Quintín once told me the story—passed on by Rebecca, since he hadn’t been born yet—of how one day his father invited four American businessmen to dinner at his house. They were investors in a large new hotel to be built on the strip of beach near the lagoon, and the residents of Alamares were thrilled at the prospect, because it would provide a casino, a swimming pool, and tennis courts they could use. Rebecca and Buenaventura were sitting with their guests at the table when the maid drew near and whispered something in Buenaventura’s ear.
“The cook is up in arms,” the maid was saying, “because the can is rusted and swollen, and he doesn’t think it wise to add Mendizabal asparagus to the salad. They might poison the guests.”
Buenaventura looked at her in disbelief. “Poison our guests just because of a little rust on a can?” he cried, his cheeks trembling. “How can anyone say such a thing? Tell the cook to be careful what he says, because slander can be much worse than rust, and if he criticizes Mendizabal products, he may end up without a job.” And when the maid brought in the salad bowl, he put four large asparagus spears on his plate and proceeded to eat them boldly, making fun of the whole episode and pretending not to notice the green slime covering them.
“Asparagus are good to ward off impotence and other disorders of the infirm,” he told his guests jovially as he ate. “They work wonders in bed, and a few hours later you piss them into your chamber pot.” Fortunately, the American entrepreneurs declined to eat any salad, because that evening Rebecca had to drive Buenaventura to the emergency room at Alamares Hospital to have his stomach pumped due to food poisoning.
PART 2
The First House on the Lagoon
6
The Wizard from Prague
REBECCA AND BUENAVENTURA HAD been married for eight years and they still hadn’t had any children. This was a disappointment for Buenaventura, who wanted a large family, but Rebecca didn’t mind it at all. She didn’t want children. She felt she was a free spirit; if she had children, she’d never be able to dance and be one with nature the way she wanted.
Rebecca had made many friends in the artists’ community of San Juan and often invited them to the bungalow, where they would sit in the garden by the lagoon and talk about poetry and painting. Buenaventura knew about these gatherings, but he was busy and didn’t give them much thought. He would leave the house at seven in the morning and wouldn’t return until eight at night, so Rebecca had most of the day to herself. She wrote poetry in the morning, practiced an improvised style of dance along the lagoon’s edge in the afternoon, and invited her friends to dinner almost every evening.
In 1925 Buenaventura decided they should move to a place more in keeping with their new prosperity. Their bungalow stood on choice property and could easily be torn down to make way for a new building. One day he was driving down Ponce de León Avenue on his way home and he saw a beautiful mansion being built on a palm-shaded hillock. It had a wide-terraced front, stained-glass windows, and walls decorated with golden mosaics that gleamed in the afternoon sun. He immediately decided he wanted a house just like it, only larger and more luxurious.
Buenaventura stopped the car and got out to inspect the house more closely. There were workmen coming and going with wheelbarrows loaded with sacks of cement, and he asked one of them who the architect was. The man pointed to a sallow, curly-haired man dressed in black, with a black silk cape thrown over his shoulders. Buenaventura approached, smiled, and introduced himself, complimenting the architect on his work. But the man stared back sullenly, muttered under his breath, and stalked off.
Quintín had done research on the architect and even contemplated writing a book about him once, before he let himself be swallowed up by his work at Mendizabal & Co. He was an admirer of Milan Pavel’s work and was convinced he was an important figure in the artistic history of the island.
Milan Pavel lived in San Juan from 1905 to 1928. He had emigrated from Prague to Chicago when he was ten years old, the son of a carpenter. He never studied architecture formally, but was probably an apprentice to one of Chicago’s well-known architects. When he saved enough money, he established his own construction company and began to build homes in Chicago’s West End, where many immigrants lived. Chicago was at the center of an architectural revolution; those were the golden years of the Prairie School.
Pavel became Frank Lloyd Wright’s protégé and assisted him first as a blueprint copy boy and later as a draftsman. He had a natural ability for design; his architectural drawings were delicate and executed with a precise drafting hand. He had a photographic memory as well, and in time was able to reproduce, line by line, Wright’s unique plans for his buildings.
Pavel became more and more obsessed with his master’s work. He hardly ate, and slept only fitfully. He drove by the master’s studio at Oak Park and marveled at the beauty of the low, horizontal buildings which gathered all the beauty of the prairie light at dusk. He admired the avant-garde designs of the homes Wright had built in the elegant suburbs of Chicago. He would have given his right hand to be able to design one of them, but in the modest bungalows of the West Side he was commissioned to build he didn’t dare take a chance like that. He was, after all, only an obscure contractor of immigrant origins.
A few years after he established himself in Chicago, something happened to Pavel which drastically changed his life. In 1898 he had married a young violinist of Bohemian descent, María Straub, but they became estranged and María took up with a lover. Pavel found them in bed one night when he returned home unexpectedly. He beat her and pushed her down the stairs. Fearing he had killed her, he left the house in a panic.
He fled Chicago and, taking with him a copy of Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio, went to Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville was experiencing a building boom, following the great fire of 1901, which had destroyed many of its downtown structures. Pavel was bound to find work there. He attended a Methodist Episcopal church, asking forgiveness for the crime he thought he had committed, and was befriended by the minister, who was about to build a new church in the parish. Pavel offered to draw the plans free of charge, and the minister was delighted. Pavel designed a beautiful building, an exact copy of one Wright had built in Chicago. But someone on the committee of parishioners was familiar with Wright’s work and accused Pavel of plagiarism. Pavel was stunned; he couldn’t understand how anyone could say such a thing. His church would have been a faithful re-creation, stone by stone, of Wright’s masterpiece, not a mere copy.
Pavel used to like to take walks on the Jacksonville waterfront in the evenings, wrapped in his black silk cape, and he would see groups of fashionably dressed Spanish-speaking people getting off ocean liners and boarding limousines that drove them to the train station. He asked where they came from and was told many were from Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States. At Jacksonville they boarded the Florida train and headed north.
Puerto Rico was often in the news at the time; it was described by the press as an exotic, far-off possession, where there was a dire need for public works. The island had been a colony of Spain for four hundred years and, as William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers often pointed out, was mired in poverty. This situation more than justified the United States taking over the island after the Spanish-American War. Ninety percent of the population was illiterate, and bilharzia and hookworm were rampant. A roster of projects was to be undertaken by the federal government to better the lot of the inhabitants.
Pavel was a keen observer. He took note of the well-heeled, elegantly dressed travelers who got off the boats from Puerto Rico, and he also read in the press about the plight of the Puerto Rican people. He surmised there must be two Puerto Ricos—one in serious need, and one which was booming. Both offered him ample opportunity for work as a contractor, and he began to consider emigrating to the island. There was another reason that moved him toward that decision: Puerto Rico was isolated enough so very few people there had heard of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Pa
vel sailed for his new destination, and for the next twenty-three years he lived out his dream: in Puerto Rico he managed to become his hero. He re-created much of Wright’s work with absolute fidelity; he filled San Juan with beautiful copies of the master’s houses, which the islanders hailed as gems of architecture.
Soon after he arrived in San Juan, he became a member of the Elks Club. It was a wise decision, because the Elks were very well connected. Only foreigners could become members, and he was immediately made to feel welcome. The Elks spoke English among themselves and were active both in private and in public institutions. They had government connections and owned many of the important businesses involved in the development of the island—the telephone company, electric power plants, foundries. Many of the Elks were Masons, like Pavel himself.
On the day of his initiation as an Elk, Pavel inscribed his profession in the members’ book as “architect.” Many of the club’s members commissioned him to design their private homes, but these were usually modest buildings, because the Elks were puritanical and didn’t believe in extravagance. Through the Elks, however, Pavel got to know the criollo landowners, who were all members of the Association of Sugar Producers. These were the people he had seen getting off the passenger ships at Jacksonville, with silver fox draped over their shoulders and expensive Stetson hats on their heads: the Calimanos, the Behn-Luchettis, the Georgettis, the Shucks—the sugar barons of the island. Soon many of them wanted him to design them ultramodern mansions. Pavel didn’t have to worry about a budget at all; he could spend whatever he wanted.
Buenaventura called on Pavel several times and finally got him to have lunch with Rebecca and him at their house. Before the meal was served, Buenaventura took the architect around and showed him the site. It was truly paradisiacal. By that time most of the wild vegetation surrounding Alamares Lagoon had been cleared away, except for the mangrove swamp, and several beautiful homes had been built near Buenaventura’s bungalow. The lagoon was clear and peaceful, and because of the buildings that had gone up around it, at night it shone like a perfect aquamarine set in a necklace of diamonds.
Buenaventura showed Pavel the gentle slope where he wanted to build his new house, with “a magnificent terrace from where he could watch his ships go in and out of the harbor.” “This place we’re living in now can’t properly be called a home,” he said to Pavel. “It’s only a temporary residence. I want you to build a mansion more suited to our social standing. I’ll pay whatever you ask.” But Pavel refused.
“It has nothing to do with fees,” Pavel said. “I simply have too much work and can barely keep up with the commitments I have already.” He knew Buenaventura would have paid him a good sum, and the site was certainly beautiful. What bothered him was Buenaventura himself—his large peasant’s hands and the unruly tufts of hair that grew out of his ears, which he never let the barber clip for him, though Rebecca begged him to. Above all, he resented Buenaventura’s ignorance, his coarse, country ways. During his walk through the site, his host emphasized that he wanted the house to be impressive, but that it should be comfortable. “I want to live in a home, not a controversial work of art,” he said. Pavel suspected the real reason Buenaventura wanted him to design the house was that he liked his golden-mosaic decorations—which gave off an affluent glitter under the noonday sun—and not because of his avant-garde architectural lines.
It was Rebecca who made him change his mind. When Buenaventura excused himself after lunch and went back to his office, Rebecca and Pavel were left by themselves, and she invited him to go for a walk along the lagoon’s edge. Rebecca was twenty-four and her beauty was in full flower. Pavel saw that she had a keen sensibility and lived for art. She wrote poetry in secret, she said, and brought out a folder of poems from the house. It had an elaborate binding with a water lily carved on the front and silver clasps on the sides. Rebecca was reading one of her poems to Pavel when a breeze from the lagoon blew away several pages. Instead of running after them, she did an elegant little dance, managing to capture them in midair. Pavel laughed as he watched her admiringly.
“I’ve always wanted to be a dancer and a poet,” she said to him. “When I was a child, my parents took me to Europe. We went to the great opera houses and saw the best dancers: Anna Pavlova in London, Nijinsky in Paris. But my favorite was Isadora Duncan. From the moment I saw Isadora dance, she became my ideal. In Puerto Rico, artistic currents arrive years later than in the rest of the world. That is why I believe your work is so important. You could teach us about modern art.”
The young men and women from well-to-do families who came to Rebecca’s salon were the jeunesse dorée of San Juan, and they had the same tastes she did. Far from belonging to San Juan’s demimonde, where the struggling artists came from, they had traveled widely in Europe, knew the best wines and cheeses, could play a Shubert impromptu on the piano, spoke French fluently, and above all did not have to work for a living. They wanted to lead beautiful lives, both inside and out, wear beautiful clothes, visit beautiful places, and occupy their minds with beautiful thoughts.
This type of existence unfortunately was not conducive to the disciplines of learning, so their compositions—the light dramas, boudoir vignettes, and playful piano pieces they put together—were never very good. Some believed that to write a poem or a musical composition one had to slave for hours learning difficult techniques, but Rebecca’s friends didn’t agree. Like Rebecca herself, who thought one could learn to dance simply by “imitating nature,” they subscribed to the Muses’ inspiration. They loved to go to the beach, buy expensive jewelry and clothes, and were fervent admirers of Rubén Darío, the modernist poet then in vogue in Puerto Rico.
While in Argentina and Peru the rising stars were avant-garde writers such as Vicente Huidobro and César Vallejo, in the backwater of Alamares Lagoon the modernist poets Darío and Herrera y Reissig, who sang the beauties of the bejeweled Art Nouveau world, were still the darlings of the moment. In Europe as well as in Latin America, rhyme and meter were passé and poetry now strove to express the conflicts of modern civilization—the loneliness of the city, the protests of the exploited masses, the loss of religious belief. The world was bursting at the seams, but in Rebecca’s literary salon poets still sang of gardens full of roses, ponds skimmed by snow-white swans, and foam-crested waves spilling over the beach like lace-hemmed gowns.
Rebecca thought maybe Pavel could change all this. He was a cultivated man. In Chicago he had led an intense life, having made contact with the cultural elite there. He was well versed in the latest artistic movements from Europe: Expressionism, Constructivism, Cubism. He understood her when she talked about modern art.
Rebecca had been feeling more and more estranged from her husband. Buenaventura had begun to pay less attention to her, so preoccupied was he with business matters. After the First World War the price of sugar had soared, and the well-to-do were living in style. They often gave parties at home and wine and champagne flowed like water. Buenaventura was very busy at the warehouse, since he was in charge of sales.
As she walked with Pavel by the water’s edge, Rebecca told him about her life. There were no ballet schools in San Juan, so when she returned to the island with her grandparents, she decided she would learn to dance on her own. “Isadora Duncan never had professional training, either,” Rebecca said to Pavel. “She became a dancer by identifying with nature. That’s why I like to spend as much time as I can in the garden. I’d like to reach, through nature, the divine expression of the human spirit.
“When I came back from my trip to Europe, I began to dress in flowing robes and I read everything I could get my hands on about her. My parents were worried, and started to invite young people to the house often. They took me to picnics, concerts, as many social events as they could think of. Finally they contacted the committee of the Spanish Casino and offered to foot the carnival’s bill that year if I was elected queen. They hoped the social activities would take my mind off my supposed
ly bizarre interests. The ladies’ committee complied and suggested a newly arrived stranger—a Spaniard from Extremadura—as my escort. I was so taken with Buenaventura’s good looks I fell head over heels in love with him. We got married a month later, when I had just turned sixteen. Then I discovered that he didn’t like poetry and hated ballet.”
Milan was sympathetic. “Now that you’ve met me, everything will be different!” he said. “I’ll teach you all about modern art.” Rebecca was overjoyed. She was sure that, with Pavel near, her talents would be rekindled. Pavel talked to her about the need for the artist to make a total commitment. Rebecca shouldn’t go on spending time with dilettantes; if she wanted to become a true poet and dancer, she had to do serious work. As she listened to him, Rebecca felt transformed.
She’s like me, Pavel thought. An inveterate dreamer, as well as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. I want to build a special house for her that will enable her to go on living for beautiful things in spite of being married to a boor. He hadn’t told her he had turned down Buenaventura’s commission. He pretended to have accepted, as Rebecca described what she wanted.
“You mustn’t just draw the plans for a beautiful house,” she said as they walked by the beach. “You must build me a masterpiece where everything will be carefully planned to preserve the illusion of art. I want Tiffany-glass windows, alabaster skylights, and floors made of capá wood from the cool forests of the island.” She laughed when she finished her fanciful description, but their conversation had brought a flush of pleasure to her cheeks.
Pavel looked around the property, which ended at the lagoon’s shore. To the left there was a large thicket of mangroves. Near Buenaventura’s bungalow, there was an old wall with a weather-beaten sign which read Cristal de Alamares. “That’s Buenaventura’s spring,” Rebecca said. “He used to sell water to the Spanish merchant ships just after we were married.”
House on the Lagoon Page 4