Eccentric Neighborhood (16 page)

“She’s going on eighteen,” Valeria answered. “I was only sixteen when I married you. And Siglinda is stubborn. She won’t care if she causes a scandal, which is just what I want to avoid. Once the newspapers get wind of what happened, our daughter’s picture will be all over the front page and the mudslinging will be inevitable.” Abuelo sat down dejectedly in front of Abuela. “All right, Valeria, I’ll do as you wish,” he said. “I’ll notify the police to call off the search. But from now on, I forbid you to mention Siglinda’s name in Emajaguas again.”

Venancio bought Siglinda a beautiful house on Crisótbal Colón Avenue, the main boulevard of Guayamés, with a wrought-iron fence around it, a gingerbread
mirador
that looked toward the bay, and, in front, a trellis covered with roses. He wanted her to have servants, but Siglinda wouldn’t hear of it. It was hot in Guayamés, she said, there was no breeze blowing in from the sea as it did at Emajaguas, and she enjoyed walking around the house naked to cool off. When Venancio came home from work they made love everywhere, on the heavy oak dining room table, on the yellow silk living room sofa, on the Persian rug with the Garden of Paradise woven into it, sometimes even on the bed, with the beautiful linen sheets Siglinda had embroidered herself. But every time Venancio asked Siglinda to marry him, she said no.

“What do you want me to be your wife for? To please Father and Mother? To keep the society ladies and the parish priest from gossiping about us? They’ll gossip anyway. I’d rather remain your mistress.”

When Abuela Valeria heard what was going on, she asked Clarissa to talk to Siglinda. Clarissa went to visit her sister, and they sat in the living room. They made an odd couple: Clarissa was snuggled up in the Mexican serape Miña had given her one Christmas, with the colors of the rainbow wrapped around her, while Siglinda sat naked on the yellow silk Victorian sofa Venancio had bought for her.

“You can’t go on like this, Siglinda. You’re getting love and lust mixed up,” Clarissa told her. “Love comes from the soul and is pure. Lust comes from the body and can scorch you to hell.”

“That’s the difference between the two of us, sister,” Tía Siglinda said, shaking her head. “I love Venancio more than anyone in this world, but it’s impossible to separate body and soul. The body keeps the soul warm and the soul keeps the body cool, but if one of them dies, the other one will too. They’re sewn together with the same magic thread.”

“What thread?” Clarissa asked innocently.

“Pubic hair,” Siglinda answered, laughing heartily. “The day you understand that, Clarissa, you won’t feel so cold.”

Tía Siglinda loved to shock people. When her well-to-do neighbors came to visit, wanting to verify the rumors that were flying around town, Tía Siglinda hurriedly ran to her room to get dressed, then sat demurely in the parlor. At first the conversation would develop normally, but out of the blue Siglinda would stare at her neighbors and say: “Each time Venancio fucks me, a red rose blooms over our porch.” Coffee cups would start trembling, teaspoons would drop to the floor, but Siglinda paid no mind. “I know we should get married because I’m a Rivas de Santillana girl,” she’d continue, fanning herself and following her flustered neighbor to the door. “But I like to go to bed with Venancio knowing I’m his procurer. I procure him whatever he wants—a tie or a tit, a cup or a cunt, or an earful of honey he can lick at will.” And although few neighbors actually heard the last part of her speech, because by that time they were fleeing down Crisótbal Colón Avenue, Siglinda loved to whisper it to herself.

In 1920, a year after Abuelo Alvaro threw Venancio out of Emajaguas, Venancio sent him a magnificent present for Christmas—a case of Dom Pérignon champagne, Abuelo Alvaro’s favorite—with a card wishing him a happy holiday and a good harvest for the
central
Plata in the new year. And as Venancio was by that time a close friend of the American governor on the island and the
central
Plata could certainly benefit from the government’s financial incentives, Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria sent Siglinda and Venancio an invitation to join them for the Christmas feast at Emajaguas that year.

The dinner was a total success. Abuela Valeria and Venancio got along wonderfully, and Venancio couldn’t stop talking about the marvelous inventions the Americans had brought to the island: the telegraph, the telephone, the electric generator, the electric stove. That was the reason he was for statehood, Venancio told Abuelo Alvaro: because he believed in the modern age. And since the Partido Republicano Incondicional was now protecting the sugar industry, it would be wise if Abuelo joined it and made a generous contribution.

Abuelo Alvaro thanked Venancio profusely and followed his advice. The next year, Tío Venancio was elected president of the Partido Republicano Incondicional. It was a position even more powerful than that of mayor. He met with the governor’s cabinet in San Juan and named the party’s candidates to the Senate and the House of Representatives. That Easter, Siglinda and Venancio had been married in the cathedral during High Mass. The entire town turned out for the wedding feast at Emajaguas.

I
N SEPTEMBER 1919 CLARISSA
traveled to San Juan and entered the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. Before she left Emajaguas, she told Abuela gravely: “I want to go to the university to study, Mother, not to find a husband. When I grow up I want to be as free as the wind; I don’t want a man hovering around me like a drone. And anyway, there’s no nicer place to live than our own house.” Abuela Valeria laughed, convinced that one day Clarissa would change her mind.

Clarissa installed herself at the Pensionado Católico. The food was bland but healthy; the beds were iron cots separated by sheets that hung from rods attached to the ceiling. The Pensionado was a large, four-storied building, with a long, balustered balcony, facing the campus. The grounds were planted with yellow trumpet vines, pink oleander, and red bougainvillea. A long avenue of royal palms led to an elegant Spanish Revival clock tower, whose pink ceramic pinnacles and green gargoyles ran with water every time it rained.

Dido and Artemisa followed in Clarissa’s footsteps and arrived at the Pensionado two years later. Soon they were flitting around the social scene like a flock of swans, invited to all the parties and making new beaus at every opportunity. Clarissa didn’t always go with her sisters. She spent a lot of time studying in the library, bundled up in Miña’s Mexican serape.

The clock on the university’s tower chimed its carillon every hour on the hour and gave Clarissa the feeling of being in a sacred place as she walked from one classroom to the next, her arms loaded with books. She had excellent professors, among them several American scientists and a famous mathematician. It made her heart beat faster, as she crossed the campus under the royal palm trees, to think that she was now part of an intellectual elite, that milling around her were the future doctors, judges, engineers, economists, and historians who would determine the fate of the island.

Clarissa majored in agronomy because she wanted to learn the most modern methods of sugar production. She thought her advice to her father might be helpful in managing the mill. They would be able to discuss the seeding, weeding, and harvesting of the
central
Plata’s sugarcane in light of the latest technological developments. Clarissa also took classes in history and sociology and grew keenly aware of the importance of preserving one’s natural resources, be it land or one’s own mind and body.

At the Sacred Heart in Guayamés the nuns had taught Clarissa that God wanted women to be mothers above all and that Saint Paul had said they must obey their husbands. Valeria had agreed with the nuns, as long as her daughters were educated in the process. She got stinging mad every time she remembered how her own father had sentenced her to illiteracy. But although education was an advantage, even educated women from the upper classes usually couldn’t find work. That’s why Valeria always insisted marriage was the only career open to them.

Clarissa couldn’t have agreed less. Education was necessary because it gave women the possibility of economic independence. You only had to drive down the road and meet a peasant woman, her belly swollen with child, a wailing baby in her arms, and a third one in rags trailing behind to understand that women were easily exploited by their husbands. Once they got old or had too many mouths to feed, the men simply took off for New York. But if a woman was educated enough to be able to survive on her own, she needn’t let a man lay a hand on her unless he took responsibility for the consequences.

Women didn’t even have the right to vote. Only men could vote on the island, which meant that women, from a legal point of view, were on the same level as prisoners, beggars, and the mentally retarded. Clarissa was indignant when she first learned this. The fight for women’s suffrage was spreading in San Juan, so Clarissa became an activist in the movement. She joined several suffragette organizations, including the Liga Social Sufragista and the Liga de la Mujer del Siglo XX.

On her next visit to Emajaguas the first thing Clarissa did was to march into the kitchen and tell Miña: “Education is the first step in women’s liberation! The right to vote belongs to those who have won it thanks to a university diploma. Educated women should be able to participate in the economic affairs of the country and have a say in its destiny.” Miña stared at her in annoyance. “The vote should belong to all women, to those who can write and those who can’t,” she retorted, swirling her mop over Clarissa’s patent-leather pumps and then wringing it out vehemently with her strong hands until the dirty water overflowed the bucket.

“To all women!” Felicia screeched, craning her neck inside her cage.

“Will you teach me how to read and write?” Miña asked.

“We’ll start right now,” Clarissa answered. And she took Miña to her room, sat her at the desk, gave her a pencil and a lined notebook, and began to guide her hand over the letters of the alphabet. When Clarissa’s birthday came around a few weeks later, Miña gave her a present: a picture of herself, with “Miña Besosa” written at the bottom in her own hand. Clarissa had it framed and hung it on her bedroom wall.

One day Clarissa told Miña about Aurelio Vernet, a nice young man she had met at La Concordia, where she went to spend a weekend with a student friend from the university, Janina Figueroa, who was studying liberal arts. Janina was her roommate at the Pensionado Católico. Aurelio was at La Concordia for the holidays; he was studying to be an engineer at Northeastern University in Boston. Aurelio’s father, Santiago Vernet, had a foundry and machine shop in La Concordia called Vernet Construction.

Aurelio was a nice young man, Clarissa told Miña. He wasn’t cruel and selfish like Tío Alejandro. He had a slender build; he wasn’t brawny and overbearing like most of the young men she knew. He loved to play the piano, and every once in a while Clarissa went to the university’s theater, where there was an old Pleyel, to listen to him play. The only trouble was, she couldn’t stand Aurelio’s touching her.

“It’s nothing serious, just an
amitié en rose
,” Clarissa assured Miña. “You know I’m never going to get married, so stop looking at me like that. I’ll never find another man like Father in the whole world.” Nonetheless, Aurelio came to visit Clarissa at Emajaguas that Christmas, and although she wouldn’t see him again until the summer because he had to go back to Boston, from then on the family considered him Clarissa’s official suitor. In 1925 she graduated from the University of Puerto Rico at the head of her class with a degree in agronomy. Then she went back to live with her parents at Emajaguas.

During Christmas dinner that year, Abuelo Alvaro told the family the bad news about Okeechobee, which had begun to suck their fortune dry. Many years later Mother told me about that evening, which she believed was a turning point in their lives. The feast started out as usual; the food was prepared with love and the house decorated with the utmost care. Clarissa wore her favorite black velvet gown, cut low at the back. Tía Siglinda wore a red brocade evening dress; Tía Dido one of her Spanish
petenera
skirts; Tía Artemisa a blue silk robe that made her look like a priestess; Tía Lakhmé, who was only a child but already had exotic tastes, wore a necklace of tiny golden beads. The older sisters complimented one another as usual; it was like seeing themselves reflected in the mirror over and over. Finally, after exchanging gifts and bantering about who’d gotten last year’s rewrapped
pasapalante
, saved from year to year because it was useless, everybody sat down at the table.

There was a lot of laughter and joking between my aunts and uncles as the wineglasses were filled again and again. At the time, only Tía Siglinda and Tío Venancio were married. My other aunts were still single. After a while, however, the tone of the family’s conversation grew surprisingly plaintive. Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria became strangely silent as Tío Alejandro’s voice rose in irritation above the rest.

He was twenty-one and was studying business administration at the University of Virginia. But he kept close tabs on what was happening at Emajaguas. He was complaining about an investment Abuelo Alvaro had made recently in Florida: a large sugar mill he had purchased on the shores of Lake Okeechobee, near the Everglades. A double disaster had struck: a severe frost as well as a hurricane had wiped out three thousand acres of sugarcane and destroyed the entire harvest. Thousands of dollars had gone down the drain.

“I told you Okeechobee was a bad investment from the start,” Tío Alejandro said to Abuelo Alvaro bitterly. “But you chose to listen to Venancio.” Lately Abuelo Alvaro had fallen more and more under Venancio’s influence because Venancio had so much power with the government. He had come to depend on his son-in-law for the government loans he needed to keep the
central
Plata going.

“I bought the Okeechobee mill because I wanted to, and I’m not sorry I did,” Abuelo said defensively. “Seventy percent of our island’s valleys are in the hands of American sugar mill owners. It’s time we turned the trend around and showed the Americans we, too, can be absentee owners.”