Eccentric Neighborhood (40 page)

When Tío Damián’s coffin finally arrived in La Concordia, Agripina had it taken to their house at 4 Avenida Cañafístula. Father, Mother, and I said good-bye to him there, together with all his friends. When the wake was over, Father and his brothers carried the coffin across the street to Abuelo Chaguito’s house, before placing it in the hearse.

Abuelo Chaguito had moved to Las Bougainvilleas some years back to be near his sons and grandchildren. Now in his nineties, he stood on the stoop of his house at the corner of Cañafístula and Flamboyan and took off his straw hat as the coffin approached. Then he slowly came down the steps and put a trembling hand on the lid. Aurelio, who was helping carry the coffin, drew near and stood next to his father.

“What did he die of? Did they finally find out?” Abuelo Chaguito whispered uneasily so the reporters wouldn’t hear.

“He died of silence, Father,” Aurelio answered, tears welling up in his eyes. “It was all our fault. We forgot Damián had a delicate heart and we didn’t listen to him.”

A
BUELO HAD DESIGNED A
house for himself in Las Bougainvilleas that was very different from those of his sons. Modern and practical, it had a cantilevered cement roof that no hurricane could blow away and lozenge-shaped louvered windows that reached all the way to the ceiling and let in a lot of light. The house was completely white, and the floors were a cream-colored terrazzo that always made me think of tapioca pudding. When he moved from Calle Esperanza, the only thing Abuelo brought with him was Adela’s rosebushes, which flowered profusely all year round. He planted them in a small garden at the back of the new house and took care of them himself. Brunhilda always said she had worked as a nurse for her first husband at the nursing home, but later we found out it was a lie. What she had really done was prepare the dead for burial. She loved to do this. It was a kind of victory to feel young and alive when you had death lurking about. As soon as a patient passed away, Brunhilda took over. She went to his room and locked the door. Then she pressed down his eyelids with coins, tied a handkerchief under his chin, bathed him, and dressed him in his best clothes. If the patient was female, she carefully brushed the woman’s hair, put nylons on her legs, and slipped heels on her feet. Once she told me how she had had to struggle to pull a girdle on a lady who was overweight and whose relatives would have been disheartened had she not looked her best. Brunhilda’s description gave me goose bumps.

Brunhilda would console the relatives and tell them not to worry, that soon their loved one wouldn’t look sick or old at all. They would be in tears and hardly anyone would dare look at the body. They would stare at the floor as they recited the Rosary and waited for the undertaker to carry their loved one away. They would sneak a look now and then, however, and discover that Brunhilda was right. As soon as the body cooled and the flesh began to get hard, the sunken cheeks filled out, the rings under the eyes disappeared, and all the wrinkles of age slowly vanished from the deceased’s face so that Grandfather or Grandmother ended up looking like a pale young man or young woman who had simply fainted away.

A year after Damián passed away, Chaguito was working in the garden and felt a heavy pressure in his chest. An intense pain seared his left shoulder and arm; even his teeth and jaw felt as if they were on fire. He keeled over into the rose bush he had been pruning and passed out. When he came to, he was in the intensive-care unit of the Hospital de las Siervas de María, where he would remain for two weeks. When Abuelo returned home, Aurelio said to Brunhilda: “Please take good care of Father. You know how much he loves you, and I assure you we’ll make it worth your while.” Brunhilda smiled and answered warmly: “Don’t worry, Aurelio. I’ll do my best.”

Abuelo Chaguito had to stay in bed and rest as much as possible. The attack had done considerable damage, and if he didn’t take care of himself, he could die of massive heart failure. “At least Brunhilda has had some experience as a nurse. She can keep your nitroglycerin handy, take your blood pressure, and bring you the bedpan at night so you don’t have to get up,” Aurelio told Abuelo reassuringly. “And I can fly here from San Juan in an hour if you get sick.”

Abuelo was almost completely deaf. I think he went deaf on purpose so as not to have to listen to Brunhilda’s constant cackle—which is what her silvery laughter had turned into. He looked skeptically at Father, but he didn’t say anything. Brunhilda had very little patience with him. She slept in a bed next to his but when he needed to pee at night he never dared to wake her up. She’d bring him the bedpan, and then, as he tried to urinate, she would pinch his arms and whack his ribs, telling him to hurry up because she was exhausted and needed to go back to bed. Abuelo Chaguito was a gentleman, and above all, he was a fireman of La Concordia. He would never complain to Aurelio about Brunhilda.

One night Abuelo Chaguito awoke with an acute fibrillation. His heart was racing like a hare’s, but he didn’t wake Brunhilda up. If he was dying, he preferred to die in peace. He looked around in the dark and saw that she had lit a votive candle in front of the plaster image of the Sacred Heart on top of his dresser. The image made him shudder because Christ’s heart, which was exposed in the center of His chest, was bleeding as if it were a pomegranate and someone were squeezing it. He looked away, trying to calm himself, and he tried to think of pleasant things. He began to imagine La Concordia’s streets, and in his mind he went walking up and down its elegant sidewalks, admiring the beautiful buildings. He remembered the day he arrived from Santiago de Cuba and first noticed that the streets were named after the Masonic virtues: Calle Fraternidad, Calle Hermandad, Calle Armonía. How happy it had made him feel! He sensed he had come home.

He meditated on the many happy coincidences in his life. In his heart, he was already a Freemason—like his father and his father’s father before him—when he arrived in La Concordia. Then his sons had become Freemasons and had built the Star Cement plant, cement being the mason’s material par excellence. Thanks to Star Cement, the city was in a constant state of development, a living organism, changing and transforming itself. Its buildings kept growing ever higher and lovelier, like flowers blooming in a tall vase. Chaguito was terribly proud of La Concordia. It was his city. He had saved it from destruction as a fireman and then had helped rebuild it many times.

He didn’t want to die, because he didn’t want to leave it. In the more than seventy-five years he had lived in Puerto Rico he had been away only once—when he traveled to New York and Chicago to take Celia to the convent. His children and his grandchildren, on the other hand, had traveled all over the world and then they had all left town. Aurelio still lived in Las Bougainvilleas, but since Vernet Construction had moved to San Juan, he practically lived there also. Ulises had shot off like a cannonball to Florida. Amparo had gone to live in Maracai with her husband. Then Roque had committed suicide and Damián had died of a heart attack. His grandchildren, too, had dispersed. Both Alvaro and I had gotten married and were living in San Juan. Rodrigo and Catalina had settled in Florida. Enrique had committed suicide, and Eduardo had disappeared with his father’s money.

Abuelo couldn’t understand why his children and grandchildren had all moved away. When he left Santiago de Cuba, Chaguito was dirt-poor and had barely escaped a bloody war. His children and grandchildren had everything—the best education money could buy, a comfortable situation, good health. And they lived in a democracy, protected by the flag of the United States. But they were like turbines without an axle, running wild all over the world. Why couldn’t they be happy in La Concordia? What were they running away from? He didn’t know.

Only Celia had stayed, and she visited Abuelo often. He had grown very close to her in the last few years. She was an extraordinary woman, and thanks to her, Abuelo had come to realize that La Concordia was beautiful not only for its buildings but also for its people. They were indestructible. They had suffered one crisis after another: devastating hurricanes, massive migration to the mainland, the collapse of the sugar market, the failures of the local oil refineries and tuna canneries. With the sugarcane industry all but wiped out, the foundry, steel welding, and machine shops had finally closed down. The Star Cement plant was still operating, but the rising cost of electricity meant it was just scraping by.

When the foundry had gone bankrupt the port area had turned into a dreadful slum. The houses of the workers became shacks and hundreds of new ones sprouted up in the marshes nearby, where land didn’t belong to anyone because it was deemed uninhabitable. These homes were set on stilts and made of wood, with tin roofs covered with stones. Abuelo asked Tía Celia what the stones were for and she explained that the youngsters threw them whenever they saw a stranger, so angry were they at the world.

Celia visited the slum every day, jumping from board to board over the stinking quagmire and avoiding the rocks that flew her way. She opened a medical dispensary next to Vernet Construction. Later, Celia added a Center of Orientation and Services to the dispensary, and then a School for Arts and Crafts. She didn’t want to mention religion, because she knew that, in the heated atmosphere of the slum, to talk about sin and repentance would have been to sink the ship before it set sail. By 1970 her School for Arts and Crafts had become a university with hundreds of students and achieved academic accreditation at the national level by the Middle States Association Board. Abuelo Chaguito was so impressed he gave Celia’s missionary center every penny he could hide from Brunhilda.

As he lay sleepless in his bed thinking of La Concordia’s troubles, Abuelo Chaguito remembered Tía Celia and slowly a peaceful smile spread across his lips. His heart quieted down, and he fell asleep.

Abuelo Chaguito didn’t open his eyes until late the next morning—to the rumble of a cement mixer outside his bedroom window. He didn’t have to see it to know what it was: the sound of gravel mixed with sand, cement powder, and water going round and round inside the giant cylinder was the most beautiful sound in the world. Brunhilda had long since gotten up, so he rang the bell next to his bed and Amalia, the maid, knocked on the door. He asked her what was going on.

“It’s the workers from the cement plant, sir. They’ve finally come to do the job in the garden.”

“What job?” Abuelo Chaguito asked, his voice trembling. And he had Amalia help him out of bed and hand him his cane.

“Doña Brunhilda is redoing the garden, sir. She’s modernizing it.”

Abuelo Chaguito put on his slippers and his bathrobe and shuffled out of the bedroom and into the family room as quickly as he could. He opened the louvered windows and looked out. The workers were pouring cement, his cement, where Adela’s rosebushes had stood. Chaguito paled and grabbed a chair for support. At that moment, Brunhilda walked in, a satisfied smile on her face.

“It’ll look fine when it’s finished, dear. We have so little household help these days; there’s no one to sweep the leaves, and the garden got into a terrible state while you were ill. But I’m having a decorator pave the cement with Talavera ceramic tile; it’ll be very colorful and we won’t have to sweep leaves anymore.”

Abuelo Chaguito went back to bed again, feeling terrible. The pain in his chest returned, as well as the fibrillation. Aurelio was summoned from San Juan and Alvaro and I flew with him to La Concordia. When we walked into the room an hour and a half later, the doctor was there, and he told us that Abuelo Chaguito was dying. Brunhilda was holding him in her arms and Chaguito was gasping like a fish out of water. He didn’t speak, but Father realized he didn’t want Brunhilda near him. His arms and chest were covered with bruises, and he looked at us with pleading eyes.

When Brunhilda saw Aurelio, she got up from the bed and left the room. We all stood around Abuelo and held his hands. The doctor began to massage Chaguito’s chest vigorously, and a nurse gave him a shot of nitroglycerin. “Go on, Doctor, keep trying, keep trying! Don’t give up!” Abuelo kept saying. “Life is a precious gift—it must be saved at all costs!”

But it was no use. The heart attack was massive and Chaguito eventually fell silent. Aurelio closed his father’s eyes gently, but he refused to cry. Abuelo Chaguito had passed on like a true fireman, his courage undaunted.

TELLING A STORY GOES
hand in hand with the knowledge of life: the knowledge of oneself, in oneself, by oneself.

—
SCHEHERAZADE
,
A Thousand and One Nights

M
OTHER’S DIFFICULTIES WITH THE
servants at our house grew worse as Father’s political campaigns intensified. A new servant would begin working at 1 Avenida Cañafístula, impressed by the fact that she was employed by the handsome Aurelio Vernet, whose photograph was plastered on all the fences and walls of La Concordia. She was usually a slender, humbly dressed young woman from the slums with a glow on her cheeks, fresh red lips, and the cleft between her breasts clearly visible above her uniform’s starched white apron. But a week didn’t go by before Mother was getting into an argument with the new maid because she had come into the master bedroom without knocking or had brushed too close to Father when she was serving the table and had stared at him doe-eyed.

When more than a dozen local girls had come and gone, Mother convinced Father that they should hire someone from Guatemala. American companies—the tuna canneries and transistor-radio factories that had sprung up around La Concordia in the fifties and that employed only women—had completely spoiled the working population. They all had to be paid the minimum wage as well as social security, they answered back tartly if you corrected them, and they wanted to go out on the town every Friday and Saturday night. But Guatemala was undeveloped enough that a young working girl was sure to be unspoiled. She would be submissive and obedient and work for a lot less.