Eccentric Neighborhood (36 page)

At dinner Ulises would say to Venecia: “Life is like a bonfire—it’s worth living only if you’re dancing on the tip of the flame. Poverty is just lack of energy. I could never stand being poor again.” And when Venecia didn’t answer but looked at him with adoring eyes, he’d add: “Don’t worry about it, my little duck, just serve me another glass of champagne. I wonder what the middle class is doing right now.”

Meanwhile, his brothers and his father tried to administer the new plants as best they could, but it was like trying to manage the Greek empire after Alexander the Great had galloped across it astride Bucephalus. The family was spreading itself too thin. Aurelio began to look for ways to control Ulises.

Tío Ulises, however, had begun to believe Tía Venecia when she assured him that he was a genius. He bought a twin-engine Cessna and flew around the island like Hermes, the mythical merchant, selling cement, glass, paper, cardboard. He didn’t care what he sold as long as he put money on the line and moved the merchandise. Entropy meant ruin, and ruin eventually spelled death. He also began to have more love affairs. Well aware of his reputation for giving his girlfriends extravagant gifts, women batted their eyelashes at him, flirted shamelessly, and did everything they could to yank him away from his wife.

Tía Venecia had other problems that made her unhappy in Las Bougainvilleas. Because Tío Ulises had divorced his first wife, he couldn’t marry Venecia in church. As a result, Catalina hadn’t been admitted to the Sacred Heart Academy, where all the girls from good families went. Venecia hired an English governess to teach Catalina at home, but consequently Catalina had few friends and was growing up a lonely child. Furthermore, Venecia didn’t get along with Clarissa. Tía Venecia thought Clarissa looked down on her. She resented the fact that Clarissa had invested almost three hundred thousand dollars in the cement plant, when she herself couldn’t provide a cent. She would have invested much more than Clarissa if she could have, in order to have Ulises run the family business. She insisted it was thanks to Clarissa’s money that Aurelio was president of Vernet Construction.

Venecia grew more and more frustrated and eventually decided that she wanted to leave Puerto Rico. She began to pressure Tío Ulises to strike out for himself in Florida. “This island is too small for us; there’s no breathing space. Think of all the business deals you could make if we lived in the States. We’d be in the big leagues there, like the Rockefellers.”

But Tío Ulises didn’t want to live so far away from his family. As president of the glass-bottle plant in Colombia, he took out several bank loans, putting the company up as collateral without telling his brothers. With the money he secretly bought extra stock in Star Cement. His equity in the company increased by twenty percent and he began to put pressure on the family to make him president of Vernet Construction. But no one wished to. Aurelio humored him. “Your work is very valuable, Ulises, but you know I’m the leader of the pack. This is all Venecia’s fault. Remember Father’s saying: ‘All for one and one for all.’
En la unión está la fuerza
.”

Ulises’s efforts to gain more power within the family didn’t appease Tía Venecia. She began to search for a way to make Ulises’s life impossible: she decided to renovate their house. Ulises was perfectly happy with it the way it was and indeed would have preferred a much smaller one, as anything that took time away from new business deals was torture for him. But Tía Venecia wanted everyone in La Concordia to know that of the four Vernet mansions standing in a row, theirs was the largest and the most luxurious. Ulises was the financial wizard, the leader of the Vernets’ quadriga, and even if the family wouldn’t admit it, the Vernets owed him everything they owned.

Every day dozens of workers would come to Venecia’s part of the house and we would hear their picks and shovels, their hammers and drills working well into the night. But the workers never finished what they began. No sooner was a living room completed than Venecia would order it demolished so a larger one could be built in its place. As soon as a bathroom was redone, she’d make the workers rip out the pink marble and carry away the pink toilet because she had changed her mind: now she wanted everything done in green. Sometimes, on exceptionally dark evenings, we would see lanterns floating in the garden and hear loud, rough bursts of masculine laughter that certainly didn’t come from Tío Ulises. Clarissa had no idea what was going on and she wouldn’t look out her bedroom window to find out, but she hoped Venecia was getting even with her scoundrel husband by fucking all the construction workers in the ruins of her house.

Ulises heard of a cement plant for sale in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and urged the family to buy it. If they weren’t interested, he’d buy it alone, he said. He was tired of having to tout his achievements louder than Aurelio all over the island. Since Aurelio had entered politics he had an unfair advantage because he got more publicity. But that didn’t mean Aurelio was the leader of the Vernet pack. Ulises was the eldest, and the Vernet empire was
his
doing.

Aurelio didn’t say anything. He called the family together, and it was agreed that Tío Ulises should buy the Florida plant if he wanted to. Since he insisted on managing it alone, he would have to go into it by himself and leave the family out.

Ulises then asked his brothers to buy his shares in Vernet Construction, and they agreed to pay him fifty million dollars. Each brother took out a loan for sixteen million dollars to buy his shares. With the money, Ulises moved to Sarasota with Tía Venecia and his two children. He bought a mansion on Bayview Avenue that was three times the size of the house at 2 Avenida Cañafístula, but Tía Venecia didn’t get to enjoy it for long. A year later, she began to have dizzy spells and the doctors discovered an abnormal widening of the aorta that would gradually result in an aneurysm. She could live another five to ten years without doing anything, they said, but eventually she would have to be operated on. Tía Venecia decided she wanted the operation right away. She was a free spirit; she couldn’t live under a death sentence. She chose to die on the operating table rather than live by halves.

After her death, Tío Ulises was like a kite without a string; he got lost in the limitless sky of his erotic fantasies. He married three more times and was divorced an equal number. He married a lion tamer from the Ringling Brothers circus in Sarasota, a topless dancer, and a nurse, in that order. By the time of his last marriage, his cement plant in Fort Lauderdale had gone bankrupt. The oil crisis of the 1970s had caused a debacle in the construction industry, and Ulises ended up owing the National City Bank of Florida a hundred million dollars, twice his original capital. When Aurelio and his brothers heard the news, they were distraught, but they couldn’t keep a hint of pride from creeping into their voices when they told their friends: “Ulises owes the National City Bank so much money it’s afraid of proceeding legally against him because it might go broke!”

Tío Ulises’s economic disaster caused the family a great deal of anguish. The National City Bank officials didn’t believe Aurelio when he told them that Ulises had sold his share of the family business and that he had nothing to do with Vernet Construction anymore. A squadron of bank lawyers and officials from the States flew to the island and descended on Vernet Construction like vultures—with permission from the State Department—to scrutinize all of Vernet Construction’s economic statements and corporate documents. The investigation went on for months, during which time all the family’s accounts were temporarily frozen. But my brother, Alvaro, proved at that moment to be a worthy leader of the Vernets’ quadriga. He surrounded himself with a battery of lawyers and, after several months, managed to prove that the deal with Tío Ulises had been a clean surgical cut and that there were no ties that made the family liable for his debts.

This was around the time that Robert Vesco fled Florida and sought refuge in Cuba for owing U.S. banks a similar amount of money. But Tío Ulises, being the beaver that he was, simply went underground. He disappeared from sight and went to live with his daughter, Catalina, in an isolated cottage on Sanibel Island, where he hibernated for years under a different name. Catalina, much to everyone’s surprise, had done very well for herself, even though she had remained single. She had studied business administration at the University of Florida and owned her own communications firm. She took care of her father and looked more like him every day. She never returned to La Concordia.

Years later Tío Ulises called Aurelio from Sanibel Island and asked him for a loan; he wanted to return to Las Bougainvilleas. Aurelio tried to discourage him. He’d be terribly bored, he said, there was nothing to do in town. Most of his friends were dead and nobody remembered him anymore. “It’s not just a whim, Aurelio,” Tío Ulises said. “I want to come home to die.” Aurelio laughed and told him not to joke like that, but when Ulises insisted, Aurelio sent him the money.

The house on Avenida Cañafístula was still his, and although it was more a ruin than a house, Ulises moved in. A few days later he came to visit me in San Juan as if nothing had happened. I hadn’t seen him in sixteen years and everybody else related to him had disappeared from the island: Caroline Allan, Tía Venecia, my cousins Catalina and Rodrigo. But Tío Ulises had turned up again, like the proverbial bad penny. I was forty-six years old, but when he saw me he smiled his happy beaver’s smile, kissed me on the cheek, and called me
nena
, just like old times. He’d be living in his bachelor apartment in Las Bougainvilleas from now on, he said, and would be glad to be of help if I needed anything.

Tío Ulises didn’t socialize very much. He stayed at home, looking after his parrots and peacocks, and almost every day he went to visit Abuela Adela’s grave, which stood on a hill near the Star Cement plant, on the outskirts of town. There he swept the cement dust that collected on the marble slab, put fresh flowers in vases, and said a prayer or two before returning to his rambling ruin.

One time Tía Celia, who was living in the convent near the Vernets’ old foundry, came to visit Tío Ulises at the house. She opened the ornate iron gate and knocked several times on the dilapidated front door, but getting no answer, she walked around to the back. She rang the bell to Tío Ulises’s apartment, and almost dropped dead when a beautiful naked young redhead opened the door. Tía Celia was used to dealing with delinquents of all sorts in the slums of La Concordia, where she did missionary work, so she calmly asked to see Tío Ulises. The girl smiled broadly and invited her to come in as naturally as if she’d been dressed to the nines. Then she disappeared into one of the bedrooms.

“And who is your little redheaded friend?” Celia asked Tío Ulises without a hint of a smile when he walked into the apartment’s sitting room.

Tío Ulises laughed and said: “It’s not what you think, Celia, don’t worry. Nanette is my daughter. She was born to my fifth wife, Marion, the nurse from Sarasota, eighteen years ago. She’s a nurse also, and she’s taking care of me.”

“And why, pray tell, must she go around naked?” Tía Celia asked dourly, staring at him with her pale blue eyes.

“It’s just a fancy of mine, Celia. You know how much I loved Venecia and how I always said she was ‘my passage to heaven.’ When I see Nanette without her clothes on, she reminds me of her.”

A few days after Tía Celia’s visit, Nanette called her at the convent at 5 a.m. to tell her that Tío Ulises had just passed away. Celia phoned Father, who was in La Concordia at the time, and they converged on the house. Nanette had disappeared. But they found Tío Ulises in bed completely naked, his penis half melted on his thigh, and a beatific expression of happiness on his face.

T
ÍO ROQUE WAS TÍA
Celia’s favorite brother, and she was the one who told me about him. “My earliest memory of Roque,” Celia said, “is of watching him climb a mango tree, limber as a Taíno Indian, to throw the ripe golden fruit at me.”

Tío Roque married Clotilde Rosales, his childhood sweetheart, after he graduated from Northeastern. They lived in the most conservative of the four Vernet houses, the one next to Ulises and Venecia’s. It was an old house that had originally stood in the middle of the cane field when Las Bougainvilleas was built. Roque had it renovated and built a new wing for the kitchen and bathroom. The house had red polished-cement tiles of the kind manufactured on the island at the time, and an old-fashioned balcony shaded by green-and-white-striped awnings where Clotilde liked to sit rocking herself and gossiping with her sisters. But its most striking feature was the modern, air-conditioned laboratory Tío Roque built at the rear of the house, with fluorescent lights and all kinds of chemical beakers on white enamel trays, which he used to help preserve his collection of Taíno artifacts and fossils.

Tía Clotilde’s last name was Rosales, but she was not related to Tía Amparo’s husband, Arnaldo. She belonged to the poor Rosaleses, not to the rich ones, as she immediately pointed out to you with pride when she was introduced. Her father didn’t boil molasses into sugar, paying his workers two cents a day, as Arnaldo’s did.

Tía Clotilde had dull black hair and a sallow complexion. She never spent any time grooming herself, which was odd because Tío Roque—though he wasn’t exactly the Clark Gable of the family—loved to dress in fine clothes, splash himself with quantities of eau de cologne after taking each of his several baths a day, and preen and admire himself before the mirror for hours. Girls were always falling all over Aurelio, who was the
nene lindo
of the family, but they also liked to be near Roque, whom they considered the sexiest of the Vernets. When Tía Clotilde began to ask Tío Roque to dance with her at parties and smiled at him coyly when they met in the street, Tío Roque preferred her above the rest. Clotilde was mysterious and he wanted to teach her the Taínos’ secret: men and women were born to enjoy the pleasures of life, not to work themselves to death.