Eccentric Neighborhood (4 page)

Clarissa knew the switchblade had a secret meaning for Abuelo Alvaro, but when she finally realized what it was, it was already too late to do anything about it.

A
BUELO ALVARO WAS VERY
conscious of his ancestors, and once Clarissa told me the story of what had happened the first time Father stayed for dinner at Emajaguas. Aurelio was courting Clarissa and had managed to make a good impression, until the moment Abuelo began to talk about family trees. He told Aurelio how he had traveled to Spain and visited an old Jew in Córdoba, whom he had paid a few hundred pesetas to trace the Rivas de Santillanas’ ancestral line. The Jew was an expert at genealogy and had combed the cathedral records in Figueras, where Abuelo’s family originated, for information. A few months later he mailed Alvaro a thick leather-bound folder with an intricate oak tree drawn in green, blue, and red ink from whose branches dozens of armored
caballeros
sprang. Abuelo got up from the table to look for it and proudly showed it to Aurelio.

“As you can see,” Abuelo said, “the roots of our family tree date from the twelfth century, when King Alfonso the Wise married Doña Violante, one of the granddaughters of Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid Campeador. Our branch is this one on the right, drawn in red ink. The Rivas de Santillanas had a castle in Figueras at the time. Do you know what town in France your family originated in, Mr. Vernet, before they emigrated to America? I require this information before I give my daughters away in marriage.”

Aurelio sat there dumbfounded. He wasn’t even aware family trees existed, but he promised to ask his mother and father about it when he got back to La Concordia. The next day, when Santiago Vernet, his father, heard what Abuelo Alvaro had said, he was incensed. “Henri Vernet, your grandfather,” he told Aurelio, “was a Freemason, and when he died in Santiago, they buried him in the Chinese cemetery. This eliminated any possibility of family records because Masons are never inscribed in Catholic parishes. And in any case, who cares! Tell your pompous Mr. Rivas de Santillana that the Vernets don’t give a damn where they came from, but they sure as hell know where they’re going.”

Fortunately, Father did not relay Abuelo Santiago’s message to Abuelo Alvaro but instead laughed the whole thing off.

Emajaguas was almost totally self-sufficient: it had a vegetable garden, an orange and grapefruit orchard, a plantain patch, several milk cows, a chicken coop, ducks, pigs, and a fishpond. But these didn’t make the house a farm, because, with the exception of the cows, the animals were simply waiting to be consumed and were never commercially reared. Family diversions included walks through the woods, sailing expeditions on the bay, and picnics almost every weekend at the beach, with an army of servants carrying practically the whole kitchen with them.

An ascetic sensibility was an important part of the family’s ethos and very much in tune with its rural austerity. Even though dinners were carefully prepared, the serving dishes brought out from the kitchen were filled not to the brim but only halfway. One time Antonio Torres—Tía Dido’s husband—newly emigrated from Spain, was so dismayed to see that the platter of chicken with rice was almost empty by the time it reached him that he didn’t dare serve himself. When Abuela Valeria chided him for his shyness he turned bright red, certain she was making fun of him. Antonio was convinced that our family was just stingy and that niggardliness had nothing to do with an “ascetic way of life,” as Valeria liked to put it. For Spaniards like Antonio, the most convincing proof of one’s success in the world was to sit down to a well-stocked table steaming with pork sausages, spicy stews, and all kinds of fish and fowl to satisfy a healthy appetite.

At Emajaguas the smell and appearance of “viands” was much more important than the amount of food served at the table. Lobster claws were split open in the kitchen so guests wouldn’t have to go through the barbaric process of cracking them, and the meat was artistically arranged on a platter.
Pasteles
, Caribbean tamales of mashed green plantains and spiced ground pork, were always served open, since it was considered vulgar to unwrap the greasy leaves with one’s fingers at the lace-covered table. Roast pig, baked snapper, and stewed chicken all came to the table decorated with laurel leaves strongly enough perfumed to “revive a corpse,” as Abuelo used to say. Wine was served—
rationed
would be a better word—in small red glasses with golden halos around the rims, in quantities that made one jovial but never drunk, and at Christmas, eggnog was poured in such moderate amounts that what I remember most vividly about it is not its taste or its potency but the tickling sensation of nutmeg on my nose.

The family was equally frugal when it came to rainwater. Abuelo Alvaro had a tank built on the roof of the house because the municipal plumbing system on the outskirts of town was not always reliable. In Guayamés it rains punctually at three o’clock every afternoon. “Guayamés is the piss pot of our island,” Abuelo Alvaro would say smugly as the family sat down to dinner, “and rain is God’s urine. He waters our cane fields every day free of charge.”

But rain was also cosmetic at Emajaguas, as Abuela Valeria insisted that it made one’s hair shinier and silkier than any cream rinse could. She practiced what she preached, and every September, when the heaviest rains fell, she would make all her daughters and granddaughters troop down to the garden in their underwear and bathe half-naked in the icy jet that poured from the gutter spout at a corner of the house.

I loved the idea of bathing in the rain, but when I was in third grade something very frightening happened. One of my classmates at the Sacred Heart in La Concordia was hit by lightning, and after that I was terrified of thunderstorms. My friend had been riding a bicycle in the street and as she went near a telephone pole a sudden bolt struck her down. The nuns sent the whole class to the wake, and for weeks afterwards I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing Monsita’s chalk-white face in the satin-lined coffin, with purple rings around her eyes, her jaws clamped shut.

A few days after the funeral Clarissa took me to Emajaguas. A rainstorm was brewing, and as soon as it started to pour, Clarissa told me to go to my bedroom and take off my good clothes because we were all going down to the garden together. White light was flashing intermittently at the window, and instead, I hid under my bed.

Clarissa hadn’t heard the story of my dead classmate and had no inkling of my horror of thunder. Angry at my rebellious attitude, she got a broom from the kitchen and began to poke under the furniture. But she couldn’t find me anywhere.

“Get Elvirita and bring her here immediately,” she ordered Miña, the maid.

“I don’t know where she is, Doña Clari. She’s nowhere in the house. Maybe she went out with her father before it began to rain.”

Clarissa went on poking under beds and bureaus, and I soon realized there was no escape. Slowly I stuck a leg out from under the bed skirt and Clarissa pulled me out by the ankle. I began to cry and to blow my nose, pretending I was coming down with a cold. But Clarissa wouldn’t relent: I had to learn to obey. And then Mother did something terrible. She ordered Urbano and Confesor, Valeria’s chauffeur and gardener, to grab me by the arms and carry me downstairs kicking and yelling. Since I wouldn’t let Miña undress me, Clarissa ordered that I be pushed, fully clothed—shoes, socks, cotton smock, and all—under the icy stream that gushed from the pipe. For a few seconds I gasped, sure I was going to drown. And then, when lightning bolts began to crackle in the palm grove nearby, I fainted at Clarissa’s feet.

C
HRISTMAS DINNER WAS ALWAYS
a big occasion at Emajaguas. The cars arrived at the house in the early afternoon full of good things to eat: roast leg of pork enveloped in crispy golden skin, turkey stuffed with chestnuts, ripe plantains stewed in red wine seasoned with cinnamon, rice with coconut milk, pineapple custard, nougat and almond pastes, all cooked especially for the occasion. We arrived dizzy from the winding roads that crisscrossed the island, our mouths watering from the delicious odors.

I remember one Christmas Eve especially. It was in 1945 and Abuela Valeria had asked Mother to bring the dessert. Clarissa had cooked an angel-cloud meringue with caramel glaze on top and a pool of heavy cream swirling at the bottom. Before we left La Concordia Clarissa had placed it on her best Limoges platter, wrapped it carefully in cellophane, and wedged it on the floor in the back of our blue-and-white Pontiac, where it would be safe and the cream wouldn’t spill and ruin the upholstery. Alvaro and I were to keep an eye on it from the backseat while Mother and Father rode in front.

As usual, I couldn’t keep still thinking about getting together with my cousins, whom I hadn’t seen for months. During the two-and-a-half-hour ride from La Concordia I leaned out the open window and watched the towns fly by—Saramá, Valverde, Vega Llana—each with its white-domed bell tower pealing in the distance, the plazas dotted here and there with mushroom-shaped laurel trees decorated with yellow, red, and blue lights. There were many people on the road that day, as everyone was traveling somewhere to visit relatives, dressed in their Sunday best. Many women wore yellow, which was supposed to bring good luck at Christmas. Little boys were dressed as shepherds, with red satin sashes around their waists and canes in their hands, and little girls as shepherdesses, with red-and-black-striped skirts, or as angels with marabou wings and blue satin smocks tied with silver cords. Each town had its own Christmas pageant that evening, and people walked for miles to reach it.

By the time we arrived at Emajaguas, I was so excited I completely forgot about the dessert. The minute Aurelio parked the car in the driveway, I opened the door and jumped out, stepping squarely on Clarissa’s angel-cloud meringue as I went.

“What did you bake for Christmas dinner, Artemisa?”

“I brought a stuffed turkey basted in sherry sauce,” Artemisa answered.

“And I brought a ham glazed with cloves, cherries, and pineapples,” Dido added.

“And what did you bring, Clarissa?” Artemisa asked my mother.

“Angel-cloud meringue, with Elvira’s footprint on it!”

Alvaro was eight and I was seven and we both believed in Santa Claus, but several of our cousins believed in the Three Kings. Our parents were fervent statehooders, so they gave Santa Claus more importance. Tía Dido had Independentista sympathies, and her son believed in the Three Kings. He always got his presents on the sixth of January, which was sad because school started on the seventh, and it left him only a short time to play with his new toys. So when Alvaro and I opened our presents on Christmas morning, Tía Dido’s son always stared at us with melancholy eyes.

Most of the nuns at the Sacred Heart were Independentista sympathizers, and they’d recently begun a campaign to undermine Santa Claus’s credibility. The Three Kings existed, the nuns told the students, because little Jesus, to whom the kings had brought their presents, as well as the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph, also existed; they were all in the Bible and were holy. Santa Claus was just a gimmick that Sears, Roebuck and Woolworth’s had thought up.

To keep the nuns happy, I wrote a letter that year addressed to both Santa Claus and the Three Kings and gave it to Clarissa to mail. Mother had addressed it, diplomatically, “To the Heavenly Couriers.” But what happened a few days later precipitated a religious crisis for me.

The letter was in both Spanish and English. I asked Santa and the Three Kings for a “fairy godmother costume”—
un traje de hada madrina
—I had seen advertised in the Macy’s toy catalog: a tutu with pink feather wings, a glittering star as a headdress, and a plastic magic wand. Clarissa had taken the catalog to Monserrate Cobián, our seamstress in La Concordia, and “La Monserrate” had faithfully copied the costume in my size. Aurelio had ordered the magic wand from Macy’s and it had arrived just in time.

That evening, after Christmas dinner, we were all put to bed by our nannies. I placed two shoe boxes full of freshly cut grass under my bed, one for the Three Kings’ camels and the other for Santa’s reindeer. After Father and Mother came in to kiss me good night, I stared into the dark for a while, listening to the noises of the house die down—the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, the tapping of high heels across the living room floor, Abuela Valeria’s rocking chair softly nudging at the darkness in her room.

My aunts and uncles all began to leave for Midnight Mass, and Mother went with them. I heard the cars start up and the doors slam. Then I watched the headlights swish silently over the bedroom walls. The rest of the children in the room were asleep, but I still hung on to consciousness. The grandfather clock slowed, as if the house itself were synchronizing its heartbeats to mine. Finally, sleep enveloped me like a soft blanket.

All of a sudden I sat up in bed. A light breeze drifted in through the window, and the mosquito netting began to billow in formless shadows around me. I heard the door close softly, and I was sure Santa had just left the room. I got out from under the covers and quietly climbed out of bed. Sure enough, a huge pink box sat under the bed. I opened it, took out the fairy godmother costume, and put it on. Then I turned on the lights and began to jump up and down, waking all my cousins to show them what Santa had brought me.

A few minutes later Aurelio, who hadn’t gone to Midnight Mass but had stayed behind to “do the presents,” came running into the room. Extremely annoyed, he ordered everyone back to bed again. I began to protest, but he told me to be quiet. “Take off that dress! Santa Claus hasn’t come yet!” he shouted. I took off my tutu, pulled my pajamas back on, and Aurelio put everything back in the box and stomped out of the room with it.

I lay in the dark, tears streaming down my cheeks. And that was the last time I ever believed in Santa Claus, the Three Kings, little Jesus, Mary, or Joseph.