SUMMER CAME WITH ITS USUAL pandemonium of bees and squirrels. The garden was at its peak, as were Willie’s allergies: he will never give up counting the petals of each rose. But that has never stood in the way of his monumental achievements at the grill, something Lori also participates in; she left behind her many years as a vegetarian when Dr. Miki Shima, as much a vegetarian as she, convinced her that she needed more protein. Our heated swimming pool attracted hordes of children and visitors. The days grew longer under the sun, slow, with no clock, like days in the Caribbean. Tabra was the only one who was missing; she was in Bali, where they make some of the pieces she uses in her jewelry. Lagarto-Emplumado went with her for a week, but he had to return to California because of his fear of snakes and the packs of hungry, mangy dogs. It seems that he was opening the door to his room and a little green snake slithered by, brushing his hand. It was one of the most lethal snakes there are. That same night something warm, moist, and furry dropped from the roof, landed on them, and then scurried out of the room. They couldn’t turn on the light in time to see it. Tabra said that it must have been an opossum, and she punched her pillow a few times and went back to sleep, while Lagarto spent the rest of the night on guard, with all the lights on and his knife in his hand, with no idea what an opossum might be.
Juliette and her boys spent several weeks with us. Aristotelis is the most polite and considerate member of the tribe. He was born with a slight tendency toward tragedy, like any Greek worth his salt, and from the time he was a boy had taken on the role of being his mother’s and his brother’s protector. Contact with the other children had lightened his load, and he became a comedian. I think he will be an actor, for in addition to being dramatic and handsome, he gets all the leads in school plays. Achilleas is still a little angel, prodigal with smiles and kisses; we spoil him outrageously. He swims like an eel and can spend twelve hours in the water. We pull him out wrinkled and sunburned and make him go pee in the bathroom. I don’t like to think what all must be in that water. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” I was reassured by the pool maintenance man when I shared my doubts with him. “The chlorine content is so high that you could have a corpse in there and still have no problem.”
The kids changed day by day. Willie had always said that Andrea had the same features Alejandro has, but just a little askew, and that one day they would settle into place. Apparently that’s what was happening, though she paid no attention because she lives in her own world, dreaming, with her nose in her books, lost in impossible adventures. Nicole has turned out to be very smart, an excellent student, as well as sociable, friendly, and a flirt, the only one in the matriarchal tribe with that quality; none of the rest of us is dying to seduce anyone. With her esthetic instinct, she can with one appraising look destroy any woman’s pleasure in what she’s wearing—with the exception of Andrea, who is indifferent to fashion and is always in some costume or other, her style since early childhood. For months we watched Nicole going about carrying a mysterious black case, and we prodded her so hard that finally one day she showed us what was inside. It was a violin, which she had borrowed at school because she wanted to join the orchestra. She placed it to her shoulder, took up the bow, closed her eyes, and left us awestruck with a short and impeccably performed concert of melodies we had never heard her practice. Alejandro’s skeleton shot upward with a great spurt, just in time, because I was planning to have the doctor give him growth hormones, the way they do cows, so he wouldn’t end up a shrimp. I was afraid that he was the only one of my descendants to inherit my undesirable genes, but that year, to our relief, he had saved himself. Although he already had the shadow of a mustache, he was still behaving like a madcap, making faces in mirrors and bothering everyone with inopportune jokes, determined to avoid at any cost the anguish of growing up and taking care of himself. He had announced that he planned to live with his parents, one foot in each house, until he was married or was kicked out. “Hurry and grow up before we lose patience,” we often warned him, tired of his clownish pranks. The twins hit the pool in two plastic floating turtles, observed from afar by Olivia, who never lost hope they would drown. Of all the fears that dog had when she came into our family, only two remain: umbrellas and the twins. All these little ones and the friends who often came with them ended the summer as tan as Africans, their hair turned green from the chemicals in the pool that are so lethal they burned the grass. Anywhere the swimmers set their wet feet, no grass would grow.
My grandchildren were at an age to discover love, all of them except Achilleas, that is, who was still at the stage of asking his mother to marry him. The kids hid in the nooks and crannies of the House of the Spirits and played in the dark. Their conversations in the pool often made their parents uneasy.
“Don’t you know that you’ve broken my heart?” Aristotelis asked, breathing heavily through his mask.
“I don’t love Eric anymore. I can come back to you, if you like,” Nicole proposed between dives.
“I don’t know, I have to think about it. I can’t go on suffering like this.”
“Well, think quick, otherwise I’ll call Peter.”
“If you don’t love me, I might as well just kill myself today!”
“Okay. But don’t do it in the pool. Willie will have a fit.”