When Father went on a trip he always brought back two beautiful presents, one for me and one for Mother. Once he went on a business trip to Mexico and bought her a magnificent silver and turquoise bracelet. I got one exactly like it, only daintier. When he traveled to the island of Margarita, off the coast of Venezuela, he bought her a magnificent freshwater-pearl crucifix and brought me one just as beautiful, only smaller. I never wore the jewelry, but I kept it as a token of Father’s love.
Mother loved Father, but the protected domestic life she led in Las Bougainvilleas slowly ate away at her self-respect. Father, in turn, adored her, but there was a blind spot in his love. I remember one Saturday morning when I spilled ink on an antique French Provincial chair in Mother’s bedroom. Going to fill my Parker pen at her marble-topped vanity, which doubled as a desk, I stumbled and carelessly dropped the ink bottle. I tried to take out the stain with milk, but it spread all over the silk upholstery. When Mother came home from shopping she was furious. She slapped me and called me a scatterbrain. She ordered me to my room for the rest of the day. Father laughed and told her that a chair was just a chair and that I was only trying to do my homework; she shouldn’t lose her perspective. Mother burst into tears and shut herself up in her room. I apologized through the locked door, but secretly I rejoiced. I stood there next to Father and took his long, slender hand in mine. Mother couldn’t stop crying. Father winked at me, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and quietly locked me in my room. I felt betrayed.
Another time, the three of us went to visit Abuela Valeria at Emajaguas and stayed overnight. Alvaro had a baseball game and didn’t come. When I woke up I discovered I had my period. I hated having it. It kept me from swimming, going out to play baseball, behaving like a tomboy. I locked myself in the bathroom, rinsed my pajama pants, and hung them to dry over the curtain rod. I wanted to pretend nothing had happened. Rather than ask Mother for a sanitary napkin, I stuffed my panties with toilet paper.
After lunch we got into the car; Father was driving. We had been traveling over an hour and were halfway to Las Bougainvilleas when Mother asked if I had packed my new pajamas in my overnight bag. “I forgot them at Emajaguas,” I said. “I got the curse last night.” Mother dug her nails into my arm. “We’ll have to drive back to get them then. Aurelio, turn the car around.” Father tried to calm her. “We can get them the next time we visit your mother, dear. We don’t have to go back right now.” But Mother was beside herself. “You little idiot!” she said. “Why do you have to be so careless? Your head’s always in the clouds.”
Father ignored us. He looked out the window and turned the car around at the next curve; soon we were speeding back to Emajaguas. I was in tears, not because of Mother’s scolding but because I was convinced Father loved Clarissa more than he loved me.
FORTY-THREE
Father Runs for Governor
IN 1956 TÍO VENANCIO approached Father and said, “I’ve run for governor too many times and people are tired of my image. I think we’d stand a much better chance if you ran this time. But I’ll still be president of the party. I’ll go on taking care of the strategy and organization. Together we’ll keep the Partido Republicano Incondicional afloat.”
Venancio’s wheelings and dealings with the sugar barons were hurting him at the polls. Still, the Partido Republicano Incondicional stood for statehood, Father’s sacred cause, and every four years at election time “el ideal” carried a large portion of the island’s votes.
Father accepted Tío Venancio’s offer and ran for governor. There were many towns to visit, many speeches to make. The Partido Democrático Institucional had a formidable political machine and was very difficult to defeat. Mother was terrified that something might happen to Father at one of the mítines. His absences were a torture to her, as she could hardly sleep at night.
Father became a politician, a public figure, and sometimes a bit of a ham actor. The moment he climbed the steps of the stumping platform he cast himself in the role of “padre de la patria.” During his campaign one of the most popular of the party’s songs, sung by groups of children clapping their hands delightedly, was “Vernet, Papá, queremos estadidad!” Aurelio loved it all: he patted, hugged, and kissed people so effusively that he became infected with mange more than once; his hair began to fall out and he got blisters all over his skin, just like the stray dogs that wandered the streets of La Concordia. Every time I heard that song I got stinging mad. My father was my father, and that stupid slogan relegated me to the status of a distant cousin.
As the campaign progressed and Father’s absences grew more frequent, Mother grew jealous of other women. She was constantly on the lookout, imagining that Father had a lover in every town. She was suspicious of his secretaries, and she made him fire all the female ones and hire only males. When she walked down the street with Father, if a woman passed by swinging her hips and batting her eyelashes because she recognized the handsome candidate for governor, Mother would narrow her eyes, whisper, “Bitch!” and hang on even more tightly to his arm. Once, a particularly good-looking party functionary walked by during a party convention, and Mother strode up quickly behind her, smacked her on the behind, and yanked a tuft of hair from her head. Then she ran down the aisle and out into the street, where she waited around the corner until Father got the car to take her home. Fortunately, Aurelio was so popular with the female constituency that these episodes never had serious consequences.
Mother’s temper tantrums began to get worse. She grew furious at the new gardener, who was a drunkard and never watered the plants; at the maid, who was a puta if she visited her boyfriend on her day off. Eladio, the Chinese cook, once got so upset at her when she called him a carbonero—a coalman—for overcooking the London broil that he threatened her with a knife, and Mother had to run and lock herself in her bedroom. She was jealous of the maids and cooks and treated them so poorly that they never stayed long. It seemed as if a different one walked through the door every month.
She would have Crisótbal drive her to the slums in the Cadillac to look for the daughters of poor but decent families whom the Siervas de María had recommended to her as maids, but after a while she couldn’t find anyone. The shantytown huts were made of flattened tin, bits of wood, and cardboard, and the streets were labyrinthine. The Cadillac would turn left and right a dozen times before it arrived at the right address; often people would “accidentally” throw garbage out their windows as the car went by. This would give the girls time to hide under the bed or scurry out the back door of the house as soon as they heard the Cadillac coming, and their parents would claim to be childless.
One time Mother went to confession at La Inmaculada, the chapel where Abuela Adela had done her charity work. It was near a slum where many of the girls who worked as maids in Las Bougainvilleas lived, so the parish priest knew many of them personally. When Mother knelt in the confessional and began to excuse herself for her short temper, the parish priest grew curious and asked her name. When she identified herself, the priest said: “I’ve heard a lot about you from my parishioners, my dear—and I’m very interested in what you have to say. A bad temper may be only a venial sin, but when you deprive someone of his dignity, it can also be a path of red-hot bricks that leads to hell!” Mother’s face flushed and she wished the earth would swallow her up. She was so embarrassed she did her best to control her temper for a while.
Most of all, I think, Clarissa was jealous of me. I was half a Rivas de Santillana; it didn’t matter how much she insisted I resembled the Vernets. When Father’s political campaign intensified and Clarissa was too tired to accompany him, he asked me to stand beside him on the platform when he spoke. I was eighteen and this made me feel important. Father needed me, I told myself, and my presence in this world made Mother’s just a little bit less necessary.
Father had to travel to New York in search of funds for his campaign. He took Tío Ulises along, which galled Mother, who regarded her brother-in-law as a relentless skirt chase
r. But Father set her mind to rest by assuring her that Ulises was essential because of his excellent connections with the mayor of New York, who arranged for them to rent Madison Square Garden for a nominal sum. The Partido Republicano would hold a Puerto Rican rally there to raise money for the statehood campaign.
It was past midnight when Father returned a week later. As soon as I heard his car turn into the driveway, I got out of bed and flew across the yellow and gray tiles of the terrace to the door. Dressed in his navy-blue wool suit and gray silk tie, with his cinnamon-colored hair, light brown eyes, and delicate mustache, he was the handsomest man on earth. I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him on both cheeks.
Mother, strangely enough, stayed in her room. When Father went to the master bedroom calling her name, I followed, ignoring the fact that they probably wanted to be alone.
Mother sat propped up in bed in one of her silk georgette nightgowns. Her table lamp, a Sèvres shepherd dressed in a blue jacket, threw a delicate oval of light over her embroidered coverlet.
“Did you have a nice trip?” she asked Father coolly, without glancing up from the novel she was reading.
Father said yes and sat on the edge of the bed. He leaned over to give Mother a kiss. “Siglinda called this afternoon,” Clarissa went on. “She said she saw a picture in the Daily News of Ulises and you at Madison Square Garden. She said you weren’t alone; there was a platinum blonde hanging on to each of you.”
Aurelio burst out laughing. “You can’t be serious!” he said. “We’ve been married for more than twenty years and you’re behaving like a jealous bride!” he said. He turned and winked at me. “They were campaign aides. Didn’t you notice the statehood flags draped across their chests?”
I laughed, too, and looked down sheepishly at the floor. I didn’t dare look at Mother. “I have the proof right here that I was thinking of you the whole time!” Father added, pulling a small black suede box from his pocket and putting it on Mother’s lap. “Open it,” he said, smiling broadly. Mother looked at him, eyebrows knit. She took the ring out of the box: it was a three-carat star sapphire. But instead of putting it on her finger, she threw it angrily toward a corner of the room.
I stood there petrified. Father got up laughing from the bed and went looking for the ring under the wardrobe. When he found it, he came over to where I was. “You take it, darling,” he said, slipping the ring back in the box. “Your mother’s right not to want it; she deserves something much better. I should have bought her a diamond.”
“Don’t you dare, Elvira! Your father has a guilty conscience and he’s simply trying to make amends!” Mother shrieked from the bed.
But I took the box, opened it, and carefully slid the jewel onto my finger.
“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, kissing him again.
FORTY-FOUR
The Queen of Music
THERE WERE FEW CULTURAL activities in La Concordia; the Athena Theater seldom presented operas or ballets, and there was no public library. Probably because she was bored, Mother one day accepted an invitation to a bridge party at the house of Rosa Luisa Sheridan, the wife of a distillery owner. Not everyone in La Concordia got invited to Rosa Luisa’s parties, but Mother belonged to the sugarcane aristocracy of Guayamés and Rosa Luisa considered her one of her own.
The sugar barons of Las Bougainvilleas still managed to live relatively well, thanks to rum’s golden ambrosia. Most of them had their own distilleries—Ron Llave, Ron Palo Viejo, Ron Bocachica, Ron Caneca, Ron Carioca, Ron Agüeybaná—which stood on the outskirts of La Concordia. But with the sugar industry on the wane, the reign of King Rum was coming to an end also, and the sugar barons knew it. Every once in a while, a distillery would be uprooted piece by piece like a half-rusted dinosaur and shipped to Santo Domingo or Venezuela, where it would be reassembled and the sugar barons would begin to make money thanks to the meager salaries paid to the peons.
The only thing the sugar barons could do was resign themselves to seeing their fortunes dwindle and live it up as best they could with the last swigs of rum at the bottom of the barrel. Probably for that reason the expression for getting plastered at the time was darse el palo, literally “clubbing oneself to death.”
Every sugar baron’s house in Las Bougainvilleas had a bar made of glass blocks, with colored lights, a brass rail, nickel-bright stools, a polished mahogany counter, and shelves loaded with liquor at the back. The barroom usually had no windows, which added to the shadowy cabaret atmosphere, already clouded with cigarette smoke. A phonograph with huge Philco speakers ensconced in a “built-in” wall unit exuded mood music, and an air conditioner was usually kept going full blast, so the sugar barons could pretend they were in New York. Pickaninnies with corkscrew penises, Coca-Cola openers shaped like steel breasts, pin-up calendars with naked models of all shapes and sizes were part of the usual decor. The exception to the rule was our house at 1 Avenida Cañafístula, where Father and Mother would have had their heads chopped off before allowing a bar. Whenever they gave a party, they stopped serving drinks at midnight, a hint for everybody to go home.
These bars often had a door leading to the back of the house, where gentlemen met their paramours and could make a discreet exit without their wives noticing anything amiss. Rum and sex were, in fact, the two main entertainments in Las Bougainvilleas. The men pursued them openly. The women, on the other hand, drank like fish but had to be careful about the sex. Female infidelity was not permitted—shooting your wife if you caught her in flagrante was a sport husbands practiced successfully—and ladies were forced to socialize only with other ladies. Mother, isolated at 1 Cañafístula, was unaware of this situation when she went to Rosa Luisa Sheridan’s bridge party.
She got there late, delayed by a dental appointment, and found the front door ajar. She stepped in, pushing it fully open with her umbrella and calling out for Rosa Luisa. Soft music wafted out from the bar. Instead of the elegant little card tables she was expecting, with ladies shuffling the deck and betting in low voices, she saw a group of women dancing and others lying on cushions strewn on the floor. They were kissing and rubbing slowly against one another, and they were so drunk they didn’t even notice Clarissa standing there. She turned and ran out of the house, her face flaming.
Aside from backroom bars, coronation balls were another form of escape for the sugar barons. They were held every year at the Sports Club, located in an art nouveau building designed by Bijas at the beginning of the century. It had once been a beautiful building, and one could still pick out the elegant prairie-style design of its overhangs and courtyards. But now the structure was eaten through by termites, and the ballroom’s plank floor was full of holes. There were coronation balls for everything: for the Carnival of Pirates, for the Carnival of Animals, for the Carnival of Planets, for the Carnival of Birds, for the Carnival of Dolls. Clarissa and Aurelio had each taken part in a carnival when they were teenagers: Clarissa had been Queen of the Dolls and Aurelio King of the Planets. When I heard about this, I told Father I wanted to be Queen of the Carnival at the Sports Club also. Father probably would have said no if it hadn’t been 1956 and he hadn’t been running for governor.
My parents offered to pay all the expenses of the carnival that year and I was named Queen of Music. I was exultant. The ball was to be given in June, and Mother ordered a beautiful dress for me from Saks Fifth Avenue (this was a formal affair and Monserrate Cobián was simply not up to the occasion). The ball was a perfect opportunity for political fund-raising, as was the cocktail party preceding the ball which would be thrown in San Juan.
My dress and train were of billowing white organza embroidered with musical notes, and the skirt was held in place by a huge hoop petticoat. A crown with a giant rhinestone C clef sat on my head. Father himself, dressed in tails, played the first movement of Chopin’s second piano concerto on the Bechstein, specially brought over to the club for the night.
Followed by my pages and maids of honor, I strutted up the s
tairs to my throne—a huge lyre, done in pearl-colored silk—and regally seated myself. From up there I saw Mother hiding behind a column, dressed in black and clutching the little white lace handkerchief with which she had been dabbing powder on my face a few minutes earlier to dry my perspiration and take away the shine as she prayed that nothing would go wrong.
As carnival queen I accompanied Father to many banquets, balls, and rallies that summer, driving through the towns of the island. Mother usually stayed home.
FORTY-FIVE
Venecia’s Passage to Heaven
OUR HOUSE WAS NEXT to Tío Ulises’s, and separated from it by a low stuccoed wall with an arched doorway. The door was later walled up, but its outline remained there for years, and it excited my curiosity as a child. Why had it been cemented over? I didn’t unravel the mystery until many years later.
Tío Ulises’s house at 2 Avenida Cañafístula had a showy wrought-iron fence decorated with white scrolls and spirals that gave it a festive look. Ours had a seven-foot-high wall around it that created a cloistered atmosphere that Clarissa cherished because it reminded her of Emajaguas. Next to Tío Ulises’s house came Tío Roque’s, and next to Roque’s was Tío Damián’s, both as beautiful as their elder brothers’. On the other side of the street was a handsome plot of land the Vernets bought for Abuelo Chaguito, hoping to convince him to build there someday. Several years after Abuela Adela’s passing, Abuelo Chaguito was still living with Brunhilda in the old wooden house on Calle Esperanza in the center of town. He didn’t want to leave; there were too many memories there of his life with Adela.
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