Flight of the Swan by Rosario Ferré Page B

the elderly Don Pedro and his wife an endless source of entertainment. They were both getting on in years, and growing lonely. But most of all, they had suffered a tragedy they were trying to forget: Don Pedro and Doña Basilisa had had a daughter, Ronda, and an only son, Adalberto, who was twenty-two, two years older than Diamantino is now. He had become infatuated with a young Spanish diva who had visited the island some years before. When the singer left the island, Adalberto was devastated and disappeared.
    “No one knew where he’d gone, but the neighbors gossiped. Some swore he’d stolen his father’s gold pocket watch, and that with the money he had sailed to New York, where Angelina had gone with her father to perform. Others were sure he had committed suicide and that, because Don Pedro was so religious, he had kept the boy’s death a secret to avoid a scandal: Catholics believe suicides go straight to hell. Don Pedro was furious and forbade his son’s name to ever be mentioned again in his presence. ‘You must erase him from your mind,’ he ordered his daughter, Ronda, and his wife, Doña Basilisa. ‘Forget we ever had a son.’ This, for Doña Basilisa, was of course impossible. She could just as well forget her son as she could banish the sun from her eyes or the darkness from her heart. But she loved Don Pedro and tried her best to obey him. The story of what had happened was veiled in mystery and all their friends were told the young man had gone away on a trip. Eventually people forgot all about him.
    “Don Eduardo’s presence in Don Pedro’s house proved to be an amusement which kept the couple’s mind away from this tragedy, and it also gave them the opportunity to exercise their largesse. The house became a mecca for the island’s intellectuals, the artists and writers who were always visiting. When Don Eduardo took a turn for the worse, politicians with the most controversial views came to stand, head bowed and hat in hand, next to the great man’s bed, which was moved from the second-floor guest room to the front living room of Don Pedro’s house.
    “Those difficult days were not without their light moments, however. Don Eduardo, no matter how much he begged, wouldn’t allow Don Pedro to hang over his bed a silver crucifix he had brought from Jerusalem during one of his travels. It was said to possess miraculous qualities because it contained, in the round crystal locket embedded at its center, wooden fragments from Christ’s cross.
    “‘Let the priest apply the Sacrament of Extreme Unction to you, my friend. These splinters from the Holy Cross may still cure you, and protect you from pain,’ Don Pedro would say.
    “‘Take away those rats nibbling, my friend,’ Don Eduardo would reply. ‘It’s better to meet death in Spanish and face to face than mumbling spells in Latin no one can understand.’
    “Diamantino, in spite of his grief, had the opportunity to mingle with the island’s most gifted poets and musicians thanks to his father’s illness. They all came to pay their respects at Don Pedro’s house. He heard them play the piano and read from their works, and he took part in the heady political discussions that were held on Don Pedro’s ample terrace overlooking the lagoon. Diamantino was a poet himself, and read voraciously—literature, history, and sociology. Over and over he listened to his father explain, in the slow, measured terms which befitted his aristocratic mien, the need to fight for the island’s independence (autonomy he called it, so as not to seem too radical to the Americans, who immediately grew alarmed at the word) through a law-abiding, parliamentary process, and not through violent means.
    “‘Our countrymen are a peaceful people,’ Don Eduardo would say. ‘Fighting for self-determination with guns would go against our nature. We’ll gain freedom with a clear conscience by democratic means.’ Diamantino would sit, head bowed, listening. He