Eccentric Neighborhoods: A Novel

By Rosario Ferré

A “colorful family saga” set against the dramatic historical backdrop of twentieth-century Puerto Rico, from an author nominated for the National Book Award (Kirkus Reviews).

Elvira Vernet narrates Eccentric Neighborhoods as she attempts to solve the mystery of who her parents truly are. Her mother, the beautiful and aristocratic Clarissa Rivas de Santillana, was born into a rarefied world of privilege, one of five daughters on the family’s sugar plantation. Elvira’s father, Aurelio Vernet, and his three brothers and two sisters were raised by Santiago, a Cuban immigrant who ruled his family with an iron hand. As Puerto Rico struggles for independence—and Aurelio takes his place among the powerful political gentry—a legacy of violence, infidelity, faith, and sacrifice is born.

Set against the backdrop of a country coming of age, Eccentric Neighborhoods is a lush, transcendent novel, a family saga about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, parents and children. In this magnificent follow-up to The House on the Lagoon, Rosario Ferré delivers a work of historical fiction influenced by magical realism and infused with forgiveness and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480481770

Rosario Ferré

Rosario Ferré (1938–2016) was born in Puerto Rico, where her father served as governor. She earned a doctorate in Spanish from the University of Maryland and is best remembered for her novels and short stories. Her literary career began with the publication of the controversial literary journal Zona. Carga y Descarga in 1972, and her first short story collection, The Youngest Doll, was published in 1976. She served as a faculty member at the University of Puerto Rico, Rutgers University, and Johns Hopkins University. In 1992, Ferré was awarded the Liberatur Prix award at the Frankfurt Book Fair for the German translation of her novel Sweet Diamond Dust. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for her novel The House on the Lagoon in 1995. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Brown University and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative arts. She was also the recipient of the prestigious Medal for Literature of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 2009.  

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Eccentric Neighborhoods

A Novel

Rosario Ferré

To the ghosts who lent me their voices

Contents

Part I: Emajaguas’s Lost Paradise

One: Fording Río Logo

Two: Boffil and Rivas de Santillana

Three: The Sugar Sultan

Four: The Piss Pot of the Island

Five: Christmas Eve at Emajaguas

Six: The Zeus of Emajaguas

Seven: Abuela Valeria’s Standoff

Part II: The Swans of Emajaguas

Eight: The Repentant Muse

Nine: The Snow Rose

Ten: The Thick Skin of Mercy

Eleven: The Venus of the Family

Part III: Clarissa’s Trials

Twelve: Abuelo Alvaro’s Little Diamond

Thirteen: Miña’s Secrets

Fourteen: The Prince of Emajaguas

Fifteen: Tía Siglinda’s Elopement

Sixteen: Okechobee

Seventeen: Abuelo Alvaro Swims Away

Eighteen: Alejandro Sells the Plata

Nineteen: Alejandro Sails to Heaven

Twenty: Clarissa and Aurelio’s Wedding

Twenty-One: The House on Calle Virtud

Part IV: The Vernet Family Saga

Twenty-Two: Sailing Down the Caribbean

Twenty-Three: Chaguito Arrives at La Concordia

Twenty-Four: The Lottery Vendor’s Daughter

Twenty-Five: The House on Calle Esperanza

Twenty-Six: President Roosevelt Visits the Island

Twenty-Seven: The Two Friends

Twenty-Eight: Aurelio Grabs Ulises by the Heel

Twenty-Nine: The Obedient Giant

Thirty: Tía Celia’s Blue Doll

Thirty-One: Adela Passes the Baton

Thirty-Two: The Masonic Dove

Thirty-Three: The Criollo Valkyrie

Thirty-Four: The Kingdom of Cement

Thirty-Five: The Vernets’ Star Begins to Rise

Thirty-Six: La Teclapepa

Thirty-Seven: Statehood and Sainthood

Thirty-Eight: Fernando Martín’s Mustache

Thirty-Nine: The Wedding Piano

Forty: Fosforito Vernet

Part V: The Vernets’ Quadriga

Forty-One: Clarissa’s House

Forty-Two: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

Forty-Three: Father Runs for Governor

Forty-Four: The Queen of Music

Forty-Five: Venecia’s Passage to Heaven

Forty-Six: Fritzi’s Wake

Forty-Seven: The Financial Wizard

Forty-Eight: Joining the Holy Roman Empire

Forty-Nine: The Fire Engine

Fifty: Roque’s Russian Roulette

Fifty-One: The Rolling Coffin

Fifty-Two: The White Jasmine

Fifty-Three: Fosforito Vernet’s Last Spark

Part VI: The I Within the Eye

Fifty-Four: Xochil’s Converse Sneakers

Fifty-Five: The Cardinal’s Dinner Service

Fifty-Six: The Family’s Sacks of Gold

Fifty-Seven: Rebellion at the Beau Rivage

Fifty-Eight: Clarissa’s Passing

About the Author

family tree

PART I

EMAJAGUAS’S LOST PARADLSE

GEOGRAPHIES CAN BE SYMBOLIC; physical spaces determine the archetype and become forms that emit symbols.

—OCTAVIO PAZ, Postdata

ONE

Fording Río Loco

RÍO LOCO GOT ITS name because it was so temperamental. When it rained in the valley and the other rivers stampeded toward the sea like runaway horses, Río Loco was dry. But when the sun was nailed to the sky like a hot coal, charring the cane fields and forcing the scorpions out of their burrows to look for water, it reared up like a muddy demon and tumbled this way and that over the dusty plain, enraged at everything that stood in its way. The river’s source was far away in the mountains, and when it rained the floods rose, even when there was fair weather in the valley.

Río Loco always reminded me of my mother, Clarissa. We would be sitting peacefully in the pantry having breakfast—Aurelio, my father, would be reading the paper, Alvaro and I would be reviewing our homework before leaving for school—when Clarissa would suddenly rise and run to her room. Aurelio would follow hurriedly behind her. As I left for school in the family’s Pontiac, I could hear Clarissa’s sobs behind closed doors, mingled with the apologetic murmur of Father’s voice.

She never explained to me why she cried, and if I insisted on asking, I risked putting myself at the mercy of one of her sharp pinches or an angry yank at a tuft of my hair. It was as if it were raining in her mind, when all around her the sun was shining.

Once a month Clarissa and my aunts journeyed to Emajaguas from different parts of the island to visit Abuela Valeria. I used to accompany Mother on these trips. Family was very important then.

I always knew when we were driving to Emajaguas because Crisótbal Bocanegra, our black chauffeur, would start whistling softly as soon as he was told of the trip. Crisótbal had a good-looking girlfriend in Guayamés, and when we traveled there he always spent the night with her, happy to get away from his wife.

Crossing Río Loco was one of the high points of our journey to Emajaguas. The old winding road from La Concordia to Guayamés had been built by the Spaniards, and although the towns were really not that far apart—twenty miles at most—the journey took two and a half hours, much longer than it should have. Father always joked about it with Mother and said the Spaniards had used the burro method when they built the road: they took a burro from La Concordia to Guayamés, let it loose, and followed it as it ran home down the shortest path.

Río Loco remained without a bridge through the 1940s; it was the last important river on the island to be spanned by one. The government was too impoverished to build one until the 1950s, when a human wave rose from the island and thousands of immigrants crashed into New York. They were desperately poor, and in the Bronx and in Harlem they’d still be poor, but a little less so. The bridge was good for the local economy, and soon the government began to invest in public works.

Río Loco was shallow, and most of the time we could drive across its dry gully without any problem, skirting the huge boulders that lay on the bottom like dinosaur eggs and the massive tree trunks left by intermittent floods. Come September, however, Río Loco was often flooded, and its waters pulled along everything that clung to its banks. Most of the poor peasants who worked the central Eureka cane fields lived in barracks; they cooked outside on coal stoves and shat in the latrines the owners had built for them. The company store was nearby, and there they could buy food on credit when they ran out of money and obtain medical supplies and services. But workers living in the barracks were closely supervised by the overseer, who would keep a tally on their debts. For this reason, some preferred the dangerous freedom of the riverbank, where they built their own shacks, to the convenience of living at the central. Riverbanks, like beaches, are all public property on the island.

The earth was black and fertile along the banks, and the peasants grew splendid plantains, manioc roots, and cane stalks there. But when the river flooded, it reclaimed with a vengeance the terrain it had temporarily ceded to the squatters. You could see doors, corrugated tin roofs, rocking chairs, tables, cooking pots, mattresses, all floating slowly toward the sea, as well as dogs, pigs, goats, and even cows, already swollen, pulled along, legs up, by the brown, toffee-like mass of water.

I loved crossing Río Loco when it was flooded, and as the family car set out for Emajaguas I always prayed for a crecida, never thinking about the havoc the river created for the peasants. It broke the monotony of the trip, the silence that inevitably sat like a block of ice between Mother and me. As we neared the river, my heart would begin to pound faster and faster. We never knew whether the current would be high or not, and if the river couldn’t be crossed, we would inevitably have to turn back toward La Concordia, with Mother in tears.

As soon as we neared Río Loco’s banks, Mother would instruct Crisótbal to drive the blue-and-white Pontiac to the river’s edge, and I would stick my head out the window to see what was going on. If the current was high, Mother would order him to pull up close to the water and we would wait in silence under a mango tree to see if it would recede. Mother could never wait very long, however. Without a quiver of fear in her voice, she would command Crisótbal to drive the Pontiac into the murky current. The car would soon be bobbing and half floating over the riverbed, maneuvering its way across the now-invisible boulders. By the middle of the river, Crisótbal would hardly be touching the accelerator; with the dangerous current flowing by on each side, we would be stranded, unable to get out.

This is precisely what happened one day. Crisótbal was following in the wake of some hardy soul who had plunged his car into the murky water ahead of us, when all of a sudden the Pontiac had an attack of delirium tremens and died midstream. Clarissa ordered us to roll up our windows, and for twenty minutes the three of us sat there in silence watching the brown water rise inch by inch until it was licking the windows, carrying with it the debris from upstream. The car was full of good things to eat that our cook at La Concordia had prepared—a leg of lamb, a roast turkey, a cauldron of arroz con gandules—and soon the delicious odors were all but stifling. A basket of oranges, pineapples, and breadfruit picked that morning from the garden lay on the seat between Mother and me. It was like sitting inside a watertight paradise dressed in our Sunday best—Clarissa in a printed silk georgette gown and high-heeled Saks Fifth Avenue shoes and me in my white organdy dress with a satin bow on my head—watching all hell break loose around us.

Clarissa looked at her diamond Cartier wristwatch on its black grosgrain band and saw that it was already half past eleven. If we didn’t hurry, we would be late for lunch at Emajaguas and wouldn’t be able to sit down at the table with Abuela Valeria and my aunts. Mother ordered Crisótbal to start the engine. He turned the ignition key; the car gave a couple of lurches and died on us again. Clarissa then commanded him to honk the horn. Soon four barefoot peasants dressed in faded khakis and scraggly straw hats, who had been standing on the shore with their oxen watching our predicament, waded silently into the river.

With rushing water up to their waists, they approached the car, yoked animals in tow. Clarissa opened her handbag, took out a dollar, and waved it at them from inside the window. The peasants tied the beasts to the Pontiac’s front bumper with a thick hemp rope, and slowly the car began to move forward. The smell of mud grew stronger, and I stared in horror as a thin line of water began to seep in through the bottom of the door. Clarissa signaled emphatically to the men to poke the oxen more sharply with their long poles. Once on shore, she slipped the dollar bill to the peasants through a crack at the top of the window and ordered Crisótbal to start the car. The Pontiac jumped forward, its shiny blue-and-white surface dripping with mud, and took off at full speed, an anxious Pegasus flying down the road toward Emajaguas.

TWO

Boffil and Rivas de Santillana

MOTHER WAS BORN IN Guayamés on January 6, 1901. Her father, Alvaro Rivas de Santillana, believed she was a present from the Three Kings, but Valeria Boffil, my grandmother, didn’t agree at all. She was sure Clarissa was born because of the rains.

In Guayamés it rains a lot from July to November; gray clouds are always rubbing their bellies against the roofs of houses, shutting out the sun. The rains influenced Mother’s life from the start. During the rainy season people stay inside much of the time. Anything can happen then: a sudden gust of wind may bring a tree branch down on your head like a punishment from God, or a wave of mud from the nearby Emajaguas River may roll down the street and whisk you away.

Every year, from July to November, Abuelo Alvaro moved into Guayamés with his family instead of staying in Emajaguas, where he could easily supervise his cane fields and his sugar mill, the central Plata. He was always bored in town, and for that reason Abuela Valeria usually got pregnant at the end of each July and gave birth at the end of each April. Mother was the first of their six children. As an infant she was bitten by a mosquito bred in a pool of stagnant rainwater; she developed rheumatic fever, which caused a soplo, a murmur, in her heart. So you could say that she was born because of the rains of Guayamés and also that she died because of them.

The house in Guayamés had a balcony that opened out over the main plaza, from which Clarissa watched the Lenten procession every year with her three sisters—Siglinda, Artemisa, Dido—and her only brother, Alejandro. Wearing white lace mantillas, the girls would lean their elbows on the rail to get a good view. Lakhmé, the baby, would peek between the balusters and admire the purple silk platform where Jesus carried the cross on his back and the black velvet one on which La Verónica, with her tear-streaked face, swayed to and fro over a sea of heads. But the Lenten procession didn’t elicit any special feelings of piety; for the Rivas de Santillanas, religious excitement and pagan celebration were all part of the same play.

Around the middle of December, when the rains had stopped and the canes ripened in the fields, the family moved to Emajaguas, three miles down the coast. Abuelo Alvaro had been born there in 1880. Both his parents had died young, so he had been brought up by two maiden aunts, Alicia and Elisa Rivas de Santillana. When he was eighteen, his aunts had bought a house in town. With the arrival of the Americans on the island, the quality of life in Guayamés had improved greatly: streets were paved, there was running water, a sewage system and storm drains had been installed.

Abuelo Alvaro’s aunts had always pampered him, and even though they were only moderately well-off, they spared no expense in his education. He was taught French by private tutors and could do his arithmetic competently enough. But he didn’t like to read and was wary of people who read a lot, because they seemed to think they were above the rest.

Abuelo learned firsthand everything there was to know about the sugar industry by struggling to keep his cane fields well tended. His aunts trusted him and put everything in his hands; with their combined fortunes, Alvaro was able to keep Emajaguas in working order. But Alicia and Elisa died during the typhus epidemic that ravaged Guayamés in 1900. Alvaro and Valeria were married that same year—she was sixteen and he was twenty—so when they moved to Emajaguas, they had the whole house to themselves. Although Abuelo Alvaro was saddened by his aunts’ demise, he had been so spoiled that he thought it only natural that they should pass away. They were merely being considerate of his need for housing in his newly married state.

Abuelo remained a man of simple tastes; he was used to country life and mistrusted city ways. After he married Abuela Valeria, the only time he traveled to Europe was in 1920, and only because Valeria dragged him there by the hair. In Paris he moped around the whole time because at the Café Procope he couldn’t order ropa vieja—his beloved string beef stewed with onions—and tostones, the luscious crumbly plantains fried in oil. Abuela Valeria, on the other hand, loved to travel and took her children to Europe several times. She would spend a month in Paris, a month in Rome, or a month in Madrid, installing herself in the best hotels with her six children, a nanny, and her personal maid. She would go to the opera almost every night, as well as to concerts and museums, and would always insist that a trip to a foreign country was as valuable as a college degree.

Valeria was the youngest daughter of Bartolomeo Boffil, a Corsican merchant nicknamed Mano Negra, who had made a fortune at the end of the nineteenth century smuggling merchandise from Saint Thomas and Curaçao. Both these islands belonged to the Dutch at the time and had a long tradition of illegal trading. They were very prosperous commercial centers. There one could buy perfumes, shoes, fine linens and laces from France, and all sorts of farming tools. Machinery for the sugar haciendas was not manufactured on the island. It was smuggled in from England and Scotland.

Bartolomeo Boffil was a rough man with no education, but he was proud of his business and considered it in keeping with the rebellious nature of his ancestors. The word corsair comes from Corsican, he would tell his friends. If we Corsicans hadn’t managed to dodge the embargo the Spanish authorities smacked on the island for three hundred years, these people would be so poor they wouldn’t have shoes to put on their feet. Commerce with the rest of the world was banned by Spain, which wanted to benefit from it exclusively. The island had no choice but to depend for all its imports on Spanish ships coming in through San Juan.

Bartolomeo was born on Cap Corse, Corsica’s most inhospitable peninsula—a veritable tongue of rock where only billy goats prospered. He was a small, evil-tempered man who lived alone with his daughters Elvira and Valeria. His wife had died giving birth to his youngest daughter, and for that reason he was often cruel to Valeria, as if wanting her to pay for her mother’s untimely passing. He loved her dearly but couldn’t help thinking that if she hadn’t been born, his wife would still be alive and he wouldn’t be alone.

Bartolomeo’s farm was on the outskirts of Guayamés and he tended it himself. He grew ginger, tobacco, cotton, coconuts, and cacao, but his real profession was smuggling. His farm had several protected coves where fishing sloops came in from Saint Thomas and Curaçao and dropped anchor at night. A half dozen rowboats would silently skim over the waters and unload the crushing mills, iron winches, and centrifugal steel pumps for which the Puerto Rican sugar hacienda owners paid a handsome price.

Bartolomeo loved to go up into the mountains to hunt blackbirds with his dog, Botafogo. Blackbird pâté was his favorite dish; he was sure it had magical qualities and he made Valeria eat some every day. As in the story of the Chinese emperor who feeds his daughter nightingale tongues so that she will sing more sweetly, Bartolomeo was convinced that blackbird pâté would refine his daughter’s voice, as well as make her more delicate and beautiful. Valeria felt terribly sorry for the birds, but she was an obedient daughter and dutifully ate what her father served her.

She was brought up practically a prisoner, never permitted to go out of the house by herself to visit the neighbors and always accompanied by a chaperon. At home she was taught the arts of embroidery and music by a governess; she could sing in French, English, and Italian and play the piano beautifully, but she couldn’t read or write. Her father had forbidden the governess to teach her how, so when Valeria turned sixteen she was still illiterate. This way, Bartolomeo hoped, Valeria would have no alternative but to stay at home and take care of him in his old age.

Valeria sometimes went to Guayamés to visit her sister Antonia, who had married a man of means and lived in a beautiful house at the entrance to town. Bartolomeo had had no misgivings in letting Antonia leave; it meant one mouth less to feed. The youngest daughter was the one who was supposed to stay home and take care of the widowed father.

Abuelo Alvaro met Abuela Valeria during one of her visits to her sister. When he heard her sing and play the piano, Alvaro immediately fell in love and asked her to marry him. But she refused. I can’t get married, because I can’t read or write, she said tearfully. What will you do when I sign the marriage license in front of the judge with an X? You’ll be so ashamed of me you’ll change your mind.

Alvaro answered, laughing, That won’t make any difference to me at all. If you can cook as well as you can sing, everything will turn out all right. And that very afternoon they eloped, asking a judge in Guayamés to marry them.

Bartolomeo found out the next day. Rumor has it he ran to his son-in-law’s house and tried to batter down the door with the butt of his rifle. When Antonia and her husband refused to open it, he began to hurl insults at them, calling them scoundrels and panderers until he was so beside himself he suffered a heart attack and died. Clarissa didn’t believe the story at all, and she found out what really happened. Bartolomeo was caught in a shoot-out with the American coastal patrol, which kept a stricter eye on his coconut groves than the Spanish Guardia Civil. When Bartolomeo died, Valeria came into a third of his fortune, and her inheritance made it possible for Alvaro to consolidate his economic situation.

The first thing Valeria did when she could afford it was to have the schoolmaster from Guayamés’s public school come to her house and teach her to read and write. Soon she became a passionate reader. She practically devoured the best Latin American novels of her time, Jorge Isaac’s María; Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab; José Marmol’s Amalia. Sometimes she read them out loud at dinnertime for the family’s benefit. Alvaro, by contrast, didn’t care for literature at all; novels bored him, and he preferred books that dealt with life as it really was. After their wedding, Valeria refused to make love if he didn’t read at least one novel a week, and in this way she managed to educate him.

Guayamés is surrounded by lush green hills where the last of the Taíno Indians lived before they were wiped out by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Its houses spill into one another without order or logic, as if huddled together for protection. The streets are narrow and cleave to the uneven terrain like ribbons of red mud; many are named for the Taíno Indians: Calle Guajira, Calle Urayoán, Calle Guaquiminí. On top of a nearby hill, overlooking the town like a huge white fowl spreading its wings, sits the cathedral, one of the oldest buildings in Guayamés.

The climate is unusually humid and rain falls in pellets that melt before they reach the ground. The frequent rains, as well as the tranquil atmosphere, bring out the vivid colors of the landscape: the limpid blue of the sky, the soft moss-green of the hills, the hard beveled green of the sugarcane fields. Perhaps for this reason a romantic imagination, an acute aesthetic sensibility, and a deep love of nature are common among the inhabitants of Guayamés.

During the rainy season, the town was relatively safe from the storms that uprooted trees and left the hills strewn with gabled tin roofs that had whirled away from outlying houses like saws in the wind. December meant the family’s return to Emajaguas for the zafra—the Plata’s sugarcane harvest—and over the next six months the rains were sparse and the breezes cool. April brought scattered showers ("Las lluvías de abril caben en un barril, as Abuelo Alvaro used to say), May brought thunderstorms (Las lluvías de mayo se las bebe un caballo), and June, July, and August were dry as cane husks (Junio, julio, y agosto, marota seca para los cerdos").

The children began to arrive in quick succession, Clarissa in 1901, Siglinda in 1902, Artemisa in 1903, Alejandro in 1904, Dido in 1905, then Lakhmé in 1923, when Abuela Valeria was thirty-nine years old. Lakhmé was the baby of the family, and Abuela spoiled her because of it.

As the children were born and as Abuelo Alvaro prospered, he added several rooms to Emajaguas and modernized the kitchen and bathrooms. The children didn’t go to public school, as they did in Guayamés; they took lessons with a tutor, a skinny, bald rural teacher who drove from town every day in his horse and buggy. This meant they could spend the afternoons horseback riding or swimming in the river; they didn’t have to wear uniforms or even shoes. I suppose that’s why, when Mother talked to me about her childhood at Emajaguas, it was as if she remembered a lost paradise, a timeless place where days and nights chased each other merrily around on the tin sphere of the grandfather clock that stood against the dining room wall.

Emajaguas was built on stilts, and the living quarters were entirely on the second level. The first level was used as Abuelo Alvaro’s office and also served as a garage. Fresh straw rugs gave it a grassy country smell. All the windows were louvered and painted turquoise-blue, so that when one looked out, the waters of the Guayamés bay seemed to flow into the rooms. A wide granite stairway led from the front of the house to the palm-lined driveway, which descended to the main road bordering the seashore. At the back, a narrow balustered stairway painted white led from the kitchen to the garden and the fruit orchards.

A steep wall circled the ten-acre property, which included mango, soursop, and grapefruit trees, a tennis court, and a pond with goldfish. A half dozen geese patrolled the garden like a row of noisy midget soldiers. There was a well-stocked library (the pride of Abuela Valeria), a grand piano in the living room, a record player, and all kinds of table games for rainy days. There were so many things to do at Emajaguas that one rarely went into town. It was only a fifteen-minute walk to Guayamés following the road by the sea, but hardly anyone ever took it.

The house had two natural boundaries that separated it from the outside world: the Emajaguas River on the right (more a creek than a river except when the heavy rain turned it into a dragon’s tail of mud) and the public road. Four feet beyond the highway, the land fell away abruptly and the sea battered the rocks that had been placed there as a barrier. In spite of them, the waves ate away an inch or two of the highway’s foundation each year.

When my brother, Alvaro, and I were children and we used to visit Emajaguas with our parents, our car had to draw up as close to the cliff as possible in order to turn into the driveway. I was always afraid we would fall into the water, and I’d shut my eyes in terror. At night I had nightmares that the sea was creeping closer and closer and that one night it would reach up to grab Emajaguas by the roof and drag us down to its depths.

There were four bedrooms and three bathrooms in the house. One bedroom had been Abuelo Alvaro and Abuela Valeria’s and was connected to the bathroom by a narrow inner hallway that always smelled of Hamamelis water, an astringent made of witch hazel that Abuela Valeria dabbed on her face with cotton every night before going to bed. Everything was white in this bathroom, and it was so large that as a child I used to get the words bathroom and ballroom mixed up. There was a cast-iron tub with griffin’s feet, a shower with a halolike nozzle, and a cylinder with rings that sprayed at you from every direction when you stepped inside naked. The shower had American Standard star-shaped spigots of stainless steel. These must have been mixed up in the installation, being labeled (logically in Spanish, but incorrectly in English) C for hot water and H for cold. Abuela Valeria, who didn’t speak English, assumed that C was for caliente (hot) and H for helada (freezing), because in the States cold water was always ice-cold. A squat square tub, a baño de asiento, sat in the corner. It was ideal for reading, and it was there that Abuelo Alvaro devoured from María, Sab, and Amalia the morsels Valeria fed him to whet his appetite every night before making love.

Tío Alejandro’s bedroom was next door to my grandparents’, in the right wing of the house. It was spacious and had a four-poster canopied bed, its own private bathroom, and a bay window that opened onto the garden.

The other two bedrooms were in the left wing of the house. There my aunts and my mother had slept long ago. These rooms shared a bathroom, a small, low-ceilinged cabinet that Abuelo had built under one of the gables. Later, when the grandchildren came to visit at Christmas, they slept in this wing of the house. Since the bathroom could hold only one person at a time, there was often a cramped line of little boys and girls in front of the door nervously crossing and uncrossing their legs.

Almost every room at Emajaguas had its own skylight. Skylights were a way of saving money: one didn’t have to turn on a light except when it began to get dark. But they also gave the rooms a special atmosphere. There is a dreamlike quality to a room with a skylight; it eliminates the passing shadows of the world outside, the swish of headlights on the road, the streetlights coming on at dusk. A room with a skylight gives one a sense of security. Nothing bad can happen there; there’s no reason to be afraid of what the future might bring.

The skylights of Emajaguas were always located in strategic places: over the dining room table, for example, or above the bathtub, where sunlight fell directly on the naked body. At the Sacred Heart in La Concordia the nuns taught us that looking at yourself in the mirror without clothes on was a cardinal sin. Girls were supposed to be ignorant of their bodies—the little bushes of hair beginning to sprout in unexpected nooks, the bulbs pushing out in flat places, and all kinds of fluids beginning to run—and modesty was an important part of being a decent person. Thanks to Emajaguas I always laughed at all that. I loved to stand in the bathtub under the skylight without a stitch on. By the time I turned twelve I knew my body’s secret places by heart: a nest of downy fleece growing here, a delicate pink halo appearing there. I grew up liking the way the creamy curve of my breast melted into my belly and, when I bent my elbow, how the hidden part of my underarm resembled a freshly baked loaf of bread. At Emajaguas I could caress and touch myself at will. Exposed to the light of day, my body was innocent and had a life of its own; shame and sin meant nothing to me.

I was thirteen when I discovered the answer to the age-old enigma of how we arrive in this world. One morning at recess one of my girlfriends, María Concepción, came over excitedly to where I was sitting with a group of other students. She said she wanted to tell us a secret, so we rallied around her in the school yard, as far as possible from the vigilanta, the lookout sister. I found out where babies really come from! María Concepción said. They don’t come from Paris on the wings of Jesusito at all, like the nuns say! Then she proceeded to describe the biological process of copulation and birth, leaving out none of the details. A naked man and a naked woman in bed, kissing and caressing, the man putting his penis into the woman’s third hole. (Was there a third hole? I wasn’t aware there was one until then. It’s between the ass hole and the piss hole, you nitwit! María Concepción whispered, pinching my arm.) And that was the hole the baby came out of nine months later. I was shocked.

It was Friday and that afternoon we left for Emajaguas, where we would spend the weekend. As soon as we arrived, I went to Mother’s room to ask if what María Concepción had said was true. Mother was taking a shower, and I knocked on the bathroom door. She didn’t turn off the water but over the shower’s din asked me what I wanted. I opened the door a crack and poked my head in. I could see Mother’s shadow: she was standing naked behind the shower curtain—the skylight a rectangle of light above her head—and steam was coming out from the top.

Mother, is it true that babies are born only after a man puts his penis inside a woman and pisses on her, and nine months later the baby comes out a third hole that only women have? I shouted. A silence followed, during which the shower’s din became a roar. Yes, it’s true, Mother answered. And please close the bathroom door, because I’m getting a draft.

A few months later I got my first period, and I went back to Mother’s room. I showed her my panties and she didn’t say a word. She went to the closet and took out a box of Kotex and a little pink elastic belt. Here, put one of these on. And don’t change it unless you have to, so you make the box last. That was the last time she ever talked to me about sex or babies.

There was only one room in Emajaguas that didn’t have a skylight: the toilet. One relieved oneself in total darkness, hidden from the eyes of the world as well as from one’s own. Shitting and pissing had to be performed in secret, so as not to offend the aesthetic sensibilities that prevailed in the Rivas de Santillana family.

THREE

The Sugar Sultan

ABUELO ALVARO WAS TALL and very good-looking. He reminded you of a Moorish sheikh, with his love for paso fino horses, his well-tended cane fields, and his house that resembled a harem with Abuela Valeria, Clarissa, and my four aunts all bustling about like partridges. The female sex also prevailed in the