Eccentric Neighborhood (38 page)

Eduardo loved fistfights, and he looked it. He reminded me of a cross between a powder keg and a pork barrel. At Los Paules he was always picking on children who were smaller and weaker. His grandfather Rosales had been a worker at one of La Concordia’s foundries—competitors of Vernet Construction—and he still lived in La Victoria, where Eduardo often visited him. There bigger children were always trying to bully him, so he’d taken his fair share of punches too; he didn’t seem to mind. Moreover, his grandfather’s crematorium made him the butt of jokes: “Broil a friend and gift wrap him for Christmas,” someone would yell at him at recess, and Eduardo’s right fist would spring out like a sledgehammer and punch the smartass in the mouth.

Once, when he was playing in the school yard, Eduardo punched ten-year-old Luis Martínez between the shoulder blades for no apparent reason, just as at La Victoria he himself had been attacked. Alvaro saw him and sauntered over. Eduardo was glowering at the younger student, who lay flat on his chest across the basketball court’s center line.

“Do you think being a Vernet gives you the right to bully people?” my brother asked in an icy but polite voice.

“No. But being a Vernet Rosales does,” Eduardo answered. “I’m not a Rivas de Santillana pansy who’s a mama’s boy.”

The insult was heard all around the court, and instantly there was a crowd of students jostling Eduardo and my brother. I pushed my way through the ring of boys, conscious of the sweaty smell of puberty. Alvaro was slender, not brawny like Eduardo, who had three hundred and sixty muscles in his body, the thickest one in his head. My brother looked down on fistfights as well as on basketball and baseball, games only plebeian students played; he loved tennis because it was an aristocratic sport.

Alvaro and I lived sheltered lives in Las Bougainvilleas, and it never occurred to my brother that something was expected of him after Eduardo’s insult. Alvaro was helping Luis up off the ground amid jeers and I was standing by his side, holding the thermos that I brought to school every day filled with tomato juice, when Eduardo’s sledgehammer swung out of the blue. Alvaro saw it coming out of the corner of his eye and ducked just in time so that it swished over his head. He turned and began to walk away, but Eduardo sent an unerring right straight from the shoulder, and his fist landed squarely in Alvaro’s face. I began to jump up and down in frustration and threw my tomato juice in Eduardo’s face.

By the time we got home, Alvaro’s bloody nose had grown to twice its size; it no longer had that elegant, chiseled Rivas de Santillana look. But Alvaro clammed up and wouldn’t tell our parents what had happened. I was the one who confessed, between hiccups and tears. Eduardo had punched Alvaro, as well as a younger student, and all three had been put on probation.

“Did you hit Eduardo back?” Father asked. Alvaro flushed and said no, he hadn’t had the chance. Father nodded his head approvingly. The important thing was to keep the peace in the Vernet family, Father said.

But Mother thought the whole thing was preposterous. “Keep whose peace, the Vernets’ or the Rosaleses’?” she asked Father, her eyes glinting. That very afternoon she went into town and bought two pairs of twelve-ounce red boxing gloves that looked like huge ripe tomatoes. She made Father and Alvaro prance around the garden in Las Bougainvilleas all week, taking jabs at each other. For three weeks they kept it up until Alvaro was ready for his revenge. Then at recess he punched Eduardo in the jaw and knocked him out cold. That was the day I learned I was really very different from my father and my brother. Brute force—something that men took for granted but that was completely beyond women—was what set us apart.

M
Y COUSIN ENRIQUE WAS
tall and gangly and looked like a grasshopper. He was very shy. He stuttered severely and sometimes you had to wait three or four seconds before he could pronounce a sentence. The other children would laugh and chant: “
Soy ggggago porque no caggo
!”—“I stutter because I can’t shit!” They were cruel, and they were also envious of him for being a Vernet. Enrique couldn’t have cared less. He just wanted to be left alone.

Enrique got bad marks and was held back twice—in second
and
third grades—but not because he wasn’t intelligent. His teachers were impatient with him, and when he couldn’t answer questions as quickly as the other pupils, they thought he was unprepared and yelled at him mercilessly. Enrique would freeze in terror and forget his lesson at once.

Enrique’s speech impediment made him self-conscious and he had few friends. Tía Clotilde, moreover, never came to school, because she didn’t want to mix with the Catholic parents of the other children, so Enrique was rarely invited to his friends’ homes. One day Enrique told his mother he didn’t want to go back to school at all. Tía Clotilde unwisely gave in, and since they could afford it, had a private tutor come to the house. But Enrique grew sadder and sadder and finally locked himself up in his room and wouldn’t emerge for days. Tía Clotilde would take food to him on a tray and beg him for hours to open the door so he could eat something. Finally, one night when the house was asleep, Enrique stole Tío Roque’s gun from his desk in the study and shot himself in the head. He was only fourteen years old.

The tragedy affected all of us, but especially Abuelo Chaguito, who mourned for the child and feared it was a bad omen. There had been no violent deaths in the family since his father, Henri Vernet, had been electrocuted in Cuba, and he was afraid it might mean the family’s star was on the wane. Adolescent suicides were practically nonexistent in La Concordia at the time, and he blamed Tía Clotilde for Enrique’s troubles. “Who wants to have an atheist for a mother? I’m not surprised no one wanted to play with the child at school. Clotilde should convert to Catholicism and have Eduardo baptized. That way, all her troubles would be over.” Tía Celia went to the house and tried to comfort Tío Roque, who was destroyed. He had been a Freemason most of his life and didn’t even remember how to pray.

“He died a heathen, Celia,” Roque said, crying. “His soul will float around forever in limbo, unable to fly up to heaven. My poor son!”

“Don’t cry, Roque,” Tía Celia replied. “Enrique had no sins. His soul went straight to heaven, whether he was baptized or not. We’ll bury him next to Mother in the family mausoleum, and she’ll take care of him.”

But Tía Clotilde wouldn’t give in. She refused to let Enrique be buried in the Catholic cemetery and had him cremated at Portacoeli. Then she took his ashes in a little bag and threw them toward heaven herself from the top of La Atalaya, a windy hill behind La Concordia.

Tío Roque went on digging for Taíno Indian bones, but they made him feel even sadder. He saw the careful way Taínos buried their loved ones, accompanied by their dogs, pottery, vessels, and all sorts of good-luck amulets for the journey to the other world, and he thought of his son, who would never be able to find his way back to Las Bougainvilleas on the day of the Apocalypse. He also felt unhappy because he had less and less work. Aurelio and Ulises had surrounded themselves with ambitious young engineers clawing their way up the executive ladder, and they had relegated him to the background. But his brothers were very generous and he went on receiving the same salary. Nonetheless, he felt smothered, useless.

In his despair, Tío Roque became infatuated with a seamstress from Riachuelo Seco, one of La Concordia’s poorer neighborhoods. Roque met Titiba Menéndez at the house when she came to alter his shirts. Roque’s arms were short and he always had to have his sleeves taken up at the cuff. Tía Clotilde wasn’t at home at the time and they ended up in bed, making love like rabbits—as quickly and as many times as possible—terrified that Tía Clotilde might walk in the door any minute. Titiba had Taíno blood, and the minute Roque saw her he was entranced. She looked like the first Taíno Indian woman Crisótbal Colón had described in his diary, the “
Libro de la Primera Navegación y Descubrimiento de las Indias
”: “She had large black eyes, copper-colored skin, and hair as silky as a horse’s mane, cut straight above her eyebrows in thick bangs.”

After that first meeting, it was as if Tío Roque had ingested a drug. He couldn’t live without the pleasure Titiba gave him. He bought her a house in Las Margaritas, the same middle-class suburb where Alvaro and I were born. And, unknown to Tía Clotilde, they had three children. Tío Roque moved his collection of Taíno artifacts and pottery shards to Titiba’s house and spent two or three afternoons a week there. He wanted to enjoy life, and Titiba was always in a good mood. He was tired of living next to a volcano that was constantly erupting and blowing ashes in his face. Roque knew that he was playing Russian roulette by keeping this arrangement and that Tía Clotilde would have his skin on the day she found out. But he was too happy with Titiba to care.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL ROQUE
was sixty-three years old that Tía Clotilde discovered his secret family. The Vernets were going through the perilous financial crisis that Tío Ulises’s bankruptcy had unleashed upon them. There were IRS inspectors and auditors from the National City Bank crawling all over, analyzing the corporate bank accounts. Unexpectedly, Roque found himself in tight economic straits. He spent no money on himself and dressed in shabby clothes. But he had two households, each with servants and all the usual expenses; moreover, he had Titiba’s three sons to put through college. His salary of a hundred thousand dollars a year from the cement plant was temporarily attached by the IRS. Still, he wasn’t worried, because he had a million dollars in cash stashed away in a box in his closet at 3 Avenida Cañafístula—or so he thought. When the time came to draw on it, he discovered it was gone. Eduardo had stolen it and disappeared. Reportedly, he was living in Spain.

Tío Roque was overcome with fear. Unable to face either Tía Clotilde or Titiba, he decided to go away. He stuffed a beat-up alligator suitcase with dirty underwear and went to visit Tía Celia at the convent.

It was Sunday and Tía Celia was at home. For a while Roque sat in the garden without saying a word while she fed her parrots. Tía Celia wondered where he was going, but she didn’t dare ask because he looked so sad. He had forgotten to shave that morning, and his long bloodhound’s ears had turned ash-gray; his heavy eyebrows hooded his eyes in shadow. When Roque finally got up to leave, Tía Celia said: “Why don’t you come and have lunch with us a little later? We’re having pig’s knuckles and garbanzos, one of your favorite dishes. I’ll put an extra plate on the table for you.” Tío Roque agreed and left, heading with his battered suitcase toward the old Vernet Construction offices, which stood next to the foundry.

The building had been constructed in the 1950s, and although it was a rough affair it had a certain charm. It was a plain square structure made from large red clay bricks manufactured at the Vernet plant. Four stories high, it had two flagpoles sticking out over the entrance door. From one of them waved the American flag, from the other the family flag: four golden stars (which stood for the Vernet brothers) linked to one another and contained within a larger star (Abuelo Chaguito’s) on a navy-blue field. There were no stars for Tía Amparo or Tía Celia.

The building was practically empty. The Star Cement plant was still in La Concordia but Vernet Construction’s management had moved to San Juan. The foundry, welding shop, and machine shop were still in operation but business was very slow. With the demise of the sugar industry the town had suffered a severe economic depression and the population had decreased from around two hundred thousand inhabitants in the 1960s to approximately a hundred and fifty thousand, the result of emigration to the mainland.

Roque walked past Aurelio’s and Ulises’s offices, which were at the front of the building. Their names were still engraved on the frosted glass, laying claim to the most important rungs on the company’s ladder—first vice president and second vice president. Roque’s footsteps echoed down the hall, and he peered into Tío Damián’s office, which had an ocean view and plenty of sunlight. Damián was away on one of his frequent trips to Europe in search of works of art. He and Roque had grown very close after being left behind in La Concordia by their elder brothers. Tío Damián’s portrait hung from the wall as usual. He was dressed in an elegant light-blue suit the same color as his eyes, and his thin lips were drawn into a delicate ironic smile. Roque walked on to his own office, at the back of the building. It was the darkest one of all and looked out on the foundry’s back yard, where the scrap iron and discarded machinery were dumped. He locked the door behind him and sat down at his desk. From beneath the bundle of dirty underwear in his suitcase, he took out a gun, aimed it at the left side of his chest, and fired.

A few minutes later the caretaker—who had heard the shot ring out in the almost-empty building—ran up the stairs. He opened the door to the office with a master key and found Tío Roque lying slumped on his desk in a pool of blood.

That afternoon, while Tía Clotilde made arrangements for Roque’s funeral with Tía Celia’s help, Titiba Menéndez went to the house at 3 Cañafístula. She was ushered into the living room by the maid, who was trembling with fear because in La Concordia everybody except Tía Clotilde knew who Titiba Menéndez was, and she wasn’t one to beat about the bush. The minute Tía Clotilde walked in, Titiba asked her if they could share Roque Vernet in death as they had in life. Tía Clotilde wanted to know what on earth she was talking about and Titiba confessed everything: Roque had been her lover for years and they had three boys, all of whom wanted to attend the wake. And so did she, because she had loved Roque with all her heart. Titiba suggested that, since Tía Clotilde’s family owned Portacoeli, both families could hold the funeral service together.

Tía Clotilde was shocked, but she agreed to the odd petition. She was touched by the fact that Roque, a man of simple tastes, had chosen Titiba, a woman of humble origins like herself, as his paramour, instead of one of the rich bitches who were always after the Vernet brothers. She invited the whole Vernet family to the wake, but only Tía Celia and Aurelio went. Celia was terribly upset by Tía Clotilde’s decision to cremate Roque’s body and by the fact that there would be no religious ceremony. But Clotilde’s atheism was very important to her. It was her way of proclaiming her right to be different from the Vernets. In spite of the Vernets’ role in La Concordia’s society and of the dignity and prestige that the Catholic Church had conferred on them, she stuck to her guns and refused to allow a Catholic ceremony for Roque.