House on the Lagoon Read Online Free

trailed its innards in the sawdust, he suddenly felt like vomiting and had to leave. That evening, when he arrived at his lodgings, he wrote another long letter to his friend back in Extremadura. “Here islanders have kept many African rites alive. It’s going to be difficult to teach the Congolese and Yorubas the good manners of the Mayflower .”
    To a cousin in Madrid he remarked: “Soon this place will be a fakir’s paradise, where everybody will live on air. The present war in Europe has made the economy more precarious, but the main concern of the islanders is to prove to the United States that they can be good American citizens. Their most popular refrain at present is ‘Food can be as effective as bullets.’ They have tightened their belts dramatically, cutting down on their intake of flour, sugar, rice, and milk, and donated the proceeds to the troops fighting overseas, so that American soldiers will be better fed.
    “The sale of Liberty Bonds has been extraordinarily successful, and even public-school children have bought some of them with their penny savings. Although hungry and often dressed in rags, these islanders have managed to purchase twelve thousand three hundred and eighty-three dollars in bonds, their contribution to the defense of the powerful nation that has adopted them. Sometimes they’re so generous they remind me of Don Quixote.”

3
The Queen of the Antilles
    B UENAVENTURA DIDN’T HAVE A cent to his name when he arrived in the city’s old port, but he wasn’t exactly destitute. He had his good looks, and he brought with him an old parchment in which his family pedigree was inscribed. This moth-eaten document claimed he had the right to a title from his great-grandfather, a descendant of Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru.
    At the time of his arrival, our bourgeoisie all descended from one exuberant family tree, and everybody was kin to everybody else through this or that offshoot. If you wanted to know who someone’s relatives were, you only had to visit your grandmother slumbering in her rocking chair, wake her up, and ask her to whisper you her secrets. Since colonial times, a clean lineage was worth a family’s weight in gold. In every town, marriages were carefully inscribed in two books, which were jealously guarded in the parish church. They were called the Bloodline Books by Spanish priests. Originally, they had been instituted to keep the blood free of Jewish or Islamic ancestry, and separate records of all white and nonwhite marriages were kept in them.
    Even though Quintín pretended not to share such absurd prejudices, I always suspected he felt the same way as the rest of his family. When he fell in love with me, this wasn’t a problem, since my lineage was clean. But Quintín’s hidden feelings would surface later, and create tension between us. In any case, at the time of our engagement, very few of our friends or relatives thought differently, which must be counted as a point in Quintín’s favor.
    When the Americans arrived on the island, the Bloodline Books were abandoned. Priests became poor and many of their records perished in random fires or during fierce island hurricanes, when the wind blew away many a leaky parish roof. But the Books disappeared also because the practice was considered unworthy of American citizens. For this reason, it was useful to have a grandmother you could ask about bygone days; she usually remembered how the Bloodline Books had read and knew exactly who might have hidden stains in his or her pedigree.
    Keeping track of these things was getting to be more and more difficult, Rebecca, Quintín’s mother, confessed to him. As the new habits of democracy gradually took over, unsoiled lineages were becoming almost impossible to find. With the exception of exclusive gathering places like the Spanish Casino, anyone who could pay for it could go to the Tapia Theater, the Palace Hotel, or the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, and there were