Eccentric Neighborhood (37 page)

Tía Clotilde’s father, Don Emiliano Rosales, owned Portacoeli, the only funeral home in La Concordia with a crematorium. He was an atheist and everybody in town knew it. He was also a rabid anarchist and labor leader, who saw God as the “antihuman principle.”

Don Emiliano Rosales thought a crematorium was needed in La Concordia, not only because it provided a cheap way for the workers to dispose of their loved ones but because in cremation we are all made equal through purifying fire. Carved over the doorway of Don Emiliano Rosales’s crematorium was “Dust to dust and ashes to ashes”—the only versicle from the Bible he believed in. And when the ashes had all been mixed together—which is what Don Emiliano Rosales did when he handed family members the remains of those they thought were their loved ones—social and economic differences were obliterated and class distinctions were transformed into anonymity. But the Catholic Church banned cremation and saw it as a mortal sin, which was why Tía Clotilde and her family were rarely invited anywhere.

Tía Clotilde, too, was an atheist, and the first thing she told Roque when she started seeing him was that she didn’t believe in God. Roque wasn’t a religious person, but he had loved Adela and after she passed away he revered her memory. He believed in a “superior spirit” and prayed to it once in a while because someday he hoped to see Adela again.

This upset Clotilde. In her opinion, God was a projection of the threatening father figure on which the whole unjust capitalist system was founded. Roque told her not to worry, that he was a Freemason himself and didn’t go to church. But Clotilde got mad at him anyway.

“An atheist is something very different from a Freemason,” she said. “Atheists deny the existence of a ‘superior spirit’ and believe resolutely in themselves.”

Because of these convictions Tía Clotilde made very few friends after she married Tío Roque and moved to Las Bougainvilleas. Her childhood friends from La Victoria, the workers’ district where she was born, didn’t like to visit her now that she was a millionaire’s wife. She rarely ventured outside the confines of her own home and became so sad it was as if her mouth were always full of ashes; she couldn’t talk without spewing and blowing them all over you. She always wore dark glasses, whether indoors or out, so no one knew the color of her eyes. “Atheists,” the parish priest used to say from the pulpit at the cathedral, “seek to poison God’s world out of despair of loving, and being loved by, Him.” And that was precisely why Tío Roque loved Clotilde. He was sure he could teach her to be happy; she would learn to live in the light instead of in the dark.

In 1948, Tía Celia made her first trip back to the island in years and the first person she visited was Roque. They spoke in his laboratory, surrounded by the dusty Taíno bones and pottery shards Roque was patiently trying to piece together. Celia told him all about the missionary work she was doing in the Appalachians, roaming through Alabama in a beat-up pickup truck with a platoon of nuns or taking a Catholic census among the coal miners and baptizing them whenever she could, with the aid of a parish priest.

Celia had received a telegram from Monsignor MacFarland, an Irish bishop who had recently arrived on the island, ordering her to come home. She asked Tío Roque if he knew what it was all about. Perhaps it was the new Catholic university the bishop wanted to build in town, Roque replied, but he was sure Tía Celia would soon find out for herself. Tío Roque was right; the next day MacFarland summoned Celia to the bishopric.

“The Puerto Rican bourgeoisie is very tightfisted, and it’s difficult to get them to give money for the public good,” he said. “But your mother, Adela Pasamontes, was different. She suffered deeply when she saw others go hungry. She was generous with the poor and used to visit the slums to feed them.”

Celia looked at the bishop, her eyes flashing. She had lost a lot of weight lately—there was seldom enough to eat in Appalachia—but she was still a live wire. She wore her summer habit, which was made of heavy white wool, and a little round straw hat. She didn’t look hot at all. The bishop, on the other hand, who loved good food, looked like a sweating eggplant in his purple silk robe.

“Mother was right, feeding the poor
is
very important, Your Excellency,” Celia answered circumspectly. “Do you know how I guessed when to knock on someone’s door in the Appalachians? If it smelled like sauerkraut or chop suey I didn’t knock because I knew they were either Jewish or Chinese and wouldn’t invite me in. But if it smelled like spaghetti or rice and beans, I’d knock on the door right away, because I might be able to baptize a sick baby and also snitch a free lunch.” The bishop smiled condescendingly. Being Irish, he hated spaghetti but he made a mental note that, as bishop of La Concordia, it was his duty to find out what rice and beans tasted like. He’d have his cook make some for him that very day.

He began to question Tía Celia and learned that while Abuela Adela and her daughters had all been pious her sons, as well as her husband, were Freemasons. This had caused Adela to suffer deeply before she passed away, but it also meant that, hidden away in a corner of the Vernets’ minds, they had guilty consciences.

“Are your brothers as selfless as you, my daughter?” the bishop asked Tía Celia affectionately.

“My brothers are all very generous,” Tía Celia answered. “They love to give away money: Aurelio to politics, and Ulises and Roque to their girlfriends. If we can convert them from Freemasonry to Catholicism, I promise you, it’ll be worth it.”

A few days later MacFarland, accompanied by a smiling Tía Celia, visited Abuelo Chaguito and Aurelio and suggested that, if they donated to the Church the sugarcane farm they had acquired on the outskirts of La Concordia for a possible expansion of the cement plant, the institution that would rise there would be called La Universidad de las Mercedes, in honor of Abuela Adela, whose full name had been Adela Mercedes Pasamontes. This generous donation, the bishop promised, would open the doors of the Holy Roman Empire to the Vernet family. The Order of Saint Gregory would be conferred on Abuelo Chaguito at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York by Cardinal Spellman himself in a solemn ceremony—but only if Chaguito renounced his Masonic beliefs.

Aurelio brought the male members of the family together in the dining room at 1 Avenida Cañafístula to discuss the issue. Abuelo Chaguito said he would consider the donation: Freemasonry was on the decline worldwide, and taking a leading role in the Catholic Church could bring the family important prestige. But several terms would have to be added to the negotiations. Catalina, his granddaughter, would have to be admitted to Sacred Heart Academy; Tío Ulises’s marriage to Caroline Allan would at last be annulled without Ulises’s having to pay a cent for the annulment; and most important of all, Tía Celia would have to be allowed to return permanently to the island to do her missionary work in La Concordia—something Abuelo Chaguito had sought for years because he missed Celia so much. Bishop MacFarland agreed to all of Abuelo Chaguito’s terms.

Soon afterward, Abuelo bought an old house near Vernet Construction and presented it to the Maryknolls as a gift. Tía Celia and her missionaries moved in and they began to work in La Concordia’s slums—Las Cajas, Pantanales, Despeñaperros, Riachuelo Seco.

The first stone of La Universidad de las Mercedes was laid on September 10, 1950, the twentieth anniversary of Abuela Adela’s death. Bishop MacFarland officiated at a High Mass in La Concordia’s cathedral to commemorate the event, and Abuelo Chaguito, his four sons, and their wives—except Tía Clotilde—all received Holy Communion. It was Tía Celia’s day of triumph. She had won the battle for her brothers’ and her father’s souls.

A year later the university opened its doors. The consecration was attended by the island’s highest clerical officials. A raised platform decorated with bouquets of white lilies was set up in the middle of the campus, where sugarcane had grown less than a year before; yellow-and-white banners—the colors of the Catholic Church—flapped in the wind. A portrait of Pope Pius XII hung over a red velvet curtain that served as a backdrop. Bishop MacFarland and the Vernet family sat on high-backed Spanish-style chairs above a sea of heads. Bishop MacFarland wanted to hold the family up as an example to La Concordia’s bourgeoisie, to see if he could generate more donations for the university.

Abuelo Chaguito wore the medal of Saint Gregory pinned to his chest. The bishop’s round face beamed above the golden crucifix with a large amethyst at its center. Tía Celia and Tía Amparo, both dressed in white, sat next to Chaguito and the bishop. The four Vernet brothers and their wives sat behind them, the men in elegant business suits. Everybody was smiling except Clarissa, who looked with melancholy eyes at what remained of the sugarcane in a field nearby; soon it would be gone too. Unfortunately, Tía Clotilde had to sit under the portrait of Pope Pius XII, which made her particularly uncomfortable. As usual, she wore dark glasses and a large hat and didn’t try to hide the mocking smile that played on her face. She was amazed at the change that had come over the Vernets—from Freemasons to exemplary Catholics in one year.

T
ÍO ROQUE AND TÍA
Clotilde had two sons, Enrique and Eduardo Vernet. When Eduardo, the younger, was born in 1938, Tía Clotilde said to Roque: “We’re a family now. Why don’t you strike out on your own? Aurelio and Ulises are in control of Vernet Construction, and Damián always does what they tell him to. You can’t make decisions without consulting them first. Right now you work well together because you’re brothers. But what’s going to happen when Enrique, Eduardo, Rodrigo, and Alvaro grow up? Cousins don’t always get along. It’s better to divide things now, while your father is still alive, so that each can take his money and do what he wants with it.”

But Roque kept putting it off. And when Ulises broke away from the family and the brothers had to raise fifty million dollars to buy him out, it became impossible. “I’d be afraid to go out on my own, Clotilde,” Roque said. “My stocks are so valuable, Aurelio and Damián couldn’t buy them if they wanted to. We’d have to sell the cement plant, which would definitely be a mistake. Anyway, the truth is that I don’t want to go into business for myself. I prefer to work a few hours a day at the plant and go on my archaeological digs in my spare time. If I sell my shares and go out on my own, I’ll have to work twice as hard as I am now.”

“We’re living a lie,” Tía Clotilde retorted. “We have everything we want—money, a beautiful house, a nice car—everything except self-respect. I want to feel proud that you’re my husband.” But Tío Roque wouldn’t relent. Instead, he shut himself up in his studio at the back of the house to study his
dujos
, his
macanás
, and his carved stone
cemíes
. Tía Clotilde shouted at him from the other side of the door: “All right, we’ll do as you say, Roque, and keep on sucking from Star Cement’s golden tit. But from now on, my children will call themselves Vernet Rosales, instead of just plain Vernet. And don’t expect me to go have lunch at the house on Calle Esperanza on Sundays anymore, because I’d rather stay home.”

Enrique and Eduardo weren’t baptized when they were born, but Tía Clotilde didn’t let anyone know. When the time came for them to go to school, she sent them to the same Catholic school Alvaro and I went to, the exclusive Academia de los Padres Paules. Clotilde’s brothers had gone to public school, like all the other children from La Victoria. But since she was now married to a Vernet, her sons were accepted at Los Paules.

Although Los Paules was a boys’ school, the fathers accepted girls until the fifth grade. Clarissa, ever faithful to the Rivas de Santillana tradition of thriftiness, decided to send me there for elementary school (instead of to the Sacred Heart, where the girls of good families went), in order to save gas. In 1944, when I entered first grade, gasoline was being rationed. Crisótbal would have to make only one trip each way.

There were two or three girls in my class and ten to twelve boys. We all wore khaki uniforms, Buster Brown shoes, and ties the same color as our uniform. The girls mingled freely with the boys, and there was absolutely no special treatment given to them. I loved Los Paules. Studying there, I was convinced that there was absolutely no difference in intelligence or spunk between boys and girls and that we could succeed equally in life.

Tía Clotilde didn’t have a chauffeur and Tío Roque never learned to drive a car, so their children went to school by taxi. But when Tía Clotilde heard that Crisótbal drove us to Los Paules in a Cadillac, which Father bought after the Pontiac, she was very upset. She didn’t want her sons to grow up with an inferiority complex, so she called the fire department, where Abuelo Chaguito still had many friends, and asked if they couldn’t pick her children up in the afternoons.

The students would all be playing in the school yard, running after one another and screaming and yelling like devils on the loose, when La Concordia’s fire engine would charge through the gate, bells clanging and siren screaming. Everybody would freeze as my cousins walked single file to the front of the engine and climbed in next to the driver. Then the firemen began clanging the bell again and drove to 3 Avenida Cañafístula at full speed.

Once I entered Los Paules, it didn’t take me long to realize that my cousins were no match for my brother and that someday Alvaro would be president of Vernet Construction and of Star Cement.

I was Father’s spendthrift daughter, and Alvaro was the practical, reasonable child. I always pressed the new tube of toothpaste in the middle, so that after a while I had to struggle to get anything out, while my brother always curled his tube from the bottom, evenly and systematically, until all that was left was a flat, empty noodle he could throw away with a clear conscience.

The differences between my brother and me didn’t worry me when I was young; in fact, I wasn’t even aware they existed I was so busy dogging Father’s footsteps. I could do everything my brother did: I could swim like a fish, bat a baseball, and even hit a home run once in a while. But things changed the day my brother got into a terrible fight with our cousin Eduardo Vernet.