Eccentric Neighborhood

by Rosario Ferré

  Celia looked at the bishop, her eyes flashing. She had lost a lot of weight lately—there was seldom enough to eat in Appalachia—but she was still a live wire. She wore her summer habit, which was made of heavy white wool, and a little round straw hat. She didn’t look hot at all. The bishop, on the other hand, who loved good food, looked like a sweating eggplant in his purple silk robe.

  “Mother was right, feeding the poor is very important, Your Excellency,” Celia answered circumspectly. “Do you know how I guessed when to knock on someone’s door in the Appalachians? If it smelled like sauerkraut or chop suey I didn’t knock because I knew they were either Jewish or Chinese and wouldn’t invite me in. But if it smelled like spaghetti or rice and beans, I’d knock on the door right away, because I might be able to baptize a sick baby and also snitch a free lunch.” The bishop smiled condescendingly. Being Irish, he hated spaghetti but he made a mental note that, as bishop of La Concordia, it was his duty to find out what rice and beans tasted like. He’d have his cook make some for him that very day.

  He began to question Tía Celia and learned that while Abuela Adela and her daughters had all been pious her sons, as well as her husband, were Freemasons. This had caused Adela to suffer deeply before she passed away, but it also meant that, hidden away in a corner of the Vernets’ minds, they had guilty consciences.

  “Are your brothers as selfless as you, my daughter?” the bishop asked Tía Celia affectionately.

  “My brothers are all very generous,” Tía Celia answered. “They love to give away money: Aurelio to politics, and Ulises and Roque to their girlfriends. If we can convert them from Freemasonry to Catholicism, I promise you, it’ll be worth it.”

  A few days later MacFarland, accompanied by a smiling Tía Celia, visited Abuelo Chaguito and Aurelio and suggested that, if they donated to the Church the sugarcane farm they had acquired on the outskirts of La Concordia for a possible expansion of the cement plant, the institution that would rise there would be called La Universidad de las Mercedes, in honor of Abuela Adela, whose full name had been Adela Mercedes Pasamontes. This generous donation, the bishop promised, would open the doors of the Holy Roman Empire to the Vernet family. The Order of Saint Gregory would be conferred on Abuelo Chaguito at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York by Cardinal Spellman himself in a solemn ceremony—but only if Chaguito renounced his Masonic beliefs.

  Aurelio brought the male members of the family together in the dining room at 1 Avenida Cañafístula to discuss the issue. Abuelo Chaguito said he would consider the donation: Freemasonry was on the decline worldwide, and taking a leading role in the Catholic Church could bring the family important prestige. But several terms would have to be added to the negotiations. Catalina, his granddaughter, would have to be admitted to Sacred Heart Academy; Tío Ulises’s marriage to Caroline Allan would at last be annulled without Ulises’s having to pay a cent for the annulment; and most important of all, Tía Celia would have to be allowed to return permanently to the island to do her missionary work in La Concordia—something Abuelo Chaguito had sought for years because he missed Celia so much. Bishop MacFarland agreed to all of Abuelo Chaguito’s terms.

  Soon afterward, Abuelo bought an old house near Vernet Construction and presented it to the Maryknolls as a gift. Tía Celia and her missionaries moved in and they began to work in La Concordia’s slums—Las Cajas, Pantanales, Despeñaperros, Riachuelo Seco.

  The first stone of La Universidad de las Mercedes was laid on September 10, 1950, the twentieth anniversary of Abuela Adela’s death. Bishop MacFarland officiated at a High Mass in La Concordia’s cathedral to commemorate the event, and Abuelo Chaguito, his four sons, and their wives—except Tía Clotilde—all received Holy Communion. It was Tía Celia’s day of triumph. She had won the battle for her brothers’ and her father’s souls.

  A year later the university opened its doors. The consecration was attended by the island’s highest clerical officials. A raised platform decorated with bouquets of white lilies was set up in the middle of the campus, where sugarcane had grown less than a year before; yellow-and-white banners—the colors of the Catholic Church—flapped in the wind. A portrait of Pope Pius XII hung over a red velvet curtain that served as a backdrop. Bishop MacFarland and the Vernet family sat on high-backed Spanish-style chairs above a sea of heads. Bishop MacFarland wanted to hold the family up as an example to La Concordia’s bourgeoisie, to see if he could generate more donations for the university.

  Abuelo Chaguito wore the medal of Saint Gregory pinned to his chest. The bishop’s round face beamed above the golden crucifix with a large amethyst at its center. Tía Celia and Tía Amparo, both dressed in white, sat next to Chaguito and the bishop. The four Vernet brothers and their wives sat behind them, the men in elegant business suits. Everybody was smiling except Clarissa, who looked with melancholy eyes at what remained of the sugarcane in a field nearby; soon it would be gone too. Unfortunately, Tía Clotilde had to sit under the portrait of Pope Pius XII, which made her particularly uncomfortable. As usual, she wore dark glasses and a large hat and didn’t try to hide the mocking smile that played on her face. She was amazed at the change that had come over the Vernets—from Freemasons to exemplary Catholics in one year.

  FORTY-NINE

  The Fire Engine

  TÍO ROQUE AND TÍA Clotilde had two sons, Enrique and Eduardo Vernet. When Eduardo, the younger, was born in 1938, Tía Clotilde said to Roque: “We’re a family now. Why don’t you strike out on your own? Aurelio and Ulises are in control of Vernet Construction, and Damián always does what they tell him to. You can’t make decisions without consulting them first. Right now you work well together because you’re brothers. But what’s going to happen when Enrique, Eduardo, Rodrigo, and Alvaro grow up? Cousins don’t always get along. It’s better to divide things now, while your father is still alive, so that each can take his money and do what he wants with it.”

  But Roque kept putting it off. And when Ulises broke away from the family and the brothers had to raise fifty million dollars to buy him out, it became impossible. “I’d be afraid to go out on my own, Clotilde,” Roque said. “My stocks are so valuable, Aurelio and Damián couldn’t buy them if they wanted to. We’d have to sell the cement plant, which would definitely be a mistake. Anyway, the truth is that I don’t want to go into business for myself. I prefer to work a few hours a day at the plant and go on my archaeological digs in my spare time. If I sell my shares and go out on my own, I’ll have to work twice as hard as I am now.”

  “We’re living a lie,” Tía Clotilde retorted. “We have everything we want—money, a beautiful house, a nice car—everything except self-respect. I want to feel proud that you’re my husband.” But Tío Roque wouldn’t relent. Instead, he shut himself up in his studio at the back of the house to study his dujos, his macanás, and his carved stone cemíes. Tía Clotilde shouted at him from the other side of the door: “All right, we’ll do as you say, Roque, and keep on sucking from Star Cement’s golden tit. But from now on, my children will call themselves Vernet Rosales, instead of just plain Vernet. And don’t expect me to go have lunch at the house on Calle Esperanza on Sundays anymore, because I’d rather stay home.”

  Enrique and Eduardo weren’t baptized when they were born, but Tía Clotilde didn’t let anyone know. When the time came for them to go to school, she sent them to the same Catholic school Alvaro and I went to, the exclusive Academia de los Padres Paules. Clotilde’s brothers had gone to public school, like all the other children from La Victoria. But since she was now married to a Vernet, her sons were accepted at Los Paules.

  Although Los Paules was a boys’ school, the fathers accepted girls until the fifth grade. Clarissa, ever faithful to the Rivas de Santillana tradition of thriftiness, decided to send me there for elementary school (instead of to the Sacred Heart, where the girls of good families went), in order to save gas. In 1944, when I entered first grade, gasoline was being rationed. Crisótbal would have to make only one
trip each way.

  There were two or three girls in my class and ten to twelve boys. We all wore khaki uniforms, Buster Brown shoes, and ties the same color as our uniform. The girls mingled freely with the boys, and there was absolutely no special treatment given to them. I loved Los Paules. Studying there, I was convinced that there was absolutely no difference in intelligence or spunk between boys and girls and that we could succeed equally in life.

  Tía Clotilde didn’t have a chauffeur and Tío Roque never learned to drive a car, so their children went to school by taxi. But when Tía Clotilde heard that Crisótbal drove us to Los Paules in a Cadillac, which Father bought after the Pontiac, she was very upset. She didn’t want her sons to grow up with an inferiority complex, so she called the fire department, where Abuelo Chaguito still had many friends, and asked if they couldn’t pick her children up in the afternoons.

  The students would all be playing in the school yard, running after one another and screaming and yelling like devils on the loose, when La Concordia’s fire engine would charge through the gate, bells clanging and siren screaming. Everybody would freeze as my cousins walked single file to the front of the engine and climbed in next to the driver. Then the firemen began clanging the bell again and drove to 3 Avenida Cañafístula at full speed.

  Once I entered Los Paules, it didn’t take me long to realize that my cousins were no match for my brother and that someday Alvaro would be president of Vernet Construction and of Star Cement.

  I was Father’s spendthrift daughter, and Alvaro was the practical, reasonable child. I always pressed the new tube of toothpaste in the middle, so that after a while I had to struggle to get anything out, while my brother always curled his tube from the bottom, evenly and systematically, until all that was left was a flat, empty noodle he could throw away with a clear conscience.

  The differences between my brother and me didn’t worry me when I was young; in fact, I wasn’t even aware they existed I was so busy dogging Father’s footsteps. I could do everything my brother did: I could swim like a fish, bat a baseball, and even hit a home run once in a while. But things changed the day my brother got into a terrible fight with our cousin Eduardo Vernet.

  Eduardo loved fistfights, and he looked it. He reminded me of a cross between a powder keg and a pork barrel. At Los Paules he was always picking on children who were smaller and weaker. His grandfather Rosales had been a worker at one of La Concordia’s foundries—competitors of Vernet Construction—and he still lived in La Victoria, where Eduardo often visited him. There bigger children were always trying to bully him, so he’d taken his fair share of punches too; he didn’t seem to mind. Moreover, his grandfather’s crematorium made him the butt of jokes: “Broil a friend and gift wrap him for Christmas,” someone would yell at him at recess, and Eduardo’s right fist would spring out like a sledgehammer and punch the smartass in the mouth.

  Once, when he was playing in the school yard, Eduardo punched ten-year-old Luis Martínez between the shoulder blades for no apparent reason, just as at La Victoria he himself had been attacked. Alvaro saw him and sauntered over. Eduardo was glowering at the younger student, who lay flat on his chest across the basketball court’s center line.

  “Do you think being a Vernet gives you the right to bully people?” my brother asked in an icy but polite voice.

  “No. But being a Vernet Rosales does,” Eduardo answered. “I’m not a Rivas de Santillana pansy who’s a mama’s boy.”

  The insult was heard all around the court, and instantly there was a crowd of students jostling Eduardo and my brother. I pushed my way through the ring of boys, conscious of the sweaty smell of puberty. Alvaro was slender, not brawny like Eduardo, who had three hundred and sixty muscles in his body, the thickest one in his head. My brother looked down on fistfights as well as on basketball and baseball, games only plebeian students played; he loved tennis because it was an aristocratic sport.

  Alvaro and I lived sheltered lives in Las Bougainvilleas, and it never occurred to my brother that something was expected of him after Eduardo’s insult. Alvaro was helping Luis up off the ground amid jeers and I was standing by his side, holding the thermos that I brought to school every day filled with tomato juice, when Eduardo’s sledgehammer swung out of the blue. Alvaro saw it coming out of the corner of his eye and ducked just in time so that it swished over his head. He turned and began to walk away, but Eduardo sent an unerring right straight from the shoulder, and his fist landed squarely in Alvaro’s face. I began to jump up and down in frustration and threw my tomato juice in Eduardo’s face.

  By the time we got home, Alvaro’s bloody nose had grown to twice its size; it no longer had that elegant, chiseled Rivas de Santillana look. But Alvaro clammed up and wouldn’t tell our parents what had happened. I was the one who confessed, between hiccups and tears. Eduardo had punched Alvaro, as well as a younger student, and all three had been put on probation.

  “Did you hit Eduardo back?” Father asked. Alvaro flushed and said no, he hadn’t had the chance. Father nodded his head approvingly. The important thing was to keep the peace in the Vernet family, Father said.

  But Mother thought the whole thing was preposterous. “Keep whose peace, the Vernets’ or the Rosaleses’?” she asked Father, her eyes glinting. That very afternoon she went into town and bought two pairs of twelve-ounce red boxing gloves that looked like huge ripe tomatoes. She made Father and Alvaro prance around the garden in Las Bougainvilleas all week, taking jabs at each other. For three weeks they kept it up until Alvaro was ready for his revenge. Then at recess he punched Eduardo in the jaw and knocked him out cold. That was the day I learned I was really very different from my father and my brother. Brute force—something that men took for granted but that was completely beyond women—was what set us apart.

  FIFTY

  Roque’s Russian Roulette

  MY COUSIN ENRIQUE WAS tall and gangly and looked like a grasshopper. He was very shy. He stuttered severely and sometimes you had to wait three or four seconds before he could pronounce a sentence. The other children would laugh and chant: “Soy ggggago porque no caggo!”—“I stutter because I can’t shit!” They were cruel, and they were also envious of him for being a Vernet. Enrique couldn’t have cared less. He just wanted to be left alone.

  Enrique got bad marks and was held back twice—in second and third grades—but not because he wasn’t intelligent. His teachers were impatient with him, and when he couldn’t answer questions as quickly as the other pupils, they thought he was unprepared and yelled at him mercilessly. Enrique would freeze in terror and forget his lesson at once.

  Enrique’s speech impediment made him self-conscious and he had few friends. Tía Clotilde, moreover, never came to school, because she didn’t want to mix with the Catholic parents of the other children, so Enrique was rarely invited to his friends’ homes. One day Enrique told his mother he didn’t want to go back to school at all. Tía Clotilde unwisely gave in, and since they could afford it, had a private tutor come to the house. But Enrique grew sadder and sadder and finally locked himself up in his room and wouldn’t emerge for days. Tía Clotilde would take food to him on a tray and beg him for hours to open the door so he could eat something. Finally, one night when the house was asleep, Enrique stole Tío Roque’s gun from his desk in the study and shot himself in the head. He was only fourteen years old.

  The tragedy affected all of us, but especially Abuelo Chaguito, who mourned for the child and feared it was a bad omen. There had been no violent deaths in the family since his father, Henri Vernet, had been electrocuted in Cuba, and he was afraid it might mean the family’s star was on the wane. Adolescent suicides were practically nonexistent in La Concordia at the time, and he blamed Tía Clotilde for Enrique’s troubles. “Who wants to have an atheist for a mother? I’m not surprised no one wanted to play with the child at school. Clotilde should convert to Catholicism and have Eduardo baptized. That way, all her troubles would be over.” Tía Celia went to the house
and tried to comfort Tío Roque, who was destroyed. He had been a Freemason most of his life and didn’t even remember how to pray.

  “He died a heathen, Celia,” Roque said, crying. “His soul will float around forever in limbo, unable to fly up to heaven. My poor son!”

  “Don’t cry, Roque,” Tía Celia replied. “Enrique had no sins. His soul went straight to heaven, whether he was baptized or not. We’ll bury him next to Mother in the family mausoleum, and she’ll take care of him.”

  But Tía Clotilde wouldn’t give in. She refused to let Enrique be buried in the Catholic cemetery and had him cremated at Portacoeli. Then she took his ashes in a little bag and threw them toward heaven herself from the top of La Atalaya, a windy hill behind La Concordia.

  Tío Roque went on digging for Taíno Indian bones, but they made him feel even sadder. He saw the careful way Taínos buried their loved ones, accompanied by their dogs, pottery, vessels, and all sorts of good-luck amulets for the journey to the other world, and he thought of his son, who would never be able to find his way back to Las Bougainvilleas on the day of the Apocalypse. He also felt unhappy because he had less and less work. Aurelio and Ulises had surrounded themselves with ambitious young engineers clawing their way up the executive ladder, and they had relegated him to the background. But his brothers were very generous and he went on receiving the same salary. Nonetheless, he felt smothered, useless.

  In his despair, Tío Roque became infatuated with a seamstress from Riachuelo Seco, one of La Concordia’s poorer neighborhoods. Roque met Titiba Menéndez at the house when she came to alter his shirts. Roque’s arms were short and he always had to have his sleeves taken up at the cuff. Tía Clotilde wasn’t at home at the time and they ended up in bed, making love like rabbits—as quickly and as many times as possible—terrified that Tía Clotilde might walk in the door any minute. Titiba had Taíno blood, and the minute Roque saw her he was entranced. She looked like the first Taíno Indian woman Crisótbal Colón had described in his diary, the “Libro de la Primera Navegación y Descubrimiento de las Indias”: “She had large black eyes, copper-colored skin, and hair as silky as a horse’s mane, cut straight above her eyebrows in thick bangs.”