Eccentric Neighborhood Read Free

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