Flight of the Swan (17 page)

One afternoon, Madame and I decided to walk to town with Ronda instead of waiting for Diamantino to drive us there. We strode down the road, enjoying the sunshine and the sweet breeze which combed the cane fields. Oro and Plata ran beside us. “In Philadelphia once I got to see Isadora Duncan dance barefoot,” Ronda said. “I liked her very much,” she added candidly. “Why don’t you dance barefoot, Madame, instead of with your feet bound like Chinese women? It would make you much closer to nature.” And when Madame laughed and insisted she was wrong, that classical ballet made the liberation of the spirit possible precisely by disciplining the body, the girl answered: “Isadora’s art is far more advanced than yours.”

“That may be so, my dear,” I retorted in defense of Madame. “But
I’d
like to see Madame dancing barefoot and au naturel if she began drinking vodka with her caviar in the company of poets with golden locks and baby blue eyes, like Isadora did with Essenin, her Russian Ganymede.”

That exchange was worthy of the trenches of Verdun, and I felt proud of myself. But when Madame heard what I said, she turned and stared back at me accusingly. “How about the pot calling the kettle black?” she shot at me. And I knew then she had caught me making love with Juan, who was ten years older than I was, on the verandah’s hammock.

Doña Basilisa wanted to have a picnic on the beach for Ronda. She asked us to help out, and we carried everything we needed down to the seashore: towels, canvas chairs, umbrellas, tablecloths, napkins, paper plates, and cups. Adelina brought out steaming cauldrons full of delicious food that Doña Basilisa had prepared: rice and guinea hen, roasted pork,
pasteles
,
hayacas
, rabbit fricassee, and we all went merrily over to the nearest palm grove looking for shade. Diamantino was wearing an oil-black bathing suit which fit him like a glove. It was the first time I had seen him partly without his clothes on, and I must admit I felt jealous. He was very attractive; under the circumstances, Madame’s folly seemed more understandable.

Don Pedro had picked out a special wine from his wine cellar—a golden amontillado which we cooled at the water’s edge, inside a lobster trap. The day was clear as a glass bell, as they often are in December on the island. I was feeling happy and looking forward to the outing when I saw Diamantino and Madame kissing shamelessly in public, a bit further down the beach. They were leaning into the wind and Madame’s clothes were billowing around them; they looked like a pair of sloops sailing full gale.

Food was the only magic raft I could hold on to so as not to sink in an ocean of sorrow. My appetite has always been my impending nemesis, and I’ve finally succumbed to it in my old age. Now I’m fat and have stopped worrying about my weight, but when I was young I used to remind myself: “A minute on the tongue, a lifetime on the hip, Masha,” trying to resist temptation. Doña Basilisa was an expert temptress, and the day of the picnic I ate everything in sight. It was the most effective way to combat depression.

Doña Basilisa had invited several of her friends from the War Relief Association: twenty ladies, all of them as plump as she was, with flanlike double chins and pink elephant legs and arms, all wearing white uniforms with red crosses sewn on their caps. After lunch they planned to cross the canal, Caño Tiburones, in a towed barge and visit Piñales, a hamlet with several poor neighborhoods. They meant to make speeches to the people there, asking for Red Cross donations and instructing the children as well as the adults on how to plant manioc roots and breadfruit and plantain trees, fast-growing staples which traveled well. They would pick up the produce themselves in a few months in several wagons, they said, to ship them to the soldiers overseas.

It was obvious Doña Basilisa had her heart set on making a good match for her daughter: Diamantino was just the right age for the girl, and he was from an excellent family. With time he would inherit part of Don Pedro’s fortune and maybe go into politics, as Don Pedro wanted him to. “Things have to happen naturally,” Doña Basilisa told me with a wink that afternoon, when she asked Ronda to spread the gay, red-checked tablecloth on the sand with Diamantino’s help. “They can’t be forced.” But it was obvious where Diamantino’s interest lay, and he only treated Ronda like a good friend.

I had to wheedle and plead, but I finally convinced our dancers to come to the party. They arrived a little later with Molinari. Juan was at the beach also, and was helping me carry the cauldrons of food to a shaded spot under a sea-grape shrub when we saw them. Molinari brought with him two bottles of rum and he said hello as if nothing had happened. Juan and I did the same. Where was he staying? He wasn’t at the hotel, and he certainly wasn’t at Dos Ríos; he had disappeared for three or four days. Neither of us dared question him about his little night visit, however, and we decided to wait until we could corner him alone.

The servants passed the rice and guinea hen around and we all began to eat and drink. Our girls wouldn’t join the rest of the company; they kept to themselves in a little group, grumbling and complaining about the heat, the sun, the mosquitoes—whatever they could think of to spoil Madame’s happiness. I walked over to them and heard them discussing how much money they would need from the sale of the tickets to go back to San Juan after the first few performances. Madame pretended she didn’t hear, and went on sitting next to Diamantino and sipping white wine under a large-leafed almond tree to keep out of the sun. Doña Basilisa and her Arecibo friends sat at a long wooden trestle table the servants had set up under the palm trees, shaded by large black umbrellas.

After lunch, Doña Basilisa called out to the boatman to ferry her over to Piñales. The girls all dove into the shallow waves and were cooling off in water up to their chests when I saw them whispering among themselves. A mischievous gleam had appeared in Nadja’s eyes. She was the most talented of the dancers, and since Madame and I were staying at Dos Ríos she had become the leader of the pack. Doña Basilisa and her friends were standing placidly on the barge, letting themselves be rowed to the other side of the canal, when the girls began to wade determinedly toward them. Madame, Diamantino, and I stood on the shore, wondering what was going on.

Nadja, Katia, Maya, and Egorova, together with Ronda, who now joined them and was laughing hysterically, pulled themselves up on the barge and sat on it until it began to sink. The fisherman who was shoving it with a long pole across the canal began to shout for them to get off, and we ran forward to try to help him. But the girls wouldn’t budge. Doña Basilisa and her twenty plump, powdered friends slowly sank to the bottom of the canal like so many waterlogged pink elephants. Fortunately, the canal was shallow at that point and the water only came to their waists. Their snow-white Red Cross uniforms ruined, they had to give up their plans to collect money from the poor and to teach the starving people of Piñales how to plant manioc root and plantain to feed the soldiers overseas.

I wondered if the girls had had too much to drink in the heat, or whether they were following someone’s orders. I remembered seeing the servants passing around jiggers of Molinari’s rum with tall glasses of lemonade, which the girls drank avidly. Fear filled my heart. The devil was punishing us for our sins, stirring the pot with his tail.

D
ONA BASILISA WASN’T ANGRY
at what had happened; she took the whole thing in stride. “You wanted to teach us how to swim, isn’t that so, dear?” she asked Ronda and the dancers as she came out of the water, laughing good-naturedly and dripping from head to toe. Her friends from town didn’t laugh, however, and they all angrily left the party, heading toward the house to dry themselves before driving back home. Suddenly I felt sorry for Doña Basilisa; she was all sweetness but she had no core, a chubby, gray-haired little girl everybody made fun of. To prove that she didn’t hold anything against Ronda and the dancers, she invited us all to dinner at the house that evening. But Nadja, Katia, and Maya began bickering among themselves about who was going to dance the leading role in the chorus. Madame had to intervene and ordered them all back to town with Smallens and Novikov. Molinari went with them; he said he had something important to do in town. Madame said she would stay on at Dos Ríos with me.

That evening Bienvenido, Don Pedro’s godson, was invited for dinner, and as he arrived early I welcomed him into the house, making small talk while everyone finished dressing. Doña Basilisa was in the kitchen giving the last touches to her suckling pig basted in Madeira wine. My mistress was taking a long bath. I needed a respite from so much tension and we sat out on the balcony admiring the star-studded sky.

I had heard a lot about Bienvenido and his family from Adelina, Doña Basilisa’s maid, the day before, when we were making the beds and scrubbing the bathtubs. Arnaldo Pérez, Bienvenido’s father, was a very competent mulatto who ran Dos Ríos when the Batistinis were away at the capital. Both he and his son came to dine often at the house—Don Pedro prided himself on the fact that his dark-skinned overseer sat next to him at his table. Aralia Pérez, Bienvenido’s mother, had passed away several years earlier, but his father had done a fine job bringing up Bienvenido by himself.

Adelina knew how many lovers Don Pedro had had in town and how many illegitimate children—in spite of his religious devotion. None was so beloved as Bienvenido Pérez, however. The boy was not only his godson, but his own flesh and blood. Although few people knew the secret, on the day of his christening Aralia had insisted that he be named Bienvenido B. Pérez. Tongues wagged that the mysterious middle “B” stood for “Batistini.” The mother used to come to the house to take up the hems of Doña Basilisa’s dresses, alter gowns, and turn the collars of Don Pedro’s shirts around when they became frayed. In spite of her humble origins—Aralia came from a family of poor farmers on the mountain—she was beautiful, with very white skin and eyes the color of mint. One day, when Doña Basilisa was away in Ponce visiting her family, Don Pedro raped Aralia. Adelina saw what happened and took care of the girl, seeing she got back to her family. When Aralia gave birth to the child and brought him to the house to show him to Doña Basilisa, Doña Basilisa had immediately recognized that he was Don Pedro’s because of his hair, which was red and curly, exactly like her husband’s. That was the reason Don Pedro worried so much about the boy and had given him the opportunity to study engineering at the university.

Bienvenido and Diamantino were practically like brothers. When Don Pedro and his family came to Dos Ríos to spend the summer months, Don Eduardo sent Diamantino with his godfather, to get him away from the city. Bienvenido, as the overseer’s son, was treated with a lot of respect. It was not a calculated thing; people were simply incapable of forgetting—even for an instant—that he belonged to both worlds, that of the owners and that of the peons. Even as a teenager Bienvenido tried to help the workers receive just treatment. Whenever he saw one of them maligned—if a worker’s pay was withheld because of illness, for example—he would stomp over to the overseer’s office, his red hair flaming like an angry banner, and demand from his father, Arnaldo Pérez, that the wrong be redressed. Diamantino was very conscious of this and admired Bienvenido, although he considered himself his superior.

At the farm, the food was always fresher and more plentiful, and there were few of the epidemics which periodically decimated the population in the capital. When Madame visited Dos Ríos, however, relations between Bienvenido and Diamantino were not what they had been in the past. The previous summer, when Ronda had just turned fifteen, Adelina had caught sight of Bienvenido and the girl kissing in the orchid grove as she leaned out the kitchen window behind the house to scrub some pots and pans.

“If you don’t watch out, your Ronda will be spirited away from you faster than a silver spoon from a rich man’s table!” she told Doña Basilisa.

“What are you ranting about, Adelina? You’re always gossiping and knitting cobwebs, as if you had nothing to do. That’s what I get for having kept you with us until you’re too old to do any real work.” But Adelina pulled Doña Basilisa to the window and pointed at the couple embracing in the orchid grove. Doña Basilisa dropped the pillowcase she was embroidering and let out a horrified cry.

“Oh, my God! It can’t be. I must be seeing things.”

“I told you so,” Adelina exulted. “That’s Don Pedro’s own flesh and blood down there, multiplied by two!”

Basilisa didn’t know what to do. She was certain that Aralia’s son was her husband’s, and she had done the seamstress and her child many good turns. But Aralia hadn’t explained anything to her son.

Doña Basilisa was panic-stricken at the possibility of brother and sister falling in love, but she couldn’t show it. She had to keep the secret for Ronda’s sake, or the girl would despise her father. Doña Basilisa told Ronda in no uncertain terms that she shouldn’t get too close to boys like Bienvenido, because even though Bienvenido was sweet and a fine boy, he wasn’t of their same social standing, and in life one did many stupid things, but the stupidest thing one could do was marry beneath one’s station. Doña Basilisa didn’t want to go beyond that, because she knew that Ronda was headstrong and that if she was too strict and forbade Bienvenido’s presence at the house, her prohibition would backfire. Teenagers breathed counterclockwise, and what they most wanted to do in the world was exactly the opposite of what their parents told them. So Doña Basilisa had been nonchalant about Bienvenido, had counseled Ronda as if she weren’t too worried about him, and had given a deep sigh of relief when, at the end of the summer, the red-headed young man got on the train and left for the university in Río Piedras and Ronda went off to Lady Lane School in Massachusetts.

Doña Basilisa had also tried to exert her influence on Bienvenido, but here the maneuver was more complicated. Since Aralia had passed away when the boy was twelve, there was no one to caution him regarding his kinship with Ronda. Doña Basilisa thought about it and decided to ask Diamantino to warn Bienvenido. He should suggest, with as much tact as possible, that Bienvenido leave Ronda alone. The boys were very close and Ronda was still very young; Doña Basilisa hoped it was just a case of puppy love.