Eccentric Neighborhood (10 page)

Manuel Felipe’s office was a stuffy cubicle with cardboard partitions that didn’t even reach the ceiling. It was exactly like a dozen others down the hall. A metal fan whirred away noisily on the desk. Manuel Felipe was a light-skinned mulatto with a delicate frame. He sat on a beat-up swivel chair, working on a sheaf of documents piled before him. His hand resembled a bird’s claw, steadily scratching numbers on the page and then punching them into an antiquated adding machine on his right.

Tía Artemisa sat in front of the secretary and smoothed her skirt around her slender legs; Don Esteban sat next to her, his Panama hat on his knee. Artemisa was wearing her yellow silk dress, her Mikimoto pearls, and L’Air du Temps, her favorite French perfume. Don Esteban wore an austere serge suit with a black ribbon on his sleeve. They were both thankful for the breeze that drifted in through the window that opened onto the Guayamés bay.

Don Esteban looked up wistfully at the caryatids holding up garlands of fruits and flowers in each corner of the ceiling, their naked breasts peeling and covered with dust. He had often danced under their gaze with his wife, Marina Lampedusa, and they made him feel crestfallen, reminding him of better times. Manuel Felipe didn’t look up when Artemisa and Don Esteban came in; he continued to work on his documents. Artemisa coughed discreetly, but he still didn’t look up.

Don Esteban knew Manuel Felipe by name but had never met him. The secretary was the son of Blanca de Montenegro, a girl Don Esteban had courted in his youth. Manuel Felipe was her only son. He had been brought up by his father, Manuel Sánchez, an illiterate gardener. Before what people in Guayamés called “her disgrace,” Blanca de Montenegro lived in a house near the cathedral, on the main square, and she came from a very rich family. Her father, Don Hipólito de Montenego, was a Spanish merchant who owned a large tobacco warehouse on the waterfront. There he stored his bales as they were brought in from the countryside before being shipped to Europe.

Don Hipólito wanted only the best for his daughter. She had been raised by a governess, so she never went to school but learned everything she knew in her own home. When she turned fifteen she was invited to attend Guayamés’s parties and met Esteban de la Rosa at one of them. They drove out to the beach for a picnic in Esteban’s blue Chrysler convertible, then to Maravilla, a small town nestled high in the mountains behind Guayamés. After a few months, Este-ban asked Don Hipólito for Blanca’s hand and they were officially engaged.

Esteban liked Blanca very much, but he wasn’t sure he was in love with her. They both read a lot and were always exchanging books. Esteban enjoyed looking at her, because he loved beauty in all its forms. Blanca’s hair was pale gold; when they rode in his convertible and it was whipped by the wind, it reminded him of the
guajana
, the sugarcane flower. But Esteban’s parents didn’t think Blanca was a good enough match for their son and tried to discourage the relationship.

In Blanca’s house Esteban felt like a stranger. The Montenegros had lamentably bad taste. They went about in a flashy silver Cadillac, wore bright-colored clothes from Martínez Padín, Guayamés’s modern department store, and their servants were never in uniform. Don Hipólito was a millionaire and sold his tobacco all over the world, but the upper crust looked down on him. For this reason Esteban never liked to go into Blanca’s house but always said good-bye to her at the door.

Esteban was weak-willed, and when his parents introduced him to Marina Lampedusa, he broke off his engagement to Blanca de Montenegro. Marina was a second cousin of his who lived in Sabana Verde, a town near Guayamés, and he felt comfortable with her. Marina was shy—almost mousy—and had an ordinary personality. Her family wasn’t half as well off as Blanca’s. Marina’s father was a physics professor at Sabana Verde’s public high school, but the family was an old, respectable one. After Esteban broke up with Blanca, he was surprised to discover how unhappy he felt, but never having been passionate about anything, he thought he had eaten something that didn’t agree with him. He purged himself with castor oil and felt much better. He married Marina a few months later, and when a baby boy was born to them, he was named Valentín.

Blanca de Montenegro was terribly depressed when Esteban jilted her, but she didn’t confide her feelings to anyone. As though her own disappointment weren’t enough, she had to bear her father’s constant criticism. He was furious at her for having lost “the best catch in Guayamés.” He was sure Blanca would never get married, he said; she was as insipid as a glass of milk. She was always going around with a book in her hand and had never learned how to be coy or to flirt with boys. Blanca felt so bad she stopped reading and spent her days lying on her bed staring at the stuccoed ceiling.

Then, what Blanca’s family called “her accident” occurred. There was an old almond tree in the Montenegros’ garden, and every March its leaves turned blood-red and fell like large brittle handkerchiefs over Doña Ester de Montenegro’s roses. Manuel, the gardener’s son, was called to the house to help his father sweep them into a pile and set it on fire. Manuel was olive-skinned, green-eyed, and very athletic. He liked to swim in the bay and had crossed it several times just before dawn when the sea was the color of hammered pewter and rippled with small waves.

Blanca loved to watch the almond leaves burning; their smell was intoxicatingly sweet, like the smell of the nuts themselves. Blanca and Manuel had been friends for years, ever since they were children. Whenever he came to the house to help his father sweep leaves or weed the lawn she came out in her straw hat and sandals to help him. When the rose bushes had aphids that had to be eliminated, Manuel showed her how to mix arsenic with an organic compound. They both wore gloves and poured the white powder in a circular trench dug around each bush, later washing their hands thoroughly and changing their clothes.

That afternoon Manuel’s father told him to rake and burn the leaves in the garden and went off to fix a leaky faucet in Doña Ester’s bathroom. Manuel was sixteen. He had helped his father with the chore many times. He took off his shirt, poured gasoline on the leaves, and then lit them with a match. Perspiration made his skin gleam like burnished mahogany as he raked the leaves onto the lighted mound. Blanca de Montenegro was standing just behind him, dressed in a white cotton frock with a bit of lace at the hem. She looked at Manuel’s muscular back and compared it with Esteban’s puny torso. She wondered why she had been so in love with Esteban in the first place and why she had thought him the handsomest man on earth. “Why don’t you have hair on your chest?” she asked Manuel, giggling. “Other men’s chests are covered with it, and it makes them look like apes.”

“I don’t know,” Manuel answered. “I guess hair is supposed to protect white skin from the sun. I’m already dark-skinned; I don’t need hair.”

“Why don’t you jump over the burning leaves, then?” Blanca went on teasing. “The sun is made of fire; this little one here shouldn’t bother you.” Then Blanca leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. Manuel was so surprised he turned around and leapt right into the flames, or rather, being an athlete, he jumped over them and landed on the other side. Blanca jumped after him, tripped, and fell on the pyre. Manuel pulled her out and smothered the flames with his hands. Blanca lay there quietly, smoke still curling from the hem of her dress. Then she looked into Manuel’s green eyes. “Please take me away from this house,” she said.

They eloped a few weeks later and went to live together in a bungalow near the Emajaguas River. They were both minors and knew they couldn’t get married without their parents’ permission. Manuel’s parents helped them out as well as they could. Manuel’s father, Felipe, was the best gardener in Guayamés and he had a lot of clients; he offered his son a steady job. After a few months, it was evident that Blanca was pregnant. Don Hipólito had cut Blanca off completely, but Doña Ester secretly sent her small amounts of money and helped the young couple survive.

When a baby boy was born to her, instead of feeling happy, Blanca felt even more despondent. The more she looked at the child, the stranger he seemed to her. He was neither white like the Montenegros nor dark like the Sánchezes; he was
café con leche
—coffee with milk. It was as if someone had mixed everything up inside him. She hated to hear him cry, but she couldn’t pick him up from his crib to make him stop.

Blanca thought that maybe if the baby was baptized she could accept him. She took him to the priest in Guayamés but he said he couldn’t baptize a child born out of wedlock. When she asked him to hear her confession, the priest refused because “to live in adultery is to live with one’s heart full of worms.” Blanca couldn’t take it anymore. That afternoon when Manuel came back from work he found her lying on the bed, her mouth full of arsenic and a glass of water next to her bed. The baby was at Manuel’s mother’s house. Blanca had left him there that morning on her way back from church.

Don Esteban was grieved when he heard the news, and he sent a wreath of white roses with a purple ribbon to Blanca de Montenegro’s wake. Don Hipólito offered to take his grandson, Manuel Felipe, into his house and bring him up as his own son. Some weeks after Blanca’s suicide he drove to the Sánchezes’ cottage in his navy-blue Packard to meet the baby. Manuel brought him out so Don Hipólito could see him, but he wouldn’t let the baby’s grandfather hold him. “I can bring my son up by myself,” Manuel Sánchez said proudly. “I don’t want a cent of your tobacco money.”

With the small stipend his grandmother sent him on the sly, Manuel Felipe studied accounting and became a CPA. He married a local girl who had worked ten years as a maid to get her degree at the local secretarial school, and they had a daughter, whom they named Blanca. Manuel Felipe was crazy about her; he worked twelve hours a day six days a week, and on Saturdays did twelve hours of overtime so his daughter would have everything.

Manuel Felipe was a member of Guayamés’s Partido Democrático Institucional. He came up slowly and surely through its ranks, until he became secretary of the Bureau of Tax Returns. He was an honest public servant; he truly believed that a nation’s resources should belong to the people and not to a privileged few.

Manuel Felipe’s behavior with Don Hipólito de Montenegro gave him a lot of credibility within the party. He set an example for how to treat the rich; he hadn’t accepted a penny of Don Hipólito’s money and had sent him packing. His daughter was brought up humbly, like most of the people in Guayamés, but with a solid education at the public high school. Several years later, when the government expropriated Don Hipólito’s waterfront warehouse because the wharf needed to be enlarged, Don Hipólito visited Manuel Felipe at his cottage on the riverbank. The government had paid him a pittance for his property, Don Hipólito said. He had had to take out a loan to buy a second warehouse on the outskirts of town to store his tobacco, and he needed a government subsidy until he could pay the bank back. But Manuel Felipe shook his head. “It would look like nepotism,” he said. “If we weren’t so closely related, I might have been able to help you, but it’s impossible.” And Don Hipólito lost his warehouse and went bankrupt.

Don Esteban trembled when he remembered the story, which came flashing through his mind as he sat in Manuel Felipe’s office. Tía Artemisa didn’t know anything about Blanca de Montenegro or about her father, Don Hipólito. Don Esteban had never told her about them.

“Pleased to meet you,” Tía Artemisa said, offering her snow-white hand over the top of Manuel Felipe’s desk when the secretary stopped jotting down numbers for a moment to turn a page. Manuel Felipe had no alternative but to shake it. He sat back in his chair and smiled, folding his hands over his ample chest. He was dressed in a khaki shirt and pants. “My friend Don Esteban de la Rosa here is in a bind,” Tía Artemisa said cordially. “As you know, the price of sugarcane has hit rock bottom, and Don Esteban hasn’t been able to pay his taxes. He wants to sell some of his farms to meet the government’s requirements, but they’ve been invaded by squatters and he can’t get the people to move out. Maybe you could help Don Esteban get the squatters out, so he can pay his taxes.” Tía Artemisa’s voice was smooth. She sat on her chair holding her hourglass figure gracefully, as if posing for a portrait in
Vogue
.

Manuel Felipe looked squarely at Don Esteban. “And why doesn’t Don Esteban de la Rosa say anything?” he asked. “I don’t understand why Miss Rivas de Santillana is doing all the talking, since it’s his farms we’re discussing.”

Don Esteban signaled to the black band on his arm. “My granddaughter died recently, sir,” he apologized. “She was only sixteen. I’m afraid my mind hasn’t been as clear as it should be since that awful day. That’s why I’ve asked Miss Rivas de Santillana here to explain my situation. I agree with everything she said.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your granddaughter. What was her name?”

“Blanca de la Rosa, sir. And she was the most beautiful girl in Guayamés.”

“That couldn’t be, sir,” Manuel Felipe said, smiling, “because the most beautiful girl in Guayamés was and still is my daughter, Blanca Sánchez.” And Manuel Felipe took a photograph from his desk and turned it around so Don Esteban could see it.

Don Esteban felt his heart ball into a fist. Blanca Sánchez looked just like Blanca de Montenegro, his old love. She had her grandmother’s silver-blond hair and delicate features, and her smile was just as perfect. “You lost your Blanca, but I still have mine,” Manuel Felipe said, shaking his head sadly. “Life has odd ways of getting even, doesn’t it, Don Esteban?” Don Esteban realized Manuel Felipe knew all about him.

Tía Artemisa couldn’t understand what they were talking about. “Is that your daughter?” she asked the secretary amiably. “She’s very pretty. Has she made her debut yet? Because a cousin of mine was recently elected president of the Shooting Club and the cotillion balls there are extraordinary events. If you’d like me to, I could suggest your daughter as a candidate for this year’s coming-out party.” But neither the secretary nor Don Esteban was listening to her chatter.