House on the Lagoon

by Rosario Ferré

  Isabel, on the contrary, would be remembered as the author of The House on the Lagoon, a “work of art”—if she ever managed to publish it. Art was a much more effective way to perpetuate oneself, to achieve a kind of immortality.

  He told himself he was being selfish, that he shouldn’t begrudge his wife her possible success. But he wished she would share his anonymity with him. Maybe he could convince her not to publish the novel, to keep it a secret between them. She had accomplished something meaningful in life and he would be the first to compliment her on it. He would praise the way she had managed to hone her phrases and give body to the wraiths of her imagination. Was it so important that her novel be published? What mattered was that it existed, that it had been born and could compete with the rest of creation. That way, his family’s reputation would be safeguarded and he wouldn’t be forced to destroy the manuscript. If Isabel still loved him, she could make that sacrifice. It would be the utmost proof of her devotion, and he would be forever in her debt.

  Quintín told himself he had to be patient and rise above the situation. His instinct told him it wasn’t wise to pressure Isabel to talk about the novel right now. She had had a tragic family history. Her mother had been an addicted gambler. Her father had committed suicide, and Carmita had gone into a severe depression before losing her mind. He would just have to wait and hope that things would straighten themselves out.

  Quintín turned once more to the manuscript at hand. He took out his pencil, sharpened the point, and concentrated as much as he could on the text. Maybe he could help Isabel write the perfect novel.

  He read Isabel’s description of her arrival in Ponce at the beginning of Chapter 16, and made a small note on the margin of the first page. “Eulogizing your own world too much?” She talked about Ponce as if it were Texas, the Lone Star State. Ponce was a beautiful town, but it could never compare with San Juan, which was a metropolis of a million and a half inhabitants. She had to keep things in perspective: Ponce had a population of a hundred and fifty thousand. “It’s true, Ponce’s houses look like wedding cakes. But that doesn’t mean Ponce is architecturally more significant than the citadel of Old San Juan—even if San Juan’s houses do have matchstick balconies,” he noted farther down.

  Another fault he found was Isabel’s tendency to use her female characters as shadow players for her own personality. She had to be careful here; it was a pitfall for mediocre writers.

  “You like rebellious characters,” he wrote at the bottom of the next page, “but that doesn’t mean you should identify with them. Be more careful—when you talk about them, the rebel in you suddenly rears its head. Perhaps that’s why you could describe Rebecca with such gusto in the sixth and seventh chapters. In her young days, Mother was ungovernable; she was spoiled and was used to having her own way. But she changed later on. Father helped her to grow up and she accepted her responsibilities as a wife and mother.”

  When Quintín reached the end of the margin on the third page, he turned the page over and began to write freely on the back of Isabel’s manuscript. He knew he was throwing caution to the winds, but he let his enthusiasm run away with him.

  “What rings true in your manuscript is your passion for ballet dancing,” he continued. “The reader can tell you love it by the way you warm to the subject. Your Isabel knows the names of all the steps and positions by heart, and must also have read a book or two on ballet theory. Rebecca, or the character you named after my mother, shares this passion with you. When Rebecca says, ‘I’d like to reach, through nature, the divine expression of the human spirit,’ she sounds a lot like Kerenski many pages later, when he tells his students, ‘If you let the music flood you when you dance, one day you’ll attain enlightenment.’ But it’s not Rebecca or Kerenski I’m hearing, it’s Isabel.

  “I remember the affair between Kerenski and Estefanía Volmer well; it was one of the biggest scandals in Ponce in the forties. You know what our island is like. Gossip is like Spanish moss; it knots itself around every telephone pole and hangs from the eaves of houses in no time at all.

  “If you permit me, I’ll add my version of the story here. It’s different from yours, because it’s based on facts. But, at this point, who can tell fact from fiction in this manuscript? For someone who never lived in Ponce, both versions could be true. It’s the artistic rendition of the story, the telling of it, that’s important. And I want to prove to you that history can be just as valid from the point of view of art if it is properly told.”

  So, as the early-morning light began to spill through the study’s window, Quintín gave his historical version of Isabel’s story—because all stories have a history:

  “Kerenski had leftist leanings, and when he married Norma Castillo, they moved to Ponce. He was nicknamed by the townspeople Kerenski the Red Jew. No one would have sent his daughter to the ballet school if Kerenski had been its director. But everyone in Ponce knew who the Castillos were; all good families on the island know each other. Norma was very effective at teaching poise and etiquette to the girls, and the school was a success from the start. But after a while Kerenski began to resent the fact that only well-to-do students were enrolled. He wanted to work with all kinds of people, he said, so he could brag to his socialist friends about running a democratic institution where poor students were also admitted. He was embittered that the school was really under Norma’s guidance. It was then that he started to look for ways to get back at her, and began stalking Estefanía Volmer.

  “I knew Estefanía long before I met you, because the young people from Ponce’s well-to-do families would often come to dances and parties in San Juan. That’s how I got to know so much about the Kerenski Ballet School. You never saw Estefanía with me because you never went to parties at fashionable night spots at the time. Your father wouldn’t let you go to them, he was such a Puritan. Estefanía, on the other hand, was wild. I took her to dances a couple of times, and I can vouch for the fact that she wore no underwear. I remember on one occasion Estefanía was supposed to crown the Carnival Queen at the Alamares Casino. She asked me to be her escort. She was wearing one of those lavish wire-hoop gowns, with the skirt resembling a balloon full of air. When the moment arrived, Estefanía climbed the stairs at the end of the dance floor, carrying the Queen’s crown on a red velvet pillow, and when she reached the top, she took a deep bow facing the throne. Her skirt rose perpendicularly behind her and revealed the prettiest pair of pink buns you can imagine. There must have been at least a thousand people there. All the men whistled and burst into applause. But Estefanía didn’t even blush. She just laughed, fastened the rhinestone crown on the Queen’s head with hairpins, and came bouncing back down the stairs to stand next to me on the dance floor. I never told you the story because I knew she was your friend and I didn’t want to embarrass you.

  “Estefanía’s mother, Margot Rinser, was the first natural platinum-blonde I ever met. Her hair was the color of the rum her parents sold. But she liked to drink it, too. That was her problem.

  “One day Arturo and Margot saw a traveling circus that had just arrived in Ponce. It must have been around six in the morning and they were returning from a party at the Ponce Country Club, when they went by the ball park and saw the big tent. Two lions were sleeping in a cage parked in a nearby gully. Margot told Arturo she wanted to see the lions up close. At first Arturo said no, but then he decided to humor her. They’d been married only a month. They came to the gully, parked their blue DeSoto, and got out.

  “Arturo was in his white dinner jacket and Margot was wearing a long evening gown with a beaded train which shimmered in the morning half-light. As they approached the cages, they saw a man taking pieces of meat and bone out of a hemp sack. It was the animals’ caretaker, feeding the lions their breakfast. Margot came near and watched in fascination as the lions gorged themselves. She had never seen real lions before in her life, and she found them beautiful. They had large, golden eyes, and when they ate, their pupils dilated like
tranquil pools.

  “Margot asked the caretaker if she could feed one of the animals. The caretaker didn’t think twice. The lions were old and were used to being hand-fed, so he gave her a small piece of meat. Margot approached the cage and called out playfully to the nearest female, a thin, squalid animal with tufts of hair on its head. Margot felt sorry for her. The circus was so cruel to animals—who knew how much this one had been through? Slowly she put her right hand inside the iron bars—Arturo was standing right behind her, holding on to her left arm, amused by her sentimentality. But just as Margot let the piece of meat drop to the floor of the cage, the lioness sprang at her. She thrust a paw between the bars and grabbed Margot’s train—the shimmering beads had caught her eye—pulling Margot toward her with terrific force. For a few desperate seconds there was a tug-of-war. Arturo held on to Margot on one side of the cage, and the lioness on the other. Margot screamed, but the lioness had a tight hold. The train of the dress was made of strong material and wouldn’t tear, so the lioness ended up mauling Margot’s thigh through the bars.

  “It was as a result of that accident—and not because of bone cancer, as you naïvely wrote—that Margot Rinser had to have her right leg amputated. A few weeks later she discovered that she was pregnant with Estefanía. It was a pathetic sight—pregnant and not even married six months—as Arturo Volmer pushed her wheelchair through the streets of Ponce. Arturo never recovered from the blow. He felt guilty for not being able to prevent the accident. In his dreams he kept seeing Margot’s right hand offering the lioness a piece of meat, as he held on to her left and laughed as if it were all a joke. That was why he devoted himself to taking care of her, and why Estefanía was brought up like a wild child.

  “Estefanía was a rebel, everybody on the island said so. She used to drive her red Ford convertible from Ponce to San Juan, and she had a reputation for doing everything. She drove Arturo and Margot half mad with her carefree life, but there was nothing they could do about it.

  “It was a well-known fact that Estefanía met Kerenski at the ballet school. It didn’t take them long to realize they were made for each other. You seem to have been half in love with that scoundrel yourself. You know very well that you were the one who pulled the lever at the end of the recital at La Perla that night, Isabel! That you were the one who made the curtain rise so that the love affair of André Kerenski and Estefanía Volmer was revealed to the world! And a few months later—to help out Norma Castillo, who had sued for divorce—you accused Kerenski of child molestation during a court hearing. And as a result of your testimony, Kerenski was eventually deported from the United States.”

  Quintín was bent over the pages of the manuscript, completely absorbed in his writing, when he heard a noise outside the study where the mangroves grew near to the house. He hid the pages in the desk drawer and moved silently to the window. But it was just an owl, hooting morosely on a branch overhead, and its shadow flitted away as soon as Quintín showed his face. He went back and sat down on the chair in front of the desk, deep in thought.

  He had discovered yet another facet of Isabel. Evidently she had been wildly in love with Kerenski. She had sworn she had never loved anyone before him and she had been lying all along. But that she should fall in love with a jerk like the immigrant ballet master only added insult to injury. Isabel was almost a child at the time, and yet she had been merciless. If what she wrote was true, she had viciously destroyed Kerenski with her slander, simply because she felt spurned. She was all innocence, all guileless spontaneity on the surface, and underneath, this terrible hate, churning. The intensity of her emotions, the violence she had been capable of, seeped through her words like a deadly poison. At fourteen she was a little Medea, and like Medea, she had used words to wreak her vengeance on a pathetic Russian immigrant.

  Quintín felt a shiver of apprehension run down his back. If Isabel had been capable of doing such a thing simply because she had seen Kerenski kiss another student, what might she do to him if she ever got it into her mind that he didn’t love her?

  PART 6

  The Second House on the Lagoon

  ISABEL

  QUINTÍN HAS FOUND AND read my manuscript. He’s not only read it, he’s put in commentaries in longhand, scribbling angrily in the margins, and even adding his version to mine on the back of some of the pages. What nerve, to accuse me of distorting the truth, of changing the events of our family histories around! He knows I know he knows. And yet he’s left the manuscript undisturbed in Rebecca’s desk.

  Fine. His curiosity is piqued; he wants to find out how the novel will end. That’s the reason he hasn’t destroyed the manuscript or said anything to make me stop writing, confident that, at the very last, he’ll be able to do away with it or prevent me from publishing. But he’ll want to get even one way or another, I’m sure of it.

  Quintín quoted the Bible at dinner tonight, just before we began to eat: “Whoever troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind,” he said solemnly. Then he gave thanks for all the “blessings” we have received. That’s fine, too. But at least I’ll have had the satisfaction of having put down on paper the story of our marriage.

  19

  Abby’s Wedding Shroud

  QUINTÍN AND I MET in the summer before my junior year in college. It was June and we were both home from school. Abby had taken me to San Juan for the weekend on a shopping trip and we stayed at the house of Aunt Hortensia, one of Carmita’s sisters, who had moved to the capital. It was a sunny day and I had gone out with my cousin to stroll on the Escambrón boardwalk. I liked the boardwalk because of its magnificent view; on the left, one can see the ocean, and on the right there is a small bay with a crescent of white sand. We were wearing our bathing suits and would dive in at the end. The waves are so transparent there that they seem to be made of quartz, pounding the rocks as if trying to reduce them to dust.

  The Escambrón’s Beach Club hadn’t been torn down yet; from the boardwalk, it looked like a white whale run aground on the other side of the bay. The heavy black iron chain the U.S. Navy had placed underwater during the Second World War to fend off German submarines still hung at the entrance to the bay, rusted and covered with barnacles. A group of street urchins in rags were playing boisterously nearby, climbing up on the handrail and diving from the edge of the platform like wild pelicans.

  Suddenly someone pushed me from behind and I stumbled. When I looked up, I couldn’t breathe; something was strangling me. I clutched at my throat and the gold chain around my neck suddenly snapped; one of the urchins ran in front of me, then disappeared as he dived with the chain over the rail. Everything happened so quickly I didn’t have time to think. When I put my hand to my neck, I realized I was bleeding.

  A second shadow rushed past me and dove into the water. I peered anxiously at the ocean below; two shadows struggled under the dark blue surface, until the second one overpowered the first. A few moments later a dark-haired young man swam back to the boardwalk, holding my chain and medal in his hand.

  “The Virgin of Guadalupe is the protector of my warrior ancestors,” he said with a polite smile. “I let the boy get away because he was too young. But next time, don’t come to the beach wearing jewelry. Urchins, like pelicans, attack anything that shines near the water.”

  He had broad shoulders and walked with a little bit of a swagger. “Thanks for the chivalrous gesture,” I said, laughing.

  Quintín took me by the arm. “You’re hurt,” he said with concern. “You’d better come with me.” He escorted my cousin and me to his car and we went to the Emergency Room at the nearby Presbyterian Hospital, where a doctor took care of me. Then he drove us back to my aunt’s house. Before he left, I thanked him again, and gave him my address and telephone number in Ponce.

  I went back home with Abby and two or three days later Quintín called from San Juan. He wanted to know how I was and if I had gotten over the fright. I told him I was fine and that I was coming to San Juan the following week. We m
et again a few days later. After we saw each other several times, Quintín began traveling to Ponce every weekend. One day he asked me to be his steady girlfriend, and gave me Buenaventura’s signet ring, which his father had once given to Rebecca. When Quintín was twenty-one, Rebecca had passed it on to him, because he was her oldest son. I remember the first time I wore it; we were sitting out on the veranda on Aurora Street. I looked at the kneeling warrior beheading a hog, and thought how different it looked from anything that was part of my world.

  Father died at the end of the next summer, just before I returned to the States for my last year in college. Carmita’s gambling finally did him in. When we moved to Ponce eleven years earlier, Carmita had been almost cured of her habit; there were no casinos in Ponce, and she had nowhere to gamble. But then the Ponce Intercontinental Hotel opened its doors atop a rocky hill behind the town. The Intercontinental was the first truly modern hotel to go up in Ponce, and it stood in contrast to the town’s elegant turn-of-the-century architecture. All the rooms had panel-glass windows; there were balconies that jutted out over the dry, spiny vegetation, and an absurd cylindrical stairway to the pool area made of round, decorative bricks which faintly resembled the neck of a giraffe.

  The hotel had a luxurious casino; the mayor had hoped it would bring American tourists to Ponce. But he was wrong. The three-hour drive from San Juan, the narrow, winding road, the hairpin curves with dark green gullies which lured careless travelers to the bottom proved to be too much of an obstacle. Ponce has no beaches; it has never been a resort town, and Ponceños have always wanted to keep it that way. Soon the Intercontinental was losing thousands of dollars. Faced with a serious situation, the manager began to advertise the casino among the local families, inviting the ladies to its Lady Luck Afternoons, when each dollar would be worth six chips instead of three, until eight in the evening.