Eccentric Neighborhood (12 page)

“I determined not to pay attention to Rodrigo’s orders. I began to see some of the European women I had met at the embassy parties, and in the afternoons we’d get together at the bar at the Hilton, which was near our house, to have a few cocktails and talk. But whenever I walked out the door in one of my designer dresses on my way to the hotel, people turned around and said shocking things to me.

“‘If you go on behaving this way, you’ll destroy my reputation as an ambassador,’ Rodrigo protested angrily. ‘I’ve lived in Rabat for ten years and I respect Arab customs. The Koran sums it up very clearly: if women aren’t covered, it’s like giving a man salt to eat and then denying him water. And besides, women are much more attractive when they go around with their faces veiled.’

“I was getting angry, too, but I pretended nothing was amiss.

“‘And why is that?’ I asked, smiling coyly.

“‘A woman’s face is like her cunt—it belongs to her husband. She doesn’t go around showing it to other men.’

“I burst out laughing”—and my cousins and I did, too, when we heard this part of Tía Lakhmé’s story. “Of course I refused to put on a scarf or a veil, and Rodrigo and I had a violent argument.

“Another time Rodrigo invited several sheikhs to dinner at our house, and before the guests arrived he cautioned me: ‘I know you’re left-handed, Lakhmé, but when we sit down to eat on the dining room cushions remember to always use your right hand. Arabs use the left hand only for “unmentionable occupations.”’

“‘And what are those?’ I asked innocently.

“‘They use it to wipe themselves when they go to the toilet,’ Rodrigo answered with a straight face. ‘And to beat rebellious wives.’

“Again I burst out laughing”—and we did too, in Tía Lakhmé’s silk-lined boudoir far away from Rabat and the fear she must have felt. “That evening I had a ball eating couscous with only my left hand from the huge hammered-bronze tray the waiters laid at my feet.

“Rodrigo was so incensed that when the guests left he took away my passport and my checkbook and forbade me to leave the house. From then on he screened all my letters and telephone calls and wouldn’t give me any money at all. He had me followed everywhere by one of his servants and threatened to beat me up if I talked to anyone about my plight.

“The following Saturday was the maid’s day off, so when the telephone rang, I answered it myself. It was Dido; she had arrived in Rabat with Antonio the week before, but every time she had called, the maid had said I was out. I asked them to come to the house for tea. We sat around talking on the red silk cushions of the living room, but Rodrigo was there also and I acted as if nothing were wrong. When Dido and Antonio were about to go I slipped a note into Dido’s hand telling her what was happening: Rodrigo had kidnapped me; I was his prisoner and desperately needed their help. They should be at a certain address the next morning in a rented Land Rover to pick me up. We had to be very careful: under Muslim law, if Rodrigo caught me trying to leave the country without his permission he could have me thrown in jail.

“On Sunday morning I pulled on my gardening jumper and tennis shoes and discreetly put all my jewelry in my pockets. When Rodrigo left for the office I told the servant at the door I was going to prune my rose bushes at the back of the garden, and I climbed over the garden wall. Dido and Antonio picked me up at the appointed place not far from the house. Antonio was at the wheel and he didn’t lose a minute. He drove the Land Rover south at full speed and soon we were deep in the Sahara desert. We didn’t stop until we reached Mauritania.

“I arrived in Emajaguas a week later without a cent to my name but with all my jewels in my pocket. Valeria was so relieved to see me she didn’t mind when I told her I hadn’t been able to take my money out of the bank. ‘Money’s here today and gone tomorrow, dear, you mustn’t worry,’ Valeria said, comforting me. ‘There’s a remedy for everything in this world except death.’ I was so relieved to be back home, I didn’t shed a single tear for handsome Rodrigo de Zelaya.

“I married my third husband, Edward Milton, in 1957 in a huge wedding at the Guayamés cathedral. I had married Tom Randolph before a judge and my marriage to Rodrigo had been a Muslim ceremony, so neither of these counted in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Now I could have a true religious ceremony, with all the trimmings.

“I told Mother I wanted to have a veil ten yards long and a wedding dress with a train all the way from the street to the altar. I wanted this to be a true marriage. Valeria was glad I was finally going to be a proper bride. She went to the bank, took out the last fifty thousand dollars I had left in my account, and gave us the money as a wedding present.

“Edward Milton was a Presbyterian, but he agreed to be baptized and married in a Catholic church. He was of British descent and loved to brag that had his father stayed in London he would have had the right to sit in the House of Lords. I met him at a reception the British consul held at his house; all my old friends from Guayamés’s best society had been invited. Having been married to an American who loved to live in the mountains and to a Spaniard who was half barbarian and had sequestered me in Rabat, I wanted very badly to return to the civilized world. Single women had a very limited social life in Guayamés. But once I married Edward I’d be invited to my friends’ homes and be able to attend all their parties. Most important of all, I’d have an opportunity to wear beautiful clothes again.

“As soon as we got married, Edward bought a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud and had a uniformed chauffeur drive us around town. He had a liveried butler—the first one in the history of Guayamés—open the door of our house, and I had a maid and a cook. Edward had his nails manicured and varnished by a beautician who visited our home every morning with a little wicker basket hanging from her arm, something truly unheard of in the
machista
culture of the island.

“Edward had studied at Oxford for a year and spoke English with a British accent. We often gave parties at home, but few of my friends came. Nobody liked Edward because he was so stiff and uppity. He had been born on a tobacco plantation near Raleigh, North Carolina, and was so wrapped up in himself he reminded everyone of a cigar. He never learned to speak a word of Spanish and the minute he walked in the door everyone had to start speaking English because it was bad manners to leave Edward out in the cold and he would immediately let you know that. If someone dared rattle on in the barbaric vernacular, Edward would start to criticize Puerto Rican men, the way they swore under their breath every time they had to wear a jacket and tie or the way they insisted that ‘a man’s dignity was in his balls.’

“Making love with Edward was something of a disappointment. He wasn’t tender, like my darling Tom, and he wasn’t exotic and erotically exciting like Rodrigo. His penis was like a cheap Flor de Oro cigar, the kind you can buy for five cents at any corner store on the island. And sometimes it got as prickly as an armadillo’s. He couldn’t stand it when I told him when and where to caress me so I could feel pleasure. He got very upset because he thought I was ordering him around.

“Edward invested our money in La Cacica, a small cigar plant in Caguana, which had a two-hundred-acre tobacco farm and a rundown shed where tobacco leaves were hung out to dry in the sun. He was completely confident because he had learned a lot about the tobacco industry in Raleigh. He discovered that Puerto Rican tobacco leaves were among the tastiest in the world. They were exported to Cuba and rolled there as gut leaves in the Montecristos and Partagás, although the Cuban tobacco manufacturers never acknowledged where the exquisite taste of their most expensive cigars came from.

“But what Edward enjoyed the most about his cigar business was the
tabaqueras
, the beautiful young women of Caguana who came to work every day in the factory. Processing the tobacco leaves was a difficult, delicate chore traditionally done by women. The
tabaqueras
first had to
despalar
, or break the stems off the leaves, then
deshilar
, or rip out the delicate veins, and finally spread the leaves out on their naked thighs to iron them out with their hands before they were hung to dry. Eventually their legs ended up as dark and perfumed as the tobacco leaves.

“Edward loved to smoke cigars, and that was probably the reason he was so attracted to the
tabaqueras
. He couldn’t resist making love to them, because each time he buried his face in their perfumed thighs, he felt the same pleasure as when he was smoking a Puerto Rican cigar. Caguana is a secluded little valley outside San Juan and Edward didn’t return until dusk, so unfortunately I didn’t find out about this side of his business until much later.

“When I married Edward I expected him to be a haven for me, someone I could depend on for the rest of my life. I believed him when he swore he was a man of means, and when I visited the Milton family estate in Raleigh before we were married I was impressed. They lived in a turreted Victorian mansion on Main Street. But Edward had so many brothers and sisters that when his parents died the estate hardly paid him any money at all. After we were married, we had to depend solely on my income.

“In Puerto Rico, Edward’s profits from La Cacica weren’t enough to cover his expenses, let alone mine. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959 it became harder and harder to export Puerto Rican tobacco to Cuba, and finally the embargo stopped commerce completely between the two islands. Shipping rates went up drastically, as all products from the island had to be transported on U.S. freighters. I couldn’t believe it when Edward told me he had to close down La Cacica. We were ruined and would have to live practically puffing on air.

“Edward sold the Rolls-Royce and got rid of the chauffeur and butler. I had to get rid of the maid and do the housework myself. My beautiful almond-shaped nails were the first thing to go, and my fingers turned into ugly stubs. I couldn’t buy stylish clothes anymore. I couldn’t even afford to go to the beauty salon; I had to fix my own hair. It was impossible to go on living like that.

“I packed my beautiful clothes in several trunks, put my checkbook and my jewels in my purse, and went back to live at Emajaguas with Mother. I left Edward the Gorham silver service, the Lenox porcelain set, and the Val Saint-Lambert glassware we had received as wedding gifts. And I would have left him much more in exchange for my freedom, because if I couldn’t live for style, I couldn’t live at all.

“Guayamés society is Catholic, apostolic, and Roman, and divorce isn’t tolerated. I knew that if I divorced Edward I’d be cut off from the social scene completely and would never be invited to another important gathering again. I had no alternative but to try to have the marriage annulled.

“I wrote a letter to Rome asking the Vatican for information about annulments, but I never got an answer. So I went to see the parish priest in Guayamés. I told him about Edward’s infidelities and how he preferred making love to the
tabaqueras
rather than to me. ‘I want to have my marriage annulled and I don’t know how to go about it,’ I told Father Gregorio, sobbing quietly behind the confessional’s red velvet curtain.

“Father Gregorio was a worldly Spaniard who loved good wine and was always amazed at other people’s follies. He had come to Puerto Rico during the Spanish Civil War and was from a good family in Santander. But he had led a spartan life since arriving on the island. I knew he would love to be invited to one of our family dinners. He pushed aside the curtain and peeked at me through the wooden grille.

“‘It’s going to be difficult to give you a hand, my dear, but perhaps we can figure something out,’ he whispered. I promised him that if he helped me get the annulment I’d see that he got invited to dinner at Emajaguas.

“‘There are three ways a marriage can be annulled,’ Father Gregorio went on. ‘If the groom is proven impotent at the time of the marriage, if the marriage contract was fraudulent—for example, if your betrothed was secretly underage or mentally unbalanced—or if one of the partners was unsure of the commitment before signing the marriage contract.’ This last option, which Father Gregorio called ‘the alternative of mental reserve,’ was the most convenient for me, but it was also very expensive. Almost anybody could get an annulment that way, but not everyone could pay the Church forty thousand dollars in cash, the cost of the mental-reserve option.

“Father Gregorio advised me to claim impotence on Edward’s part. Since we hadn’t had any children it was a plausible allegation. The process of annulment was a complicated one. The pope in Rome would send a papal nuncio to conduct a detailed investigation on the island. All my relatives and friends would be interviewed. But if I could get Edward to play along, I’d have a good chance of success.

“I called Edward the next day and asked him if he was willing to make a deal. He said he wanted to go back to live in North Carolina, where one of his brothers had offered him a job, but he needed money to settle in Raleigh and he didn’t have a cent. I offered to help him out. I told him all he had to do was tell the papal nuncio he was impotent, and I would give him twenty thousand dollars. Once the marriage was annulled, he could go back to Raleigh and his family with the money. Edward agreed and I sighed with relief.

“The next day I went to the bank with Valeria, who sold a bond for twenty thousand dollars and lent me the money. We sent the money to Edward. Father Gregorio wrote a letter to Rome with my petition and asked that an envoy from the Vatican be sent to the island to investigate the matter as soon as possible.

“The papal nuncio arrived four months later. He was thin and sallow, with long ears and sunken cheeks, and he wore a brown habit that made him look like he’d walked out of a painting by Caravaggio. He went around visiting everyone in the family—Valeria, Siglinda, Dido, Clarissa—asking very private questions. The family was as solid as a brick wall. They covered my tracks so well the nuncio didn’t even find out Edward was my third husband.

“Unfortunately, one day the nuncio traveled to Caguana and talked to the
tabaqueras
who still lived near the closed cigar factory. And once he had their testimony, there was no way to accuse Edward of being impotent. I had to get the annulment through the mental-reserve clause after all, and it cost me an additional forty thousand dollars, which Mother also had to lend me.