Eccentric Neighborhood (7 page)

“You’re a nincompoop and a loser!” Clarissa told Tía Dido angrily the next morning when she read what the poet had written. “At least your namesake got to be queen of Carthage before she committed suicide over that thickhead Aeneas. But you’ll never be anything other than an excellent cook.”

Tía Dido took Juan Ramón Jiménez’s suggestion and kept her love songs a secret from that day on; she put her literature books away and never wrote another poem. Antonio married her in the Guayamés cathedral the following month and took her to live with him in San Juan.

T
ÍA ARTEMISA WAS THE
tallest of all the aunts. She was so tall my cousins and I teased her that she had her feet firmly planted on the ground but was always bumping her head against the clouds. Tía Artemisa, like Tía Dido, lived for the imagination, but of a different kind. She was always dreaming of Jesusito, who lived in her heart.

She was a keen businesswoman, and she was also very religious. Thanks to her unusual combination of financial savvy and religious devotion, she almost landed one of the richest men in Guayamés, Don Esteban de la Rosa, the owner of the
central
Santa Rosa. The story of their romance was one of the most picturesque I’d ever heard.

Tía Artemisa fell madly in love with Don Esteban de la Rosa in 1947, when she was forty-four and regarded by everybody as a spinster. In contrast to my other aunts, who loved beautiful things and were always buying expensive baubles to adorn themselves, Artemisa dressed in black from head to toe and never wore any jewelry except for a perfect three-carat solitaire that shone, night and day, on her finger.

Tía Artemisa was as intelligent as Tía Dido, but she didn’t finish her studies at the University of Puerto Rico either. She only went as far as her junior year. She was beautiful and charming, but she had one flaw, her religious fanaticism.

Swearing in front of Tía Artemisa was absolutely out of the question because she would immediately pull a long face and make you feel ashamed. Once, during Christmas dinner at Emajaguas, little Lakhmé made a joke. Saint Tecla, she said, was at death’s door and Saint Peter and her friends were kneeling around a hole in the clouds looking down, waiting for her soul to come out of her body and begin to rise toward heaven. Saint Tecla’s spirit finally went forth and began its ascent through the clouds, but she had been so saintly in life that she rose higher and higher and soon passed Saint Peter and kept on going. When Saint Peter saw this he called out: “Saint Tecla, please! Say a couple of
carajos
so you’ll stop soaring and stay down here with us!” Saint Tecla did and came tumbling back to Earth. Artemisa was furious and made Abuela Valeria take Tía Lakhmé to the bathroom to wash her mouth out with soap and water.

Everybody in the family liked Don Esteban and hopes were high that he would marry Artemisa. He was a widower and had had a tragic life. His wife had died of breast cancer when she was still relatively young, and his only son, Valentín, had been killed at Saint Laurent, during the invasion of Normandy. Valentín’s remains had been buried in a cemetery in Calvados, and Don Esteban wasn’t able to visit his grave until two years later.

Don Esteban’s sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Blanca Rosa, was the apple of his eye. Blanca, Valentín’s only daughter, was one of the beauties of Guayamés. She was blond and blue-eyed, and her skin was so white her friends called her the Snow Rose. Don Esteban didn’t want Blanca Rosa to marry any of the local young Turks, so in 1946—a year after the war was over—he decided to travel with her to Europe and introduce her to some young men of good standing. They flew on a Pan American Clipper from San Juan to New York. There they boarded the
Gloucester
, a luxury steamship of the Grace Line, and landed in Le Havre at the end of November.

Don Esteban rented a limousine with a chauffeur, and he drove south with his granddaughter down the Normandy coast to visit the cemetery where Valentín was buried. The weather was misty and cold, but the landscape was beautiful. Trouville-sur-Mer; Deauville; Fleurie: the towns that Don Esteban had read so much about in A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu
and that the Impressionists had painted so many times went flying by before his eyes. Many were being reconstructed after the terrible damage the war had inflicted. Debris littered the dunes on the beach and signs were posted everywhere warning of land mines and forbidding people to walk along the shore. They finally reached Omaha Beach. Don Esteban hadn’t said a single word the whole time, but he felt in control of himself. His son had died a hero’s death defending his country, the United States. Valentín was thirty-five, in the flower of his youth. Now he would never grow old, would never experience sickness or grief. When Don Esteban thought about it that way, he was almost glad a piece of German mortar shell had flown through the air and embedded itself in Valentín’s brain.

They passed the cemetery’s gate and the marble sculpture of an angel carrying a fallen soldier in his arms. Ten thousand limestone crosses stood on the rolling green meadow like gulls poised for flight, several Stars of David interspersed among them. The steel-gray waters of the English Channel glinted restlessly in the distance. Don Esteban took a deep breath and got out of the car. In his pocket he carried the small map the army had sent him with the exact location of his son’s grave. He took Blanca Rosa’s arm and together they began the long walk to where Valentín’s cross stood.

They reached Paris that evening and drove to the Hôtel Crillon. Soon they were installed in a beautiful suite with a view of the Place de la Concorde. Blanca Rosa was to attend the Christmas ball at Versailles in a few days—the first such ball since before the war. She had brought a trunk full of clothes with her, and Guayamés’s best dressmaker had designed her a beautiful evening gown for the ball. But Blanca Rosa needed a winter coat, and since it was always warm in Guayamés, winter evening coats were not for sale. So Don Esteban asked the dressmaker to sew Blanca Rosa a coat made of marabou feathers, which were very fashionable at the time. “I would like to buy you an ermine cape with a hood,” he joked the day he gave her the feather coat, “but I would have to sell my best farm to pay for it. Marabou will have to do. The feathers are very fine; they come from Africa and only brides wear them.” Blanca loved the coat. She didn’t know what ermine looked like, but it couldn’t be as soft and beautiful as marabou.

The night of the Versailles ball Blanca met a French count, Jean-Baptiste de l’Abbaye Richey, great-grandson of one of France’s
grands maréchals.
Jean-Baptiste asked her to dance, and they sailed together across the parquet floor. The air around them swirled with laughter; champagne flowed from dark green bottles like liquid happiness; the chandeliers were hives ablaze with excitement above their heads. But they didn’t notice a thing, because they had fallen in love.

By the time the orchestra began to play “La Vie en Rose,” they had decided to elope. They would drive from Versailles to Nice that very night. It was the middle of December, and although Blanca Rosa knew she looked very attractive in her silk chiffon dress, she was amazed that, with so many beautiful girls at the ball, Jean-Baptiste should have eyes only for her. “You look like a Venus draped in alabaster folds, and I love you more than my life,” he whispered, drawing her close. Blanca Rosa believed him.

At midnight Jean-Baptiste took her by the hand and they slipped away unnoticed. Blanca Rosa threw her marabou coat over her shoulders and ran with Jean-Baptiste down the hall of mirrors, crossed the military court in front of the palace, silver heels flying over the stone slab floor, and got into Jean-Baptiste’s red convertible Alfa Romeo.

“Is that coat warm enough?” Jean-Baptiste asked her dubiously as they got in the car.

“Of course it is,” Blanca answered, smiling, not wanting him to think she was a small-town girl. “It’s tropical ermine. Father gave it to me as a present to wear at Versailles.”

The car took off like a bullet in the night. Soon Blanca Rosa felt the knife of the wind fly by, but Jean-Baptiste put his arm around her shoulders and pointed to the dome full of stars. “There must be thousands, but you’re more beautiful than all of them, because you fell from a tropical sky,” Jean-Baptiste said. Blanca snuggled close to him. Orion was flying above their heads, arms and legs spread wide against the sky, wearing four stars on his belt and three on his dagger, as he always did. Orion made Blanca Rosa think of Don Esteban. All of a sudden she missed him and was sad to think how distressed he must be, not knowing where she was.

“Can we stop at the next gasoline station, so I can call my grandfather?” she asked Jean-Baptiste. “He must he terribly worried.” But at that hour of the night all the gasoline pumps were closed. Around four in the morning, as they were nearing Nevers, Blanca tried again, but Jean-Baptiste didn’t think it was a good idea to call. “We still have too many hours to go before we get to Nice,” he said. “Your grandfather could warn the police, and they’ll send a patrol to stop us before we reach the hotel. Let’s wait until tomorrow, so we can spend the night in each other’s arms.” Blanca looked up at Orion and sighed. It made her feel better that he was looking after her from up there.

Soon the sky was shrouded with a mantle of clouds, and tiny featherlike snowflakes began to caress Blanca’s cheeks. “You look even more beautiful under the snow than under the stars,” Jean-Baptiste whispered in her ear as they flew past Lyon at a hundred kilometers an hour.
“Ma rose de neige
.” And Blanca was so much in love and at the same time so afraid of what Jean-Baptiste might think if he found out her coat was made not of ermine but of marabou feathers that she didn’t dare tell him how cold she was.

The snow kept sifting over them like flour. “Now I know how angels feel on their way to heaven,” Blanca Rosa said. She gazed admiringly at Jean-Baptiste, who reminded her of a prince in his black astrakhan coat buttoned up to the chin and his Russian-style hat. Then something strange happened: Blanca didn’t feel cold anymore. Instead a fiery blaze began to burn her insides. She wanted to make love to Jean-Baptiste so badly she wished her breasts, her abdomen, her thighs were made of snow so she could melt in his arms.

They drove on until they reached Avignon and stopped there at a little café by the side of the road to have a cup of coffee and a croissant. Blanca could hardly get out of the car; she was stiff and her legs were numb. She felt terribly sleepy and kept stumbling on her silver heels. Jean-Baptiste had to help her to a chair. When Blanca asked if there was a ladies’ room, a dirty-looking peasant hunched over a glass of wine pointed toward the back of the establishment, where there was an outhouse. Blanca gave up the idea of visiting it. Jean-Baptiste went, and when he came back to the car he rolled up its canvas cover. Blanca got in and fell into a deep sleep.

They arrived in Nice around four in the afternoon, the day after the ball. They took a suite in the Hôtel de Paris, the best in town. The hotel was right next to the Palais de Jeu and from their window that evening Blanca could see men in elegant tuxedos and women in long, glittering evening gowns stepping out of their cars and going up the casino’s marble stairway.

When Blanca lay down on the bed she was shivering, whether from the chill of the trip or from the desire that raged inside her she didn’t know. Jean-Baptiste undressed her slowly, blowing away the last snowflakes that clung to her marabou coat. Then he removed her Venus chiffon dress. When Blanca was totally naked she looked like an alabaster statue lit from within, her skin glowed so unnaturally. They made love passionately, then fell into a deep sleep. When Jean-Baptiste woke the next morning, the sun was streaming into the room and Blanca Rosa lay motionless by his side. She looked even more like an alabaster statue, but she wasn’t lit from within any longer. She had died of hypothermia during the night.

Back in Paris Don Esteban had gone without news of his granddaughter for twenty-four hours and was almost beside himself. He had searched for her, room by room, at Versailles and had finally returned to the Crillon without her. When Blanca was still missing the next morning, he informed the police and a search was begun. The following evening Don Esteban received a telegram from Jean-Baptiste at the hotel, informing him of Blanca Rosa’s death. Don Esteban immediately took a train to Nice.

On his arrival, he went straight to the police station, where Jean-Baptiste, the prefect of police, and a pathologist were waiting for him. “
Je suis désolé, Monsieur
,” the young man said as he tried to embrace Don Esteban, tears streaming down his face. But Don Esteban pushed him away. He had never gotten angry at anybody; he was a peaceful man. But he felt a noose of rage tighten around his throat when he saw the French count.

Blanca Rosa had died of overexposure during the night because she had driven almost all the way from Paris to Avignon in Jean-Baptiste’s Alfa Romeo with the canvas top rolled down, the prefect of police explained to him. Don Esteban was incensed. He picked Jean-Baptiste up by the lapels of his coat and threw him against the wall. He threatened to call a lawyer and press charges against the young man. His granddaughter was a minor and Jean-Baptiste had carried her off from Versailles by force. But the prefect of police explained he couldn’t do that, because Jean-Baptiste was the great-grandson of one of France’s
grands maréchals
. Don Esteban clenched his fists and hung his head. At home he was an hacendado; the police wouldn’t have dared ignore him. But in France he was an eccentric old man from an impoverished Caribbean island raving about an unfortunate accident that had happened to a young couple in love.

Don Esteban went to the morgue to identify the body and then to a nearby chapel to pray for Blanca Rosa’s soul. He somehow managed to stay in control through the day. When he came back from the cemetery, he went to his granddaughter’s hotel. He gave the concierge a twenty-dollar bill, asked for a key to her room, and gave orders to keep Jean-Baptiste and the reporters away. News of the unusual death had made the local papers, and a photograph of Blanca Rosa dancing with the French count at Versailles was published on the front pages.