Free Eccentric Neighborhood by Rosario Ferré

station, where he was pronounced unbalanced.
    Don Esteban was consigned to an institution at Aulnay-sous-Bois, an asylum run by Carmelite nuns. For a week he lay in bed as if he were dead. The nuns held his head up and fed him little spoonfuls of broth and recited the Rosary by his side. One morning he got up at daybreak and looked out the window of his cell. A wonderful peace emanated from the cloister, from the fishpond in the middle of the vegetable garden, from the gnarled olive trees planted around it. He listened to the nuns singing matins, their voices echoing like distant bells from the chapel. He recovered gradually and began to go to Mass every morning. He had never been devout, but his granddaughter’s death had changed him.
    When he felt strong enough, he returned to Guayamés. The Carmelite nuns had an old, dilapidated convent on top of a hill there, and Don Esteban began to visit them. The nuns did a lot of humanitarian work. They had a hospitalillo , a dispensary where they gave out food and dressed the sores of the needy. They usually had six or seven people in a special wing of the convent where they cared for the terminally ill.
    Don Esteban donated money to have the convent’s facilities restored. One Sunday he brought the nuns a case full of good things to eat: a canned Danish ham, a roast beef, a smoked salmon, which he knew they couldn’t afford. He was sitting in the portería waiting for the nuns to open the door—no men were allowed into the convent except for its benefactor—when the Rivas de Santillanas’ black Packard arrived at the convent’s door and Tía Artemisa stepped out. She was bringing the nuns a basket of fresh fruits and vegetables from Emajaguas’s garden.
    Tía Artemisa was attracted to Don Esteban the minute she saw him. His back was straight and he wore his silver hair carefully combed to the side. He was polished and urbane in his perfectly cut blue linen suit. His slender face and hands gleamed like a spirit’s in the half-light of the portería.
    Tía Artemisa had heard about Don Esteban de la Rosa but she had never met him. She knew that he was a widower and that he lived alone in the family’s old mansion on Crisótbal Colón Avenue, in the center of town, because his son and his only granddaughter had passed away. Don Esteban’s father was a widower also. He had worked hard all his life and had retired to live in Europe on the income provided by the central Santa Rosa. He had left Esteban at the head of the mill, not wanting to be bothered with any of its problems. Don Esteban sent his father a generous amount every month so the old man could live with dignity.
    The Santa Rosa was on the outskirts of Guayamés. It was one of the few sugar mills owned by the local hacendados that were still grinding cane and making money. Not a lot of it, but enough to let Don Esteban live reasonably well and pay for his father’s expenses. The reason for the mill’s success was that all the cane-producing farms belonging to Don Esteban were adjacent to one another. Once the cane was cut, it could be transported to the mill along the farm’s interior roads rather than on the highway, which was heavily trafficked, full of twists and turns, and capable of sending trucks keeling over like overstuffed dinosaurs. The Santa Rosa had an excellent manager, a German who had lived on the island for more than twenty years and married a girl from Guayamés. Don Esteban never had to visit the mill at all.
    Don Esteban was a very cultured man who knew a little of everything. He wasn’t an architect, but he understood the laws of perspective, volume, and depth. He wasn’t a painter, but he could extemporize on Renaissance painting. He wasn’t a mechanic, but he could take his Buick’s engine apart and put it back together again in no time at all. He was, in short, a dilettante who was totally inept at anything that had to do with making money but an expert at spending it. People in Guayamés