Eccentric Neighborhood (20 page)

Vernet Ice was a success from the start; delivery carts came by the dozen every hour to pick up blocks of ice that would be wrapped in hemp sacks and carried to private homes and businesses all over the city. Temperatures in Santiago could reach a hundred degrees in the shade. But once Vernet Ice was in business, people insisted, it was never as hot as before.

Henri had inherited the Vernets’ bad luck. Once a short circuit cut off the plant’s generator and Henri called out to Roque to go to the front of the building and pull the disconnect lever down. Then he went to the basement to try to fix the problem. Elvira had dropped Chaguito off at the plant while she went shopping, and he skipped down the stairs behind his father. It was dark and Henri had to light their way with a gas lamp.

Roque did as he was told. He pulled the lever down and then stood by the switch waiting for Henri to call again from the basement. Henri searched around by the light of the lamp and found a bare wire in one of the generator’s cables; the frayed part needed to be cut and the cable connected again. “This is where the problem is,” he told Chaguito, showing him the mat of wires inside the frayed cover. “We have to cut and repair the cable.”

But upstairs one of the carts heavily laden with ice suddenly rolled out of the warehouse gate. There was a lot of traffic on the avenue, and the gatekeeper yelled, “Go ahead!” to the driver to let him know he could ride out. Roque mistook the driver’s voice for Henri’s and pushed the lever up. Henri landed three feet from his small son.

When he heard Henri cry out, Roque ran to the basement but in his haste forgot to pull the lever down. His friend was lying on the ground, his hands still stuck to the cable, and he was shaking violently. Roque was about to grab him by the arm to pull him away when Henri cried out, his eyes bulging, “Don’t touch me! You’ll only double the charge and kill us both! Turn the switch off!” Roque flew upstairs again, but by the time he returned, Henri was dead. Chaguito stood helplessly by, watching the smoke come out of his father’s long brown curls.

When Elvira was told of the accident, she fell to the ground in a faint. Roque was overwhelmed as well. He felt responsible for Henri’s death and kept seeing the terrified look in his brother-in-law’s eyes as Henri struggled to free himself from the cable. Elvira tried to console him. “Some people are born under a good-luck star and others are born under an evil one,” she said. “The Vernets belong to the second category. You mustn’t blame yourself for what happened, Roque. Given his family history, Henri would probably have died young anyway.”

Elvira was deeply concerned about her son. One night she came to Roque’s room and knocked on his door. “We’ve both lost Henri, and nobody can bring him back. But we still have each other and shouldn’t be bitter about it. I need you to help me look after Chaguito. He hasn’t said a single word since Henri passed away. His teachers have threatened to expel him from school if he doesn’t come out of his obstinate silence.”

Roque agreed to try to help his nephew. In true Vernet fashion, the boy hadn’t shed a single tear since his father’s death, and Roque felt sorry for him. Chaguito was good with numbers, and to learn mathematics one didn’t need to talk. If Chaguito didn’t want to speak it was his business, but he could certainly count. Roque went up to the attic, opened an old trunk, and took out Henri’s books of electrical engineering from the Ecole des Ponts et des Chaussées. He brought them down and opened them on the dining room table. Chaguito drew near and stared at them in fascination. They were all in French, and at first Roque thought this would make it impossible for Chaguito to understand them. But he was wrong. Soon Chaguito knew all there was to know about algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, and electrical and mechanical design, and along the way he had also learned to read French.

Years passed and in 1895, when Chaguito was a young man of sixteen, the War of Independence was raging in Cuba. José Martí was killed during a suicide charge at Dos Ríos, and the Zequeiras were incensed by his death. One time Roque took a potshot at a Spanish officer from a second-floor window of their house. Roque escaped but the house was ransacked, and the piano in the living room turned out to be full of bandages and cotton swabs. The Zequeiras’ home was a nursing station for wounded revolutionaries. Elvira, Roque, and Chaguito all went to jail but were set free six months later, during a lull in the war.

When they returned to the house, Roque found an order to present himself for military service at the conscription office in Santiago de Cuba. He left the city and went into hiding in the
manigua
, the wild brush country near the town. Elvira hid her son in the attic. Chaguito was now seventeen and would soon be eligible for conscription. In spite of his small stature, he could only sit there; the ceiling was too low for him to stand. Late at night he crept downstairs to have a hot meal and be with his mother. All kinds of insects stung him—spiders, scorpions, and gnats—and his eyes were so swollen they looked like slits, but he had inherited Henri’s military stoicism and endured his discomfort without complaint.

Elvira was very religious, and she made an altar in the attic where Chaguito could pray to the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba. He could light candles in the dark for the Virgin and watch the small red flames waver like hopeful flags around him. But Chaguito didn’t pray. He slept with his back to the Virgin and swore that he’d make the family’s bad luck change.

After a month Chaguito couldn’t stand lying in the dark anymore. He was about to escape and join the
mambises
in the bush when his uncle Roque turned up at the house. Roque told Elvira that an electrical engineer was needed in Puerto Rico. The job was in La Concordia and involved mounting some new evaporators at the Siboney, a mill on the outskirts of town. His friends had passed on the information and were waiting for him outside the house. They were going to try to smuggle him off the island that very night.

“Take Chaguito with you, Roque, I beg you,” Elvira said, pointing to the attic. “I don’t care if I never see him again. I’d rather know he’s far away and alive than nearby and six feet under.” But when she told Chaguito, he didn’t want to go; he didn’t want to leave Cuba. So Roque and his friends knocked Chaguito out and smuggled him aboard the
Alicia Contreras,
a cargo steamer bound for Santo Domingo. Chaguito worked in the boiler room and fed coals into the furnace with such fury you would have thought he was feeding the anger that blazed in his heart.

In Santo Domingo the ship picked up a load of oranges, bananas, and green plantains, then sailed on to Puerto Rico. Chaguito and his uncle spent two weeks on a diet of bananas and oranges but arrived safe and sound at their destination.

“L
OOK AT THOSE
GACHUPINES
marching up and down the square!” Chaguito exclaimed to his uncle Roque the day they arrived in La Concordia. He saw the Regimiento de Cazadores de la Patria—the Regiment of Hunters of the Fatherland—performing their military maneuvers in the Plaza de las Delicias. “They’re an elegant-looking lot, but I bet they don’t exactly hunt boar or fox!”

Chaguito was right. In La Concordia the Cazadores de la Patria tracked down citizens who wanted to overthrow the government and, once they had caught them, sliced off their ears, cut off their eyelids, or drove splinters under their nails until they confessed. And once they had confessed, they were shot.

La Concordia was unabashedly commercial. There were thriving businesses on every corner and only one or two churches in sight. Concordians were entrepreneurs; in his brief stroll through the city Chaguito noted four factories: crackers, noodles, and Panama hats were all made in La Concordia, and tobacco was grown nearby. Next, he wanted to find out how many foundries there were in town. He stopped at a street corner, closed his eyes, and sniffed around like a dog. He was an engineer’s son and he had iron in his blood; he could recognize the smell of liquid ore a mile away. Immediately he knew there were two in town, and he walked off in their direction. They were old-fashioned enterprises. One was owned by a Scotsman, Mr. McCann, who didn’t want to spend any money modernizing his kilns, and the other by a Spaniard, Don Miguel Sáez Peña, who had made thousands of dollars building steam engines, conical wheels, crowns, and rollers for the sugarcane mills. But Chaguito saw that Don Miguel’s foundry had an outdated steam boiler that was very run-down. Not surprisingly, it exploded a few months after he arrived in town.

Concordians were a practical, down-to-earth people who liked to call things as they saw them. The street the hospital was on was Calle Salud; the school stood on Calle Educación; the butcher’s street was Calle Matadero. But the streets Chaguito liked best were Calle Armonía, Calle Hermandad, and Calle Fraternidad, representing the Masonic virtues.

Under Spanish law Freemasonry was strictly forbidden; membership in a Masonic lodge was punishable by death. But in La Concordia, Freemasons were all over the place, and Roque soon got in touch with them. He had served as grand master at the clandestine Masonic temple in Santiago de Cuba and he still had some influence in the fraternity. So the first thing he did after he arrived was to visit the Aurora Lodge, which was located in a ruined sugar warehouse on the outskirts of town, and ask that his nephew be accepted as a member. Chaguito was initiated soon after, and since all Masons were members of La Concordia’s Firemen’s Corps, he became a fireman as well.

The earliest photograph I’ve ever seen of Abuelo Chaguito was taken in 1900, four years after he arrived in Puerto Rico. He’s sitting on a bench with twelve other firemen, and he’s wearing the firemen’s dress uniform: a red-visored cap, a high-collared navy-blue jacket with gold trim at the neck, and a bronze saber at the waist. At five feet four, he was the shortest one of all—and his slight frame made his whiskers seem that much larger. At the bottom of the photograph someone had written in ink: “Fosforito Vernet—Little Matchstick Vernet—who loved starting fires as much as putting them out.”

Precisely because they were so proud of their town, La Concordia’s merchants had invested heavily in its fire brigade. The firemen had the latest equipment: horse-drawn engines, water pumps and hoses, tanks, axes, and ladders. La Concordia sat on a wide valley planted with sugarcane that was periodically set ablaze to facilitate harvesting. Hence the city often fell victim to fires sparked by flying embers of cane that landed on the roofs of the wood-frame houses of the poorer residents on the outskirts of town.

Two years after Abuelo Chaguito arrived in La Concordia, a tremendous fire broke out in the Plaza del Mercado Isabel Segunda. Since the wind was blowing from the south, the fire soon spread north toward the military powder magazine. The American army that had come with General Nelson A. Miles was stationed at La Concordia, and Colonel Hulings, the officer in charge, ordered everyone to evacuate. The fire seemed sure to reach the munitions depot and blow the town to pieces.

Chaguito was a lieutenant in the fire brigade and he disregarded the colonel’s order. He drove his truck to where the fire was raging, and he and his men put it out. The next day the firemen were hailed as heroes by the citizens of La Concordia. But the army brought civil charges against them for disobeying military orders and the firemen were all put in jail. A large group of prominent men went to visit the American commandant and convinced him that what the firemen had done was heroic. La Concordia was as much a work of art as Paris, they said, only on a smaller scale, and saving it from destruction had been an act of humanity. The next day Colonel Hulings set Chaguito and the other firemen free.

The job of building the new evaporator at the Siboney had taken Roque and Chaguito two years, and when it was finished, Don Eustaquio Ridruejo, the mill’s owner, commissioned them to install a new copper still for his rum distillery. But Roque wanted to return to Cuba. “The war is over now, sir. It’s time to go home,” he told Don Eustaquio.

“Your mother is waiting for us, lad,” Roque told Chaguito. “She has no one in the world but us.”

“You go on ahead, Tío,” Chaguito said coolly. “I want to stay on at La Concordia for a few months. I’ll install Don Eustaquio’s copper still for him.”

Tío Roque thought Chaguito was still angry at his mother because of the way she had had him put aboard the
Alicia Contreras.
So he carried his bags to the harbor himself and boarded the sloop that would take him back to Cuba.

But Tío Roque was wrong. Abuelo Chaguito wanted to remain on the island for other reasons. After the
Maine
had blown up in Havana’s harbor, rumors had begun to fly around La Concordia that the United States was planning to invade Puerto Rico. Chaguito wasn’t about to leave the island when things were just heating up. He had heard that President William McKinley’s advisers at the Department of State had toyed with the idea of keeping Cuba after they invaded it—there were plenty of Cubans like Narciso López, who had wanted to annex the island to the United States in 1850—but it was too dangerous to attempt. Cuba was a rich and beautiful island, the largest of the Greater Antilles, but the mermaid might turn crocodile at any moment. It was much safer to take over Puerto Rico, the minnow to the south.

A month after the American invasion was over, Abuelo Chaguito wrote a letter to his mother in Santiago de Cuba. Bisabuela Elvira always kept it by her, and when she died not long after, Tío Roque mailed it back to Chaguito in Puerto Rico. It has been in the Vernet family for a hundred years. Aurelio kept it in his desk and showed an almost religious reverence for it.

November 25, 1898

Dear Mother:

I have received your letter and beg you not to worry, because I’m well and in good health. Things have calmed down a lot here, and people have taken up their usual routines of working, eating, and sleeping, even though now we have a very different flag in front of the
alcaldía
and the post office.