Eccentric Neighborhood (28 page)

Brunhilda loved to show Chaguito off whenever they went out on visits. “And how does my Puss in Boots feel today? Doesn’t he look like a sugar granddaddy?” she’d say to her friends, laughing, as she patted Chaguito’s cheek and combed his perfumed mustache with a tortoiseshell comb she had ordered from Paris. Abuelo would blush with embarrassment, but he didn’t dare complain lest he hurt Brunhilda’s feelings.

Brunhilda was very wise in the ancient ways of love and soon had Chaguito lighting up like a match every night. The first time they made love Chaguito climbed on top of her and felt like Captain Ahab astride his mythic whale, cruising the seas of immortality far from the sight of shore. Brunhilda banished Abuelo’s German shepherds from under Chaguito’s bed, where they had reigned supreme. In the early morning she loved to walk around the house in her semitransparent nightgown, looking exactly like Rubens’s Venus in
The Judgment of Paris.

A few months after her marriage Brunhilda began pleading with Abuelo Chaguito to buy new living room furniture because the old mahogany and wicker chairs and settees that made one sit up at attention were reminders of Abuela Adela. Chaguito rushed to humor her and bought comfortable new Henredon sofas and chairs upholstered in silk shantung. He also got rid of Abuela Adela’s four-poster bed with its pineapple finials, which he sold at a very good price since it was an antique. Brunhilda replaced it with a queen-size Beautyrest mattress with a cushioned headboard upholstered in blue satin. She had a modern bathroom installed in the house that was the talk of the town. All the fixtures were of gleaming black porcelain: the toilet looked like a throne from the pharaohs’ necropolis at Luxor, the tub like a Roman coffin, and the sink like a basin for ravens. The walls were done in black tile, which Brunhilda decorated with transfers of naked women from exotic countries the world over so Chaguito would realize the great advantage she held over all of them.

Where Brunhilda made the most striking improvements to the house, however, was in the kitchen. She ordered a stainless-steel range and an oven, each of which cost five thousand dollars and was large enough to make King Farouk’s chef die of envy. She purchased a Mix Master electric beater for a thousand dollars and had it hung from the ceiling so that it looked like a windmill. The refrigerator was as large as the one installed at the Condado Vanderbilt, the largest hotel in San Juan at the time, and cost three thousand dollars.

When Aurelio learned that Abuelo Chaguito had spent over twenty thousand dollars on the house, charging all the expenses to Vernet Construction’s account, he told his father: “Have you forgotten how hungry you were when you arrived in La Concordia from Santiago de Cuba, after eating only bananas and oranges for weeks? That day you swore you’d make the family’s bad luck change! If you go on like this, you’ll make us go bankrupt.”

Chaguito was filled with confusion and dread. His past came rushing back at him and he gave a great sigh. “What do you suggest I do?” he asked, fidgeting uncomfortably in his chair. “You must put your shares of Vernet Construction in our names, Father,” Aurelio said. “Then you must close your bank account, and we’ll give you a weekly allowance to live on. I’ll be your accountant from now on. That way we’ll be able to keep track of every penny Brunhilda spends.”

When Brunhilda found out about this, she stopped laughing. “So that’s the way things are going to be!” she fumed at Abuelo Chaguito. “I guess I’ll just have to go back to work.” And she opened up a pastry shop in the house at 13 Calle Esperanza.

Soon Brunhilda became famous in La Concordia for her wedding cakes. Every young lady of social standing wanted a Brunhilda original at her wedding. There were golden ziggurats all over the house: on the heavy oak table in the dining room, on the marble-topped sideboard, on the delicate oval end tables in the living room, even on the piano bench—six- and seven-tiered constructions that Brunhilda said were her palaces of love. The cakes were covered with satiny icing and decorated with bouquets of roses sprinkled with silver globules, glass lakes with swans skimming the surface, stairways beneath arches braided with ribbons, extravagant gazebos where white doves kissed and nuzzled, just as Chaguito wanted to do every night—except Brunhilda now kept him at bay. And on the base of each cake Brunhilda wrote with a frosting nib trailing creamy sugar mixed with egg white: “Love is a wicked poison and also a divine balm. Its antidote is unknown, but only thanks to love does man survive.”

To please her clientele in La Concordia, Brunhilda added a special detail to each cake, a reproduction of one of the beautiful buildings the citizens were so proud of, baked separately and then covered with icing: the Athena Theater, the casino, the Adelphi Masonic Lodge, the cathedral, the firehouse. Before the bride and groom sliced the first piece of wedding cake with a silver knife, they had to take the building off the top and eat it piece by piece until not even a crumb was left. This architectural cannibalism of his beloved city almost made Chaguito cry. He thought Brunhilda was purposely ridiculing his respect for a city that had been built as a monument to individual entrepreneurship, and he wondered what his long-gone friend Bijas, the architect, would have said if he had seen such a sacrilege: La Concordia’s beautiful buildings crumbling under the dainty teeth of young brides and grooms. But by now Brunhilda had her own money—she was paid hundreds of dollars for each cake—and Abuelo Chaguito couldn’t remedy the situation.

A
LMOST NO ONE ON
the island remembers the thirties anymore,
los años de las vacas flacas
—the years of lean cows. But Father never forgot them. He was always looking to save something for hard times. “
El que guarda siempre encuentra
”—“He who saves always finds”—was one of his favorite sayings, which was very different from Tía Artemisa’s “
El que da lo que tiene a pedir se atiene
”—“If you give away what you own, one day you’ll have to beg.”

In 1932 San Ciprián left the island’s coffee industry in ruins. The forests of mahogany, oak, and
yagrumo
trees that served as a canopy for the delicate red coffee beans were decimated, and the mountains looked as if they had been blasted by a bomb. Coffee never recuperated, but although the sugarcane fields around La Concordia were flattened, that industry soon began to revive. La Concordia’s merchants and hacendados were a tough breed, and they immediately set to work to rescue their crops.

First they set fire to them. Then they planted new seeds. A year later, the rustling cane stalks were almost ready for cutting again. Orders for the crushing mills and the evaporators used to process molasses into sugar began to pour into Vernet Construction. Father was relieved, but Fernando Martín, the leader of the Partido Democrático Institucional, was furious. He had believed that San Ciprián, coming four short years after San Felipe, was sugarcane’s coup de grâce, that the
yerba del diablo
, or devil’s weed, had been stamped out for good. The island would finally rid itself of the absentee sugar consortiums, as well as of the exploiting criollo hacendados. But the weed was springing up again all over the island.

Fernando Martín was still a fledgling politician then, but he had a lot of influence in Washington. He supported the Costigan-Jones bill, which set a quota on sugar-producing mills—domestic and foreign—and was particularly onerous for the Puerto Rican sugar industry. In February 1934, the U.S. Congress made the bill law. Father himself told me the story.

The Partido Republicano Incondicional—Tío Venancio’s and the sugar barons’ party—was in power. But although the crisis in the sugar industry had eased and the cane fields were producing again, sugar prices kept falling drastically in the States. Shiploads were imported from Cuba, which was thirteen times larger than Puerto Rico and produced much more sugar. To make matters worse, Hawaii, though thousands of miles away, was not so far that it couldn’t compete with us, and soon it added to the avalanche. Sugar beets, moreover, were now produced by the ton in Louisiana. The United States was awash in sugar.

Many years later, when the Vernets had established themselves, Abuelo Chaguito used to say with relish that the Costigan-Jones law had been to the Puerto Rican sugarcane aristocracy what the guillotine had been to the French. In 1933 sugar production on the island had reached 1,101,023 tons, but the quota for 1934, imposed by the Costigan-Jones law, was 826,000 tons. This was a hard blow for La Concordia, where sugar was everything.

The American consortiums that had taken over the sugar-producing industry in Cuba, as well as those in Louisiana, were a lot more powerful than the mainland owners of Aguirre, Eastern Sugar, and Guánica Central, so their sugar quotas were much higher. In Cuba, Fulgencio Batista had just come to power, and he promised to let the United States build naval bases on the island if Cuba’s sugar quota was respected.

Vernet Construction immediately began to feel the pinch. Aurelio, Ulises, Roque, Damián, and Abuelo Chaguito went spinning around the island trying to get the sugar barons to pay their debts. Not one of them did.
Centrales
Machete, Bocachica, Cortada, Constancia, and Carambola—the five criollo mills that surrounded La Concordia—began to list like ships about to go down. The large American sugar mills had a hard time keeping afloat as well. There was nothing the brothers could do but stare in horror at the multiple catastrophe, aware that Vernet Construction, tethered as it was to the sugar mills, might soon end up at the bottom of the ocean.

Organized labor was the next blight, and strikes ravaged the sugar mills. In November 1934 it was rumored that the Partido Socialista was going to carry the elections. But people were shot by mysterious agents for trying to prevent the sugar barons from locking them up in cattle pens on election day, and things stayed as they were. The Partido Republicano Incondicional won.

The turmoil continued and the workers of Vernet Construction also went out. Abuelo Chaguito had to reduce the workweek to three days and lay off ten of his workers at the foundry. Salaries were cut twenty percent. Abuelo felt terribly guilty, knowing his employees were already on the verge of starvation, but it was the only way he would be able to refinance his debt to U.S. Steel in Michigan.

Then something extraordinary happened. In 1936 Eleanor Roosevelt visited Puerto Rico. The President had sent her to investigate accusations that the Costigan-Jones law had benefited only the mill owners, who received cash compensation for a reduction of their quotas, while cane laborers by the hundreds were left without work. Governor Blanton Winship received Mrs. Roosevelt at the gubernatorial palace with a dozen roses wrapped in cellophane, but Mrs. Roosevelt wasn’t interested in the elegant reception the governor had organized for her. She asked him to cancel it, climbed into a Model T Ford, and went to visit the slums. She had a horsey face and was much too tall to be beautiful by Puerto Rican standards. But she talked to the women in the needle workshops and told them not to forget to exercise their right to vote, which they had just recently acquired. She talked with children about the importance of washing their hands before meals, brushing their teeth at night, and saying their prayers; she spoke in old people’s homes about the Social Security Act, which included the provision for retirement insurance her husband had succeeded in getting passed in 1935. Everybody loved her.

When she visited the schools she was amazed to see young girls embroidering lace handkerchiefs during their lunch hour in order to add a few pennies to the family income. She also visited the shacks of the sugarcane laborers and the factory workers. Typically these consisted of two rooms with no windows. The back room was dark; the front room’s only light came in through the doorway. There were no screens, no plumbing, no toilets, and women cooked outside on little coal stoves. It was like the Stone Age, and she was horrified.

Mrs. Roosevelt evidently had the President’s ear, because four months later he visited the island. He landed in La Concordia’s bay, where General Miles had landed forty years earlier. His caravan went up Calle del Real de la Marina, to the wild cheers of the crowd. The street was lined with American flags, and a triumphal arch had been set up at the entrance to La Concordia, with a lion—the city’s emblem—standing on each side. President Roosevelt saw that everything his wife had said was true, and as a result he assigned seventy million dollars to the island through the Puerto Rico Emergency Reconstruction Administration, better known as the PRERA. When he arrived at Plaza de las Delicias, the President gave a speech and pointed out the purpose of his program: relief for unemployment through public works. Housing projects would be built to relocate people living in the slums, aqueducts and sewer systems would be installed, streets would be paved and sidewalks laid.

“I went to hear the President’s speech,” Father told me once. “I had to stand on top of one of the lions surrounding the fountain in the plaza in order to see him, but I didn’t miss a word. When I got home I immediately summoned my brothers to Father’s office. ‘President Roosevelt is offering Puerto Rico an extraordinary opportunity,’ I said to them, and I described the public projects planned. ‘By next year, the demand for cement on the island will be three times what it is today. Why don’t we build a cement plant with the funds the federal government is willing to lend the island? We can raise part of the money for the plant by putting Vernet Construction itself up as collateral. I’m sure that if Ulises and I travel to Washington, we can get the rest of the funds.’

“But Ulises didn’t think it was a good idea, because it hadn’t occurred to him first. ‘Sugarcane will always be the backbone of our island,’ he said. ‘The mills will come out of their slump soon and they’ll be able to pay what they owe us. But if we try to build the equipment for the cement plant at the foundry and stop taking the hacendados’ orders, they’ll go someplace else and cancel our contracts. If the cement plant is a failure, Vernet Construction will never be able to recover. I think we should build a plant to manufacture chemical fertilizer instead.’