House on the Lagoon Read Online Free PDF Page B

The people bore their adverse destiny patiently. They were used to tightening their belts on empty stomachs and they survived in spite of everything, killing hunger with carajitos, shots of rum in their coffee, and sweet-potato skins boiled with orange leaves for their midday meal. Children went barefoot, their heads full of lice and their bellies swollen with parasites. When they ran down the street, their souls barely clung to their bones, like fragile kites made of tissue paper.

5
The Merchant Prince
    B UENAVENTURA INHERITED A SPANISH coat of arms from his ancestor, Don Francisco Pizarro, depicting an armed warlord beheading a hog with his short sword. “The Pizarro Mendizabals had always been successful merchants before they turned into soldiers,” he said to Rebecca on the day of their wedding. “Before they sailed off to Peru during the Spanish Conquest, their business had been selling smoked hams, which they peddled with great flair all across Castile.” And as he spoke, he slid a heavy gold ring, emblazoned with that uncouth heraldry, on her finger.
    Things went well with Buenaventura after the marriage. He was doing good business selling water, and Don Esteban Rosich, his wife’s grandfather, was proud of him. Don Esteban was in the shipping business and decided to help his grandson-in-law by making him a present of two small steamships of eight thousand tons each, so that Buenaventura could transport his provisions from Spain to the island. Rebecca christened them herself, the S.S. Patria and the S.S. Libertad, breaking a bottle of champagne on the side of each ship and toasting the future of Mendizabal & Company, her husband’s newly established enterprise.
    My future father-in-law wasn’t as intelligent as Rebecca believed him to be, but he had an unfailing commercial instinct. “These are difficult times, my dear,” Buenaventura would say to Rebecca. “No business is foolproof except in food, because, no matter what happens, people always have to eat.”
    In 1918, when German submarines laid siege to our city and people were literally dying of hunger, Buenaventura decided it was the right moment to expand his business. So he bought a shipload of dried codfish in Newfoundland, which he somehow managed to get through the blockade. When he put the fish on the market, it sold out in less than a week. The fish fillets were thick and lush, their juices stored under a layer of hardened salt which protected them from the rain and the flies and preserved them from rot. They had, furthermore, a sky-high protein content which began to work wonders on the starving population. All through the mountains, one could see peasants boiling codfish slabs with green plantains, yuca and taro roots, in large tin cans poised over an open fire, under the shade of mango trees.
    Buenaventura discovered that cod actually saved people’s lives, and on top of this, it was excellent business. He bought it dirt cheap: for a ten-pound package of cod he paid one American cent to the Canadian company, Viking Co., and he sold it for ten cents a pound. Business was so good that soon after a second shipload managed to slip into port, he made Rebecca a splendid gift for their wedding anniversary. He bought her a white Packard, which she named Dulce Sueño in honor of the paso fino horse that won the trophy that year at the racetrack.
    A windfall like that couldn’t last forever. Soon other wholesalers were buying cod by the shipload in Halifax and squeezing it past the German submarines. Buenaventura saw danger coming, and he wrote to Viking Co. asking them to identify his product by stamping each crate with the seal of Francisco Pizarro. But they refused to comply. “No cod is better than the next cod, and to distinguish yours from the rest would go against our company policy,” the president of Viking Co. replied dourly.
    Competition was fierce, but Buenaventura’s ships always managed to dodge the German U-boats, and he sold more cod