House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  “I’d like to see the spring,” Pavel said, his curiosity piqued. They walked toward the enclosure. Rebecca searched for the key, which was hidden under a stone, and opened the padlock. They entered, taking care not to dirty their shoes in the mud. Inside, there was a well about four feet deep, full of water. A pipe drained the well in the direction of the lagoon. Pavel drew near and bent down to scoop some water into his cupped hand. “It’s delicious,” he said, taking a long drink. “Cool and sweet. Taste it.” And he offered Rebecca some. But when he felt Rebecca’s breath on the palm of his hand, he couldn’t resist the temptation and kissed her on the lips. Rebecca didn’t say anything. She just looked at him. “You should build your house right here,” Pavel told her. “That way the Muses will always inspire you.”

  When he returned home that night, Pavel took out his copy of the Wasmuth Portfolio and picked out one of Wright’s masterpieces as his model. He wanted to build Rebecca the most beautiful house in the world. As he worked on the plans he grew inspired and added many new elements which would make the house more in keeping with life in the tropics. At the front entrance, the one which opened onto Ponce de León Avenue, there was to be a magnificent mosaic rainbow. Through this rainbow Rebecca would dance out into the world, swathed in her silk chiffons and reciting her love poems.

  The bedrooms would be in the front wing, facing the boulevard, and an elegant open pavilion would connect that wing to the dining and living rooms, which would face the lagoon. As the terrain sloped gradually toward the back of the house, one could drive under the open pavilion, which would serve as a carport and at the same time add a colorful accent because of its mosaic decorations. Under the house would be a large cellar. The kitchens would be there, as well as a large number of storage rooms, and a special chamber for the spring. The ceilings were to be twice as high as those of Wright’s houses, and the edge of the gabled roofs would be decorated with a glittering mosaic of olive boughs—the token gesture Pavel made toward Buenaventura, since olives were one of Mendizabal’s best-selling products. The house would be surrounded by a garden, and the glassware used at table would repeat the motifs of the flora: the water goblets would be lotus-shaped, the wine goblets would resemble hyacinths, and the champagne flutes water lilies.

  Pavel designed a beautiful golden terrace at the back of the house, floating over the lagoon. He would be more than glad to meet with Rebecca’s artist friends there, he said, and together they would stimulate the lazy artistic climate of the island. The next day Pavel accepted Buenaventura’s commission. It was the first time in his life he designed something truly original. He created the house on the lagoon as one would create a poem or a statue, breathing life into its every stone.

  7

  Rebecca’s Kingdom

  BUENAVENTURA AND REBECCA MOVED into their new house in 1926, and a few months later he was named Spanish consul for the island. This strengthened his economic situation even more. Now he didn’t have to sneak his merchandise into the city in covered barges that crossed the swamp, but could bring it directly into port, still without having to pay taxes on it. He sold his black Packard, bought a silver Rolls-Royce, and put a Spanish flag on its radio antenna. “Spain’s flag is the same color as the bullring’s,” he would say proudly to the diplomats he ushered around the city. “Gold for its sand and red for the blood that brave men spill on it.”

  As Buenaventura’s wife, Rebecca was required to be at his side at all formal receptions for Spanish dignitaries and for goodwill ambassadors from other European countries. When Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States, diplomatic relations virtually ceased between the island and the rest of the world. Every business or legal transaction had to be processed through the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., and this office was so flooded with work that dealing with Puerto Rican affairs was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  Buenaventura acquired an unexpected political prominence as one of the few businessmen who could still import merchandise directly from Europe. His house became a meeting place for envoys from all over the Continent. Dinners were always seven-course affairs, and the elaborate social receptions required constant supervision. Buenaventura expected Rebecca to make everything run smoothly.

  Rebecca herself told me about this time in her life during the months when Quintín and I were engaged and she was still my friend. Once our family difficulties began, though, this kind of confidence ceased. But in the summer of our courtship I used to travel from Ponce to San Juan often, and as I waited at the house for Quintín to come home from work, Rebecca would talk to me about herself.

  Rebecca, as I’ve said, began to be unhappy in her new house. Once he was made Spanish consul, Buenaventura refused to let her meet with her artist friends, because it wasn’t seemly for a diplomat’s wife to patronize such bohemian goings-on. As a result, a year after they moved to the house the poetry readings, concerts, and dance recitals ended and the sparkling mosaic terrace went unused. Rebecca had wanted a Temple of Art, and instead they lived in a Temple of Commerce and Diplomacy where her husband reigned supreme. She maintained that a man’s kingdom is his business and a woman’s is the home, but Buenaventura wouldn’t take her seriously. “A man’s home is like a rooster’s coop: women may speak out when chickens get to pee,” he said to Rebecca, giving her a pat on the behind. Rebecca anguished about it for several weeks and then accepted giving up her artistic soireés for the time being, because she didn’t want to damage Buenaventura’s career as a diplomat.

  In Extremadura, Buenaventura’s family wasn’t rich but they lived in a nice house and kept a moderate number of servants, in accordance with their modest prominence. After a number of years in Puerto Rico, however, he observed that the local bourgeoisie were very tight-fisted. They never spent a penny more than they needed to on their homes, and their servants lived in miserable conditions in underground cellars.

  When they moved into Pavel’s house, it was as if Buenaventura enjoyed behaving in open contradiction to his opulent surroundings. He forced Rebecca to walk around the house with a sheaf of keys hanging from her waist with which she would lock up the wines, the coffee, the oil, and the sugar in the pantry. Mendizabal’s smoked hams were considered a great delicacy, and in their new home Buenaventura hung them from bronze hooks in the pantry’s cupboard. The hams were aged—sometimes five or six years old—and had a round tin cup at the bottom, into which the slow tears of lard dripped day and night. After a while, Buenaventura began to be afraid that someone would steal them, and he had Rebecca store them in her closet, next to her fashionable Paris outfits and lace lingerie. So, when Rebecca was invited to dinner at their friends’ homes, there was always an odor of smoked ham about her that left no doubt as to the prosaic origin of the Mendizabal family fortune.

  Occasionally, Rebecca would defy her husband’s decrees, smiling sweetly under her Mary Pickford curls. Buenaventura had ordered that no broken porcelain plate or drinking glass should ever be thrown out before he inspected it, so he could keep track of how much waste there was at the house. Rebecca and the servants were so terrified of his outbursts that they would secretly glue the pieces together and put them back in the dining-room cabinet. On one occasion, when Buenaventura needed a loan for his cod-importing business, he invited the president of the Royal Bank of Canada to dinner at the house, and Rebecca poured him his coffee in one of the porcelain cups with a reconstructed handle. Unfortunately, the heat melted the glue and the cup fell into the man’s lap, staining his white linen pants and scalding his groin. When Rebecca saw his grimace of pain, she smiled charmingly and said without losing her composure: “Please excuse my clumsiness, sir. My husband abhors waste and never throws anything away, even broken cups. That’s why he fully deserves to be trusted by the Royal Bank.”

  Buenaventura and Rebecca traveled to Spain for the first time in 1927. They drove south from Madrid to Valdeverdeja, but he wouldn’t stay with his aunts Angelita and Conchita at their qua
int whitewashed home, with its geranium pots on the windowsills and its inner courtyard with the ancient well still in use. He insisted they set out immediately for the austere plains of Extremadura, where the Conquistadors were born. So they crossed the valley of the Tajo River in their rented Bentley without stopping until they reached the Monastery of the Virgin of Guadalupe, high up in the Sierra. He stayed there with Rebecca for a week, and visited the place every three or four years throughout most of his life.

  Buenaventura had had the monastery restored as soon as he could afford it. It was from Guadalupe that several of the Conquistadors had set out for the New World, after being blessed by the prior at the chapel. Trujillo, the town of Buenaventura’s ancestor Francisco Pizarro, was nearby, and Pizarro had also been blessed at the monastery before he set sail for Peru.

  When Buenaventura stayed at the abbey, he liked to sleep in the same spartan cell that King Charles V of Spain had used on his religious retreats; he strolled in the Mudéjar cloister, bathed in the freezing waters of the monastery’s pond, and shat comfortably in the white-porcelain toilet he had ordered built. It was the only building with modern plumbing in the province, and the monks had had the toilet raised on a velvet dais and draped with red damask curtains to keep the icy mountain drafts which seeped through the louvered windows from chilling their benefactor’s bottom.

  Rebecca hated the place. The monks had whitewashed the cells and fixed the leaky roof, but there was no heating system; they still relied on braziers to heat the rooms. The walls and floors were so cold Rebecca swore a white mist breathed out of them at night. The first time she stayed at the abbey, she was so chilly she slept fully clothed in the cell adjacent to Buenaventura’s and refused to take a bath the whole week they spent there.

  Ten years had gone by since Rebecca’s wedding, and she was no longer as much in love with Buenaventura, but she liked being married to him because he was a powerful man. When they attended parties in San Juan together, the minute the orchestra began to play a paso doble—The Kiss, for example, which went: “A kiss, in Spain, is carried by a woman deep in her soul!”; or My Tawny Beauty: “Step on my cape, my tawny beauty, and the imprint of your foot I’ll carry in a locket deep in my heart!”—Buenaventura would walk over to Rebecca in his silk tuxedo and puckered shirt, and ask her to dance. Rebecca’s misgivings would all melt away as she sailed across the crowded dance floor in Buenaventura’s arms, the envious looks of her friends falling by her side like dead birds.

  By the time Rebecca was twenty-seven, she had begun to tire of Buenaventura’s stubborn disregard for her artistic vocation. They had lived in their new house for two years and she had been a model wife, but Buenaventura hadn’t let her hold a single artist’s soirée. Pavel hardly dropped by anymore and Rebecca had no one to talk to. She didn’t have any children and she was bored to death.

  Pavel visited Rebecca often during the construction of the house on the lagoon, but once the family moved in, he stopped coming. In the past year he had been ill and withdrawn. A rumor was going around that people who lived in the houses Pavel built went gradually out of their minds. The Behn brothers, for example, the owners of the local telephone company—known in San Juan as “los hermanos Brothers”—were so happy with their beautiful house at the entrance to Alamares that they refused to go out and took care of their business by telephone instead. Eventually the brothers went bankrupt and the government expropriated their company; the house was torn down. The Calimanos, powerful hacienda owners from Guayama, began to spend their days planting water lilies in the Japanese pond at the back of their house and stopped ordering the modern crushing mills and flywheel gears necessary for their business. They produced less and less sugar and their house was also torn down. The collapse of sugar in the world market—in 1920 a ton of sugar was worth $235.87 and by 1926 it was worth $83.31—put pressure on other sugar barons, too, and they no longer commissioned lavish homes from Pavel.

  To forget his woes, Pavel began to drink a purple liquor made from sugar beets which he distilled himself in the cellar of his house. His grandmother had made it in Czechoslovakia when he was a child, and now he drank it to feel closer to his Czech roots. He stopped working and became a recluse. He built a moat around his rural-style cottage on the outskirts of San Juan, so no one could approach it from the street.

  One morning Pavel, half drunk, stepped into his car to go downtown, but the car wouldn’t start. He opened the hood and tried to get the motor going, but nothing happened. He stood in front of the car, cranking it over and over, thinking it wouldn’t budge. But the car suddenly shot forward and crushed him against a telephone pole. People were afraid of his bad luck and no one went to his funeral; he was carted off, unaccompanied, to the Municipal Cemetery. Rebecca was the only person who put flowers on his grave.

  Soon after Pavel died, Rebecca decided she couldn’t bear to live with Buenaventura any longer. She approached him, head hung low, her blond curls almost hiding her face, and told him she was leaving him. Governor Horace Towner, who was a friend of Don Esteban Rosich, had offered her father, Arístides Arrigoitia, an office job in Atlanta, and she had persuaded him to accept. Her mother, Madeleine Rosich, had always wanted to go back to the States. They would take Don Esteban with them, as he was well on in years. They would be living in a house with a pillared portico at the end of an avenue of ancient mahogany trees. Buenaventura couldn’t believe it. It had never crossed his mind that Rebecca might desert him.

  “And what will we do with our beautiful house?” was the only thing that occurred to him to say. “Frankly, I don’t know,” Rebecca replied sadly. “For all I care, you may use it as a warehouse for your precious hams and your cursed codfish.” And she went on packing the flowing robes, the dancing slippers, and the books of poetry into her suitcase.

  When Buenaventura found himself alone, he fell ill. For the first time since he arrived on the island, he didn’t have the energy to get out of bed. He stayed there all day like a beached whale, not shaving, not even dressing for breakfast. He couldn’t stand living in Pavel’s house, where everything reminded him of Rebecca. A week later he got out of bed, took a bath, dressed, clipped the tufts of hair growing out of his ears, and traveled to Atlanta to ask her forgiveness.

  On the day Buenaventura arrived, Rebecca found that she was pregnant. She didn’t want the child to be born without the father’s knowing about it, so she told Buenaventura the news. He was exultant. He apologized for everything and promised Rebecca she could have all the artistic soirées she wanted if only she would return to the island with him. Rebecca consented. Her mother and father were happy with the decision—they had hoped the rift would be temporary—and a few weeks later the whole family boarded the ship back to San Juan. Rebecca returned triumphant on Buenaventura’s arm, and from that day on she reigned as undisputed mistress of the house on the lagoon.

  8

  Salomé’s Dance

  BUENAVENTURA WAS SO HAPPY he wanted to please Rebecca in everything. She could invite as many artists as she wanted to her cultural gatherings, which would alternate with Buenaventura’s diplomatic meetings. Dressed in elegant gowns and velvet suits, Rebecca’s friends came at least one evening a week to the house, to lounge on the terrace and discuss poetry, art, and music until the early hours of the morning. They made fun of Buenaventura’s acquaintances—the businessmen, lawyers, and politicians he invited to dinner, who dressed in dark suits, had generous paunches, and ate with napkins tucked under their chins. But Buenaventura didn’t mind.

  Rebecca wrote poetry every day. She visited the spring in the cellar and drank its waters, convinced that they nourished her inspiration. Her friends wrote poetry also, and they read their compositions aloud to each other on the terrace, commenting on them and making suggestions. They read books on modern art and became politically conscious. They admired Luis Palés Matos, the son of a white hacendado, who in 1929 had published a collection of revolutionary poems titled Tún tún de pasa y grif
ería in which black ethnic roots were regarded as fundamental to Puerto Rican culture. The bourgeoisie was scandalized, but Rebecca’s friends fell in love with the poems, which echoed with the mysterious rhythms of Africa. Rebecca was so proud to have these meetings in her own home that she kept her racial prejudice in check and never complained when her friends recited Palés’s poems.

  Thanks to these rendezvous—the cultural and the diplomatic—Buenaventura and Rebecca got along better than they ever had in eleven years of marriage. Rebecca was content and didn’t even notice when Buenaventura brought Petra Avilés to work for them at the house. Brambon, Petra’s husband, moved in with them, too, and the couple installed themselves in the cellar. Petra worked as cook and Brambon became Buenaventura’s chauffeur.

  Petra’s ancestors were Angolan, and when people told her she was strong as an ox she would smile and say that was to be expected, her ancestors drank ox blood. She was six feet tall and her skin wasn’t a watered-down chocolate but a deep onyx black; when she smiled it was as if a white scar slashed the darkness of the night. She wore brightly colored seed necklaces around her neck and steel bracelets on her wrists, and she went barefoot, so the only thing you heard when she walked into a room was her bracelets tinkling like spearheads. Petra was born in 1889 in Guayama, a town famous for its sorcerers and medicine men, and her parents had been slaves. As slavery was abolished in 1873, she was born free.

  Petra’s grandfather, Bernabé Avilés, whose African name was Ndongo Kumbundu, was born in Angola. Petra herself told Manuel and Willie Bernabé’s story when they were children, and it would make their hair stand on end. Bernabé was chieftain of a tribe living in Bié Plateau, an area six thousand feet above sea level and one of the richest in Angola, when one day Portuguese traders raided his tribe and made him a prisoner. He was taken to the port of Luanda and put aboard a ship that landed in nearby St. Thomas. That same year he was brought to Puerto Rico in a small frigate and sold to Monsieur Pellot, a sugarcane hacienda owner in Guayama, which had lush cane fields all around it.