Eccentric Neighborhood (39 page)

Tía Clotilde ordered two adjacent chapels at Portacoeli to be filled with flowers—one for the Vernet and Rosales families and one for the Menéndez family. Tío Roque’s silver-gray casket was mounted on a little car with wheels, and he spent the whole afternoon commuting between the two families before entering the oven’s sad tunnel hidden by velvet curtains. He would spend two hours with the Vernet and Rosales families at their chapel and would then punctually be wheeled to the Menéndezes in the adjoining chapel. And all the time, Tía Celia walked behind her favorite brother’s coffin, crying her eyes out and reciting the Rosary out loud, remembering how Tío Roque had loved to throw ripe mangoes at her from the tree as if he were a Taíno Indian.

T
ÍO DAMIÁN’S HOUSE, 4 AVENIDA
Cañafístula, next to Tío Roque’s, was the last one in the row. It was exactly like our house, only smaller, because Tío Damián and Tía Agripina had no children. Inside, it was full of the beautiful sculptures and paintings Tío Damián had brought back from his frequent trips to Europe. But the thing I remember the most about it was the collection of medieval armor, the swords and spears that lined the walls of the study, and the huge white polar bear rug in the hallway, legs spread apart and red tongue lolling out between white fangs.

Clarissa and Aurelio were always teasing Tío Damián and telling him to get rid of the moth-eaten shag—something totally out of place in a town like La Concordia, where the heat could be unbearable—but he never did. I loved the polar bear; the first thing I did when we visited Damián was throw myself on the rug and roll around on it. I felt I knew why it was so important to my uncle. He had to impress upon the family the fact that, even though he was the most reserved of the Vernets, his spirit was as strong as a bear’s.

Tío Damián hardly ever spoke when the family came to visit him: he let Aurelio and Ulises do all the talking. But he wasn’t shy with children. He was a bit of a ventriloquist and loved to do magic tricks. Whenever we went to his house, he immediately picked me up and squeezed pennies out of my ears or pulled quarters from his shirtsleeves and gave me the money to buy candy. When he finished his act, his index finger would buzz all around me like a mosquito and end up tickling my underarm.

Tío Damián married Tía Agripina, but instead of helping him become a more self-assured young man, Agripina only added to his insecurity. She was from a good family in San Juan, the Leclercs, and everybody was surprised when she decided to marry Damián Vernet, who had no social standing whatsoever. The Leclercs had lost most of their money during the First World War. Agripina’s father, Roberto Leclerc, was a daredevil pilot and a friend of Abuelo Chaguito’s, but he was killed at the battle of Verdun. Still, they had a very prestigious name.

Agripina’s mother had brought her up as a society belle. She graduated from a finishing school in Newport, Rhode Island, where she learned to embroider Madeira tablecloths and decorate porcelain plates with apricots and roses, but she could do virtually nothing that was useful. During Hurricane San Felipe, for example, Agripina had been no help at all. Her mother was going crazy, trying to fill tubs with water and prepare enough food to tide them over for several days. But when the 150-mile-per-hour winds started to blow and the tin roof began to rattle, Agripina dove into a kitchen cupboard and stayed there throughout the hair-raising ordeal.

A year after they were married, Agripina said to Tío Damián: “I wonder why I haven’t gotten pregnant yet. Are you sure you’re not consumptive? You know, one of the reasons I married you was because I wanted to have children. I’m sick of society life.” Tío Damián laughed and told her she was being silly; it was much too early to start worrying. “This way we can enjoy ourselves a little longer before getting tied down: go to the movies, play tennis, visit our friends as much as we want.” But Agripina began to cry and said, “I have no one else in the world but you. If anything happened to you, I’d be completely alone.”

She hadn’t always been like that. Before she met Tío Damián she had lived a flapper’s life. “Flappers live heroic lives,” she’d say to her friends. “When they defy convention they lend a special brightness to things.” In Agripina’s opinion there was little difference between a daredevil pilot and a flapper—both were equally intense. The main thing was to escape boredom, to defy the bourgeois mentality by living on the edge. And so Agripina smoked, drank, and frequented all the speakeasies in San Juan.

One night she dropped by the Pif-Paf-Pouff, a nightclub hidden away in a cellar. Even young ladies were obliged to enter it by sliding down a chute, at the bottom of which a group of young men in tuxedoes helped them up from silk cushions, inevitably complimenting them on their lace panties. She got so drunk that the next morning, when an M.P. found her, she was sprawled on the sidewalk. She had passed out after vomiting all over her sequined black tulle evening dress. The M.P. helped her into his car and drove her to the police station near Fort Brooke. After a phone call from her mother, Marina Leclerc—who had powerful friends—Agripina was released. The incident created a scandal. The photograph of her lying drunk on the sidewalk was in all the local newspapers and left her seriously shaken. For several months afterwards she woke up in the middle of the night dreaming she was hurtling through space strapped in a blazing biplane—which was exactly how her father had died.

Agripina’s mother was so disgusted she told her daughter to leave the house, and Agripina took refuge with one of Tía Amparo’s friends. Tío Damián met her there on a visit to San Juan; she was already on the wagon and had changed her ways. Tío Damián was so shy he never dared ask any girls out. When Agripina discovered what a sweet man he was and began to call him at La Concordia every day, he was overwhelmed with gratitude that such a good-looking girl should notice him and asked her, over the telephone, to marry him.

La Concordia was just what Agripina needed. She wanted peace and tranquility, and the first few months there were a balm for her. Agripina did volunteer work at the Hospital de las Siervas de María, a beautiful pink building from Spanish colonial times, where the nuns glided silently down arched corridors with huge starched coifs fluttering on their head. But Agripina still woke up in the middle of the night feeling an unendurable emptiness. “I feel like a plaster cast instead of a woman: beautiful on the outside and hollow on the inside,” she complained to Tío Damián every night before she fell asleep. “I want a baby more than anything else in the world.”

For five years Agripina tried to get pregnant, and then Damián went to see a urologist. The urologist examined his testicles and discovered that they were diminished in size. He asked him about his childhood illnesses and it turned out that Damián had suffered a severe case of mumps when he was fourteen. The infection had left him permanently sterile.

When Damián told Agripina the news, she was shattered. He took her in his arms and tried to comfort her. “We can adopt a baby and bring him up as our own. There are dozens of abandoned children in the orphanage.” But Agripina wouldn’t consider it. She was terrified of adopting a child who might have inherited who knows what horrible defects. She decided to help out at the orphanage anyway.

The work was good for her. It made her feel less guilty for her past sins. But whenever she and Damián made love and she was about to let herself be engulfed in an avalanche of pleasure, she saw a tiny baby floating on the crest of a wave, stretching out its arms to her, and all the pleasure she was feeling would ebb away like a retreating tide.

In spite of his personal problems, Tío Damián proved instrumental in the success of Star Cement. As a chemical engineer, he became one of the plant’s principal administrators and helped his brothers and his father turn around the businesses they acquired from the government. He had as much money as he wanted, and he loved Tía Agripina deeply, but he wasn’t happy. He was in a constant state of anxiety, threatened by invisible dangers. That was when he began to collect medieval armor, swords, and pikes and hang them on the walls of his study. Then he bought the white polar bear skin and spread it out in the entrance hallway of his house in Las Bougainvilleas. Tío Damián felt he had to defend himself from something, but he didn’t quite know what it was.

He suspected that his opinions were never taken into account at Vernet Construction. Although Aurelio and Tío Ulises were always very polite and affectionate with him, they made the really important business decisions behind his back. Each of them had a battery of executive advisers, but Damián had no one. He didn’t tout his achievements around town or have a reputation as an investor or a politician. No one was interested in what
he
had to say.

In 1968, after Aurelio moved the management of Vernet Construction to San Juan, Ulises sold his shares and moved to Florida. Damián and Roque were left in charge of the huge, half-empty Vernet Construction building in La Concordia, where doors creaked open by themselves and Abuelo Chaguito shuffled in every afternoon, leaning on his cane. He’d post himself at the door to the building and turn back everyone who tried to leave the office at half past four, twenty minutes before the bell rang.

To take his mind off things, Tío Damián began to travel to Europe with Agripina more often. They would board the
Queen Mary
in New York and spend three weeks at the Savoy in London. Then they would sail to Le Havre and spend a week at the Plaza Athenée in Paris. Then on to Florence, Venice, Rome, Athens. They came back from each trip loaded with art treasures: paintings, sculptures, antique silver. The house in Las Bougainvilleas began to resemble a museum. But Tío Damián was still melancholy and talked less and less. Agripina’s perpetual complaints about his sterility didn’t help.

When Tío Roque committed suicide in 1970, Abuelo Chaguito stopped coming to the Vernet Construction offices altogether; Damián had to go there alone every day. The old foundry next to the offices, though still operating, was losing money. Tío Damián was supervisor, and he made his rounds every morning. He checked to see that the welders were wearing their protective masks. He visited the machine shop and verified the new orders for crushing mills and cogwheels, which were fewer and fewer as the island’s sugar mills closed down. He visited the warehouse, where the steel and iron beams were stored. Then he went up to his office and sat at his desk looking out the window at the ships unloading their cargo on the nearby dock.

After a while, the contours of reality began to disintegrate, and he got lost in a fog of speculation. One evening at nine Agripina telephoned the office to see if he was still there. No one answered the phone. Agripina drove over in her Lincoln Continental and had the janitor open the building. They found Damián sitting at his desk in the dark, as if in a trance, staring out the window.

This was in 1972, when Aurelio was still spending a lot of time in San Juan. Agripina telephoned him and he flew to La Concordia the following day. They decided Damián should be hospitalized and arranged to have him admitted to New York’s Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital, which had one of the best mental clinics in the States, where Dr. Lothar B. Kalinowsky was world-renowned for his electroconvulsive therapy. Tío Damián was administered several electroshock treatments during the following months, and his recovery was spectacular. A few weeks after his third treatment he was as good as new. He had come out of his catatonic stupor and talked normally with Tía Agripina and everyone else. He immediately began planning a trip to Mexico City with her, because they had never been there.

One night, while Damián and Agripina were traveling in Mexico, Aurelio woke up bathed in perspiration. It was three o’clock and he had had a harrowing nightmare. He had dreamt that Damián was buried alive inside one of the pyramids of Tenochtitlán and was calling out desperately, begging Aurelio to rescue him. At the foot of the pyramid there was a plumed serpent carved in stone with its jaws open wide. It looked like a water spout but was actually an
almoducto
, a pipe through which the souls of the sacrificed traveled from the center of the pyramid to the outside.

“If you stand in front of the pyramid for a few minutes, you’ll see Damián’s soul come out of the stone pipe and be able to take it home with you,” Aurelio heard somebody say in his dream. “But his body belongs to us. He’ll be buried in Mexico, because when he was alive you never listened to him.”

Father got out of bed. His heart was racing. He crossed the terrace, walked over to the piano in the living room, and started playing. Nothing helped. Suddenly the telephone rang. It was Agripina, calling from Mexico City. Damián had just died. They were having dinner at a restaurant in La Zona Rosa when he felt an acute stab of pain in his chest. By the time the ambulance got him to the hospital, he was dead.

Father flew to Mexico City and drove immediately to the hotel where Tía Agripina was staying. Damián’s body was still in the morgue. On the way there, Aurelio asked her if the doctors had discovered the cause of Damián’s death.

“They wanted to do an autopsy and I wouldn’t let them. But he probably died of a heart attack,” she answered, trying to hold back the tears. “We’re at almost eight thousand feet here, and Damián’s heart was weakened by the electroshocks. It never occurred to us when we planned the trip to Mexico City, but he probably couldn’t stand the altitude.”

Aurelio thought her theory was plausible. He took her in his arms and tried to console her. Then Agripina added: “When he was dying in the ambulance, around one o’clock in the morning, Damián kept calling out your name. He wanted you to come and get him. He was convinced that only you could save him.”

Aurelio felt his hair stand on end but he didn’t tell Agripina that he had heard Tío Damián calling out to him in his dream at that very hour. Since Mexico was two hours ahead of Puerto Rico, it was then three o’clock in San Juan. In the meantime, the Mexican authorities were alleging that, since the cause of death was unknown, Tío Damián’s body couldn’t leave the country until a thorough criminal investigation was conducted. A mandatory autopsy had to be performed and it could take several months because Tío Damián had to wait his turn. Aurelio was furious. He wasn’t going to let the Aztecs cut his brother up or leave parts of him behind. He was going to get him out of the country in one piece if he had to bribe half the Mexican government to do it. It cost him ten thousand dollars, but three days later they were on their way to the island with the body.