Eccentric Neighborhood (35 page)

Tío Ulises bought all her mangoes and invited her to get into the car. The girl did so, and Tío Ulises began to hum a song the Trío los Panchos used to play a lot: “
A la orilla de un palmar
,
estaba una joven bella
,
su boquita de coral
,
y sus ojitos de estrella
,
al pasar le pregunté, que quién estaba con ella
,
y me contestó llorando
,
sola vivo en el palmar
”—“At the edge of a palm grove I met a beautiful girl, her lips like coral, her eyes like stars. I asked who was with her and she answered, crying, ‘I live alone among the palms.’”

After a while, Ulises asked her where she lived, and the girl pointed out a run-down establishment near Maunabo’s town square. “My father, Francisco Martínez, owns a
colmado
in town, La Cócora de Pepe. My mother and my three little brothers live in two rooms at the back,” she said. Tío Ulises drove up to the town square, walked into La Cócora de Pepe, and introduced himself. Then he asked the man what his daughter’s name was and learned it was Filomena Martínez.

“I want to buy everything you have in your shop,” Ulises told him. The girl’s father stared at him. Tío Ulises’s face seemed familiar, and before telling him to get out, Don Pepe asked him what his last name was. When Tío Ulises said it was Vernet, Don Pepe said he’d sell him the whole store: rum, potatoes, rice, beans, plantains, yams, yucas. Ulises could even take his daughter if he wanted, all for ten thousand dollars. A few minutes later Filomena Martínez was sitting in Tío Ulises’s convertible roadster. Ulises took her to his home in La Concordia.

Filomena loved the house. The first thing she did when she got out of the car was to take off her shoes and walk barefoot through the gate. Tío Ulises liked everything about Filomena except her name. So the next day he took her to La Concordia’s cathedral, sprinkled holy water on her from the baptismal font, and baptized her Venecia Vernet. He married her before a judge, bought her a trunk full of beautiful clothes, a necklace with two hundred diamonds, and a marquise diamond ring worth half a million dollars. They traveled together to Venice, where he showed her Saint Mark’s basilica, the campanile, and the Grand Canal and asked if she saw how similar she was to her namesake. Venecia laughed, but since she had always been poor and Ulises was a kind man, she didn’t mind his eccentricities. When Ulises went to bed with her and began to call out Adela’s name in anguished tones when they made love, Venecia felt sorry for him and treated him very gently. Eventually Tío Ulises fell in love.

Tía Venecia was a free spirit and in that respect she was very much like Tío Ulises. She had grown up almost as a child of nature in a palm-thatched hut by the sea. Her father was a
mallorquín
, a merchant from Mallorca, who had come to Puerto Rico long ago and had fallen in love with a local girl from Maunabo. Venecia had only an eighth-grade education, but she was naturally intelligent, and as soon as she was settled, she began to read everything she could lay her hands on. She taught herself to speak English and she became a charming hostess to all the bankers and businessmen of La Concordia who came to dinner when she and Ulises moved to the spectacular new house at 2 Avenida Cañafístula.

Tía Venecia was beautiful and she knew it. Her body was lithe and voluptuous, and with her golden skin and dark eyes she caused a sensation wherever she went. Before she met Tío Ulises she loved to swim naked at the beach in Maunabo at night, where—because the continental shelf is very shallow there—waves travel long distances and pull silver manes of foam behind them. She loved to stretch her body over the water like the bow of a violin and feel the sea flow over her breasts and between her legs. She had had many lovers and she would lie with them on the beach under the stars.

After she had lived with Tío Ulises for a while Tía Venecia realized Ulises would never be completely faithful to her. Every time the family made a new business deal—if they needed money for a new cement mill or if they were planning to build a new kiln and Ulises had to go on a business trip—he would get terribly anxious and miss Adela. Then he’d find himself a prostitute and bury his head in her groin until he wallowed in her acrid smell, and only then would he be able to forget his mother and make the deal. Venecia was very understanding and didn’t object to Ulises’s behavior. But she made him move to the back of the house, where he built himself a bachelor apartment, while she kept the front of the house to herself. The red-light district of La Concordia was nearby, and this was very convenient because once in a while Tío Ulises could bring a woman into the house without anyone’s noticing.

Venecia didn’t want to become resentful; jealousy was a petty emotion she considered beneath her. Furthermore, she loved Ulises, so she decided to go on living with him on condition that he spend at least four nights a week with her and the other three in his bachelor apartment with whomever he wished. That way she would be able to keep her dignity and also hold on to her husband. Tío Ulises was erotically very inventive, and he built a secret passageway that connected both sides of the house. There he could run naked after his wife at night, and they could search for each other, laughing and playing hide-and-seek. Every time Tío Ulises found Tía Venecia in the dark, he felt so happy he was sure he was in heaven. And after they made love, they went back to their respective suites.

Most of the family remained ignorant of their goings-on and believed Tío Ulises had finally settled down to a normal family life. But we lived next door to Tío Ulises, and Clarissa once saw a strange woman running naked in the garden at the back of the house. From then on she forbade me to visit my cousins Catalina and Rodrigo unannounced. It was at that time that she had the door in the wall between the two properties cemented over, without telling anyone the reason.

The episodes of Tío Ulises’s promiscuity were few and far between, so Tía Venecia remained relatively happy. They decorated their house with lavish frescoes executed by Puerto Rican artists that portrayed folkloric scenes such as cockfights, the sugarcane
zafra
, and the coffee harvest. Everything in their house was on a grand scale—the thirty-foot-high ceilings, the salons the size of ballrooms, the gilded furniture. The gardens were filled with parrots, peacocks, and even a declawed baby leopard. And when the two of them sat down to lunch in front of their beautiful garden, served by liveried waiters, Ulises would joke with Venecia, a tinge of condescension in his voice: “I wonder what the middle class is doing right now.”

M
Y COUSIN RODRIGO WAS
Tía Venecia’s favorite. He looked like her and had the same delicate frame. When Rodrigo grew up he would be able to do all the things Venecia had never been able to do and would do them with her face. It was as if at birth a mischievous spirit had switched the sex of her child.

For Rodrigo’s seventh birthday, Venecia had three miniature houses built on the terrace of her mansion in Las Bougainvilleas, one made of straw, another of cardboard painted to look like wood, and a third of cement blocks carefully arranged one on top of the other. Alvaro, Catalina, and I were to act out the story of the three little pigs, and Rodrigo would play the part of the wolf. Venecia read the story from behind a screen of green bushes, which was supposed to be a forest. Alvaro, Catalina, and I approached the three houses, laughing and giggling with delight. Rodrigo huffed and puffed, and first the straw, then the cardboard house fell down (thanks to a push from Tío Ulises, who was hiding behind them). But when it was time for the cement house, the wolf huffed and puffed and the house stood firm. We all cheered.

My cousin Catalina often came to our house to play, and I went to play at hers. Catalina had a miniature dachshund named Fritzi, and she was crazy about her. Fritzi had long, shiny ears and a torso as sleek as a black torpedo skimming the ground. When Fritzi died, Catalina was terribly upset, but she pretended she wasn’t. She called me over to her house and said, “Fritzi just passed away and I’d like to do an experiment with her. Let’s bury her in the garden and dig her up in a month.” We put Fritzi in a large shoe box—one belonging to Tío Ulises, who had large feet—and trooped solemnly down the stairs with it. We dug a hole under a hibiscus bush, put the box in, covered it with flowers, and filled the hole with dirt. A month later Catalina reminded me of our experiment, and we dug up the box. But when we opened it, there was a mass of creeping worms inside that stank to high heaven. We dropped it on the ground and ran as fast as we could into the house, and when we stopped to catch our breath, we were both crying. “It’s not Fritzi,” I told Catalina, trying to calm her down. “Fritzi’s in dog heaven. That’s just a rotten sausage the cook threw away.”

Catalina was short and heavyset, with a thick neck. Tía Venecia was forever making fun of Catalina’s looks; Catalina’s body, not surprisingly, became a source of anxiety for her. Venecia had caught Tío Ulises thanks to her extraordinary beauty, and she was afraid that, when the time came to get married, Catalina wouldn’t be able to do as well for herself.

I liked Tía Venecia a lot—she was always laughing and she dressed in bright clothes, while Mother dressed only in black and was always complaining about something. Venecia liked doing things with us. She took us on picnics in the mountains and organized Halloween outings and Easter egg hunts. She was affectionate and intelligent and very kind to me. But she had no empathy with her own daughter.

I hated when Tía Venecia was cruel to Catalina. I wondered why mothers were always looking into their daughters’ faces and never liked what they saw. Were they so unhappy with their own lives?

“Stop dragging your feet, Catalina, you look like a platypus dragging your tail!” Venecia would tell her. Or “Don’t stoop when you walk. You look like a doggy bag!” Unfortunately, Tía Venecia was always setting me up as an example: “Why don’t you try to walk like Elvirita? Try to hold your neck up so people will see you
have
a neck!” Every time I heard this I cringed because Catalina would look at me with hatred. I knew exactly how Catalina felt when Tía Venecia scolded her, because Clarissa did the same thing to me. “Go put some clean clothes on! You look like a beggar girl,” she’d tell me when I came in from playing basketball at the club. I loved sports and Clarissa couldn’t endure them. They were
marimacha
games that fostered familiarity between boys and girls.

Catalina and I were very close, and when Tía Venecia and Tío Ulises went to live in Florida, I missed her very much. Like everyone else who surrounded Tío Ulises, my cousins disappeared one day, and I never heard from them again.

I
N AN INITIAL EFFORT
to industrialize the island, Fernando Martín’s government invested heavily in four new plants for the production of glass bottles, cardboard and paper, clay bricks, and cement. But two factors worked against the project. In the first place, the mainland investors who were being wooed to open additional manufacturing businesses in Puerto Rico were afraid of the socialist image Martín’s party presented—the
pan
,
tierra y libertad
that had so infuriated Tía Artemisa when she saw the red
jíbaro
flags fluttering in the wind over Don Esteban’s lands. It was rumored that, once the Americans had invested their capital, Fernando Martín would nationalize all the new plants. In the second place, the government was a poor administrator. In 1955, three years after the four plants opened, thousands of dollars were going down the drain, and Fernando Martín had no alternative but to put them up for sale. But nobody wanted to buy them.

Because of his many friends in the Partido Democrático Institucional, Ulises was the first to find out about the sale, and he told Aurelio about it. Abuelo Chaguito immediately ordered Tío Ulises to raise the money, and Ulises began to scurry here and there, nosing up and down the government’s corridors and burrowing all over the place like a groundhog. First he went to the Banco de Fomento and asked the government itself to lend the Vernets the first two million dollars, since it was in such a hurry to sell. Then he withdrew funds from several other accounts until the family finally got the money together and bought the plants. Six months later, thanks to the management skills of Aurelio and his brothers, all four plants were making money.

The plants were owned by Vernet Construction, which became the family’s holding company, and Aurelio was made president. Adela had wanted him to be the head of the family, and Chaguito had respected her wish. Each brother was issued an equal number of shares (the women didn’t count because they “didn’t work”). But Tía Venecia began to feel that the family’s good fortune was entirely the result of Tío Ulises’s financial savvy and that he should have more shares and head the company. She was always bragging about his achievements and making the rest of the family feel as if we owed him everything. As far as she was concerned, Aurelio was a nincompoop who did nothing but ride the coattails of others.

The first time I heard Tía Venecia talk like that about Father, I stopped liking her. She was ambitious, much more so than my uncle, who always remained Adela’s son at heart. Venecia loved Tío Ulises so much she would have given him the world to play with if she could have. But for Ulises, making money never had anything to do with controlling other people’s lives; it was a sport he played, and he wanted to play it better than anybody else.

Ideas for new business deals spurted out of Tío Ulises like a geyser; Aurelio couldn’t understand how Ulises could think up so many schemes at once. No sooner had the family bought the four government plants than Ulises suggested to Aurelio that they buy a cement plant in Santo Domingo, which he named Cementos Titán, in honor of himself. Then he acquired a glass-bottle factory in Colombia that he had heard was going for a very good price and that he named Cristales Odiseo, again in honor of himself. A few months later, Aurelio and his brothers had these plants making money as well.