Eccentric Neighborhood (30 page)

The family purchased a sugarcane plantation on the outskirts of La Concordia, at the foot of a small, rocky hill where the Vernets could extract lime. The cane was stamped out and the plant’s first kiln—the one that had escaped the German U-boats—was put in place. A small kiln, it measured only 189 feet in length and 10 feet in diameter, and it arrived in two segments, which the brothers riveted together at the foundry. They also bought a secondhand mill in Pennsylvania that had originally been used to grind flour. It was much larger than they needed, but it was being sold on the cheap at a flour-processing plant in Philadelphia.

The mill’s motor was a 1,000-horsepower Allis Chalmers. It operated with an unusual system of switches, which Aurelio found fascinating. The stator—the stationary part of the motor—and not the rotor, was what made it begin to roll. Father fell in love with it the minute he saw it. He named it La Teclapepa and often took me to see it when I was a child. We would walk up the four concrete steps, a little iron door like the visor of a helmet would open, and Father would hold me up in his arms, placing a mask with round purple glasses before my eyes. Inside the revolving inferno, liquid cement rolled around in waves.

The kiln reminded me of the hell the nuns and priests were always talking about in school to make us behave. If the devil existed, his gut would be like La Teclapepa’s. When he swallowed up the souls that died in mortal sin, they’d fall into a cement mill and spend an eternity going round and round in a white-hot mess, sliding down the brick-lined cylinder, unable to get out.

Whenever Mother got angry at me, she’d tell me I was going to end up in La Teclapepa. This scared me at first, but I stopped being afraid when I saw how well Father took care of La Teclapepa: any time there was a breakdown, even if it was at three in the morning, he’d run to the plant to fix it himself because he could work faster and more efficiently than any of the engineers and a few hours of stoppage meant thousands of dollars down the drain. I was sure La Teclapepa was a benevolent monster. Instead of sin and punishment, I associated it with the family’s economic well-being, because it turned clinker stones into gold.

When the plant opened, La Teclapepa produced 4,000 sacks of cement a day. By 1944 three more kilns had been installed, and the Vernets’ cement plant was producing 1,626,059 sacks of Portland cement a month, most of it destined for the U.S. army and navy bases on the island. By 1945, when I was seven years old, the four Vernet brothers were millionaires.

None of the Vernet men was drafted during the Second World War; their plant was deemed essential to the national defense. Army, air force, and navy bases went up all over the island, and they were all built with Star Cement.

More important, the Vernets had made their fortune cleanly, without taking anything away from anyone. Theirs was a very different situation from that of Abuelo Alvaro, for example, who had made his money by fighting tooth and nail to keep his precious acres of land from his neighbors, the powerful American sugar mills.

Once the military bases were built, a second project came along that helped consolidate the Vernet brothers’ fortune: the Federal Housing Administration announced that it would issue thirty-year home loans but that the houses had to be built of cement. That way they could be used as collateral for the loans. Cement homes began to mushroom all over the island. In San Juan, two major new thoroughfares surrounded by middle-class projects were built on what was then the outskirts: one was wide and palm-lined and named Avenida Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the other was a narrow, busy street that ran parallel to it, the Eleanor Roosevelt. One could imagine the four Vernet brothers standing at the ends of these avenues, smiling from ear to ear, selling paper sacks full of cement.

Aurelio never forgot Adela’s blessing on her deathbed. As soon as the Star Cement plant was running, he implemented the same Masonic principles he had enforced at Vernet Construction: he saw the plant’s three hundred employees as his personal responsibility and established a health-care plan for them. He also set up a retirement fund. He made Star Cement the first Puerto Rican enterprise to pay its workers the federal minimum wage, a dollar an hour at the time. The workers at Star Cement were considered part of the Vernet family. Every year at Christmas its members would assemble at the foundry grounds—the site of the Vernets’ original business—and the Vernet children, dressed in their best clothes, would share with the workers’ children the toys Santa Claus had brought them.

“M
Y STRUGGLE AGAINST THE
pressures of being a Vernet began in 1944,” my mother told me. “That’s when Star Cement gave your father the opportunity to fight for statehood. Aurelio had enough money to enter politics then, and he ran for mayor of La Concordia on an independent ticket. He was soundly defeated, but it didn’t daunt him in the least. He was willing to bide his time.

“Aurelio had inherited your grandfather Chaguito’s ardent belief in statehood. It was Chaguito’s friendship with the Stone and Webster engineers that had given him the idea of sending his four sons to college in Boston. The American government had lent him about half of the money needed to build the cement plant, and then they had bought the cement from him to build the new military installations on the island, as well as the New Deal housing projects.

“But Aurelio’s faith in statehood had an older, deeper root. When he was seven years old, he told me, he was standing next to Adela on the balcony of 13 Calle Esperanza when he saw Chaguito riding toward the house. Sitting next to him in the horse-drawn carriage was Don Francisco Pasamontes, Adela’s uncle, who had given her family a helping hand when they emigrated from Guadeloupe. Tío Francisco’s face was covered with blood, and he was pressing a handkerchief to his forehead. Adela ran to the sidewalk and helped Chaguito carry Tío Francisco into the house. Fortunately, a doctor was able to stop the hemorrhage, but for several hours Tío Francisco’s life hung in the balance.

“‘What happened to Tío Francisco, Mother?’ Aurelio asked in a terrified whisper.

“‘He was stoned at a statehood rally by an independence sympathizer,’ Adela answered. She brought out her best sheets for Tío Francisco, who stayed at 13 Calle Esperanza for several days. Adela recited the Rosary by his bedside, comparing Francisco to Saint Stephen, Christianity’s first martyr, who had died by stoning. Aurelio knelt beside her and said the Rosary also, and since that time statehood and sainthood had remained strangely yoked in his mind.

“Cement, the foundation on which our family’s well-being rests, made your father’s battle for statehood possible, but it was at odds with Emajaguas’s credo. Faith in inspiration, the importance of aesthetic experience, and love of nature—these were beliefs I had acquired as a child. When Aurelio began to get drawn into politics I immediately saw that statehood would mean dozens of shopping centers, more cement roads, and urbanization all over the island. ‘Developers have no respect for the land, for growing things!’ I’d say to him when still another forest was razed to make way for a new project on the outskirts of La Concordia. ‘Everything is interconnected. If we destroy our environment we’ll never be free!’ But Aurelio never listened to me.

“Politics is a sordid arena and I don’t believe in it. I’ve always made fun of the local patriots who have statues erected to them in the middle of the town square, their heads convenient landing spots covered with bird droppings. When I was young I believed political action could change the world and I joined the Liga Social Sufragista and the Liga de la Mujer del Siglo XX. I was exultant when we won the right to vote. But after so much struggle, women didn’t know what to do with the ballot. Most of them voted as their husbands told them to. After the First World War many women on the island became professionals and struggled to lead independent lives—I was one of them. But the independent spirit I had inherited from my grandfather Bartolomeo Boffil didn’t do me any good when I came face-to-face with my brother, Alejandro. ‘
Que te parta un rayo y que te pise un tren’
—‘May lightning strike you and a train roll over you’—I kept wishing my brother. And when the moment came, he kicked me out of the Plata with Mother’s consent.

“Then I met Aurelio and fell in love. My husband is the kindest person in the world. He believes that statehood is the most effective way to help the poor, wipe out sickness and hunger, eliminate the slums, give everybody electricity, running water, and a deed of ownership to his own house. He’s probably right, but my soul remains tied to the land. I’m Puerto Rican before anything else. For this reason, every time elections come around, I leave a blank space where I should make a cross. But I keep quiet about it because I see how important statehood is for Aurelio, and I’m afraid to lose him.

“From the beginning I saw politics as a fearsome rival competing for Aurelio’s love. My father, Alvaro Rivas de Santillana, lived only for his family: Valeria was his queen, his daughters were his princesses, and Emajaguas was his kingdom. He would never have lent himself to the hullabaloo of politics. My father led a dignified, productive life and reared his family in peace, as far away as he could from the turmoil of the crowd.

“I knew Aurelio had the best intentions at heart, but I couldn’t help feeling resentful. I had given up so much for him. My studies in agronomy and history were diversions, and their effect on me cosmetic, as Valeria had predicted. I was no longer Clarissa Rivas de Santillana, who had once planted Guayamés’s sugarcane valleys and taken responsibility for the family business. I became Aurelio’s comforter, his adviser, the university-educated mother of his children. I lived by reflection, like the moon—basking in the light of my husband’s successes. It was very hard for me.

“After Father passed away, I loved Aurelio more than anyone else in the world. Aurelio loved me, but I always feared politics would take him away from me.”

T
HE YEAR MY FATHER
ran for mayor of La Concordia, Mother and I attended our first political rally, and we had to do it on the sly. Women seldom went to political rallies. Meetings—
mítines
, as they were called—were often held in dangerous barrios where the men ended up getting drunk and whipping out their machetes the moment there was a disagreement. Clarissa was under strict orders from Aurelio not to attend any
mítines
alone.

But one night, when Father was away campaigning in a distant barrio, Mother took me along to a
mítin
the Partido Democrático was holding in barrio San Martín de Porres, near Río Flechas. I was only six, but like Mother I wanted to know what the opposition was saying about Father.

Mother wore a frumpy old dress and a wide-brimmed hat, and she made me wear a pair of beat-up overalls and tennis shoes. We elbowed our way into the noisy mass of people milling around a wooden platform on the dry river’s edge. Mother picked me up in her arms so I could see what was going on, and what I saw will remain branded in my mind forever. On the platform, the Democrats had built a wooden gibbet, from which hung a straw doll wearing an old guayabera with an American flag wrapped around its neck like a bib. Every time one of the men on the platform pulled the cord, the straw doll’s head jerked, the crowd cheered, and the doll danced in the air like a drunkard who had been hanged. During one of its turns it faced our way, and we recognized the delicate mustache, the straight nose, the warm brown eyes. It was Father’s image. I started to cry and kicked Mother in the stomach until she put me down. We both ran home, not daring to look up. Now I knew why Mother got so upset every time Father left for a political rally.

For a while after losing the race for mayor, Father stayed out of politics, which was a relief for Mother and me. But in 1945, Tío Venancio approached him and suggested that he join the Partido Republicano Incondicional. Tío Venancio was a very able politician. He had been president of the party for twenty years and had fought for statehood for just as long. When Venancio generously offered to teach Aurelio the ropes, Father took him up on the offer. He joined the party.

Partido Republicano billboards appeared on every major avenue of San Juan, La Concordia, and Guayamés announcing the political partnership of the brothers-in-law. A stern Tío Venancio, the president of the party and its candidate for governor, loomed against the sky in an elegant dark business suit with a tiny diamond horseshoe pinned to his tie, looking down at the cars stuck in traffic. A smiling Aurelio, the party’s vice president and candidate for resident commissioner, stood next to him in a short-sleeved guayabera, a sacrificial expression on his face. It was hoped that Tío Venancio’s image would speak to the well-to-do voters, while Father’s would appeal to the poorer people from the barrios.

Political leaders began to visit our house loaded down with chickens, goats, roosters with slick red feathers curling jauntily in their tails; baskets overflowing with navel oranges, ripe plantains, and
pan de azúcar
pineapples; with portable ice boxes filled with red snapper, blue shad, and silver grouper. When Mother saw them at the gate she smiled her delicate Cupid’s-bow smile at them, carefully hiding her feelings. Those generous gifts and eager handshakes meant only one thing: if the Partido Republicano Incondicional ever won the election, Aurelio would become a public figure and she would have to share him with these strangers.

What was worse, she would no longer belong to herself. She would lose her anonymity—which of course meant being approved or disapproved of by everyone in La Concordia. Already her face often appeared next to Aurelio’s in the party’s leaflets. Her spirit would remain trapped inside the wooden ballot box. But Mother went on giving Aurelio her unconditional support.

From 1942 to 1946 Fernando Martín consolidated his power. He was very Latino-looking, though with a twist. He had swarthy skin, charcoal-black hair, and a carefully clipped mustache. But he was tall and brawny and gave an impression of solidity that was new to the image. He had grown up in Greenwich Village and had worked as a reporter in the States for years, so he spoke English without an accent. All this was unfamiliar to American congressmen. Until Martín’s election, Congress and the President were used to dealing with members of the Partido Republicano Incondicional, most of whom were fair-skinned and very European-looking and spoke perfect English. Many members of the Partido Democrático, by contrast, knew hardly any English at all and were proud to speak through interpreters.