After that first meeting, it was as if Tío Roque had ingested a drug. He couldn’t live without the pleasure Titiba gave him. He bought her a house in Las Margaritas, the same middle-class suburb where Alvaro and I were born. And, unknown to Tía Clotilde, they had three children. Tío Roque moved his collection of Taíno artifacts and pottery shards to Titiba’s house and spent two or three afternoons a week there. He wanted to enjoy life, and Titiba was always in a good mood. He was tired of living next to a volcano that was constantly erupting and blowing ashes in his face. Roque knew that he was playing Russian roulette by keeping this arrangement and that Tía Clotilde would have his skin on the day she found out. But he was too happy with Titiba to care.
FIFTY-ONE
The Rolling Coffin
IT WASN’T UNTIL ROQUE was sixty-three years old that Tía Clotilde discovered his secret family. The Vernets were going through the perilous financial crisis that Tío Ulises’s bankruptcy had unleashed upon them. There were IRS inspectors and auditors from the National City Bank crawling all over, analyzing the corporate bank accounts. Unexpectedly, Roque found himself in tight economic straits. He spent no money on himself and dressed in shabby clothes. But he had two households, each with servants and all the usual expenses; moreover, he had Titiba’s three sons to put through college. His salary of a hundred thousand dollars a year from the cement plant was temporarily attached by the IRS. Still, he wasn’t worried, because he had a million dollars in cash stashed away in a box in his closet at 3 Avenida Cañafístula—or so he thought. When the time came to draw on it, he discovered it was gone. Eduardo had stolen it and disappeared. Reportedly, he was living in Spain.
Tío Roque was overcome with fear. Unable to face either Tía Clotilde or Titiba, he decided to go away. He stuffed a beat-up alligator suitcase with dirty underwear and went to visit Tía Celia at the convent.
It was Sunday and Tía Celia was at home. For a while Roque sat in the garden without saying a word while she fed her parrots. Tía Celia wondered where he was going, but she didn’t dare ask because he looked so sad. He had forgotten to shave that morning, and his long bloodhound’s ears had turned ash-gray; his heavy eyebrows hooded his eyes in shadow. When Roque finally got up to leave, Tía Celia said: “Why don’t you come and have lunch with us a little later? We’re having pig’s knuckles and garbanzos, one of your favorite dishes. I’ll put an extra plate on the table for you.” Tío Roque agreed and left, heading with his battered suitcase toward the old Vernet Construction offices, which stood next to the foundry.
The building had been constructed in the 1950s, and although it was a rough affair it had a certain charm. It was a plain square structure made from large red clay bricks manufactured at the Vernet plant. Four stories high, it had two flagpoles sticking out over the entrance door. From one of them waved the American flag, from the other the family flag: four golden stars (which stood for the Vernet brothers) linked to one another and contained within a larger star (Abuelo Chaguito’s) on a navy-blue field. There were no stars for Tía Amparo or Tía Celia.
The building was practically empty. The Star Cement plant was still in La Concordia but Vernet Construction’s management had moved to San Juan. The foundry, welding shop, and machine shop were still in operation but business was very slow. With the demise of the sugar industry the town had suffered a severe economic depression and the population had decreased from around two hundred thousand inhabitants in the 1960s to approximately a hundred and fifty thousand, the result of emigration to the mainland.
Roque walked past Aurelio’s and Ulises’s offices, which were at the front of the building. Their names were still engraved on the frosted glass, laying claim to the most important rungs on the company’s ladder—first vice president and second vice president. Roque’s footsteps echoed down the hall, and he peered into Tío Damián’s office, which had an ocean view and plenty of sunlight. Damián was away on one of his frequent trips to Europe in search of works of art. He and Roque had grown very close after being left behind in La Concordia by their elder brothers. Tío Damián’s portrait hung from the wall as usual. He was dressed in an elegant light-blue suit the same color as his eyes, and his thin lips were drawn into a delicate ironic smile. Roque walked on to his own office, at the back of the building. It was the darkest one of all and looked out on the foundry’s back yard, where the scrap iron and discarded machinery were dumped. He locked the door behind him and sat down at his desk. From beneath the bundle of dirty underwear in his suitcase, he took out a gun, aimed it at the left side of his chest, and fired.
A few minutes later the caretaker—who had heard the shot ring out in the almost-empty building—ran up the stairs. He opened the door to the office with a master key and found Tío Roque lying slumped on his desk in a pool of blood.
That afternoon, while Tía Clotilde made arrangements for Roque’s funeral with Tía Celia’s help, Titiba Menéndez went to the house at 3 Cañafístula. She was ushered into the living room by the maid, who was trembling with fear because in La Concordia everybody except Tía Clotilde knew who Titiba Menéndez was, and she wasn’t one to beat about the bush. The minute Tía Clotilde walked in, Titiba asked her if they could share Roque Vernet in death as they had in life. Tía Clotilde wanted to know what on earth she was talking about and Titiba confessed everything: Roque had been her lover for years and they had three boys, all of whom wanted to attend the wake. And so did she, because she had loved Roque with all her heart. Titiba suggested that, since Tía Clotilde’s family owned Portacoeli, both families could hold the funeral service together.
Tía Clotilde was shocked, but she agreed to the odd petition. She was touched by the fact that Roque, a man of simple tastes, had chosen Titiba, a woman of humble origins like herself, as his paramour, instead of one of the rich bitches who were always after the Vernet brothers. She invited the whole Vernet family to the wake, but only Tía Celia and Aurelio went. Celia was terribly upset by Tía Clotilde’s decision to cremate Roque’s body and by the fact that there would be no religious ceremony. But Clotilde’s atheism was very important to her. It was her way of proclaiming her right to be different from the Vernets. In spite of the Vernets’ role in La Concordia’s society and of the dignity and prestige that the Catholic Church had conferred on them, she stuck to her guns and refused to allow a Catholic ceremony for Roque.
Tía Clotilde ordered two adjacent chapels at Portacoeli to be filled with flowers—one for the Vernet and Rosales families and one for the Menéndez family. Tío Roque’s silver-gray casket was mounted on a little car with wheels, and he spent the whole afternoon commuting between the two families before entering the oven’s sad tunnel hidden by velvet curtains. He would spend two hours with the Vernet and Rosales families at their chapel and would then punctually be wheeled to the Menéndezes in the adjoining chapel. And all the time, Tía Celia walked behind her favorite brother’s coffin, crying her eyes out and reciting the Rosary out loud, remembering how Tío Roque had loved to throw ripe mangoes at her from the tree as if he were a Taíno Indian.
FIFTY-TWO
The White Jasmine
TÍO DAMIÁN’S HOUSE, 4 AVENIDA Cañafístula, next to Tío Roque’s, was the last one in the row. It was exactly like our house, only smaller, because Tío Damián and Tía Agripina had no children. Inside, it was full of the beautiful sculptures and paintings Tío Damián had brought back from his frequent trips to Europe. But the thing I remember the most about it was the collection of medieval armor, the swords and spears that lined the walls of the study, and the huge white polar bear rug in the hallway, legs spread apart and red tongue lolling out between white fangs.
Clarissa and Aurelio were always teasing Tío Damián and telling him to get rid of the moth-eaten shag—something totally out of place in a town like La Concordia, where the heat could be unbearable—but he never did. I loved the polar bear; the first thing I did when we visited Damián was throw myself on the rug and roll around on it. I felt I knew why it
was so important to my uncle. He had to impress upon the family the fact that, even though he was the most reserved of the Vernets, his spirit was as strong as a bear’s.
Tío Damián hardly ever spoke when the family came to visit him: he let Aurelio and Ulises do all the talking. But he wasn’t shy with children. He was a bit of a ventriloquist and loved to do magic tricks. Whenever we went to his house, he immediately picked me up and squeezed pennies out of my ears or pulled quarters from his shirtsleeves and gave me the money to buy candy. When he finished his act, his index finger would buzz all around me like a mosquito and end up tickling my underarm.
Tío Damián married Tía Agripina, but instead of helping him become a more self-assured young man, Agripina only added to his insecurity. She was from a good family in San Juan, the Leclercs, and everybody was surprised when she decided to marry Damián Vernet, who had no social standing whatsoever. The Leclercs had lost most of their money during the First World War. Agripina’s father, Roberto Leclerc, was a daredevil pilot and a friend of Abuelo Chaguito’s, but he was killed at the battle of Verdun. Still, they had a very prestigious name.
Agripina’s mother had brought her up as a society belle. She graduated from a finishing school in Newport, Rhode Island, where she learned to embroider Madeira tablecloths and decorate porcelain plates with apricots and roses, but she could do virtually nothing that was useful. During Hurricane San Felipe, for example, Agripina had been no help at all. Her mother was going crazy, trying to fill tubs with water and prepare enough food to tide them over for several days. But when the 150-mile-per-hour winds started to blow and the tin roof began to rattle, Agripina dove into a kitchen cupboard and stayed there throughout the hair-raising ordeal.
A year after they were married, Agripina said to Tío Damián: “I wonder why I haven’t gotten pregnant yet. Are you sure you’re not consumptive? You know, one of the reasons I married you was because I wanted to have children. I’m sick of society life.” Tío Damián laughed and told her she was being silly; it was much too early to start worrying. “This way we can enjoy ourselves a little longer before getting tied down: go to the movies, play tennis, visit our friends as much as we want.” But Agripina began to cry and said, “I have no one else in the world but you. If anything happened to you, I’d be completely alone.”
She hadn’t always been like that. Before she met Tío Damián she had lived a flapper’s life. “Flappers live heroic lives,” she’d say to her friends. “When they defy convention they lend a special brightness to things.” In Agripina’s opinion there was little difference between a daredevil pilot and a flapper—both were equally intense. The main thing was to escape boredom, to defy the bourgeois mentality by living on the edge. And so Agripina smoked, drank, and frequented all the speakeasies in San Juan.
One night she dropped by the Pif-Paf-Pouff, a nightclub hidden away in a cellar. Even young ladies were obliged to enter it by sliding down a chute, at the bottom of which a group of young men in tuxedoes helped them up from silk cushions, inevitably complimenting them on their lace panties. She got so drunk that the next morning, when an M.P. found her, she was sprawled on the sidewalk. She had passed out after vomiting all over her sequined black tulle evening dress. The M.P. helped her into his car and drove her to the police station near Fort Brooke. After a phone call from her mother, Marina Leclerc—who had powerful friends—Agripina was released. The incident created a scandal. The photograph of her lying drunk on the sidewalk was in all the local newspapers and left her seriously shaken. For several months afterwards she woke up in the middle of the night dreaming she was hurtling through space strapped in a blazing biplane—which was exactly how her father had died.
Agripina’s mother was so disgusted she told her daughter to leave the house, and Agripina took refuge with one of Tía Amparo’s friends. Tío Damián met her there on a visit to San Juan; she was already on the wagon and had changed her ways. Tío Damián was so shy he never dared ask any girls out. When Agripina discovered what a sweet man he was and began to call him at La Concordia every day, he was overwhelmed with gratitude that such a good-looking girl should notice him and asked her, over the telephone, to marry him.
La Concordia was just what Agripina needed. She wanted peace and tranquility, and the first few months there were a balm for her. Agripina did volunteer work at the Hospital de las Siervas de María, a beautiful pink building from Spanish colonial times, where the nuns glided silently down arched corridors with huge starched coifs fluttering on their head. But Agripina still woke up in the middle of the night feeling an unendurable emptiness. “I feel like a plaster cast instead of a woman: beautiful on the outside and hollow on the inside,” she complained to Tío Damián every night before she fell asleep. “I want a baby more than anything else in the world.”
For five years Agripina tried to get pregnant, and then Damián went to see a urologist. The urologist examined his testicles and discovered that they were diminished in size. He asked him about his childhood illnesses and it turned out that Damián had suffered a severe case of mumps when he was fourteen. The infection had left him permanently sterile.
When Damián told Agripina the news, she was shattered. He took her in his arms and tried to comfort her. “We can adopt a baby and bring him up as our own. There are dozens of abandoned children in the orphanage.” But Agripina wouldn’t consider it. She was terrified of adopting a child who might have inherited who knows what horrible defects. She decided to help out at the orphanage anyway.
The work was good for her. It made her feel less guilty for her past sins. But whenever she and Damián made love and she was about to let herself be engulfed in an avalanche of pleasure, she saw a tiny baby floating on the crest of a wave, stretching out its arms to her, and all the pleasure she was feeling would ebb away like a retreating tide.
In spite of his personal problems, Tío Damián proved instrumental in the success of Star Cement. As a chemical engineer, he became one of the plant’s principal administrators and helped his brothers and his father turn around the businesses they acquired from the government. He had as much money as he wanted, and he loved Tía Agripina deeply, but he wasn’t happy. He was in a constant state of anxiety, threatened by invisible dangers. That was when he began to collect medieval armor, swords, and pikes and hang them on the walls of his study. Then he bought the white polar bear skin and spread it out in the entrance hallway of his house in Las Bougainvilleas. Tío Damián felt he had to defend himself from something, but he didn’t quite know what it was.
He suspected that his opinions were never taken into account at Vernet Construction. Although Aurelio and Tío Ulises were always very polite and affectionate with him, they made the really important business decisions behind his back. Each of them had a battery of executive advisers, but Damián had no one. He didn’t tout his achievements around town or have a reputation as an investor or a politician. No one was interested in what he had to say.
In 1968, after Aurelio moved the management of Vernet Construction to San Juan, Ulises sold his shares and moved to Florida. Damián and Roque were left in charge of the huge, half-empty Vernet Construction building in La Concordia, where doors creaked open by themselves and Abuelo Chaguito shuffled in every afternoon, leaning on his cane. He’d post himself at the door to the building and turn back everyone who tried to leave the office at half past four, twenty minutes before the bell rang.
To take his mind off things, Tío Damián began to travel to Europe with Agripina more often. They would board the Queen Mary in New York and spend three weeks at the Savoy in London. Then they would sail to Le Havre and spend a week at the Plaza Athenée in Paris. Then on to Florence, Venice, Rome, Athens. They came back from each trip loaded with art treasures: paintings, sculptures, antique silver. The house in Las Bougainvilleas began to resemble a museum. But Tío Damián was still melancholy and talked less and less. Agripina’s perpetual complaints about his sterility didn’t help.
When Tío Ro
que committed suicide in 1970, Abuelo Chaguito stopped coming to the Vernet Construction offices altogether; Damián had to go there alone every day. The old foundry next to the offices, though still operating, was losing money. Tío Damián was supervisor, and he made his rounds every morning. He checked to see that the welders were wearing their protective masks. He visited the machine shop and verified the new orders for crushing mills and cogwheels, which were fewer and fewer as the island’s sugar mills closed down. He visited the warehouse, where the steel and iron beams were stored. Then he went up to his office and sat at his desk looking out the window at the ships unloading their cargo on the nearby dock.
After a while, the contours of reality began to disintegrate, and he got lost in a fog of speculation. One evening at nine Agripina telephoned the office to see if he was still there. No one answered the phone. Agripina drove over in her Lincoln Continental and had the janitor open the building. They found Damián sitting at his desk in the dark, as if in a trance, staring out the window.
This was in 1972, when Aurelio was still spending a lot of time in San Juan. Agripina telephoned him and he flew to La Concordia the following day. They decided Damián should be hospitalized and arranged to have him admitted to New York’s Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital, which had one of the best mental clinics in the States, where Dr. Lothar B. Kalinowsky was world-renowned for his electroconvulsive therapy. Tío Damián was administered several electroshock treatments during the following months, and his recovery was spectacular. A few weeks after his third treatment he was as good as new. He had come out of his catatonic stupor and talked normally with Tía Agripina and everyone else. He immediately began planning a trip to Mexico City with her, because they had never been there.
Eccentric Neighborhood Page 30