Eccentric Neighborhood (5 page)

E
MAJAGUAS WAS A PLACE
where one could find peace simply by admiring the geometric perfection of a red poinsettia or by glorying in the bougainvillea vines that hung from the palm trees like purple mantles. At Emajaguas, nature gave you back the guilelessness of innocence in spite of the fact that a sugarcane worker’s life expectancy was forty years, that his salary was less than a hundred and fifty dollars a year, and that during the
tiempo muerto
—between harvests—he often starved to death. The human misery that raged outside Emajaguas’s ten-foot wall had no relevance within. Justice and beauty were never at odds with each other there.

The house had a large veranda where the family used to sit in the afternoon before the sun went down and a cloud of gnats descended on us, making us feel like pincushions. The veranda faced seaward, and the floor was made of colorful
losa nativa
, a locally made glazed cement tile decorated with arabesques of fruits and flowers. It was like a magic carpet on which one could fly away to Europe or to the United States. Planters full of ferns encircled the veranda, the curly green leaves melting into the blue of the sea as if the house itself were about to set forth on a voyage. At night the house’s lighted windows glimmered on the water like those of a ship, and the murmur of the waves drifted in and out of the rooms like the very essence of sleep.

The dining room was the most important room at Emajaguas. As you entered the house you walked down a corridor that opened directly onto it, as if it were a stage where the family’s dramas were enacted. The table was Spanish-colonial style and seated fourteen people. The ceiling was higher than those in the rest of the house. It rose like a magnificent hat, with pastel-tinted windowpanes all around. As you ate, you could count the clouds as they slid by.

Clarissa, Siglinda, Dido, Artemisa, and Lakhmé all resembled one another. They had the same swan’s neck, milk-white skin, and delicate nose, and for that reason Abuelo Alvaro was known in Guayamés as the Zeus of Emajaguas, father of the five Ledas of Mount Olympus. The swans had their humorous counterpart in the five geese who noisily patrolled the grounds, running after unwary visitors—orange beaks wide open and red gullets bared—ready to swallow them whole. In Guayamés, the geese were said to resemble my aunts running after their suitors.

On the right wall of the dining room were the wedding portraits: the sisters in their bridal finery, standing next to their tuxedoed husbands. Each photograph was a kind of trophy, the result of years of effort directed toward achieving that respectability and peace of mind which only marriage vows conferred. It permitted each of my aunts to be photographed next to her hard-won prize, the young man she had brought into the family’s bosom.

The left wall was also covered with pictures: a seedbed of grandchildren of all ages and sizes, the progeny of the unions displayed on the other side. There were Tía Siglinda’s six daughters; Tía Dido’s son; Alvaro, and me at different stages of our lives. The pictures overflowed the wall and hung helter-skelter over the doorways. Caught in the midst of graduations, First Communions, picnics, horse shows, and senior proms, we smiled at the camera without a care in the world, vying with one another for attention.

Several of Valeria’s granddaughters had inherited the Rivas de Santillana looks and these girls she always treated with a shade of distinction. Beauty would undoubtedly help them succeed in the world, enabling them to get away with gaffes and blunders unforgivable in the less fortunate. Those born like me with a pug nose and a thick neck would have to learn to be a lot smarter if they wanted to get ahead.

Grandchildren under twelve were not allowed to sit at the dining room table during Christmas dinner. We were exiled to the pantry, where we could eat drumsticks with our hands, lick the custard bowl clean, and stick our little fingers in the coquilles Saint Jacques. Once we were old enough to join the grown-ups at the table, discipline was strict: we were not permitted to wipe the sauce from our plates with a piece of bread or to push our food around with our thumbs—something only the Americans did. We had to chase each morsel of food patiently around the plate, hoping that the china slope of the rim would somehow make the last grains of rice and beans fall strategically onto the fork instead of into our laps. If perchance the last bit of food was an okra pod or a slippery pig’s knuckle, it was best to renounce it in advance rather than risk the pinch of one of our aunts’ long, Elizabeth Ardened nails.

Abuela Valeria’s relationship with nature was almost mystical; her bedroom opened onto the veranda, and at night she slept with the doors wide open so she could hear the waves breaking softly on the sand and the palm trees swaying in the wind. One Christmas Eve something extraordinary happened. Abuela Valeria consented to have a pine tree brought into the living room.

The family should have kept her eccentric beliefs in mind when it decided to put up a Christmas tree at Emajaguas. Since the Americans had arrived on the island, Christmas trees had become very popular, much more so than the
nacimientos
, with their shepherds and Holy Family carved in wood or in painted gesso, kneeling in front of Jesusito. Pine trees were shipped to the island all the way from Canada and New Hampshire. That year my aunts insisted that Valeria buy one, so a twelve-foot Canadian spruce was brought into the house on Christmas Eve. At first Valeria thought the whole thing was silly. She had never traveled to the United States, as several of her children had, and a Christmas tree struck no sentimental chord within her.

When the tree was set up in the middle of the living room, Abuela Valeria sat before it entranced. It shone like a soft emerald torn out of the forest, and it filled the house with its perfume. But then Valeria inexplicably began to feel sad. She had a vivid imagination, and as she looked at the tree her mind went flying off in an unexpected direction. Tall and elegant, the tree had stood guard for years over acres of virgin forest, before perishing under the woodsman’s ax. The soft, damp moss, the murmuring rivers, the rustling wild deer all came into her living room in the wake of the scent that wafted from its branches. She felt like singing one of Mahler’s songs, to console it for its impending death, the doom that was already hovering around
it.

Oblivious to Abuela Valeria’s distress, we all began to decorate the spruce, and soon it was decked out with shiny glass balls, tinsel, twinkling electric lights, and Ivory soap flakes. When Abuela saw what we were doing, she grew even sadder. In a matter of hours the tree had become a yellowish brown because of the heat and had begun to shed its needles. Loaded down with heavy ornaments, its boughs drooped like the wings of a dying bird. Abuela began to cry and locked herself in her room. Behind the locked door she told her family in no uncertain terms that they would have to get rid of the tree if they wanted her to come out. Her children had no alternative but to call the mayor of Guayamés and offer him the tree as a gift. The mayor immediately sent a truck and his workers removed the tree, which shone that night, with all our elaborate decorations, in the middle of the town square.

Once the tree was taken care of, preparations for Christmas dinner proceeded as usual. Abuela became her old energetic self, summoning all the servants together to organize the details of the feast. Urbano the chauffeur, Confesor the gardener, Gela the cook, and Miña the housemaid all followed her around, sweeping, shining, dusting, and decorating the house with fresh poinsettias brought in from the garden, until Emajaguas looked like a tropical Currier and Ives print.

T
HE DAY ABUELA VALERIA
died was the first and only time I ever saw a Catholic priest at Emajaguas. Abuela Valeria was a Rosicrucian and a staunch believer in
espiritismo
, which she blended with her belief in the “positive currents of the universe.” She read
The Christian Science Monitor
in Spanish, but she liked to think of herself as “an independent.” Through the mail she received a constant stream of leaflets that she read to her children, insisting that the body could be healed through the power of the mind. When all her daughters except Tía Lakhmé had left Emajaguas and gone to live in distant towns, she’d travel to their sides with her handbag full of little Rosicrucian and Christian Science prayer books the minute she heard one of them was sick. She’d come into the sickroom, stand near the bed, and ask her daughter what was making her sad.

“It’s the soul that makes the body sick,” she’d say. “Close your eyes and tell me about your troubles. I’ll take them away with me.” My aunts would tell her what was worrying them and let her rub their temples with malagueta leaves and camphor oil, so that they felt better immediately. When Mother became ill because of her
soplo
, Abuela came to our house also and stood next to her oxygen tent for hours, praying.

Valeria believed in her own kind of afterlife, and when Abuelo Alvaro and Tío Alejandro died she communicated with them at least once a week through a Ouija board. She’d sit in her room in front of the open window, the board on her knees, close her eyes, and listen to the waves breaking on the sand below. Then she’d let the little wooden wedge point this way and that toward the letters of the alphabet, making words and phrases that she swore were messages from the other world. My aunts tended to look on her eccentric behavior as a symptom of approaching senility. But I loved to be with Abuela when she played with the Ouija board. I knew it was her way of denying death and asserting her faith in the positive currents of the universe. “Everything is interconnected and interdependent,” she’d say. “The positive currents of the universe make you see the unity, not the differences. Believe in unity and you will see God.”

Abuela revered the sun and prayed to it every morning at dawn. She had a deck built next to her bedroom, facing east. She took sunbaths there well into her eightieth year and would lie naked for an hour on a chaise lounge behind a canvas screen, her flesh hanging from her bones in soft brown folds and her breasts completely bare. She didn’t mind it when we grandchildren peeked at her, giggling through the rose trellis. She had a beautiful body; she walked as gracefully as a ballerina, her wide shoulders fanning out elegantly and her neck a delicate vase that carried the faded flower of her face.

Valeria never went to church. She believed people should pray silently and in private, not loudly and in public. Neither Abuelo Alvaro nor any other man had ever dared order her about, and she insisted that she’d rather go to hell than to Mass if it meant she had to kneel when the priest told her to. But she was sure she could still manage to get to heaven by doing things her own way.

By way of explanation she enjoyed telling her family the story of “
Corso ni vivo ni morto
”:

“Long ago,” she said, “when my father still lived in Corsica, my uncle Basilio Boffil had a fierce argument with a neighbor. The boundary between their farms was a creek that changed course every time it rained. One day the man who owned the farm next to Basilio’s insisted that the land that the creek passed over now belonged to him, and he proceeded to move his fence to include the adjacent piece of property. Basilio was enraged; he went to his neighbor’s house, called him a crook and a liar in front of everybody, and then went out into the field to put the fence back where it belonged. In the morning his neighbor’s knife turned up buried in Basilio’s front door and he immediately knew what it meant: he would have to fight the man to the death the next day.

“The priest of the nearby town came to visit Basilio. ‘You have to patch things up,’ he told him. ‘If you kill your neighbor you’ll go to hell, and that forlorn piece of land you’re fighting for isn’t worth it.’ Basilio answered that he didn’t care. If he didn’t do anything and let his neighbor kill him he would go to heaven, but it would mean a dishonorable death. He preferred going to hell. The next morning Basilio got up before dawn, walked to a mountain pass that overlooked the road his neighbor had to travel, and lay down on high ground. He loaded and cocked his rifle and propped it up carefully before him. He waited almost all day, but his neighbor didn’t come. As the sun went down it got colder and Basilio fell asleep. Soon it began to snow and Basilio froze to death. But he still lay there, covered with powdered snow, his rifle cocked in his hands. The sun had almost gone down when his neighbor finally came walking along the road. He carried a loaded rifle and warily looked up at the hills as he approached the mountain pass. He suddenly saw something glint in the distance, lit by the sun’s last rays. He cocked his rifle and fired. The bullet hit Tío Basilio’s body, his frozen finger jerked the trigger, and he shot his neighbor to death. Basilio managed to go to heaven, and he also had an honorable death.”

When she finished telling her story, Valeria would look at Abuelo Alvaro and her children, head held high, and add defiantly: “That’s how stubborn the Boffils can be.”

I loved Abuela Valeria and couldn’t understand why Mother had a grudge against her. When Abuela Valeria grew seriously ill, it was as if her sickness followed a trail of gunpowder. The family was told she was dying, and we all traveled to Emajaguas from different parts of the island, prepared to spend the night there. The next morning my aunts stood sadly around her bed waiting for the end—the doctor had assured them Valeria wouldn’t last more than a few hours. Everybody was depressed but we maintained nonchalant expressions; we knew Abuela Valeria wouldn’t like to see us cry. She had always insisted death wasn’t a tragedy, simply a transformation, a passage from one natural state to the next.

Tía Dido sat by Abuela Valeria’s bed reading her a poem, something about the moon lighting up the road like a silver guitar. Tía Lakhmé opened the doors to the terrace so Abuela could hear the waves breaking on the beach and periodically dabbed her forehead with a handkerchief soaked with eau de cologne. Tía Artemisa put a yellow rose next to her bed and tried to cool her with a fan. Tía Siglinda hummed her a song and held her hand. But Mother stood in front of Valeria’s bed stone-faced and dry-eyed, not saying a word.