Eccentric Neighborhood (24 page)

Aurelio was five. He never forgot the foul smell of charred flesh and the uproar Ulises’s accident caused. The family forgot all about him and he hid in a closet. He was terrified. The word
death
went swishing around the house like a sharpened sickle. It was the first time Aurelio had heard it, and he was surprised to learn that someone could “pass away,” simply cease to exist. When he tiptoed out of the closet, he was forbidden to enter his brother’s room, but unseen he peered at him through a chink in the wall. Aurelio saw Adela and Chaguito kneeling next to Ulises’s bed, praying and holding hands. Ulises was their first child, Adela sobbed. All their dreams were pinned on him. Aurelio was dismayed; he realized he was in second place—
el segundón
—and he was afraid his parents wouldn’t love him.

Ulises pulled through, thanks to Adela’s unfailing energy—she spent three days and nights dressing Ulises’s wounds and praying. And from that moment on, Aurelio knew that his mother’s love was the foundation on which the house on Calle Esperanza stood.

Abuelo Chaguito was wonderful, but he was not altogether dependable. Tía Celia told me the story of how Abuelo sent Ulises to Boston University in 1920, but although Father was to start at Northeastern the same year, Chaguito said there was no money to pay for his steamer ticket. Abuela Adela was furious at her husband, but she still felt a lot of respect for him. She controlled her temper and said sweetly, “I have some money laid by under the mattress, dear. Why don’t we buy Aurelio’s ticket with that?” It was her savings for the last five years, but she didn’t hesitate to part with it.

After Adela’s quarrel with Abuelo Chaguito over Aurelio’s future, she was so hurt she moved out of their bedroom. From then on she slept next to Tía Amparo and Tía Celia and Abuelo slept by himself in the huge canopied double bed next to Aurelio and Ulises’s room. Something had broken inside her, perhaps her confidence in Chaguito. She never explained her decision to anyone.

Abuelo didn’t move out of the house, but he never came straight home from work after that. He had many friends in town and visited them until late at night. The house at Calle Esperanza was split in two: the men slept on the left and the women on the right.

Tío Ulises looked the most like Abuela Adela: he was pudgy and had Pasamontes eyes, which were small and close-set. This made him look slow-witted, as if he were zapping flies, decidedly an advantage because Tío Ulises was sharp as could be. He had inherited Abuela Adela’s ability to make a good deal, and with his short, fat fingers could count dollar bills faster than anyone.

Aurelio took after the Vernet side of the family; he had inherited Henri Vernet’s silky brown curls, wide-set eyes, and long, slender fingers, which were perfect for playing the piano. He also shared Bisabuelo Henri’s love for science, combined with Adela’s passion for music. Aurelio was as incapable of telling a lie as Ulises was of speaking the truth. But Aurelio never told on his brother when he did something wrong.

One day, Abuela Adela sent them to buy a loaf of bread at the
panadería
, and on the way back to the house Ulises made a small hole in it and ate half the insides. When they brought the bread to the table and Abuela sliced the first piece, the whole loaf crumbled and fell apart. Adela picked up Santa Ursula, and Aurelio took his punishment like a man. But when Abuela Adela went looking for Ulises, she couldn’t find him anywhere.

“Where’s that devil of a brother of yours?” Adela asked Aurelio, shaking Santa Ursula in his face. “I’m sure you know where he’s hiding. You two are as close as chiggers!” Aurelio wouldn’t tell.

Ulises had climbed on top of Adela’s wardrobe, and he stayed there for three days. He came down only to pee and drink milk at night. On the third day Abuela was so worried she called the police.

“It’s as if the earth had swallowed him up. He’s disappeared!” she told the officers in tears when they came to the house. “I thought it was all a game and that his brothers were hiding him, but he must have run away! Poor child, it’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have been so strict with him!” When Tío Ulises heard this, he crept silently down the back of the wardrobe and slipped out the kitchen door. A few minutes later the police found him lying in the middle of the street unconscious; he had fainted from hunger. Abuela Adela was so happy they found him that Aurelio was the only one who was punished.

Ulises was always trying to win his mother over. He became a friend of most of the vendors in the marketplace and bought Adela all kinds of special fruits and vegetables with the money he made on the sly selling combs and chewing gum at school. He could sell anyone just about anything—especially if it was something the person didn’t need. “Selling is the oldest of all the arts,” he’d tell Father. “Every time you sell something, you’re selling yourself. That’s why you can’t be a successful businessman if you don’t think you’re the greatest fucker on Earth.” Father winced at Tío Ulises’s foul language and told him to shut up, but Ulises only laughed.

There was nothing in this world that Tío Ulises liked to do more than sell. Sometimes he would take things from the house and sell them in the marketplace. He would take one of Adela’s scuffed silver-plated serving pieces, for example, polish it so that it looked like sterling, and get a ridiculously high price for it. Then he would run back home and tell Adela, “Here’s the money from your chafing dish, Mother. It looked a little beat up, and I sold it so you could buy a new one.” Adela would scold him angrily and make him kneel in front of an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, but she always forgave him in the end.

When Ulises grew up he enjoyed selling as much as he did making love. “Both activities are an affirmation of life,” he’d say, “from both you derive the thrill of conquest. When you fuck, you vanquish by will; when you sell, you conquer by wile.” Abuelo Chaguito agreed with Tío Ulises in this respect; they both saw doing business as a kind of game in which the better team always won. Later, when Aurelio and his brothers were all back from their studies in the States, Vernet Construction became a team with four players, and Abuelo Chaguito was its captain. Their game was hardball: the winning team got everything and the losing team got nothing. It was sad, but those were the rules.

Aurelio, my father, was so softhearted he couldn’t see a dead dog lying in the road without getting out of his car to bury it, and if the dog was hurt he’d take it home and nurse it back to health. Once he was driving home late at night from one of his jobs installing machinery at a sugar mill when he saw two drunks slashing each other with their machetes. Father got out of the car and stood between the struggling men. They didn’t want to kill a stranger, so they had to stop fighting.

He was sentimental and romantic and tried to win Adela’s heart by learning to play the most difficult piano pieces. In 1916, when he was thirteen years old, he played Mendelssohn’s
Rondo Capriccioso
in a high school competition. Several students were participating, and his cousin Mariana Pasamontes was one of them. Mariana was eighteen, and she was a much more advanced student than Aurelio. Aurelio gave a commanding performance the day of the competition and won first prize. But when the principal came on stage to present him with a medal, he said he didn’t want it. He asked that the medal be given to Adela instead.

Aurelio was something of a child prodigy, but his precociousness was due to his desperate effort to catch up with Tío Ulises. He skipped eighth grade and graduated from high school at sixteen, at the same time as Tío Ulises. They both went off to study in Boston and finished in record time, each with a college diploma under his arm—but Father also had a master’s degree. Tío Ulises was full of fun; he liked to drink and dance and go to parties. He had half a dozen girlfriends and knew all the artists in La Concordia, but Father never had any fun.

While the brothers were in Boston they lived together at 22 Kingsbury Street, in a boardinghouse near Fenway Park. After school Aurelio worked as a waiter at a coffee shop on Huntington Avenue, near the Boston Conservatory of Music. Ulises got a job at a hardware store on Commonwealth Avenue. Being a born salesman, he immediately began to make more money than Aurelio. Every week Father received a letter from his mother telling him not to abandon the piano but to study at the conservatory no matter what the cost; his weekly letter from his father told him to quit the piano and do his best to get through Northeastern in three years.

Aurelio would go directly from his classes to the piano and practice two hours every day. Then he would work at the coffee shop and study for his engineering courses until two in the morning. During his senior year he signed up for a course in circuits and devices and then forgot all about it. He didn’t go to a single class. When he was notified that the exam was the next day and that if he didn’t pass it he would fail the course—which meant he wouldn’t graduate—he pulled an all-nighter, took the exam the next morning, and just squeaked by. He didn’t know what the word
tired
meant. He was like a little lead soldier, always marching across the battlefield.

Scrimping and saving, Abuela Adela and Abuelo Chaguito managed to send Roque and Damián to study at Northeastern too. Roque studied civil engineering and Damián chemical engineering, but as students they weren’t as good as Ulises and Aurelio. Roque was a slow learner and he had to cram for hours in order to pass a course; Damián was very intelligent but he was sensitive and sometimes got so nervous when he had to take an exam that he panicked and flunked. Adela had to keep writing them letters giving them moral support. She also threatened not to let them come home for summer vacation unless they passed their courses.

I
N 1926, TÍO ULISES
married Caroline Allan, a platinum-blond Boston heiress whom he’d met while studying at the university. Abuelo Chaguito was too busy to go to the States and Abuela Adela wasn’t feeling up to traveling alone, so Aurelio was the only family member who attended the wedding. He was Tío Ulises’s best man and had to pawn his wristwatch—Adela’s graduation present to him that summer—to rent tails for the ceremony.

Caroline came to live with the family at the house on Calle Esperanza, and she was like a daughter to Abuela Adela. For two years she kept Adela company and was a great help; Adela’s health was already fragile and she couldn’t move about easily. Caroline was Tía Celia’s best friend, and Caroline taught her perfect English. Adela felt sorry for Caroline for having married Ulises, the rascal of the family. She wished she had married my father instead, but Aurelio was already in love with Clarissa. Mother was a little stern for Adela’s tastes, and she was always going on about the Rivas de Santillana as if they were God’s gift to humanity.

In 1925, the year before she married Tío Ulises, Caroline had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe. Her family had a “cottage” called Valcour in Newport, near The Breakers, the Vanderbilt mansion. Valcour had sixteen bedrooms, six bathrooms, a swimming pool, and a tennis court. The bathtubs ran both salt water and fresh water, hot or cold. The family also owned a yacht, the
Cormorant
, which sailed to the Bahamas every summer.

“Why would an heiress marry an odd little mustachioed Latin lover and come to live on an exotic Caribbean island where half the population goes barefoot, doesn’t have enough to eat, and lives in palm-thatched huts with no sanitary facilities?” I asked Tía Celia once. “To run away from her family, of course!” Celia exclaimed.

Caroline was madly in love with Tío Ulises. This was something I found extraordinary because Ulises was far from good-looking. He was short, and his close-set eyes, fleshy cheeks, and thick mustache made him look like a satisfied beaver. But I suppose it is true that a man as passionately in love with life as my uncle Ulises could make a woman feel rapturously happy.

As long as she had her beloved Ulises at her side, Caroline didn’t mind sharing the only bathroom in the house with eight other family members, having the dogs’ ticks crawling up the legs of her bed, or passing the serving dishes around the table at dinnertime. She was a moonlit beauty who appeared cold and aloof on the surface. But her heart was a regular little volcano in a constant state of eruption. Like Abuela Adela, she was a woman with a mission, but hers was women’s suffrage. When she learned that women in Puerto Rico could not vote, she was horrified. In the States, women had secured the franchise in 1920, thanks to the Nineteenth Amendment.

For two years Caroline worked with the suffragettes in La Concordia, organizing meetings in support of women’s right to equal pay and employment opportunities as well as to the vote. When Tía Celia began to talk of going to Nepal to be a missionary, Caroline gave her her full support. “The Vernets talk a lot about justice,” she said to Tío Ulises once, “but Amparo has studied only as far as high school. And Celia wants to be a missionary, but Chaguito won’t let her. What kind of justice is that? Where is the equality the Vernets are always touting?”

As soon as my uncles returned to La Concordia, they went to work at Vernet Construction with their father. Adela wasn’t sorry to see Ulises become a businessman—he had commerce in his blood. But Aurelio was different. It made her cry to see how he never had time to sit down at the piano to play even a short little
danza
like “No me toques” by Morel Campos, which made her wish Chaguito were tickling her and they were sweethearts again.

The twenties were a very difficult time on the island. Sugar prices plummeted after the First World War and Puerto Rican coffee couldn’t compete with Colombian, which sold for half the price on the mainland. In 1929 the Wall Street crash sent the economy reeling. But the island had already suffered another, even more severe blow: in 1928 San Felipe had struck.

San Felipe was a flying sawmill that mowed down everything in its path. It arrived from the south and left through the north with winds so strong that anemometers were bent out of shape. None of Adela’s prayers worked, not even the novenas to San Antonio and Santa Agata, two saints who scare off rain because they like cats. Nobody was prepared for the catastrophe: communications were completely inadequate, and people had no way of knowing a hurricane was coming. My grandparents had to rely on the avocado tree in their garden, which plopped unripe fruit to the ground when there wasn’t a trace of wind. Suddenly the sky began to grow black and before long everything on the island was being shooed like a stray dog across the Caribbean. Even furniture had to be tied down if you didn’t want to find your living room rocker, your kitchen stove, and even the roof of your house hanging from a mangrove in Florida.