Eccentric Neighborhood Read online

  Eccentric Neighborhoods

  A Novel

  Rosario Ferré

  To the ghosts who lent me their voices

  Contents

  Part I: Emajaguas’s Lost Paradise

  One: Fording Río Logo

  Two: Boffil and Rivas de Santillana

  Three: The Sugar Sultan

  Four: The Piss Pot of the Island

  Five: Christmas Eve at Emajaguas

  Six: The Zeus of Emajaguas

  Seven: Abuela Valeria’s Standoff

  Part II: The Swans of Emajaguas

  Eight: The Repentant Muse

  Nine: The Snow Rose

  Ten: The Thick Skin of Mercy

  Eleven: The Venus of the Family

  Part III: Clarissa’s Trials

  Twelve: Abuelo Alvaro’s Little Diamond

  Thirteen: Miña’s Secrets

  Fourteen: The Prince of Emajaguas

  Fifteen: Tía Siglinda’s Elopement

  Sixteen: Okechobee

  Seventeen: Abuelo Alvaro Swims Away

  Eighteen: Alejandro Sells the Plata

  Nineteen: Alejandro Sails to Heaven

  Twenty: Clarissa and Aurelio’s Wedding

  Twenty-One: The House on Calle Virtud

  Part IV: The Vernet Family Saga

  Twenty-Two: Sailing Down the Caribbean

  Twenty-Three: Chaguito Arrives at La Concordia

  Twenty-Four: The Lottery Vendor’s Daughter

  Twenty-Five: The House on Calle Esperanza

  Twenty-Six: President Roosevelt Visits the Island

  Twenty-Seven: The Two Friends

  Twenty-Eight: Aurelio Grabs Ulises by the Heel

  Twenty-Nine: The Obedient Giant

  Thirty: Tía Celia’s Blue Doll

  Thirty-One: Adela Passes the Baton

  Thirty-Two: The Masonic Dove

  Thirty-Three: The Criollo Valkyrie

  Thirty-Four: The Kingdom of Cement

  Thirty-Five: The Vernets’ Star Begins to Rise

  Thirty-Six: La Teclapepa

  Thirty-Seven: Statehood and Sainthood

  Thirty-Eight: Fernando Martín’s Mustache

  Thirty-Nine: The Wedding Piano

  Forty: Fosforito Vernet

  Part V: The Vernets’ Quadriga

  Forty-One: Clarissa’s House

  Forty-Two: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

  Forty-Three: Father Runs for Governor

  Forty-Four: The Queen of Music

  Forty-Five: Venecia’s Passage to Heaven

  Forty-Six: Fritzi’s Wake

  Forty-Seven: The Financial Wizard

  Forty-Eight: Joining the Holy Roman Empire

  Forty-Nine: The Fire Engine

  Fifty: Roque’s Russian Roulette

  Fifty-One: The Rolling Coffin

  Fifty-Two: The White Jasmine

  Fifty-Three: Fosforito Vernet’s Last Spark

  Part VI: The I Within the Eye

  Fifty-Four: Xochil’s Converse Sneakers

  Fifty-Five: The Cardinal’s Dinner Service

  Fifty-Six: The Family’s Sacks of Gold

  Fifty-Seven: Rebellion at the Beau Rivage

  Fifty-Eight: Clarissa’s Passing

  About the Author

  PART I

  EMAJAGUAS’S LOST PARADLSE

  GEOGRAPHIES CAN BE SYMBOLIC; physical spaces determine the archetype and become forms that emit symbols.

  —OCTAVIO PAZ, Postdata

  ONE

  Fording Río Loco

  RÍO LOCO GOT ITS name because it was so temperamental. When it rained in the valley and the other rivers stampeded toward the sea like runaway horses, Río Loco was dry. But when the sun was nailed to the sky like a hot coal, charring the cane fields and forcing the scorpions out of their burrows to look for water, it reared up like a muddy demon and tumbled this way and that over the dusty plain, enraged at everything that stood in its way. The river’s source was far away in the mountains, and when it rained the floods rose, even when there was fair weather in the valley.

  Río Loco always reminded me of my mother, Clarissa. We would be sitting peacefully in the pantry having breakfast—Aurelio, my father, would be reading the paper, Alvaro and I would be reviewing our homework before leaving for school—when Clarissa would suddenly rise and run to her room. Aurelio would follow hurriedly behind her. As I left for school in the family’s Pontiac, I could hear Clarissa’s sobs behind closed doors, mingled with the apologetic murmur of Father’s voice.

  She never explained to me why she cried, and if I insisted on asking, I risked putting myself at the mercy of one of her sharp pinches or an angry yank at a tuft of my hair. It was as if it were raining in her mind, when all around her the sun was shining.

  Once a month Clarissa and my aunts journeyed to Emajaguas from different parts of the island to visit Abuela Valeria. I used to accompany Mother on these trips. Family was very important then.

  I always knew when we were driving to Emajaguas because Crisótbal Bocanegra, our black chauffeur, would start whistling softly as soon as he was told of the trip. Crisótbal had a good-looking girlfriend in Guayamés, and when we traveled there he always spent the night with her, happy to get away from his wife.

  Crossing Río Loco was one of the high points of our journey to Emajaguas. The old winding road from La Concordia to Guayamés had been built by the Spaniards, and although the towns were really not that far apart—twenty miles at most—the journey took two and a half hours, much longer than it should have. Father always joked about it with Mother and said the Spaniards had used the “burro method” when they built the road: they took a burro from La Concordia to Guayamés, let it loose, and followed it as it ran home down the shortest path.

  Río Loco remained without a bridge through the 1940s; it was the last important river on the island to be spanned by one. The government was too impoverished to build one until the 1950s, when a human wave rose from the island and thousands of immigrants crashed into New York. They were desperately poor, and in the Bronx and in Harlem they’d still be poor, but a little less so. The bridge was good for the local economy, and soon the government began to invest in public works.

  Río Loco was shallow, and most of the time we could drive across its dry gully without any problem, skirting the huge boulders that lay on the bottom like dinosaur eggs and the massive tree trunks left by intermittent floods. Come September, however, Río Loco was often flooded, and its waters pulled along everything that clung to its banks. Most of the poor peasants who worked the central Eureka cane fields lived in barracks; they cooked outside on coal stoves and shat in the latrines the owners had built for them. The company store was nearby, and there they could buy food on credit when they ran out of money and obtain medical supplies and services. But workers living in the barracks were closely supervised by the overseer, who would keep a tally on their debts. For this reason, some preferred the dangerous freedom of the riverbank, where they built their own shacks, to the convenience of living at the central. Riverbanks, like beaches, are all public property on the island.

  The earth was black and fertile along the banks, and the peasants grew splendid plantains, manioc roots, and cane stalks there. But when the river flooded, it reclaimed with a vengeance the terrain it had temporarily ceded to the squatters. You could see doors, corrugated tin roofs, rocking chairs, tables, cooking pots, mattresses, all floating slowly toward the sea, as well as dogs, pigs, goats, and even cows, already swollen, pulled along, legs up, by the brown, toffee-like mass of water.

  I loved crossing Río Loco when it was flooded, and as the family car set out for Emajaguas I always prayed for a crecida, never thinking about the havoc the river created for the peasants. It
broke the monotony of the trip, the silence that inevitably sat like a block of ice between Mother and me. As we neared the river, my heart would begin to pound faster and faster. We never knew whether the current would be high or not, and if the river couldn’t be crossed, we would inevitably have to turn back toward La Concordia, with Mother in tears.

  As soon as we neared Río Loco’s banks, Mother would instruct Crisótbal to drive the blue-and-white Pontiac to the river’s edge, and I would stick my head out the window to see what was going on. If the current was high, Mother would order him to pull up close to the water and we would wait in silence under a mango tree to see if it would recede. Mother could never wait very long, however. Without a quiver of fear in her voice, she would command Crisótbal to drive the Pontiac into the murky current. The car would soon be bobbing and half floating over the riverbed, maneuvering its way across the now-invisible boulders. By the middle of the river, Crisótbal would hardly be touching the accelerator; with the dangerous current flowing by on each side, we would be stranded, unable to get out.

  This is precisely what happened one day. Crisótbal was following in the wake of some hardy soul who had plunged his car into the murky water ahead of us, when all of a sudden the Pontiac had an attack of delirium tremens and died midstream. Clarissa ordered us to roll up our windows, and for twenty minutes the three of us sat there in silence watching the brown water rise inch by inch until it was licking the windows, carrying with it the debris from upstream. The car was full of good things to eat that our cook at La Concordia had prepared—a leg of lamb, a roast turkey, a cauldron of arroz con gandules—and soon the delicious odors were all but stifling. A basket of oranges, pineapples, and breadfruit picked that morning from the garden lay on the seat between Mother and me. It was like sitting inside a watertight paradise dressed in our Sunday best—Clarissa in a printed silk georgette gown and high-heeled Saks Fifth Avenue shoes and me in my white organdy dress with a satin bow on my head—watching all hell break loose around us.

  Clarissa looked at her diamond Cartier wristwatch on its black grosgrain band and saw that it was already half past eleven. If we didn’t hurry, we would be late for lunch at Emajaguas and wouldn’t be able to sit down at the table with Abuela Valeria and my aunts. Mother ordered Crisótbal to start the engine. He turned the ignition key; the car gave a couple of lurches and died on us again. Clarissa then commanded him to honk the horn. Soon four barefoot peasants dressed in faded khakis and scraggly straw hats, who had been standing on the shore with their oxen watching our predicament, waded silently into the river.

  With rushing water up to their waists, they approached the car, yoked animals in tow. Clarissa opened her handbag, took out a dollar, and waved it at them from inside the window. The peasants tied the beasts to the Pontiac’s front bumper with a thick hemp rope, and slowly the car began to move forward. The smell of mud grew stronger, and I stared in horror as a thin line of water began to seep in through the bottom of the door. Clarissa signaled emphatically to the men to poke the oxen more sharply with their long poles. Once on shore, she slipped the dollar bill to the peasants through a crack at the top of the window and ordered Crisótbal to start the car. The Pontiac jumped forward, its shiny blue-and-white surface dripping with mud, and took off at full speed, an anxious Pegasus flying down the road toward Emajaguas.

  TWO

  Boffil and Rivas de Santillana

  MOTHER WAS BORN IN Guayamés on January 6, 1901. Her father, Alvaro Rivas de Santillana, believed she was a present from the Three Kings, but Valeria Boffil, my grandmother, didn’t agree at all. She was sure Clarissa was born because of the rains.

  In Guayamés it rains a lot from July to November; gray clouds are always rubbing their bellies against the roofs of houses, shutting out the sun. The rains influenced Mother’s life from the start. During the rainy season people stay inside much of the time. Anything can happen then: a sudden gust of wind may bring a tree branch down on your head like a punishment from God, or a wave of mud from the nearby Emajaguas River may roll down the street and whisk you away.

  Every year, from July to November, Abuelo Alvaro moved into Guayamés with his family instead of staying in Emajaguas, where he could easily supervise his cane fields and his sugar mill, the central Plata. He was always bored in town, and for that reason Abuela Valeria usually got pregnant at the end of each July and gave birth at the end of each April. Mother was the first of their six children. As an infant she was bitten by a mosquito bred in a pool of stagnant rainwater; she developed rheumatic fever, which caused a soplo, a murmur, in her heart. So you could say that she was born because of the rains of Guayamés and also that she died because of them.

  The house in Guayamés had a balcony that opened out over the main plaza, from which Clarissa watched the Lenten procession every year with her three sisters—Siglinda, Artemisa, Dido—and her only brother, Alejandro. Wearing white lace mantillas, the girls would lean their elbows on the rail to get a good view. Lakhmé, the baby, would peek between the balusters and admire the purple silk platform where Jesus carried the cross on his back and the black velvet one on which La Verónica, with her tear-streaked face, swayed to and fro over a sea of heads. But the Lenten procession didn’t elicit any special feelings of piety; for the Rivas de Santillanas, religious excitement and pagan celebration were all part of the same play.

  Around the middle of December, when the rains had stopped and the canes ripened in the fields, the family moved to Emajaguas, three miles down the coast. Abuelo Alvaro had been born there in 1880. Both his parents had died young, so he had been brought up by two maiden aunts, Alicia and Elisa Rivas de Santillana. When he was eighteen, his aunts had bought a house in town. With the arrival of the Americans on the island, the quality of life in Guayamés had improved greatly: streets were paved, there was running water, a sewage system and storm drains had been installed.

  Abuelo Alvaro’s aunts had always pampered him, and even though they were only moderately well-off, they spared no expense in his education. He was taught French by private tutors and could do his arithmetic competently enough. But he didn’t like to read and was wary of people who read a lot, because they seemed to think they were above the rest.

  Abuelo learned firsthand everything there was to know about the sugar industry by struggling to keep his cane fields well tended. His aunts trusted him and put everything in his hands; with their combined fortunes, Alvaro was able to keep Emajaguas in working order. But Alicia and Elisa died during the typhus epidemic that ravaged Guayamés in 1900. Alvaro and Valeria were married that same year—she was sixteen and he was twenty—so when they moved to Emajaguas, they had the whole house to themselves. Although Abuelo Alvaro was saddened by his aunts’ demise, he had been so spoiled that he thought it only natural that they should pass away. They were merely being considerate of his need for housing in his newly married state.

  Abuelo remained a man of simple tastes; he was used to country life and mistrusted city ways. After he married Abuela Valeria, the only time he traveled to Europe was in 1920, and only because Valeria dragged him there by the hair. In Paris he moped around the whole time because at the Café Procope he couldn’t order ropa vieja—his beloved string beef stewed with onions—and tostones, the luscious crumbly plantains fried in oil. Abuela Valeria, on the other hand, loved to travel and took her children to Europe several times. She would spend a month in Paris, a month in Rome, or a month in Madrid, installing herself in the best hotels with her six children, a nanny, and her personal maid. She would go to the opera almost every night, as well as to concerts and museums, and would always insist that a trip to a foreign country was as valuable as a college degree.

  Valeria was the youngest daughter of Bartolomeo Boffil, a Corsican merchant nicknamed Mano Negra, who had made a fortune at the end of the nineteenth century smuggling merchandise from Saint Thomas and Curaçao. Both these islands belonged to the Dutch at the time and had a long tradition of illegal trading. They were
very prosperous commercial centers. There one could buy perfumes, shoes, fine linens and laces from France, and all sorts of farming tools. Machinery for the sugar haciendas was not manufactured on the island. It was smuggled in from England and Scotland.

  Bartolomeo Boffil was a rough man with no education, but he was proud of his business and considered it in keeping with the rebellious nature of his ancestors. The word corsair comes from Corsican, he would tell his friends. “If we Corsicans hadn’t managed to dodge the embargo the Spanish authorities smacked on the island for three hundred years, these people would be so poor they wouldn’t have shoes to put on their feet.” Commerce with the rest of the world was banned by Spain, which wanted to benefit from it exclusively. The island had no choice but to depend for all its imports on Spanish ships coming in through San Juan.

  Bartolomeo was born on Cap Corse, Corsica’s most inhospitable peninsula—a veritable tongue of rock where only billy goats prospered. He was a small, evil-tempered man who lived alone with his daughters Elvira and Valeria. His wife had died giving birth to his youngest daughter, and for that reason he was often cruel to Valeria, as if wanting her to pay for her mother’s untimely passing. He loved her dearly but couldn’t help thinking that if she hadn’t been born, his wife would still be alive and he wouldn’t be alone.

  Bartolomeo’s farm was on the outskirts of Guayamés and he tended it himself. He grew ginger, tobacco, cotton, coconuts, and cacao, but his real profession was smuggling. His farm had several protected coves where fishing sloops came in from Saint Thomas and Curaçao and dropped anchor at night. A half dozen rowboats would silently skim over the waters and unload the crushing mills, iron winches, and centrifugal steel pumps for which the Puerto Rican sugar hacienda owners paid a handsome price.

  Bartolomeo loved to go up into the mountains to hunt blackbirds with his dog, Botafogo. Blackbird pâté was his favorite dish; he was sure it had magical qualities and he made Valeria eat some every day. As in the story of the Chinese emperor who feeds his daughter nightingale tongues so that she will sing more sweetly, Bartolomeo was convinced that blackbird pâté would refine his daughter’s voice, as well as make her more delicate and beautiful. Valeria felt terribly sorry for the birds, but she was an obedient daughter and dutifully ate what her father served her.