to pay their debts. Not one of them did. Centrales Machete, Bocachica, Cortada, Constancia, and Carambola—the five criollo mills that surrounded La Concordia—began to list like ships about to go down. The large American sugar mills had a hard time keeping afloat as well. There was nothing the brothers could do but stare in horror at the multiple catastrophe, aware that Vernet Construction, tethered as it was to the sugar mills, might soon end up at the bottom of the ocean.
Organized labor was the next blight, and strikes ravaged the sugar mills. In November 1934 it was rumored that the Partido Socialista was going to carry the elections. But people were shot by mysterious agents for trying to prevent the sugar barons from locking them up in cattle pens on election day, and things stayed as they were. The Partido Republicano Incondicional won.
The turmoil continued and the workers of Vernet Construction also went out. Abuelo Chaguito had to reduce the workweek to three days and lay off ten of his workers at the foundry. Salaries were cut twenty percent. Abuelo felt terribly guilty, knowing his employees were already on the verge of starvation, but it was the only way he would be able to refinance his debt to U.S. Steel in Michigan.
Then something extraordinary happened. In 1936 Eleanor Roosevelt visited Puerto Rico. The President had sent her to investigate accusations that the Costigan-Jones law had benefited only the mill owners, who received cash compensation for a reduction of their quotas, while cane laborers by the hundreds were left without work. Governor Blanton Winship received Mrs. Roosevelt at the gubernatorial palace with a dozen roses wrapped in cellophane, but Mrs. Roosevelt wasn’t interested in the elegant reception the governor had organized for her. She asked him to cancel it, climbed into a Model T Ford, and went to visit the slums. She had a horsey face and was much too tall to be beautiful by Puerto Rican standards. But she talked to the women in the needle workshops and told them not to forget to exercise their right to vote, which they had just recently acquired. She talked with children about the importance of washing their hands before meals, brushing their teeth at night, and saying their prayers; she spoke in old people’s homes about the Social Security Act, which included the provision for retirement insurance her husband had succeeded in getting passed in 1935. Everybody loved her.
When she visited the schools she was amazed to see young girls embroidering lace handkerchiefs during their lunch hour in order to add a few p
ennies to the family income. She also visited the shacks of the sugarcane laborers and the factory workers. Typically these consisted of two rooms with no windows. The back room was dark; the front room’s only light came in through the doorway. There were no screens, no plumbing, no toilets, and women cooked outside on little coal stoves. It was like the Stone Age, and she was horrified.
Mrs. Roosevelt evidently had the President’s ear, because four months later he visited the island. He landed in La Concordia’s bay, where General Miles had landed forty years earlier. His caravan went up Calle del Real de la Marina, to the wild cheers of the crowd. The street was lined with American flags, and a triumphal arch had been set up at the entrance to La Concordia, with a lion—the city’s emblem—standing on each side. President Roosevelt saw that everything his wife had said was true, and as a result he assigned seventy million dollars to the island through the Puerto Rico Emergency Reconstruction Administration, better known as the PRERA. When he arrived at Plaza de las Delicias, the President gave a speech and pointed out the purpose of his program: relief for unemployment through public works. Housing projects would be built to relocate people living in the slums, aqueducts and sewer systems would be installed, streets would be paved and sidewalks laid.
“I went to hear the President’s speech,” Father told me once. “I had to stand on top of one of the lions surrounding the fountain in the plaza in order to see him, but I didn’t miss a word. When I got home I immediately summoned my brothers to Father’s office. ‘President Roosevelt is offering Puerto Rico an extraordinary opportunity,’ I said to them, and I described the public projects planned. ‘By next year, the demand for cement on the island will be three times what it is today. Why don’t we build a cement plant with the funds the federal government is willing to lend the island? We can raise part of the money for the plant by putting Vernet Construction itself up as collateral. I’m sure that if Ulises and I travel to Washington, we can get the rest of the funds.’
“But Ulises didn’t think it was a good idea, because it hadn’t occurred to him first. ‘Sugarcane will always be the backbone of our island,’ he said. ‘The mills will come out of their slump soon and they’ll be able to pay what they owe us. But if we try to build the equipment for the cement plant at the foundry and stop taking the hacendados’ orders, they’ll go someplace else and cancel our contracts. If the cement plant is a failure, Vernet Construction will never be able to recover. I think we should build a plant to manufacture chemical fertilizer instead.’
“‘Fertilizer?’ I asked Ulises, laughing so hard I almost fell out of my chair. ‘You must be out of your mind! Agriculture is dead. Cement is the future, sugarcane is the past.’”
But my father was afraid of getting Vernet Construction even more deeply into debt. He knew the cement plant would cost at least two million dollars and that the federal government wouldn’t lend such a large amount to a Puerto Rican enterprise. “Let’s wait a while and take advantage of the building that will soon be done in La Concordia by the PRERA,” he said to his brothers wisely. “The aqueduct and sewer system, the bridges—we can do all that easily at the foundry. That way we’ll save money and have more capital to invest in the cement plant when the time comes.”
Father turned out to be right. The PRERA announced a half-million-dollar loan to Governor Winship to build a cement plant in San Juan; a Baltimore firm would supply the machinery. Later the PRERA lent Winship an additional million dollars, and in three years the cement plant began to operate. But thanks to the New Deal’s reconstruction plans, the demand for cement on the island was more than the government’s plant was able to supply.
For the next five years Vernet Construction made miles of iron pipe for the sewage system of La Concordia and helped install it. It also built the city’s aqueduct, which brought water from the mountains. Thirty-five kilometers of street were paved and dozens of iron bridges spanning the island’s rivers were forged at the foundry. All of it was paid for in cash by the PRERA. By 1940 my grandfather and his four sons were almost ready to embark on their great adventure: building the Star Cement plant.
Abuelo Chaguito was euphoric. He danced around the living room singing “La Marseillaise,” with Siegfried and Gudrun barking after him. He was still a fireman at heart and cement was, in his eyes, the answer not only to his family’s troubles but to La Concordia’s. The Vernet family enterprise would at last be free of the scoundrel hacendados who had tortured him for so long. They had refused to pay for the equipment the Vernets had built and installed on commission and had left him so saddled with debt that it was a miracle Vernet Construction was still afloat.
Cement would now be produced at La Concordia, the most beautiful city on the island and the pride of the Masonic world. Star Cement would be made with Puerto Rican lime and Puerto Rican sand; the city would become practically indestructible. Bijas, Abuelo Chaguito’s architect friend, would have been proud of him. Chaguito wrote Star Cement’s first advertising ditty himself, and it went like this: “Build your house with Star Cement / And sleep secure at night, / Safe from fires, hurricanes, and termites, / That’s right!” It was sung over and over on La Concordia’s radio stations for years.
THIRTY-FIVE
The Vernets’ Star Begins to Rise
TÍO ROQUE AND TÍO Damián were as important in the building of the cement plant as their elder brothers. But unlike Aurelio and Tío Ulises, they were shy and didn’t tout their achievements all over town. The competition between Aurelio and Ulises, by contrast, never ceased. Aurelio needed to prove he was worthy of Adela’s trust every day of his life. Ulises was so absorbed in everything he did, he didn’t even notice that his brother was snapping at his heels.
Tío Roque was the most ungainly of the Vernet brothers. Short, with long ears and a thick nose, he looked like a bloodhound. He never did as well as his elder brothers in college, except during his junior year. That was when he took a course called Archaeology in Lowland South America and the Caribbean as a distraction from civil engineering. It was like discovering a lost paradise. He dropped all his courses in construction management, structural analysis, behavior of reinforced-concrete structures—subjects in which he was just scraping by—and signed up for a program in the prehistory of the Amazon region.
Roque was overwhelmed with admiration for the Taíno Indians, who were living on the island when Columbus discovered Puerto Rico in 1493. The Taínos lived in harmony with nature, following the rhythm of the sun, the moon, and the tides in their daily lives. They bathed two and three times a day in the island’s pristine rivers, smoked tobacco and campana leaves to cleanse themselves and communicate with the gods, and made love as often as they could in their hammocks of rainbow-colored twine braided with hummingbird feathers. Tío Roque thoroughly agreed with the Taíno Indians’ way of life.
After he began to study the Taíno culture, Roque decided he didn’t want to go back to the island. He wanted to live in Venezuela and look for the remains of the Ignery, the ancestors of the Taínos, in the Amazon basin. When Aurelio heard about his brother’s plan, he was incensed. It was not for this that Chaguito and Adela had sacrificed to send Roque to Northeastern. He took the first steamer to New York, arriving at Northeastern two weeks later.
The new cement plant, although still years off, was already on Aurelio’s mind, and he knew that without Roque’s help it would be impossible to begin building it. As a civil engineer, Roque would be essential in the assembling of the steel structures which would house the kiln and the heavy mill. But Aurelio didn’t scold him or tell him he was behaving selfishly, changing his plans at the last minute and letting his parents and his brothers down.
“Did you know the limestone quarry behind the site where we’re hoping to build has a Taíno Indian burial ground that’s two thousand years old? Hundreds of pottery shards, bones, and seashells were found in it recently—El Diario la Prensa just reported it. The Smithsonian Institution has expressed an interest, and we plan to mi
ne the limestone around it and save as many of the Taíno artifacts as possible. If you come to work with us, you can oversee the job yourself.” Aurelio had made the story up on the spur of the moment.
“Really?” Tío Roque asked, his eyes lighting up. “I’d love to do that. I’ll help you build the cement plant if you promise to let me supervise the excavation of the burial ground.”
Tío Roque studied hard and managed to graduate a year later. He went back to the island and helped his brothers build the cement plant, erecting the iron beams and reinforced-concrete pedestals that would hold up the long revolving gut of the mill. As soon as the plant was ready to produce cement, the electric shovels started to eat away at the nearby limestone quarry, which later was known in town as Vernet’s Cheese.
Tío Roque discovered that what Aurelio had said was true—the limestone hill turned out to contain several Taíno tombs. A square hole in the ground was discovered at the top, where apparently a chieftain had been buried. A dujo, or low chair, carved in stone with a lizard’s face protruding in front, was found at the site, as well as an elaborately carved macaná, a fighting club. Tío Roque was ecstatic. He carefully removed the relics and gave orders that, as soon as another tomb was found, all work at the quarry should stop and he should be notified. It wasn’t long before another tomb was located. Roque ran to the hill and crept into the square opening, at the bottom of which he found more priceless relics. He spent hours kneeling on the ground under a merciless sun, a small spatula and a brush in his hands, slowly unearthing the ancient objects and sniffing around to see if he could find more. Naturally, when the operators of the bulldozers, Caterpillars, and electric shovels—whose incomes depended on how fast Vernet’s Cheese disappeared under the jaws of their machines—realized what was happening, they were upset. From then on, the minute a Taíno yacimiento turned up, they would dig away at that side of the quarry as fast as they could, until it was buried under tons of debris. That was why, after the first couple of extraordinary archaeological finds, Tío Roque never discovered any more Taíno remains in Star Cement’s limestone quarry. He had to go scouting for Taíno relics elsewhere.
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