Free House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré Page B

Rolls-Royce arrived in front of the house and he walked up the stairs with several of his friends. When he saw Rebecca, he didn’t say a word. He simply took off his cordovan belt, livid with rage, and flogged her until she fell unconscious to the floor.
    Quintín was seven years old. He got out of bed when he heard music, and he wandered out into the living room, which opened onto the terrace. It was dark, but he saw everything. His mother’s naked body remained etched in his mind all his life. When Quintín told me this story on the veranda of the house on Aurora Street many years later, his voice shook with emotion. Rebecca’s dance had been a strange ceremony; her purple veils fell to the floor one by one, until a single streak of gauze covered her golden pubis. Quintín was both fascinated and terrified by what he saw.
    It took Rebecca several weeks to recover. When she was finally able to get up from bed and join the family at dinner, she hardly dared look at her husband. She sat there like a broken doll, dressed in one of her flowing gauze gowns, and wouldn’t say a word. Quintín didn’t look at her; when he kissed her good night he had to close his eyes, because he was scared to see her bruises up close. Buenaventura was convinced Pavel was to blame for the whole situation. “It’s all his fault she behaved so shockingly,” he would grumble when he saw Rebecca so silent and withdrawn. “If she hadn’t known him, she wouldn’t have lost touch with reality. I had to give her a lesson to make her come down to earth.”
    When Buenaventura got together with his cronies at the Spanish Casino’s bar, he would say to them over sherry and aperitifs: “Pavel may be dead and gone, but his house is still breeding fantasies around us like Anopheles mosquitoes. If Rebecca goes mad, it will be his fault; everyone knows his buildings are jinxed and the owners end up in an asylum. But I’m not going to let that happen to us. My aunts brought me up in Valdeverdeja to be a hardworking squire, even if that meant learning how to turn hogs into hams and knead bread out of stones.”
    Buenaventura was worried for other reasons, too. The Spanish Civil War had broken out in July of 1936. Sales were slow. Merchandise from Spain—the wines, olives, and white asparagus which made up a good part of Mendizabal’s staples—began to grow scarce. Moreover, he had many friends among General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces, who had invaded Spain from Morocco and were fighting to overthrow the Republic. He had heard that many of the artists in Spain were sympathetic to the Republic: Picasso, Pablo Casals, the poet García Lorca, and he vilified them every time he had the chance. He was convinced that Rebecca’s artist friends were socialists and perhaps even Communists. It didn’t matter that Rebecca repeatedly pointed out that her friends were the sons and daughters of some of the richest families on the island. Buenaventura still saw them as dangerous, because now all art to him was dangerous.
    One day he came home for lunch, and as he sat with Rebecca at the table in Pavel’s beautiful dining room, he looked around reproachfully. “We need to get rid of all this useless bric-a-brac,” he said loudly, taking in at a single gesture the stained-glass lamp hanging from the ceiling, the lotus water goblets on the table, and the silver wine cooler on the buffet. “Tear it all down and let fresh air and sunlight into these rooms. This house is too dark, and only vermin like to breed in twilight.” When the servants brought him a tray of partridges stuffed with French plums, he refused to eat them. He ordered Petra to go back to his aunts’ hearty recipes, like pig’s feet stewed with chickpeas, or white-bean fabadas with stewed chorizos, which made one think straight and not lose one’s bearings.
    A few days later Buenaventura made his threats come true. He moved Rebecca and Quintín to a hotel, called in a demolition