House on the Lagoon Read Online Free PDF Page A

More often than not, they were more interested in the coronation gown, train and crown, and all the paraphernalia that being carnival queen entailed, than in their pimply sixteen-year-old escorts. For the parents of the young man, on the other hand, to have their son accepted as king was a privilege not easily refused. Once he was chosen, the young man’s family became members of the exclusive Spanish Casino without the steep entrance fee.
    Quintín chuckled every time he told me how the ladies of the committee had an especially hard time with Rebecca’s escort, because his mother knew exactly what she wanted. An only child, Rebecca had been thoroughly spoiled. The ladies of the committee brought half a dozen candidates to her door who were unceremoniously “beheaded,” as Rebecca kept shaking her golden curls. This one reminded her of a lily of the valley and might wilt at the first sign of heat; that one was sinewy and athletic but had a nervous tic; this one was a ninny who slobbered compliments in her ear whenever she danced with him; and that last one was as brawny as a bull but just as thickheaded. What she wanted was an intelligent king.
    She wanted a true monarch, one who could subdue her with a single glance. A sovereign with shoulders spread like infantry battalions, strong cavalry thighs, and eyes so blue they made you want to sail out to sea. A real commander in chief, who would raise her slumbering regiments at a command. She wanted a prince who longed for the whole of her: her marzipan throat and her cream-puff shoulders, her coconut-custard breasts, her dainty rice-and-cinnamon feet, and her delicate ginger pussy; one who would eat her, lick her, nip her, and drink her, and then grind her into powdered sugar in his arms. Not a trace would be left of the porcelain doll her parents kept hidden in her silk-lined boudoir at the end of the bedroom corridor, where neither the dust nor the noise nor the heat of the street could harm her, and where every night her bed was a dark whirlpool of loneliness into which she plunged, weighed down by icy sheets.
    Exhausted from her endeavors, Dona Ester Santiesteban came to Rebecca’s house one last time with a photograph of a dark-haired young man in a red-velvet frame under her arm. He was broad-shouldered and stood very straight, and he wore a black sombrero Cordobés on his head, of the kind people wore at corridas de toros in Spain.
    “The young man is perfect for the part,” Doña Ester said. “He’s twenty-three years old and recently arrived from Spain. His family is not too well off, but he has all sorts of papers which say he’s from a good family, and I thought you might be interested in meeting him.” She said nothing about his good looks on purpose, because she feared Rebecca might repeat her litany that good looks were not all that important, compared to what was inside.
    Doña Ester was Don Miguel Santiesteban’s wife, and the couple had emigrated to the island from Extremadura thirty years before. During his first night in San Juan, Buenaventura slept in Don Miguel’s warehouse at La Puntilla. During the next couple of weeks the old gentleman did everything he could to help him find a job, but there were so many immigrants in the city that it was no simple task.
    He invited Buenaventura to lunch at his house, and the young man made a good impression on Doña Ester. He had dark hair and blue eyes, but she felt sorry for him because he was so awkward and looked so lost. All during the meal he stared at his food, not knowing which silver fork to use. He overturned the wine goblet and dropped his knife several times, so that it clattered against the rim of the plate. Doña Ester asked herself how he would manage to get ahead in the finicky island society and on that very day began to teach him that gentlemen didn’t eat chicken with their fingers, stood up to help a lady with her chair whenever she rose, didn’t barge ahead through a door in front of