Free House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré Page A

wasn’t worth anything, but she meant one day to have Buenaventura’s heart.
    Petra settled herself in the cellar, where she built an altar to Elegguá, her favorite saint, behind the door of her room. Elegguá was so powerful he was known among blacks on the island as “He who is more than God.” He was a strange idol—I saw him many times when I went down to the cellar of the house on the lagoon. He looked like a peeled coconut; with a coconut’s dark brown skin, two knobs in place of eyes, and a small stem at the top of the head, which Petra rubbed with her finger whenever she asked him to do something for her. An unsmoked cigar, a red ball, and a large conch shell were always on the floor next to him. The tobacco and the red ball were to please Elegguá—he was a man and he liked to smoke cigars, but he was also a little boy and liked to play with toys. The conch shell was to speak with the dead. Through it Petra spoke with her ancestors, and it was from them she gleaned her medicinal wisdom.
    Rebecca assigned the bulk of the household chores to Petra—the cooking, cleaning, and laundering. When Quintín was born, Petra served as midwife. When the birth pains commenced, Rebecca panicked. She was twenty-seven and was sure she was going to die in labor. She lay in bed screaming, “I can’t do it! I can’t! The baby’s head is too large, it will never come out!” Petra went to her room and rubbed Elegguá’s head. Then she went back upstairs, knelt by Rebecca’s bed, and gently massaged her belly with coconut oil for the next twenty-four hours, repeating the words “Olorún, ka kó koi bé!” until the baby found its way out of Rebecca’s womb.
    Quintín was born in November of 1928. He was born before Rebecca’s pregnancy reached full-term—he was an eight-month baby—and as she managed to hide her swollen abdomen under layers of silk gauze, his birth went almost unnoticed. Petra brought her niece Eulodia—her first relative to come to the house on the lagoon from the slum across the mangrove swamp—to take care of the baby and be its wet nurse. Most of the time Quintín’s crib stayed in the kitchen, which was in the cellar. Quintín got used to playing on the cool earthen floor of the servants’ quarters.
    Two weeks after his birth, Rebecca went back to her artist friends, without even spending half of the forty days devoted to San Gerardo in bed. She was soon totally involved in her dancing and other creative pursuits and for the next seven years led an intense artistic life.
    Rebecca liked to dance for her friends on Pavel’s golden terrace. One day one of her friends brought a copy of Salomé, Oscar Wilde’s drama, to the literary salon. They read it aloud and found it extraordinary, and one of them translated it into Spanish. Then they decided to act it out on the terrace one evening. It was a risky decision. Buenaventura would be having guests of his own that night, and they might stop by. But Rebecca was adamant. She was determined to be true to her artistic vocation, as she had promised Pavel, and announced that she would play Salomé herself, and do the Dance of the Seven Veils.
    She visited a famous couturier, who designed a beautiful costume for her, and she went to see a local coppersmith, who took her measurements and made her a special bustier. Two golden goblets would cover her breasts, which she would remove at the end of the performance and use to pour water from the lagoon on St. John the Baptist’s severed head—a wooden sculpture an art collector had agreed to lend them. It was supposed to be a literary joke as well as a statement, a kind of local baptism of San Juan’s revered patron saint by the members of the salon.
    The day of the performance, everything went according to plan. When the moment arrived, Rebecca appeared onstage and began her dance. She took off each of her seven veils and was almost stark naked, except for the golden goblets, when Buenaventura’s