House on the Lagoon Read online

  The House on the Lagoon

  A Novel

  Rosario Ferré

  I wish to thank both Susan Bergholz and John Glusman for their generous help during the writing of this book. Their literary expertise and spiritual support were crucial to me, and made this novel possible. I also wish to thank my husband, Agustín Costa, for sharing the novel’s difficult moments with me, as well as its joys.

  Contents

  Quintín and Isabel’s Pledge

  Part I The Foundations

  1 Buenaventura’s Freshwater Spring

  2 Buenaventura Arrives on the Island

  3 The Queen of the Antilles

  4 When Shadows Roamed the Island

  5 The Merchant Prince

  Part 2 The First House on the Lagoon

  6 The Wizard from Prague

  7 Rebecca’s Kingdom

  8 Salomé’s Dance

  Quintín

  Part 3 Family Roots

  9 Carmita Monfort’s Promise

  10 Madeleine and Arístides’s Marriage

  11 The Courage of Valentina Monfort

  Quintín

  Part 4 The Country House in Guaynabo

  12 Thanksgiving Day, 1936

  13 Chief Arrigoitia’s Ordeal

  14 Tosca the Soothsayer

  15 Carmita and Carlos’s Elopement

  Quintín

  Part 5 The House on Aurora Street

  16 The Kerenski Ballet School

  17 The Firebird

  18 Vassar College

  Quintín

  Part 6 The Second House on the Lagoon

  Isabel

  19 Abby’s Wedding Shroud

  20 The Wedding Vow

  21 Rebecca’s Book of Poems

  22 A Dirge for Esmeralda Márquez

  23 Petra’s Kingdom

  Quintín

  24 The Viscounts from Madrid

  25 Buenaventura’s Wake

  Part 7 The Third House on the Lagoon

  26 Rebecca’s Revenge

  27 Quintín’s Odyssey

  28 Ignacio’s Martyrdom

  Quintín

  29 The Art Collector

  30 The Magic Birthmark

  Quintín

  31 The Forbidden Banquet

  32 The Love Child

  Quintín

  33 Willie and Manuel

  34 Fire Coral

  35 Manuel’s Rebellion

  36 Quintín’s Folly

  Quintín

  37 AK 47

  38 The Strike at Global Imports

  39 Petra’s Threat

  Quintín

  Part 8 When the Shades Draw Near

  Isabel

  40 Petra’s Voyage to the Underworld

  41 Quintín Offers to Make a Deal

  42 Willie’s Clairvoyance

  43 Perla’s Gift

  44 Perla’s Funeral

  45 A Whirlpool of Shadows

  About the Author

  Any shade to whom you give access to

  the blood will hold rational speech

  with you, while those whom you

  reject will leave you and retire.

  HOMER

  The Odyssey, XI

  Before I ever loved a woman

  I wagered my heart on chance

  and violence won it over.

  JOSE EUSTASIO RIVERA

  The Vortex

  QUINTÍN AND ISABEL’S PLEDGE

  MY GRANDMOTHER ALWAYS INSISTED that when people fall in love they should look closely at what the family of the betrothed is like, because one never marries the bridegroom alone but also his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and the whole damned tangle of the ancestral line. I refused to believe her even after what happened when Quintín and I were still engaged.

  One evening Quintín came to visit me at the house in Ponce. We had been lounging on the veranda’s sofa, when a sixteen-year-old boy who was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the house began to sing me a love ballad.

  The singer, the son of a well-known local family, had been secretly in love with me, although we had never met. He had seen me occasionally when our paths crossed in the streets of Ponce and at parties. Recently, my picture had been in the society columns, announcing my engagement to Quintín Mendizabal.

  The young man became very depressed when he read the news, and in his deranged state the only thing that would ease his sadness was to sit under the flowering oak tree which grew in front of my house on Aurora Street and sing Love Me Always in a haunting tenor voice.

  That night, as I sat next to Quintín on the veranda’s sofa, I was mesmerized by the song. I had never heard anyone sing with such a voice; it sounded like a silver bell as it filtered through the terrace’s white iron grillwork, and I thought that if there were angels in heaven, they would probably sing like that.

  When the unexpected serenade began, Quintín had one of his fits of temper, which he inherited from his ancestors. He rose from the sofa, walked unhurriedly to the door, crossed the garden path under the purple bougainvillea vine massed over the veranda’s roof, went through the hedge of hibiscus that grew in front of the house, his belt in his hand, and mercilessly lashed the unfortunate bard. I ran after him crying, but I couldn’t make him stop. When she heard my cries for help, Grandmother ran out of the house, too, and tried to hang on to Quintín’s arm, but he went on beating the boy. Abby and I stood there horrified. As the brass buckle whistled at the end of Quintín’s belt, he coldly counted the blows aloud, one by one.

  I had begged the boy to get up and defend himself, but he refused even so much as to look at his attacker. He went on sitting on the ground, singing: “Love me always, / sweet love of my life. / You know I’ll always adore you. / Only the memory of your kisses / will ease my suffering,” until he fell unconscious on the sidewalk.

  Soon after this, the young man slashed his wrists with a razor blade, without even trying to contact me. I was tormented by guilt, and for a while deeply resented Quintín for his brutal behavior. Many years later I still couldn’t listen to that song without tears welling up in my eyes. It always made me remember the young man who had wanted to serenade me, spreading the balm of his voice on a beautiful summer night.

  It took my family a long time to recover. From then on, Grandmother was obstinately opposed to my marriage to Quintín Mendizabal. “Someday you’ll be sorry, that’s all I can tell you,” she said to me repeatedly. “There are enough kind, educated men in this world so that you shouldn’t have to end up in the arms of a common bully.”

  Abby had married a Frenchman’s son, and this perhaps had something to do with her dislike for everything Spanish. “Quintín’s ancestors,” she would insist, “are from the most backward country on earth. ‘Spain never had a political or an industrial revolution,’ my husband used to say, and it’s been our tragedy that it was the Spaniards who colonized us. If I ever travel to Europe, the only reason I would visit that country would be to relieve myself, and then I’d leave.”

  For years the episode stayed vividly in my mind, though at the time I refused to see it as a bad omen. I never forgot the unhappy singer, however. Whenever I thought of him, I remembered what Grandmother had said. Unfortunately, I did not mind Abby’s advice, and on June 4, 1955, I walked down the aisle on Quintín’s arm.

  Quintín was very much in love with me. After the young man’s suicide, he began to have trouble sleeping, and he would wake up in the middle of the night bathed in sweat. One day he came to visit me in anguish and asked me to forgive him. “An ungovernable temper is a detestable thing,” he said. “One ceases to be oneself and becomes another; it’s as if the devil himself crept up under your skin.” He didn’t want to be like his father, his grandfather, or
the rest of his ancestors, he added, who were descended from the Spanish Conquistadors. They all had wrathful dispositions and, worse yet, were proud of it, insisting that rashness was a necessary condition for bravery. But there would be no getting away from them if I didn’t help him wrench himself from the morass of heredity.

  It was after lunch, the hour of the siesta, and everyone else in the house was sleeping, stretched out lightly on their beds without bothering to take their clothes off. We were sitting as usual on the veranda’s sofa, and the afternoon heat intensified our wooing. We kissed and embraced a dozen times under the flowering jasmine that hid us from intruding eyes. “Love is the only true antidote to violence,” Quintín said to me. “In my family, terrible things have happened which I find difficult to forget.”

  It was then that we made our pledge. We promised we would examine carefully the origins of anger in each of our families as if it were a disease, and in this way avoid, during the life we were to share together, the mistakes our forebears had made. The rest of that summer, we spent many afternoons together, holding hands on the veranda and telling each other our family histories as Grandmother came and went busily through the house, performing her household chores.

  Years later, when I was living in the house on the lagoon, I began to write down some of those stories. My original purpose was to interweave the woof of my memories with the warp of Quintín’s recollections, but what I finally wrote was something very different.

  PART I

  The Foundations

  1

  Buenaventura’s Freshwater Spring

  WHEN BUENAVENTURA MENDIZABAL, QUINTÍN’S father, arrived on the island, he built himself a wooden cottage on the far side of Alamares Lagoon, a forgotten stretch of land that had been only partially cleared of wild vines and thickets. There was a spring nearby which the residents of the area had once used. A stone fountain built around it had been maintained by a caretaker, since it was considered public property. In recent years, however, people had forgotten all about it. The caretaker, an arthritic old man who lived next to the spring, had stopped keeping it up, and soon the mangrove swamp had enveloped it completely.

  Half a kilometer down the beach stood the beautiful houses of Alamares, one of the most exclusive suburbs of San Juan. Alamares stood on a strip of land crossed by a palm-crested avenue—Ponce de León Avenue—with water on either side: the Atlantic Ocean to the north, and Alamares Lagoon to the south. The more public side of the avenue looked out to the Atlantic, where the surf was always swelling and battering the sand dunes; and the more private one opened onto the quiet beach of the lagoon. This beach ended in a huge mangrove swamp, and only the tip of it was visible from Alamares. When he moved to the area, Buenaventura built a modest cottage precisely at this site, where the mangrove swamp met the private beach of the lagoon.

  The swamp was a mysterious place, full of exotic wildlife and strange botanical specimens, with creatures both amphibious and terrestrial. The mangroves had bushy tops with all sorts of birds nesting in them. The white heron roosted there, and at sundown turned the branches of the trees a ghostly white, as if a snowstorm had just blown through. Albatross were often seen gliding over the swamp, looking for a safe place to spend the night, and from time to time one could even see a tiger-eyed guaraguao, the nearly extinct local eagle, perched on one of its branches. But the mangroves were also aquatic, and their roots spread an intricate maze over the water. Inside this labyrinth of knots and sinews a whole universe of mollusks, crustaceans, and fish proliferated freely, half immersed in the mud, half encrusted in the mossy cartilage of the wood.

  It was a strange territory to navigate in, and although several wide channels crossed it from end to end, if one were to get lost in its tangle, there was only a slim chance of finding one’s way out. Following the waterways, one came eventually to Morass Lagoon—thus named by the Spanish explorers and later renamed Molasses Lagoon by the slum’s inhabitants—and after crossing it would finally end up in Lucumí Beach. A sugar mill, the Central Oromiel, had been established on the lagoon’s shores and emptied the foul-smelling sludge from its rum distillery into its quiet waters, turning the lagoon into a quagmire. The sugar mill had closed down at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the waters were still contaminated. Many of the city’s sewers emptied into it; it was cheaper to get rid of raw sewage that way than pollute the white sand beaches, which tourists had begun to visit. On the shores of Morass Lagoon was one of the city’s worst slums, Las Minas. Most of the servants who worked in the houses of the elegant suburb of Alamares lived there, and frequently crossed the intricate waterways of the mangrove swamp in their rowboats.

  Ponce de León Avenue, the capital’s longest boulevard, began in the Old City, cut straight across Puerta de Tierra, and converged into Alamares, before losing itself in the distance as it penetrated the country’s interior. When Buenaventura moved into the area there were still a good number of old-fashioned horse-drawn carriages driving by, as well as fashionable Stutz Bear Cats, Packards, and Silver Clouds belonging to the affluent residents. Everyone knew everyone else in Alamares and waved cheerfully from their motor seats, dressed in white cotton jackets to keep off the dust from the road and wearing rubber-rimmed goggles that made them look like owls.

  In the afternoon, when nannies came out to take their charges for a walk, they always preferred to stroll down the sidewalk of Ponce de León Avenue, where the wind from the ocean playfully pulled at their starched aprons and coifs. There the Atlantic broke in long blue waves over the bathers, who had to swim energetically to keep their heads above the crests of the waves. The nannies felt secure and invigorated. But when they walked down the quiet beach path which bordered Alamares Lagoon, they insisted they could hear strange moans coming from the nearby swamp that reminded them, they said, of things dying or being born. Once the sun began to go down, mysterious lights sometimes glowed through the bushes; crabs and lizards crept through the undergrowth. For this reason no one walked in the direction of Buenaventura’s half-hidden cottage at the end of the lagoon dusk.

  One day the caretaker of the spring was found dead, lying by the rim of the fountain, from a mysterious blow to the head. A small item appeared in the morning papers, but nobody paid much attention, and the event was soon forgotten. The residents of Alamares didn’t need water from the spring any longer, since they were connected to the city’s aqueduct. Soon after that, Buenaventura moved to the caretaker’s house and nobody seemed to mind. He cleared the spring of undergrowth and put it back in use. Afterward, Buenaventura married Rebecca Arrigoitia and took her to live with him on the shores of Alamares Lagoon.

  The caretaker’s fate was a stroke of good luck for Buenaventura. Since the outbreak of the First World War, San Juan Bay had been filled with merchant marine ships, as well as navy destroyers that would sail past the looming stone walls of San Felipe del Morro, the Old City’s largest medieval fort, crowned with Spanish cast-iron cannons, to anchor not far from Alamares Lagoon. There were so many ships that the municipal aqueduct could not supply fresh water for all of them, and before long the captains of the Spanish merchant ships, like the Virgen de Purrúa and the Virgen de Altagracia, came knocking at Buenaventura’s door to ask if he could provide them with fresh water from his spring. Buenaventura felt it his duty to oblige and he did all he could to accommodate them. There was no other well for twenty miles around, and Spanish ships were always left for last, since government officials in the city were understandably partial to serving those merchant ships which sailed under the American flag. Yet, despite the increasing American influence, there was always a lively market for Spanish foods on the island: most well-to-do people favored the paella valenciana, Segovian sobreasada, ensaimadas from Mallorca, and other such tasty dishes over American-style food. Trade with Spain was impossible to eliminate completely.

  Buenaventura was, above all, a good Spaniard, and he never pressed his countrymen to pay cash for his services. He prefer
red to exchange his water casks for a few cases of the Riojas and Logroños which the Spanish captains brought him. In turn, he would sell them to his customers in the city at a favorable price. Soon after he arrived on the island, he proved so successful at this friendly bartering that he built a small warehouse next to his spring. There he stored his wines; the ruby-red hams he began to import from Valdeverdeja, his hometown; the ivory-white asparagus from Aranjuez; the honeyed nougats and marzipans from Jijona; and the exquisite Moorish olives from Seville. He brought most of his goods into the island illegally in flat, covered barges that navigated through the mangrove swamp. The barges would load their merchandise off the deserted coves of Lucumí Beach, where the Spanish merchant ships arriving from Europe made discreet stops before going on to the port of San Juan.

  2

  Buenaventura Arrives on the Island

  WHEN BUENAVENTURA ARRIVED ON the island in the Virgen de Covadonga, he was twenty-three years old and without a cent to his name. An orphan since he had turned fifteen, he was raised in Spain by two maiden aunts, who set great store by his good looks. He was six feet tall, tan-skinned and dark-haired, and had eyes so blue they made you want to sail out to sea every time you looked at them. Quintín told me the story of his arrival when we were first engaged to be married, and many years later he repeated it from time to time for our two boys, Manuel and Willie, to remind them of who they were and where they came from.

  All during his trip across the Atlantic, Buenaventura had wondered what the island of Puerto Rico would be like. He had read something about the history of the Caribbean before setting sail from Cádiz, but he had also learned much of it firsthand. The Spanish-American War, which had ended nineteen years before, was still fresh in the mind of many Spaniards. He knew his country had fought tooth and nail to keep Cuba, the last jewel in the crown of the Spanish empire. After the Seven Years’ War, in 1763, Spain had traded Florida for Cuba to the British. Later, thousands of Buenaventura’s countrymen had died at Punta Brava, Dos Ríos, Camagüey, shot down in bloody combat by Cuban rebels during the Revolution. But when Spain lost the Spanish-American War, it simply let Puerto Rico go. Was the island too poor and not worth fighting for, Buenaventura asked himself. Or was Spain just too exhausted to go on fighting?