Eccentric Neighborhood (27 page)

At four o’clock in the afternoon, Aurelio finally arrived. He drew near the bed and leaned over his mother to give her a kiss. Adela opened her eyes and two large tears rolled down her cheeks—the first she had shed since she had been taken ill. “Aurelio, I’m glad you’re finally here! God bless you, my son!” she whispered. And heaving a great sigh, she passed away.

And with that special blessing, imparted only to Aurelio before she expired, Adela let her family know whom she wanted to be in command.

W
ITHIN A YEAR VERNET CONSTRUCTION
was making enough money for Aurelio to be able to pay for Tía Celia’s education without having to take out the loan. Tía Celia had no trouble getting accepted at Marymount College of the Sacred Heart in Washington, D.C.: she had graduated from La Concordia’s Sacred Heart Academy at the head of her class. When September came around, Celia had everything ready, and Amparo helped her buy new clothes.

But after Adela’s death, Abuelo Chaguito didn’t want Celia to leave. He was deeply grieved by Abuela’s passing. All his life he had drawn his strength from Adela, and he no longer had the Statue of Liberty to hold up the roof of his house.

Being short had never bothered Abuelo, but now he felt small and vulnerable. He was so sad he shaved off his mustache and went around with his clothes frayed and his tie rumpled and stained. His face betrayed a vulnerability that had never been there before. Without his mustache, it was as if he were exposing his sadness to the world.

“Please don’t go yet. You’re my youngest, my turtledove. Who’s going to take care of me after you’re gone?” he said to Celia, his eyes glistening. And when Celia didn’t answer, he added: “Amparo deserted me, Adela passed away, and now it’s your turn. Perhaps God is punishing me for having left my mother behind in Santiago de Cuba to come to this island years ago. But if I hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have met your mother and none of you would have been born.”

Tía Celia could see that Abuelo Chaguito needed her. The house had begun to look like a college dormitory in disarray. There were clothes scattered all over and the furniture was covered with dust. Matilde, the maid, had so much work that she might leave at any minute. And if she did, what would happen to Celia’s father and brothers?

So Celia did what her mother had taught her. She rose to the occasion and decided to make a sacrifice. “All right, Father, I’ll stay and take care of you. But promise me that three years from now, when I’m twenty-one, you’ll take me to study in the States.”

Abuelo Chaguito gave a sigh of relief and promised her. Celia was eighteen, she was in the prime of life. Who knew what might happen in three years? With her curly auburn hair and her clear blue eyes, she could meet a nice boy from La Concordia and fall in love. Meanwhile, he wouldn’t be alone.

For three years Tía Celia helped Matilde with the housework. She played the piano for her father every evening and kept him company. Aurelio offered her a job as a social worker at Vernet Construction, and she spent part of each day visiting the families of the firm’s employees. She was patient; she had promised her mother she would go to Nepal one day, and she swore to herself she would.

A few months before Tía Celia turned twenty-one, she wrote to a convent belonging to the Maryknoll order in Chicago and was accepted. The morning she received the letter, she reminded her father of his promise as he was having breakfast. But Chaguito said he didn’t remember having said any such a thing. Celia was furious. She began to throw pots and pans into the sink and accidentally scalded Siegfried’s and Gudrun’s backs.

Aurelio had to step in when he heard the racket. He tried to be as diplomatic as possible. “You promised Celia you’d take her to the States to study to be a nun, Father. Today is her twenty-first birthday—the time has come,” he said.

“I said I’d take her to the States to study, not to be a nun,” Abuelo answered, without looking up from his desk. “She’s twenty-one. If she wants to go, she can go.”

“You’re taking her to the States to
study to be a nun
, Father. The same way you took the three of us to learn to be engineers and Ulises to be a businessman. You have to do the same for Celia. You can’t let her go alone.” And Abuelo had no alternative but to keep his promise.

The following week, Abuelo boarded the steamer
Borinquen
with Celia. Before they left, Aurelio gave Tía Celia Adela’s jewels, the ones Abuelo Chaguito had bought her on the birth of each of her sons though he couldn’t afford them. Adela had kept them because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings: a pearl necklace, a pair of small diamond earrings, a sapphire ring and brooch. “Make good use of them, little sister,” Aurelio said, giving Celia a kiss on the cheek. “Wear them and make yourself beautiful, or give them to the poor. Whatever you do, put them someplace Mother will see them from heaven.”

Abuelo and Celia landed in New York and from there took the train to Chicago. When they arrived at the convent, a large, forebiding Victorian mansion of gray limestone with seven turrets, Tía Celia said: “Don’t come in with me, Father. It’s late and you should go back to the hotel.” She knew that the moment she entered its doors, she would be a novice and eventually would take vows, and she didn’t want her father to know the truth. Aurelio had said that she was going to a college in Chicago to
study
to be a nun.

But Abuelo Chaguito insisted. He was too much of a gentleman to leave his daughter standing on the sidewalk with all her luggage around her. He rang the bell and three nuns opened the door. “We’ve been expecting you, my dears,” they chanted in unison, ushering Abuelo Chaguito and Tía Celia in cordially. The nuns took Abuelo’s hat and cane, as well as Tía Celia’s suitcases, and made him sit in the waiting room. Celia disappeared into the cloister. An hour later, it was Abuelo Chaguito’s turn to learn what the meaning of the word
sacrifice
was: a door opened and Tía Celia emerged before him, shorn of her long auburn locks and wearing the Maryknolls’ severe habit of heavy black wool, her face beaming with joy.

Abuelo Chaguito took the train to New York the next day and left for the island by steamer the following week. Tía Celia stayed in the convent for years, taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. She donated Adela’s jewels to the convent, and they were used to adorn the monstrance in which the Holy Host was exposed. Every time Celia knelt in front of the monstrance to pray, she felt Abuela Adela watching her from heaven. This helped her persist in her vocation and overcome the many trials she had to face during her difficult novitiate.

Tía Celia took her perpetual vows in 1940, and for ten years she did missionary work in the Bronx and then in the Appalachian Mountains of Alabama. She taught blacks, Italians, and Puerto Ricans and never again thought of going to Nepal. Eventually she was put at the head of one of the Maryknoll congregations and asked Abuelo Chaguito to create a design the sisters could use on a processional pennant. Abuelo Chaguito was more than glad to oblige: he drew a triangle that looked suspiciously like a Masonic pyramid, and inside it, in place of the all-seeing eye, he designed a dove, its wings open in flight. “The triangle is the Holy Trinity and the dove is the Holy Spirit, of course,” Abuelo explained to Tía Celia in a letter. But Celia knew that when her father had placed the dove inside the Masonic pyramid he was thinking of her.

A
BUELO CHAGUITO MET BRUNHILDA
Casares, my stepgrandmother, after he left Tía Celia at the convent in Chicago. Brunhilda was a pastry maker from Caguas, and I’ve never been able to eat a piece of wedding cake without thinking of her, because her hair was the exact color of the golden batter she poured into her cake molds. She always kept a tin can full of freshly baked ladyfingers at her house, and whenever Abuelo Chaguito’s grandchildren came to visit, she’d offer us some. The ladyfingers were just like her, much too sweet and full of air.

After leaving Celia at the convent, Abuelo Chaguito boarded the
Borinquen
in New York and set sail for Puerto Rico. He was very depressed. He dreaded sleeping by himself in his cabin and going back to the house on Calle Esperanza alone. He was strolling sadly on deck, cane in hand, watching the Statue of Liberty slide by on the port side and thinking of Adela, when he saw a large woman leaning on the railing, her blond hair braided around her head in a golden crown. When she turned around and faced him she was laughing merrily—apparently at nothing, since she was completely alone.

Chaguito approached her and introduced himself in English, thinking she was an American. She answered in Spanish:

“I’m Brunhilda Casares. Very nice to meet you.”

“Have you been traveling long?”

“I spent a month in New York. My husband recently passed away, and I was staying with relatives.” And she laughed her silvery laugh, winking at him puckishly though neither of them had said anything funny.

Chaguito made a bow and kissed her hand. “I like women like you, with an ample provision of everything: caramel tresses, guava flan hips and derrière, and large coconut-custard tits full of laughter.”

Chaguito surprised himself. He wasn’t usually so forward, but he was sick of musty black habits, clouds of incense, and mumbled talk of salvation, immolation, and sacrifice. And he was enchanted by Brunhilda’s laughter. Adela had never laughed like that; she was usually as stern as a sphinx. Brunhilda looked at him as if what he had said was the most natural thing in the world and giggled softly, fixing a loose hairpin that sparkled in the afternoon sun. Her good humor seemed to spread out glimmering over the sea in beckoning waves. Three dolphins sprang immediately to the surface and began to swim next to the ship, curving their sleek backs playfully in and out of the water. Brunhilda pretended to be afraid of them and drew closer to Chaguito so he could smell the Balà Versailles essence she had dabbed under the gauze flounces of her dress.

Chaguito didn’t have to spend the night alone in his stateroom after all. He slept enmeshed in the sweet net of Brunhilda’s hair. After making love several times, he said to her: “I’m so happy I met you, I swear I could die in your arms.”

When they arrived in La Concordia they were already married. Chaguito walked through the door of 13 Calle Esperanza with Brunhilda proudly clinging to his arm. “No one will have to worry about me from now on!” he told his children heartily as he greeted them. “Brunhilda is young and strong. With her to take care of me, I’ll never be a nuisance to anyone, and a few years from now you’ll save yourselves a pretty penny because you won’t have to put me in a nursing home.” At first the family was concerned, because Brunhilda was only twenty-eight years old, half of Abuelo’s age. They were afraid she might be a scheming, greedy woman. But when they saw how she laughed at every little thing and refused to take anything seriously, they stopped worrying. They were convinced she was a complete dunce.

The first thing Brunhilda did was to bake Chaguito her special
ponqué
. “I’m an artist in my own right,” she said as she brought the cake into the dining room. “It’s not my fault that gourmet food is the most perishable of all the arts. It’s very difficult to cook one’s way to immortality because the tongue has such a short memory and gives only ephemeral pleasure.” She had been a locally famous pastry maker before she met her first husband, a Dr. Mediavilla, and had had her own catering shop in Caguas. Dr. Mediavilla managed a nursing home for the terminally ill in San Juan, El Angel de la Guardia, and he had many patients. When they were married, Brunhilda closed her pastry shop and moved to San Juan.

Brunhilda knew how to make all kinds of delicious desserts—meringues, pies, puddings—all of which she sold to her exclusive clientele in Caguas. But her specialty had always been the
ponqué
. She had her own secret recipe: a dozen egg yolks beaten to a lemony yellow, a pound of pure butter, three cups of sifted flour, a cup of sugar, half a teaspoon of baking powder, and a pinch of salt—everything folded together as intimately as lovers. The mixture was poured into a round aluminum mold with a hole at the center, put in the oven
a fuego lento
,
al baño de María
—at low temperature, in a pan of water—for forty-five minutes, until an aromatic golden ring emerged. It was said that Brunhilda’s butter-and-egg cake had magical qualities and that once it was tasted by the groom he would never be unfaithful to his bride. But Brunhilda gave all that up when she married Dr. Mediavilla, and she hadn’t baked a cake for years.

Brunhilda enjoyed the finer things in life, and my grandfather soon recovered his joie de vivre. The day after her arrival she began to poke about the house to see what was inside the cabinets and cupboards. From the sideboard in the dining room, she took out the fine linen tablecloth, hand-decorated china, and Fostoria glassware that Adela used only on special occasions. She ordered the maid to set the table with them and throw out the everyday tableware and glassware. When Chaguito expressed his surprise at lunchtime, she told him: “I don’t see the point in living like a pauper when we have such nice things. What are you saving them for? So your children can enjoy them after we die? Let’s take pleasure in them ourselves!” Chaguito found this preposterous and laughed his head off. Brunhilda’s exuberant potlatch was a refreshing change from the thriftiness of Adela, who had saved every penny as if it were gold.

Chaguito was still in his fifties, but he had had a difficult life. He had worked fourteen hours a day practically since he was a child, struggling against hell and high water to keep his family afloat. But the effort had taken its toll and he looked much older than his age. He was almost completely bald, and his mustache was snowy white. Chaguito loved to wear old clothes, the kind that feel they wear themselves on you. But his wife enjoyed buying him elegant Belgian linen suits, French ties, Spanish cordovan shoes. She soaked his handkerchief in Jean-Marie Farine eau de cologne and took him out for a ride every afternoon in the shiny blue De Soto sedan she had also purchased. Chaguito didn’t mind any of it. He remembered with nostalgia the days when he had admired beautiful cars. Now he was tired and could find little enthusiasm for them, but he wanted Brunhilda to enjoy herself.