Eccentric Neighborhood (32 page)

I never forgave Abuelo. I brooded and cried for a month and began pestering my parents to send me to study in Boston. Perhaps my insistence had something to do with the fact that I knew how much it would hurt Abuelo Chaguito; I wanted to get back at him for having made me give up ballet. After all, I was only thirteen and I wasn’t fluent in English, although I had learned to read it well enough at the Sacred Heart. In retrospect, it should have scared me to death to think of going away, of leaving my family and my friends, and yet I have no recollection of fear.

My family finally agreed to let me go away to study. When the question of what type of school I should attend came up, Chaguito suggested that I attend a Protestant one because in his opinion there were no first-rate Catholic schools for girls. When I observed, echoing the nuns’ comments, that I might be putting my Catholic faith in jeopardy, Abuelo said that there wasn’t one faith, there were many, and that understanding this was part of being a Vernet.

My parents sent me to study at Danbury Hall, a Protestant boarding school in Newton, Massachusetts. I loved Danbury. For four years I didn’t have to go to confession; I confessed my sins to myself instead of to a priest. I didn’t have to get up early to go to Mass on Sundays; instead I went to vespers on Friday evenings, where we sang hymns and didn’t have to kneel. When the Protestants prayed “Our Father, Who art in Heaven,” they added a little tail to the prayer, “for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen,” which Catholics never said. But I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it. I had become a Vernet.

W
E GO BACK AND
back; forever we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.

—
V. S. NAIPAUL
,
A Way in the World

B
Y 1948 THE VERNET
brothers had made so much money that Aurelio, Ulises, Roque, and Damián all moved to Las Bougainvilleas, the most elegant district in town. The houses were all constructed of Star Cement in what was known as the Hollywood style: sloping red-tiled roofs, stuccoed white walls, cool inner patios with fountains and arched galleries to minimize the heat, wide front lawns with orchids, frangipani, ylang-ylang, and many other exotic blossoms and trees. The Vernet homes were set in what used to be a cane field and were lined up next to one another on Avenida Cañafístula like four ornate chariots competing for elegance and speed.

Father was the first of the brothers to build a house at Las Bougainvilleas. We had never lived in a cement house before, and it was almost like living in the States. It meant we didn’t have to worry about “fires, hurricanes, and termites” anymore. We could escape all the plagues of the tropics.

When the house at 1 Cañafístula was being built we were still living on Calle Virtud. Father would take me to the two-acre lot on the outskirts of town early in the morning, before I went to school. The workmen were already there, waiting for us to arrive. The minute we got out of the car, they began to pour the cement powder into a circular trench. Then they added three parts sand and one part gravel and poured some water from a hose into the center of the little gray volcano. Next they carefully mixed the Star Cement with the rest of the materials, lifting it from the edges and throwing it into the center with their shovels. The mixture was similar to the cake batter Mother made in the kitchen, except the cement was gray. The workers would stand in a line and pass bucketful after bucketful of cement over to a wooden mold with iron rods sticking out of it and then pour in the contents. In a week, the mold would be removed and a new room, a new terrace, a new hallway would be standing there—something that hadn’t existed before.

The house had two wings that were perpendicular to each other: the living room and dining room were on one side and the bedrooms on the other. A long arched veranda that ran along both wings opened onto the garden. A sloping roof at least twenty feet high was painted a deep turquoise, as if Aurelio wanted to bring La Concordia’s perfectly blue skies into the house. It was an optimist’s color, just as the solid concrete foundation was an expression of Father’s faith in the American way of life.

The house was surrounded by a vast expanse of lawn that needed to be watered constantly, since it seldom rained in La Concordia. The garden was lush with royal palm, oak, and mahogany trees, as well as with myrtle, frangipani, jasmine, and
dama de noche
blossoms that left perfumed wakes around the rustling trees and bushes whenever a breeze came up.

The garden was Clarissa’s hobby, and her bedroom window opened directly onto it. As soon as she got out of bed she leaned out the window in her nightgown and from there would direct Confesor, the elderly gardener who had worked for our family for many years, to prune a hedge of myrtles over here or water the frangipani over there. It was the happiest part of her day, and she would spend hours trying to create, at Avenida Cañafístula, an exact copy of the garden at Emajaguas.

If you walked by our house in the evening you could often hear the music of Liszt, Schubert, Chopin, and Beethoven spilling over the garden wall. Concerts were frequently held on Saturday evenings, and friends who played the violin, the viola, and the flute came to accompany Father and Mother’s piano. During these concerts I was expected to sit in the living room for hours as though I were in church—never getting up or interrupting under any circumstances. Classical music was like God. Its beauty was absolute, merciless, unyielding. There was no way to establish a dialogue with it; it left you absolutely mute with its perfection. And to make matters worse, it had all been composed by men.

My parents couldn’t stand it when I played popular music on my Victrola: the boleros of Rafael Muñoz, sung by Bobby Capó, or the
guarachas
and mambos played by Mingo and His Whoopee Kids, El Trío Vegabajeño, and La Sonora Matancera. Mother practiced the piano in the morning and Father practiced in the afternoon, after work. She played minor works by Chopin that made you feel weak and want to lie down, while Father’s music was always exuberant and energizing—Beethoven’s
Emperor
Concerto, Liszt’s Sonata no. 123, Chopin’s Concerto no. 2—and when he played, the sun shone like a golden orb outside our windows. Mother loved Chopin’s preludes, especially the ones he had composed at Valdemosa, where he stayed with George Sand when he was ill with consumption. The minute Clarissa began to play them I would have trouble breathing, my hands and feet would grow cold, and I would be sure I was about to spit blood. I would run to my room and grab a volume of
Tarzan
by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and only then would my spirits revive.

Music was Father’s great escape; reading was mine. As a child I loved to read, and I soon discovered Father’s library on the second floor, above the bedrooms. I would sneak in, filch a novel, and tiptoe with it to the small, narrow balcony of the guest room that jutted out over the garden. No one ever went up there. The windows were always closed to keep out the dust, and it was kept dark so the curtains and bedspreads wouldn’t fade. The balcony had cast-iron balusters through which one could look down at the lawn spread out beneath one’s feet like a steaming green lagoon. A huge vine of purple bougainvillea clung to the balcony’s red-tiled gable and kept out the rain.

I squeezed myself against the railing to shut the double doors behind me, sat down on the floor, opened my book, and began to read. Inside that prickly grotto, suspended in midair like a bird in its nest, I became acquainted with Emma Bovary, Eugenie Grandet, Catherine and Heathcliff, Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp, Tom Sawyer, Cyrano de Bergerac, Don Quixote, and many other heroes and heroines who have accompanied me through life. I could hear Mother and the maids, twenty feet below, calling me to come do my homework, practice my piano lessons, or take a bath. But they never found me. When I got tired of reading, I’d stand on the balcony and look out toward La Concordia, wondering what went on in all those houses and how many plots of novels were being acted out in them.

Once, in an unexpurgated copy of
A Thousand and One Nights
I came upon a passage that said: “When Jazmina, the sultan’s daughter, became betrothed to Aladdin, she was taken to the baths by the women of the harem, and they shaved her pubis until they left it as smooth and pink as the palm of her hand.” I racked my brain, but I couldn’t understand why anybody would do that. I went downstairs and ran into Abuela Valeria, who was staying with us for a few days. I read her the passage and she was shocked. She snatched the book away from me and gave it to Father, who promptly locked it in a cabinet.

Fortunata y Jacinta
, by Don Benito Pérez Galdós, was one of my favorite novels, and I read almost all of it in my secret hiding place. It was the story of two girls: Fortunata, the rebel chicken vendor who defies society’s conventions and gives her lover, a high-society
señorito
, raw eggs to eat before making love to him in a haystack, and Jacinta, the well-brought-up society girl the
señorito
marries, who never complains, accepts a woman’s place in the world, and dies young but at peace with herself. Right away I identified with Fortunata. When Mother asked me what costume I wanted to wear to the carnival at La Concordia’s casino that year, I showed her the novel I was reading and said I wanted to go dressed as Galdós’s chicken vendor, who fed her lover raw eggs. Mother slapped me, took the novel away, and didn’t permit me to go to the carnival that year. After those two episodes, I didn’t tell anybody in the house what I was reading.

Looking through some old books one day, I found my brother’s and my baby albums. Alvaro’s was beautiful: bound in blue silk, with a baby sitting on the cover with a tiny crown on its head. In it Mother had kept a day-by-day account of Alvaro’s progress: when he first sat up in his crib, when he began to teethe, when he took his first steps, when he gurgled his first words. Stored neatly in a box next to this album was a curl of Alvaro’s dark hair tied with a blue ribbon; his first shoes, dipped in bronze; his baptismal certificate; his early report cards; his vaccination certificates; the ribbons he won in school; and the cloth book Mother taught him to read from. I had never seen a book like it; it was a book one could sleep with, like a pillow, and I immediately fell in love with it. But when I asked Mother if I could play with it, she said, “No, that was Alvaro’s first book,” and gently put it back in the box.

My album had a pink silk cover with a hand-painted stork carrying a baby swinging from its beak. As I opened it my heart trembled in anticipation. But after the first few entries—the hospital I was born in, the time of day, the name of Mother’s obstetrician—the pages were blank. There was nothing on them; some even smelled brand-new. I felt as if I had fallen out of the stork’s beak and was tumbling into space.

Right then and there I decided to fill in the empty pages. For the next few weeks I pestered Mother with questions like: “When did I first begin to walk?” “What were my first words?” “When did I learn to read?” I snipped off a lock of my hair, tied a ribbon around it, and pasted it to the album’s pages. I found an old pair of baby shoes—I couldn’t be sure if they were my first, but they would have to do—and asked Mother to have them dipped in bronze like my brother’s. She gave them to Father’s secretary in my presence and ordered him to mail them to Macy’s baby department “to be dipped in something or other to preserve them.” She was humoring me and I knew it, but I didn’t care. I went on looking for the missing documents: I asked Tía Celia to get me a copy of my baptismal certificate; I asked for copies of my report cards at school; I searched the house for all the photographs Father had taken of me when I was a baby and pasted them in my album. When I finished, it was as complete as Alvaro’s. It was like giving birth to myself.

Mother often sang me to sleep when I was a child. We’d sit in a rocker and she’d always sing the same song: “
Una góndola fue mi cuna, el Adriático me arrulló
,
y una sútil y azul laguna, mi tranquila niñez paso
”—“The Adriatic was my crib, a gondola rocked me to sleep, and my peaceful, happy childhood was spent on its blue lagoon.” When I’d ask Mother where Venice was, she’d say that it was a city far, far away where honeymooners went but that I shouldn’t go there or get married for a long time because then I would lose my way back to Las Bougainvilleas, just as she had lost hers to Emajaguas. That’s what had happened to her, she’d say, kissing me softly in the dark.

Mother was beautiful. I remember how much I wanted to be like her even though I looked like Father, as she constantly reminded me. The stories of how smart Mother had been in school—how she had won the First Medallion at the Sacred Heart in Guayamés and then had been valedictorian of her class at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras—were like myths in our family. Alvaro was just as smart; he never got anything less than an A and was always at the head of his class. But I got As, Bs, and Cs; sometimes I was at the head of the class and sometimes at its tail. There was nothing I could do. I would never have the chiseled Rivas de Santillana nose or Clarissa’s brilliant mind.

I was afraid of losing Mother. Whenever we drove to Emajaguas I was terrified that she’d stay there and that Crisótbal and I would have to return to La Concordia alone in the family car and explain to Father why Mother wasn’t with us. Other times I fell into a panic, certain that I would be left behind, a feeling that never left me after my roller-coaster adventure.

I was seven years old when we traveled to New York for the first time. It was the fall of 1945 and the war had just ended; a spirit of optimism reigned in the city. We stayed at the Essex House in a beautiful room overlooking Central Park. Around the corner was the Automat, a cafeteria we loved to go to, where you could put a dime in a post office-type box and take out a dish of lemon meringue pie, a ham-and-cheese sandwich, or a shiny red apple.