Eccentric Neighborhood Read Free Page A

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