Abuela Gabriela was a beautiful woman, but beauty was unfortunately her nemesis. There was very little to do in the mountains, and Abuela had a hard time keeping Abuelo’s mind off his favorite pastime. He loved guava shells with goat cheese, and Abuela would prepare them for him almost every day. When she boiled the guavas, the aroma would fill the whole house and waft in and out through the windows. Abuelo could smell it before he got off his horse. The moment he climbed the stairs, he would start peeling off his clothes and chase Abuela through the house until they wound up in bed. Abuela Gabriela’s skin was a delicate guava pink, and when they made love he nibbled playfully at her breasts and felt himself to be more and more potent. Abuela finally realized the guavas were an aphrodisiac and stopped cooking them, but it was too late. For six years in a row she had a baby every year. Abuelo was delighted with his wife’s productiveness, which he saw as a gift from God. “My wife is so fertile,” he would say to his friends, “that I just have to sneeze by her side once, and nine months later she’s as big as a pumpkin. But I don’t mind it at all, because being so close to nature is one of her many charms.”
Abuela Gabriela did her duty and lived with a clear conscience. In their seventh year of marriage, Vicenzo was still moonstruck every time he came near her, but she couldn’t stand it anymore. She chose to fall out of favor with God rather than lose her inner peace. That December she pushed Vicenzo out of her room before she turned into a pumpkin again.
It wasn’t an easy victory; she had to fight for her bed as if it were a castle under siege. Vicenzo importuned her nightly with his poems and serenades, standing like a lovesick calf by her locked door, but Abuela was proud of her Corsican blood and withstood his assaults with an iron will. “If this goes on for one more day, the cradle will be my tomb,” she cried to Vicenzo. She pleaded with him to accept chastity as a way of life, but it was no use. When he insisted she honor a husband’s prerogatives, Abuela rose up in arms. Like a mountain-born Lucretia, she defended her celibacy with brooms, dust mops, and even kitchen knives. When in the dead of night she saw Abuelo’s shadow creeping silently near her bed, she sat up, knife in hand, and cried out at the top of her lungs: “Get out of here, Vicenzo; this is my private bastion! From now on, whoever tries to climb these ramparts will end up in one of Río Negro’s ravines.”
It was a struggle for both of them. They still loved and needed each other. Abuela Gabriela didn’t want to exile Abuelo from her side; she tried to convince him that true love didn’t dwell in the bottom half of the body but in the mind, and that a chaste embrace could be as effective an antidote for incurable wounds as a lustful one. But Abuelo wouldn’t give in. His eyes would fill with tears, he would look at her reproachfully, and then would try to kiss and embrace her. When he finally realized that she meant what she said, he tried to practice continence for two weeks, but on the fourteenth day he felt as if he were burning in hell. He stole out of the house and went off to the nearest town.
Abuelo began to visit two mistresses in Yauco once a week, and no one thought him the worse for it. “Only the exercise of nature’s most elemental pleasure can reconcile a man to the suffering of this world,” he said to the priest of the town, who was one of his best friends. When he went to confession, the priest didn’t make anything of his new situation and gave him absolution anyway. Soon both of Abuelo’s mistresses became pregnant. Abuela was so relieved that it was someone else’s task to give birth, nourish, and bring up the new babies that she gave them both her blessing. She attended the christenings and had Abuelo recognize them as legitimate.
Not long after she chose a celibate life, Abuela stopped going to church. She would lie alone in bed at night and miss Vicenzo terribly. Instead of praying to the Virgin Mary, whose image stood in a corner of her bedroom on a little shelf surrounded by candles, she would reproach her for allying herself with St. Peter and St. Paul, and with the Fathers of the Holy Church, who were all unfair to women. St. Paul had told his male brethren it was better to marry than to burn; but he had no palliative for his female brethren, who would burn whether they were married or not.
Abuela was a sensual woman and had enjoyed sex with her husband; abstention was torture. She resented the fact that a woman’s fertility should condemn her to loneliness. She consulted with the midwife, who told her menstruation would last only twenty years, and at the end of that time she would be able to live a normal life, free from the terror of becoming pregnant every time she made love.
Abuela simply had to be patient and wait it out. In time she pardoned not only Abuelo for his sexual dalliances, but also St. Peter and St. Paul for being so unrelenting. But it wasn’t until she was able to forgive herself that she was finally at peace. Sexual sins were not important, after all; what really counted was shared responsibility and companionship, and even though they slept in separate beds, she went on living with Vicenzo on excellent terms. When Abuela was finally blessed with menopause, she let Abuelo climb back into her bed, and they began making love with the same gusto as at the beginning; he still preferred her to either of his mistresses. Abuelo and Abuela got along very well after that. When he sold the farm in Río Negro and moved to Ponce to open his coffee warehouse, Abuela went on being his business partner and worked side by side with him for many years.
Abuela kept only one secret from Abuelo during all this time. When her six daughters were born in Río Negro, she swore to herself she wouldn’t let them undergo her terrible trial. She made them promise they would have one child every five years, and they would surreptitiously do everything to prevent consecutive pregnancies. “An only child is portable,” Abuela said to them. “The mother may carry it with her everywhere. But two babies are a powerful link in the iron chain with which men tie women down and make them their prisoners.”
This was the promise Carmita was supposed to keep and recklessly broke three years after I was born. When Abuela learned her daughter had become pregnant a second time, she traveled from Ponce to San Juan with the midwife to remind Carmita of her pledge. Abby was away at the time; she had gone to visit her nephews in Adjuntas because Father’s Uncle Orencio had just passed away. If Abby had been home, none of this would have happened. Abuela Gabriela, left to her own designs with my mother, forced her to drink some brew to terminate the pregnancy. But it was so strong it caused hemorrhaging.
When I ran into the house and saw Carmita unconscious on the floor, I was terrified. I couldn’t understand what Abuela Gabriela was whispering about with the midwife, but I knew something
dreadful had happened. I saw Abuela and the maids carrying Mother to bed, then scurrying about to change the bloodstained sheets and take them to the laundry house in the garden. Then I heard Abuela say to Mother that she mustn’t worry, that something at least four moons old had fallen into the toilet bowl, and how relieved she should feel. A little later the doctor was smuggled into the house through the back door, so the neighbors wouldn’t see him. When Father came back from his workshop that evening, the crisis was over and Mother was lying neatly in bed, simply getting over a bad headache.
I remember feeling both excited and afraid. I was part of an adult plot, a secret female conspiracy which Abuela Gabriela said would be of benefit to me when I grew up, so I did my best to say nothing to Father. The whole thing would probably have blown over if Mother hadn’t developed a serious infection (the pregnancy was too advanced and complications set in) and was unable to have any more children. This was a hard blow for Father, who never found out about the miscarriage but eventually discovered that Carmita was sterile.
Year after year Father had hoped for a son. Carlos was an orphan, and he felt that not having a father was the saddest thing that could happen to a child. He planned to do many things with his son and teach him to grow up to be a fine young man. Carmita was silent when she heard him talk like that, but she became more and more depressed.
Abby and I talked this over many years later and she told me what had happened. When Abuela arr
ived from Ponce, she convinced Carmita that every woman had the right to determine what took place in her own body, and that she would be able to take good care of her second child only when the first one—meaning me—was grown enough so that it wouldn’t be a constant worry. Carmita had gone along with the abortion. Then the unexpected had happened.
Carmita suddenly felt guilty; something had been uprooted from her heart that she hadn’t known was there. A mantle of affection had already wrapped itself around the faceless baby in her womb. A deep sadness came over her, and one day Abby discovered that all the knives had disappeared from the kitchen drawer, the scissors from her sewing box, the pruning shears from the gardener’s tool box, and Father’s razor blades from the medicine cabinet. She went looking for Carmita and found her in the sewing room, where she spent her mornings after Father went to work.
Carmita was sitting in front of her black Singer sewing machine, the one decorated with gold miniature roses that Father had given her for her last birthday. She had put the knives and scissors in a row on the table, next to her needles and spools of thread, and was staring at them intently. When Abby came into the room, she looked up at her in a daze. “I know there’s something important I have to do with these knives and scissors, Abby,” she said, “but I can’t remember what.” Abby was terrified; she made a thorough search of the house and put all sharp-edged objects under lock and key until Carmita came out of her depression a few months later.
All of a sudden it was as if Carmita weren’t there anymore. Her eyes grew absent and her black clothes, wet with tears, were always cold when I hugged her. It was as if she lived in a perpetual mist. She wouldn’t let me kiss or embrace her, because I reminded her of the dead baby.
10
Madeleine and Arístides’s Marriage
QUINTÍN’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER DON Esteban Rosich was Italian by birth. He lived in Boston for many years and was naturalized in 1885. One day—it must have been around 1899—he walked with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Madeleine, into La Traviata, a store in Old San Juan. Spread over several polished mahogany counters were rolls of imported silk from France, lace from Portugal, Belgium, and Venice, colorful linens from Ireland. Arístides Arrigoitia, Quintín’s grandfather, worked in La Traviata as a store clerk. He was twenty and had a difficult apprenticeship: the store’s owner had a habit of kicking him in the shins every time he found mouse nests in the goose-down pillows at the back of the shop. But the real reason he hit him was that he hated foreigners. He saw them as leeches who took income away from Puerto Ricans, and he employed them only because they worked for half the pay. Arístides was an affable young man and made the most of his unpleasant job. Elegant ladies who led an active social life in San Juan came to shop in La Traviata almost every day, looking for the laces and silks that their fashionable couturiers would make into beautiful gowns. Arístides knew their tastes by heart.
Don Esteban was a widower. He had decided to retire to the island for reasons of health, after making a fortune selling Italian shoes in Boston. He also owned a steamship company—the Taurus Line—which did a lot of business between San Juan, Boston, and New York, and he could easily go on supervising it from the island. Don Esteban had arrived in San Juan only a month before and had purchased a country house in the blue hills of Guaynabo, because he liked the cool temperatures there. The house had a sloping tile roof, wooden rafters, and a brick chimney—built to please the fancy of the previous owner, a rich islander who dreamed of owning a home in the snow-covered hills of Maine.
Don Esteban took his daughter to La Traviata so they could buy linens for their house.
“How may I help you, sir? We have some beautiful new merchandise just arrived from Europe,” Arístides said, smiling, as Don Esteban strolled in, silver cane in hand. He spoke perfect English, and Don Esteban was taken by surprise. At the time, almost no one in the city could speak English.
“What part of the States are you from, young man?” he asked pleasantly. Arístides’s blond hair and easygoing manner misled Don Esteban into thinking he was an American. “I was born right here, sir,” he said, politely pulling out a chair for Madeleine. “My parents immigrated from the Basque provinces just before my birth.”
Quintín used to talk to me about Don Arístides often, because he was very fond of him. In fact, there has always been a photograph of him in a silver frame on our library table. He never met his grandfather on the Mendizabal side of the family; Buenaventura talked to him about his ancestors from Extremadura, but they were always heroes, not flesh-and-blood people. Don Esteban, on the other hand, was a lovable old man, with pink cheeks and snow-white whiskers on either side of his face.
Arístides was tall and robust; Quintín said he looked like a peasant from the Pyrenees. Don Esteban immediately took a liking to him. He identified with people who came from humble backgrounds and had learned to make a go of it in a difficult situation.
“Il piacere e mio,” Don Esteban said in Italian, and asked Arístides where he had learned to speak English so well. “The American nuns from the School of the Annunciation were my teachers, sir,” he replied. “They taught us it would be our duty to speak English when we knocked on the doors of heaven, asking to be let in.” Don Esteban and Madeleine burst out laughing. They knew he was poking fun at a comment the governor had made recently in the local press. The governor had decreed that English be mandatory in all the island’s schools, and four thousand copies of Appleton’s First Reader in English had been handed out to schoolchildren. Both Don Esteban and Madeleine thought it was preposterous to make children take all their classes in a language they couldn’t speak. “Of course, this means we’ll be an educated people when we get to heaven, even if we don’t understand what God says,” Arístides added with a wink at Madeleine.
Arístides knew he had made a good impression and decided to take advantage of it. He brought out a roll of ivory Alençon lace to tempt his customer into buying it; it would make a beautiful gown. “I need a roll of plain white percale to have a dozen sheets made for our new house,” Madeleine said in a no-nonsense voice, vigorously shaking her head. “We never attend formal parties.” Arístides brought out a roll of fine Belgian linen and showed it to her. “You should have sheets made of this,” he said. “It’s impossible to sleep on anything else on this island. At night it gets so hot that cotton sticks to you like sour gum. That is, unless one sleeps in the nude. Then it doesn’t matter what kind of sheets one sleeps on.”
Madeleine stared at him unabashed. She was a forthright young woman with few inhibitions, in spite of having been brought up by the nuns. “I wouldn’t mind sleeping in the nude,” she replied in a lilting voice, “but only on sheets that have my initials on them.” And she asked Arístides if he knew someone on the island who could embroider them for her. “At the convent next to the Church of Our Lady of Miracles, of course,” he answered courteously. “I can take you there myself tomorrow if you like. The nuns are friends of mine.”
A year after her visit to La Traviata, Madeleine walked down the aisle of the Church of Our Lady of Miracles carrying a beautiful bouquet of white orchids, and returned on her husband’s arm. Don Esteban gave them his blessing. He was going to need a young man like Arístides to help him manage the offices of the Taurus Line, he said, and Arístides was very sociable and knew a lot of people in San Juan.
Arístides’s father was born in Bilbao, and worked as the head chef at the Spanish Casino—where his granddaughter was to be crowned Queen of the Spanish Antilles seventeen years later. Arístides’s mother died when he was a child, and his father sent him to the orphanage in Puerta de Tierra, which was run by American nuns. Before the Marines landed in Guánica in 1898, there were practically no schools for children on the island; the orphanage at Puerta de Tierra was an exception. By the time Don Esteban had settled in Guaynabo, however, there were six hundred public schools, all of them built by the American government.
The school Arístides attended a
s a child was run by an order of missionary nuns who did valuable work in San Juan. It was because of the nuns of the Annunciation that Arístides admired the United States so much. They were very good teachers and were careful to instill in their students a true civic spirit. The history of the United States was taught thoroughly at their school, yet Puerto Rican history was never mentioned. In the nuns’ view, the island had no history. In this they were not exceptional; it was forbidden to teach Puerto Rican history at the time, either at private or at public schools. Can history be so dangerous as to be revolutionary? I’ve often asked Quintín that question, but he never answers me.
The nuns of the Annunciation taught Arístides that the island had begun to exist politically when the American troops landed at Guánica. President Wilson had said so himself in a speech in 1913. “The countries the United States have taken in trust, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, must first accept the discipline of law. They are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice.” It was for this reason that Arrigoitia had so loyally embraced the ideals of Republicanism and American democracy.
As Arístides grew up, the world seemed to endorse the lessons he had learned from the nuns. His employer at La Traviata exploited him, something the American government would never have done. Arístides tried to get a job at the post office before he took the one at La Traviata. Postal officials were highly regarded; they got paid the federal minimum wage, which very few people earned on the island; obtained health insurance and were given a paid two-week vacation each year. But he had no luck. He never forgot the painful lessons he had learned at La Traviata. “The day we become an independent nation,” he would tell Quintín years later, “the local bourgeoisie will throw the more recent immigrants off the island and take away our rights and properties. We owe everything we have to the American Constitution, and for this reason you should cherish and defend it.”
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