House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré Page B

author say. And yet that wasn’t always so. Many writers had a rich imagination; they could make everything up from scratch without having to resort to personal experience. Isabel simply hadn’t learned to apply Turgenev’s advice: an author must cut the umbilical cord that binds him to his story.
    On the other hand, all writers interpreted reality in their own way — and that was why Quintín preferred history to literature; literature wasn’t ethical enough for him. There were limits to interpretation, even if the borders of reality were diffuse and malleable. There was always a nucleus of truth, and it was wrong to alter it. That was why Quintín didn’t consider writing a serious occupation, like science or history.
    Isabel’s lack of professionalism bothered him even more than her fantastic fabrications. She was a truant, a brain picker, an intellectual pickpocket! She had unscrupulously plagiarized the historic material he had given her — she could never have written the chapters w ithout his help — and yet she never acknowledged it. Not only had he confided to her with naïve sincerity the story of his family; he had given her all the historical background she needed.
    She owed him the picturesque story of how Rebecca had met his father when she was sixteen, for example, and of how she chose him to be King when she was Queen of the Antilles. She also owed him Milan Pavel’s story; Isabel could never have found out about the Czech architect on her own. Quintín had been an admirer of the man and had collected information about him for years. No books about Pavel had been published, and Quintín had come by his material through interviews with the owners of Pavel’s few houses that were still standing. The owners of these houses were all friends of his family. Would they have talked to Isabel Monfort about Pavel? Would they have bared their family secrets to her? He didn’t think so. She wasn’t a Mendizabal by birth; she belonged to San Juan’s bourgeoisie by marriage, and people tended to be clannish.
    Not content with her plundering, Isabel had blatantly altered Pavel’s story. Her description of the famous architect as a Bohemian Count Dracula who went about the city with his black silk cape fluttering in the wind was ludicrous. True, Pavel was a scoundrel, but he was a refined scoundrel. Quintín had seen photographs of him wearing starched white linen pants and white suede shoes. Isabel had also suggested that Milan had returned Rebecca’s favors, and had become infatuated with her himself, building the house on the lagoon to please her. The whole story was a sham and yet perhaps there was a seed of truth to it. Perhaps Rebecca would have been happier married to someone like Pavel.
    Isabel had made some inexcusable mistakes. Some of them were silly; for example, pretending there were hot-dog stands in 1917, and that Buenaventura had eaten a hot dog on the day he arrived in San Juan. Quintín laughed again. No one knew for sure when hot dogs had arrived on the island, but he doubted it was before the Second World War.
    A more serious error was saying that Puerto Rico’s siege by German submarines had taken place during the Great War, when actually it had happened during the Second World War. Von Tirpitz’s plan for an invasion remained a dream, an insubstantial report in the archives of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It wasn’t until 1942 that Nazi submarines roamed Caribbean waters. But Isabel needed to invent the siege of Puerto Rico in 1918; the German submarine blockade was important for her development of Buenaventura’s supposedly Fascist sympathies. She had consciously altered the facts of history to serve her story.
    Quintín didn’t feel guilty about reading the manuscript; he felt he was doing the right thing. He was discovering something important about Isabel and was examining his family’s history in a way he’d never done before. It was true, Rebecca had sometimes been unhappy in her