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piss them into your chamber pot.” Fortunately, the American entrepreneurs declined to eat any salad, because that evening Rebecca had to drive Buenaventura to the emergency room at Alamares Hospital to have his stomach pumped due to food poisoning.

PART 2
The First House on the Lagoon

6
The Wizard from Prague
    R EBECCA AND BUENAVENTURA HAD been married for eight years and they still hadn’t had any children. This was a disappointment for Buenaventura, who wanted a large family, but Rebecca didn’t mind it at all. She didn’t want children. She felt she was a free spirit; if she had children, she’d never be able to dance and be one with nature the way she wanted.
    Rebecca had made many friends in the artists’ community of San Juan and often invited them to the bungalow, where they would sit in the garden by the lagoon and talk about poetry and painting. Buenaventura knew about these gatherings, but he was busy and didn’t give them much thought. He would leave the house at seven in the morning and wouldn’t return until eight at night, so Rebecca had most of the day to herself. She wrote poetry in the morning, practiced an improvised style of dance along the lagoon’s edge in the afternoon, and invited her friends to dinner almost every evening.
    In 1925 Buenaventura decided they should move to a place more in keeping with their new prosperity. Their bungalow stood on choice property and could easily be torn down to make way for a new building. One day he was driving down Ponce de León Avenue on his way home and he saw a beautiful mansion being built on a palm-shaded hillock. It had a wide-terraced front, stained-glass windows, and walls decorated with golden mosaics that gleamed in the afternoon sun. He immediately decided he wanted a house just like it, only larger and more luxurious.
    Buenaventura stopped the car and got out to inspect the house more closely. There were workmen coming and going with wheelbarrows loaded with sacks of cement, and he asked one of them who the architect was. The man pointed to a sallow, curly-haired man dressed in black, with a black silk cape thrown over his shoulders. Buenaventura approached, smiled, and introduced himself, complimenting the architect on his work. But the man stared back sullenly, muttered under his breath, and stalked off.
    Quintín had done research on the architect and even contemplated writing a book about him once, before he let himself be swallowed up by his work at Mendizabal & Co. He was an admirer of Milan Pavel’s work and was convinced he was an important figure in the artistic history of the island.
    Milan Pavel lived in San Juan from 1905 to 1928. He had emigrated from Prague to Chicago when he was ten years old, the son of a carpenter. He never studied architecture formally, but was probably an apprentice to one of Chicago’s well-known architects. When he saved enough money, he established his own construction company and began to build homes in Chicago’s West End, where many immigrants lived. Chicago was at the center of an architectural revolution; those were the golden years of the Prairie School.
    Pavel became Frank Lloyd Wright’s protégé and assisted him first as a blueprint copy boy and later as a draftsman. He had a natural ability for design; his architectural drawings were delicate and executed with a precise drafting hand. He had a photographic memory as well, and in time was able to reproduce, line by line, Wright’s unique plans for his buildings.
    Pavel became more and more obsessed with his master’s work. He hardly ate, and slept only fitfully. He drove by the master’s studio at Oak Park and marveled at the beauty of the low, horizontal buildings which gathered all the beauty of the prairie light at dusk. He admired the avant-garde designs of the homes Wright had built in the elegant suburbs of Chicago. He would have given his right hand to be able to design one of them, but in the modest bungalows of the West Side he