The House on the Lagoon [antikvár]

QUIMTÍM AMD ISABEL'S PLEDGE My grandmother always insisted that when people fall in love they should look closely at what the family of the betrothed is like, because one never marries the bridegroom alone but also his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and the whole damned tangle of the ancestral line. I refused to believe her even after what happened when Quintín and I were still engaged. One evening Quintín came to visit me at the house in Ponce. We had been lounging on the veranda's sofa, when a sixteen-year-old boy who was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the house began to sing me a love ballad. The singer, the son of a well-known local family, had been secretly in love with me, although we had never met. He had seen me occasionally when our paths crossed in the streets of Ponce and at parties. Recently, my picture had been in the society columns, announcing my engagement to Quintín Mendizabal. The young man became very depressed when he read the news, and in his deranged state the only thing that would ease his sadness was to sit under the flowering oak tree which grew in front of my house on Aurora Street and sing Love Me Always in a haunting tenor voice. That night, as I sat next to Quintín on the veranda's sofa, / was