House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré Page A

hiding place. Around two in the morning, when Isabel was sound asleep, Quintín got up quietly from bed, returned to the study, and took the folder from the back of the shelf. He sat in front of Rebecca’s ornate desk and began to read with intense concentration. The manuscript had no title, but the first page read: “Part One: The Foundations.” There was also “Part Two: The First House on the Lagoon”—eight chapters in all.
    Quintín remembered saying to Isabel long ago that it would be an interesting project to write down the story of both the Mendizabal and the Monfort families. They had been so young, so idealistic! He didn’t want Isabel to be just another bourgeois housewife; he wanted her to amount to something, so he could be proud of her. Isabel wanted to be a writer, and being a historian himself — he had a master’s degree in history from Columbia University, although life had forced him to travel a different road — he thought they could embark on the project together.
    History is one of fictions most important quarries, he had told her, imagination being the other important source. He was at her disposal with whatever historical information she needed to write her autobiographical novel. He could help her with the research, he said, and leave the literary part to her. But Isabel had let the matter drop; after writing a few chapters, she hadn’t done any more.
    Some of the pages were yellowed; others looked relatively fresh, as if they had been typed recently. Quintín had thought it curious that since they came back from Manuel’s graduation at Boston University, Isabel had been asking him so many questions about the Mendizabal family history. He had answered as well as he could and had seen her take some notes, but he hadn’t given the matter much thought.
    As he read on, Quintín began to feel uncomfortable. The manuscript was an authentic effort at writing fiction; Isabel definitely intended it as a novel. But she had made up incredible things about his family and left out much of what had really happened.
    “The Pizarro Mendizabals had always been successful merchants before they turned into soldiers,” she said in the chapter “The Merchant Prince,” and it was from Don Francisco Pizarro that they inherited their uncouth heraldry: a warlord beheading a hog with his short sword. What a way to turn things around, Quintín thought. The Mendizabal coat of arms had a chevalier hunting a wild boar, not beheading a hog. In the Middle Ages the Spanish nobility used to hunt to keep in good shape while they awaited the moment when they would wage war against the Moor, and this was what Quintín’s great-great-grandfather had done. But Isabel had altered everything. She was manipulating history for fiction’s sake, and what was worse, she was putting words into his mouth as if the false information had come from him.
    Quintín was dumbstruck. How could Isabel write such things about his parents? At first he was angry, but then he began to see the humor of it. If she’s been writing this all along, he told himself, Isabel must hold the record for wives who have shared the same bed with their husbands for years and still have managed to keep secrets from them!
    Some of the allegations Isabel made were truly shocking. She accused Buenaventura of being a German sympathizer during the First World War, then implied that his mother had been secretly in love with Milan Pavel, the Czech architect. Her description of Rebecca taking a stroll with Pavel by Alamares Lagoon beneath her lace parasol as she talked him into building them the house, and the scene of the kiss in the spring’s shed, would have been romantic if it weren’t so preposterous, almost as preposterous as Rebecca dancing naked on the terrace for her artist friends — something he never witnessed. What Isabel had written was absurd; it was impossible to take seriously.
    “Writing lies means writing lies,” he had once heard a famous