House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré

crew, and had Pavel’s house razed to the ground. In twenty-four hours the Tiffany-glass windows and pearl-shell skylights were shattered to pieces, and Rebecca’s mosaic rainbow was ground to bits. In place of the old house, Buenaventura built a Spanish Revival mansion with granite turrets, bare brick floors, and a forbidding granite stairway with a banister made of iron spears. From the ceiling in the entrance hall he hung his pièce de résistance, a spiked wooden wheel that had been used to torture the Moors during the Spanish Conquest, which he ordered made into a lamp. The construction went quickly, and the family was able to move into the new house in less than a year.
    “I want us to have more children, and they must grow up strong and healthy,” Buenaventura announced to Rebecca once they had moved in. “From now on, everyone in this house will get up at daybreak, take a cold shower before going to Mass, and work for his keep.” Rebecca laughed to herself. It had taken her eleven years to get pregnant with Quintín, and she doubted very much that she would have any more children. But Petra began to give her brews to drink, and they were very effective. She soon found that she was pregnant again, and was surprisingly submissive.
    Quintín loved going with his mother early in the morning to the chapel on the other side of Water Bridge, at the entrance to the lagoon. It was one of the few buildings Pavel had built that were still standing. Buenaventura never went with them: he liked to open the heavy, iron-studded doors of his warehouse at La Puntilla himself and was usually at his desk at seven, when his employees arrived. Quintín was only eight but he remembered this time of his life clearly. He was happy: the other children hadn’t been born yet and he didn’t have to share his mother with them. Mass was the one time of day when he was alone with Rebecca. He would walk with her down Ponce de León Avenue holding hands, and together they’d jump over the rain puddles from the night before.
    At that early hour the lagoon was shrouded in mist and the vessels coming into San Juan seemed to float in the distance like ghost ships. As they entered San Juan Bay, their wailing horns reverberated through the windows and woke people up, just as they do today. The haze seemed to seep through everything, giving the lagoon a fantastic air. The royal palms that grew around the lagoon’s edge were plumed mermaids standing on their tails; the black boulders the Spaniards had dropped at the entrance to the bay to keep pirate ships away were fierce dogs baring their fangs at the enemy. Everything seemed possible to Quintín at that hour: Buenaventura might go back to Spain to fight alongside his Fascist friends, and then Rebecca would belong only to him.
    The only section of Pavel’s house Buenaventura didn’t order destroyed was the terrace. The contractor said it might weaken the foundations of the new house, so the terrace was left standing and was made part of the Spanish Revival mansion. Ignacio was born in 1938, a year after they had moved into the new house. Patria and Libertad followed soon after, in 1939 and 1940, respectively. Rebecca bore her frequent pregnancies patiently, seemingly reconciled to her fate. But she was exhausted. She put away her dancing shoes and her poetry books and slowly faded from view.

QUINTÍN
    O NE SATURDAY AFTERNOON QUINTÍN made a disconcerting discovery. He was in the study reading Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Romans when he needed to look up a word in Latin. He went to the bookcase to take out the Latin dictionary, a two-volume affair bound in red leather, and he came upon a manuscript hidden behind it, in a tan folder tied with a purple ribbon. He read the first few pages quickly, then sat down in amazement on the study’s green leather couch. He knew he didn’t have time to examine all the manuscript before Isabel came back from the market, so he put it back carefully in its