Eccentric Neighborhood

by Rosario Ferré

  The following evening I boiled some spaghetti and made a plain marinara sauce for it, practicing for my upcoming university days. Suddenly, Ricardo took his plate of spaghetti and threw it against the kitchen wall. “I don’t like my spaghetti al dente,” he yelled as I sat openmouthed, watching the vermicelli in red sauce trickle down the yellow wallpaper like a Jackson Pollock painting. “And I don’t want my wife chumming around with male students half her age. You should have asked me before you signed up for those courses.”

  I still didn’t know my way around Ricardo, or if there was a way around him. I lowered my head and didn’t answer.

  I soon realized that Ricardo was a violent, intractable man. If I contradicted him, he yelled and threatened to hit me. But I really grew afraid of him when he began to collect hunting rifles and spend all his free time oiling and cleaning them on the front porch of our house. He had picked up hunting as a hobby and often traveled to Santo Domingo with his friends on birding expeditions.

  We remained married for nine years. I did a lot of serious thinking during that time. I realized the folly of deluding myself into believing I could acquire a career by osmosis. We weren’t living in England, where the nobility inherited their power by divine right. In Puerto Rico the most I could aspire to be as Father’s daughter was carnival queen. Worst of all, I began to feel I had been used. I was thirty-one years old, my self-respect was in shreds, and I had nothing to be proud of. And I was married to a man I hated and feared.

  I wanted to get a divorce but I had no money of my own and was too proud to ask my parents. I also feared having to live under the same roof as Mother. First I had belonged to Father and now I was Ricardo’s. That’s why women understood the politics of colonialism so well: if you treat them well, feed them, clothe them, and buy them a nice house, they won’t rebel. Except that hatred keeps smoldering inside them.

  I chose Ricardo’s physical threats over Mother’s psychological battering and decided not to get a divorce. I stayed home, took care of my children, and gave them as much affection as I could. I also read voraciously. I never gave up hope of going back to the university to get a doctorate in literature. But I lived in constant fear that my sons would grow up to be as belligerent as their father. There was simply no way out of the situation. I struggled to keep all the balls in the air while trying to appease Ricardo. In the eyes of San Juan society, I was the perfect wife.

  In the meantime, in 1966, something unexpected had happened. Fernando Martín, feeling very sure of himself, announced that a plebiscite would be held so that Puerto Rico could approve commonwealth as its definitive status. Tío Venancio decided the Partido Republicano Incondicional wouldn’t participate. The party’s constituency had been decreasing steadily, and he was afraid it might be completely wiped out. Father was incensed. Venancio was more concerned about the party and his own position as president than about statehood—el ideal. For the first time in his life he fought openly with Tío Venancio. Statehood had to be an option at the polls.

  He broke with Tío Venancio’s Partido Republicano Incondicional and founded his own political party, the Partido Estadista Reformista, which pledged to defend statehood in the plebiscite. In a single year he put together a successful campaign, paying for much of it out of his own pocket.

  The plebiscite was a momentous event. The outcome showed the island to be equally divided between those for statehood and those in favor of commonwealth status. All those years the island had been voting for Fernando Martín and against Tío Venancio, not against statehood, as his opponents insisted. Aurelio ran for governor again the following year, but this time it was different. Fernando Martín had retired. The polls indicated that the Partido Estadista Reformista had a good chance of winning. Free of Tío Venancio and of the colmillús shadow, Father was running on his own.

  Aurelio was having the time of his life. More and more, he enjoyed mixing with the crowds, listening to their grievances and taking note of their needs and wants. He chose the almácigo tree as a symbol of his party, a happy choice. In pre-Columbian times the almácigo represented the home: the Taíno Indians used its bark to cure all kinds of ills and sometimes thatched their huts with it. He was convinced that life couldn’t hold defeat or failure.

  As soon as speculation about a possible victory for Father began to spread, Mother became ill. She complained of a sharp pain in her chest that made breathing difficult. A thorough medical examination revealed that her childhood soplo, the little murmur in the aorta, had gotten worse. At the same time she had developed calcification of the arteries, and this made her situation very dangerous. Her brain was slowly being deprived of oxygen, and she could have a hemorrhage at any moment. The heart specialist ordered her to remain in bed, inside an oxygen tent.

  In the last month of the campaign Mother and Father grew closer than they had ever been. I noticed it every time I went to visit them in Las Bougainvilleas. Father made a point of spending the night at home no matter how far he had to travel during the day to give one of his speeches. They talked for hours—the master bedroom was next to mine, and I could hear their murmuring voices well into the night. In the morning, before he left for his campaign appearances, Father would sit next to Mother’s bed and she would tie a little string around his wrist. He couldn’t leave until he had described in detail his schedule for the day: the towns he would visit and the number of speeches he would make. She knew she was very ill. It was the only thing she could do in solidarity.

  On November 1, 1968, four days before the election was to take place, I was in La Concordia visiting Mother. I tiptoed into her room to see if she was awake. Two oxygen tanks, like steel missiles with pressure valves on them, stood next to her bed. I peeked into the plastic tent spread over it. She lay quietly on her lace pillows, her chest hardly moving, so the oxygen could go straight to her lungs. She had her eyes closed, and there wasn’t a single wrinkle on her face. She was sixty-seven, but she didn’t look a day over fifty.

  Clarissa opened her eyes and smiled at me. I slipped my hand under the tent and held her icy hand in mine. “Are you cold, Mother?” I asked as I tucked Miña’s old rainbow-colored serape around her legs.

  “No more than usual. I didn’t hear you come in, Elvira. When did you arrive from San Juan?”

  “Just a few minutes ago. The plane hit a thunderstorm as we flew over the mountains.”

  “And how is Ricardo?”

  I was silent for a few moments, then looked straight at her. “The same as usual, Mother. You know how it is between us.”

  Clarissa let out a deep sigh. “Ricardo loves you in spite of his bad temper, and the children need their father. You’re letting happiness slip through your fingers like sand.”

  I didn’t want to argue with her—we had been over this many times already. But I never dared make a decision; I just hung on. Mother knew what I was thinking.

  “No Rivas de Santillana has ever gotten a divorce except for Tía Lakhmé, and everyone knows she’s crazy,” Mother said. “If you do, your grandparents’ ghosts will follow you around and push you down the stairs or in front of a car. Your aunts and uncles will be furious. The whole family will be up in arms. You must be out of your mind, Elvira.”

  Mother looked at me as if she were at the bottom of a pool, she seemed so far away. Her hair had turned completely white and was cropped closely around her head like a halo.

  “Remember those myrtle bushes you sent me years ago, Mother? They’re in bloom and my house is full of ghosts. I guess there’s something to nature after all, like you always said.”

  “Really? And do they talk to you?” Clarissa asked me, half in jest.

  “They talk to me every day,” I answered seriously. “Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria, Abuelo Chaguito and Abuela Adela pull up their chairs and sit next to me. They tell me to leave Ricardo and go look for a job.”

  Mother laughed, and looked at me reproachfully.

  “Ricardo has been a good husband,” she said. �
�He’s a good provider and has never been unfaithful to you. And that’s the only reason to get a divorce.”

  I paced around the room, wanting to say something and not finding the words.

  “Tell me something, Elvira,” Mother murmured. “All your life you’ve insisted you were a Vernet. But you have some of Tía Lakhmé in you, because you love beautiful clothes; you’ve got some of Dido, because you love literature; some of Siglinda, because before you married Ricardo you were crazy about boys. You’ve got some Rivas de Santillana in you, after all, even if you refuse to acknowledge it.”

  I was surprised at what she was saying. But she went on: “Having money, a career, is not that important. Nature, the positive current of the universe where everything is interconnected, is what really matters. Our duty is to partake of that unity, not of its differences. To try to understand ourselves and, by the way, to find God. That’s why getting a divorce from Ricardo in order to live like an independent woman won’t do you any good. You have to be independent in your own soul.”

  I couldn’t bear it anymore. “That’s not true!” I whispered desperately. “Don’t tell me you weren’t sorry to sacrifice your career. And you never wanted Father to get into politics.” She didn’t answer.

  “Why didn’t you try to dissuade him?” I asked. “Wasn’t politics a way of being unfaithful to you? Didn’t you see how it was harming me? Why have you always kept quiet about everything that really mattered to you…to us?”

  “Because I love your father. It’s important for men to do what they have to do.”

  “That’s bullshit, Mother!”

  She fixed an icy gaze on me from behind the transparent tent. “I won’t stand your being disrespectful to me,” she said in a trembling voice.

  “Well, I’m not going to follow your example, Mother. I’m leaving Ricardo, even if I have to starve. And the children are staying with him. Let him take care of them for a change!”

  I began to sob as if my soul were being wrenched from my body. “You never loved me, Mother. That’s why you were always telling me how much I looked like Father.”

  All of a sudden I felt Mother’s hands as cool as snow on my shoulders. She had pushed aside her plastic cocoon and was pulling me close to her. Then she began to rock me as if I were a child.

  “Shhhh! Don’t cry, Elvira! Everything will be all right. I said you looked like your father because you liked to hear it so much. But you’ve always been my spitting image. And I love you very much.”

  Then she closed her eyes and lay back on her pillows. She was too weak to talk to me anymore, so I tiptoed out of the room.

  I flew back to San Juan that same afternoon steeped in sadness, fearing that I had found my mother just when I was about to lose her.

  The election had a momentum of its own. Four days after my conversation with Mother, Father was elected governor of the island. No one was more surprised than he was. He was in Las Bougainvilleas, sitting next to Clarissa’s oxygen tent, when he heard the news from party headquarters in San Juan. His victory was decisive; there was no question about it. This was the third time he had run for governor, and he had been sure he was going to lose.

  Over the next few days the whole family rejoiced and congratulated him, Clarissa most warmly of all. They would now live in La Fortaleza, the governor’s palace in Old San Juan. A month later Mother made the trip from Las Bougainvilleas to the capital in an ambulance. She was very brave about it. She knew she was never coming back, but she didn’t cry. She said good-bye to everyone with a perfect smile: to Martina, the cook; Confesor, the gardener; Crisótbal, the chauffeur; all her neighbors and friends. She was leaving behind the house she had lived in for thirty-eight years; her gilded Louis XVI furniture, decorated with delicate bouquets of roses; her silver and china; her family photographs from Emajaguas. Most painful of all, she was leaving behind her beautiful garden.

  Clarissa’s hospital bed, with its oxygen tent, was set up in the governor’s private apartments on the third floor of La Fortaleza. The massive Spanish-colonial furniture that the governors traditionally used was carved dark mahogany, and it was more than two hundred years old. The double bed was especially forbidding, it was a large boxlike affair with a flounced red canopy where Fernando Martín—Father’s longtime antagonist—had slept so many years. Mother thanked God she didn’t have to sleep in Fernando Martín’s bed; it would have given her nightmares. She would have been kept awake by the song she had sung so often at rallies: “Abajo la pava, abajo el pavín, abajo el bigote de Fernando Martín!”—“Down with the big pava, down with the little pava, and down with Fernando Martín’s mustache!” Aurelio, however, didn’t mind sleeping in the governor’s bed at all. In fact, he slept like a rock. His sleeping there meant that the American way of life, with better living conditions for the poor and democracy for all, was finally on its way to Puerto Rico.

  La Fortaleza had originally been a military fort, and the governor’s apartments were located in the old part of the building, dating from the sixteenth century. The rooms had walls three feet thick, ceilings supported by dark ausubo beams, and very small windows. The windows had angled sides from which soldiers had shot their muskets to defend the palace from pirate and Indian attacks.

  The governor’s private apartments consisted of a bedroom and a small living room, where Father’s Bechstein was immediately installed. It was the only piece of furniture that was moved from our house in Las Bougainvilleas. Father still practiced the piano for an hour every day. None of Mother’s gaily decorated furniture was brought along: it wouldn’t have fitted in with the severe colonial decor.

  Mother pined away for two years in these dark, solemn rooms, looking out the small windows at the traffic jams in the narrow streets of Old San Juan. The governor’s palace was surrounded by beautiful gardens, planted by the count of Mirasol in the eighteenth century, but Mother never got to see them up close. She was too weak to go downstairs to the ground floor, but she never complained. She simply refused to talk about her illness.

  Aurelio’s office was on the first floor of La Fortaleza, and one day, while working on a speech, he got a telephone call from the doctor to come up to the private apartments immediately. Mother had taken a turn for the worse. He ran up the staircase three steps at a time; he couldn’t wait for the elevator. When he arrived at the third floor he was told Mother had had a cerebral hemorrhage. She never knew she was dying—she passed away without regaining consciousness. Father couldn’t believe what had happened. He stood by the bed holding her hand, reassuring her she had nothing to be afraid of because he was there by her side, but she was already dead. The doctors came up to him and took him gently away. Aurelio stumbled into the next room, overwhelmed.

  I arrived at La Fortaleza a few minutes later. Nobody had called me at home to tell me Mother was dying. I was sitting out on the terrace writing letters and paying my monthly bills when I felt a sudden urge to visit her. She hadn’t been feeling well lately, but her ups and downs were frequent and the family had become accustomed to them.

  When I entered the private apartments, I saw several of Father’s bodyguards whispering and milling about the hall. Then the door to the bedroom was flung open and Father walked hurriedly by without seeing me, his hand over his eyes. I called out to him, but he disappeared rapidly down the hallway. I thought it was odd, because at the end of that hall there was only a dark sitting room where no one ever went. I stopped at the door and saw Mother’s head from behind. She was lying uncovered on the bed, the plastic oxygen tent pushed to one side. The doctors and nurses were still there, picking up needles and cotton swabs from the floor and from the night tables. I walked into the room and slowly turned. I saw that Mother was dead.

  I stood there, stunned. My skin felt dry and I couldn’t understand why—I felt as if I were drowning. Mother had fallen into a dark pool, and I was falling in after her.

  It was strange to see her without the plastic cover separating us, as if she had suddenl
y been stripped of the armor that had protected her from the world. A nurse, Mrs. Gómez, led me to a chair, and I sat down, trembling. She brought me a glass of water.

  “Your father asked me to bathe and prepare her before she’s put in the coffin,” Mrs. Gómez said. “He wants the wake to take place in La Fortaleza; he doesn’t want her to be taken to a funeral parlor. Why don’t you go into the next room and wait with your father until the rest of the family gets here?”

  I refused. Mother needed me desperately.

  I thought of Brunhilda and thanked God she was at La Concordia; otherwise she would have been here, insisting on doing the job herself! We locked the door and I stood next to the bed, facing Mother. I watched Mrs. Gómez bring a bowl of water, a sponge, and a bottle of Jean-Marie Farine, Father’s favorite cologne, which Mother had also taken to wearing. She took off Mother’s nightgown and began to bathe her. Mrs. Gómez had soft, gentle hands and moved Mother’s limbs as if she were still alive and could feel what was being done to her. A sickly-sweet smell filled the room, filtered into my nostrils, and stayed there. For months afterward I had to put myrtle boughs in vases all around my house so one smell would mask the other.

  When Mrs. Gómez was finished, I kissed Mother lightly on the forehead. She looked frail and vulnerable; I was surprised at how much weight she had lost. There was so little left of her.

  So this was Mother’s death! I had imagined it otherwise. Her skin was white as unspun silk. The stillness—not even an eyelash stirring. The chest a calm receptacle for a quiet heart. It was over; there was nothing else to be done: she was finally reconciled with herself.