Conquistadora (40 page)

“I changed some things,” Severo explained as they walked around, “to account for the slope of the land.” Openings faced the expansive views, where each room would have a window and a door to the gallery that ran around three sides of the house.

“I hardly know what to say. When did you do this?”

“I can only assign workers during
el tiempo muerto
. We learned to make the bricks here. I’ve had poor luck finding a good mason, so it’s been trial and error all along.”

It had taken years, Ana realized, to get the enormous structure to its current half-finished state. The house was easily three times the size of the
casona
. José’s furniture wouldn’t look quite so imposing in these rooms, and Ana wondered if the carpenter knew this as he filled the
casona
with chairs, tables, and dressers.

Until this moment, Ana and Severo had hardly touched. He’d kissed her hand once, held her elbow when she walked on uneven terrain, helped her to dismount, brushed her fingers when handing her letters or the ledgers. But as she walked through the house, Ana needed to touch the man who built these rooms for her. As they turned into the gallery facing the mountains, she stood closer to Severo than ever and reached for his hand.

———

They were married on August 31, 1851, after Ana’s twenty-fifth birthday. The women decorated the
rancho
with festive hibiscus and bougainvillea garlands on the eaves and posts, and vases full of pink and white
nardos
. Her antique crucifix was again the center of an altar where Padre Xavier said Mass, baptized babies, and declared Severo Fuentes Arosemeno and Ana Larragoity Cubillas man and wife. Witnesses to their marriage were the foremen, slaves, and laborers, who then enjoyed a feast with dancing until the sharp clang of the last bell.

As Flora bathed her that night, Ana heard Severo pacing impatiently in the next room, where earlier that day Teo had moved his things. For her wedding night, she’d stitched a new pale green nightgown trimmed with ivory lace on the neckline, cuffs, and hem. As Flora dropped it over her head, it emitted the faint scent of roses and geraniums.

He made love like a woman, slow and attentive to the nuances of her pleasure. His hands were weather-beaten, but he had a light touch, and his rough fingertips against her skin were particularly erotic. He pushed the bedcovers to one side and loosened the ribbons on her nightgown with one hand while with the other he stroked, patted, drummed his fingers all over, around, and into her. No one, including Elena, had made her feel so much.

Ramón and Inocente had always extinguished the lights before intercourse, but Severo kept the candles flaming. She saw his body naked, the curly golden hair, the skin normally covered by clothes the shade of buttermilk. The first time she saw his penis erect, she averted her eyes. It was so aggressive, and yet so vulnerable, defenseless.

“No le tengas miedo,”
he said. “I’ll not hurt you.”

It was warm and heavy in her hand, softer than she expected. Once she lost her timidity, she loved her power over him with a touch, a secret look, a flicker of tongue across her lips.

He was a self-possessed lover, and even in his ecstasy there was control.

“Why?” she asked the first night he spilled his seed on her belly.

“I want you to myself before you have a baby.”

The act felt incomplete. Certainly neither Ramón nor Inocente had ever done such a thing; she hadn’t even seen what left their bodies. She only felt a warm liquid oozing between her legs while Ramón or Inocente fell away from her, more worn out than their exertions deserved.

Night after night Ana and Severo studied each other’s bodies with the concentration of explorers memorizing a map.

“And this?” He kissed a healed scar along her left knee.

“I fell from a stool when helping my mother hang a curtain. And this one?” She touched a spot high under his right arm.

“A scuffle with boys.”

He sucked the smooth skin on her belly, shoulders, buttocks, the inside of her thighs, forming red welts that didn’t hurt but turned blue by morning. She did the same to him, and they branded each other with blue-black islands on pale skin.

In private, Severo called her
mi reina, mi tesoro
. Among the workers and
campesinos
, he treated her as before their marriage, with formal deference. It was customary that married couples use the informal
tú
when addressing each other in private but the polite
usted
in public. Severo, even after Ana told him to call her
tú
, refused.

“
Tú
is for my inferiors,” he said, “not for you,
mi cielo
.”

Ana found it hard to get used to, since if he called her
usted
she had to do the same to him, and it felt awkward to do so in their most intimate moments. It was the only wall he’d placed between them, one extra syllable of distance.

She was in the garden with Conciencia one morning, gathering
manzanilla
flowers for tea, when Ana was overcome by a feeling of well-being.

“This is happiness,” she heard herself think, and so was surprised when Conciencia turned to her.
“¿Disculpe, señora?”

Ana laughed, aware that she had never caught herself laughing giddily in the middle of the day as she was now doing.

During their first years at Los Gemelos, heavy rains and strong winds had compromised the buildings, but the damage had been reparable. Ana and Severo knew that it was a matter of time before a powerful
hurricane would hit the island, destroying the weaker structures, flooding the fields, leveling crops, and killing the animals raised for food and trade. Their fears were realized on the early morning of September 5, 1852, when a hurricane raced through Puerto Rico from east to west. For two days Ana and Severo huddled with their household slaves, Siña Damita, the women, and children in a large natural cave previously cleaned and equipped for just such an emergency. The men and overseers occupied
tormenteras
, shelters dug into the high ground near the
casona
and the barns.

When they first went into the cave, the workers didn’t know how to behave with Ana and Severo in such close quarters. Severo kept his machete, whip, and rifle nearby, and the first few hours were tense with mistrust and fear. But as the storm ravaged the countryside, everyone adjusted to the forced intimacy. Flora laid a quilt for Ana and Severo to rest upon. The others sat or squatted on the ground until sleep overcame them. Some told stories in hushed voices, in a patois of Spanish and African tongues. Others gossiped and hummed. Ana prayed, and the women came closer and followed the clicks of her rosary.

When they emerged, two days later, the world was upside down. Were she not
la patrona
, Ana would have joined the laments of the women, children, and old men as they walked the sodden grounds. The gardens and orchards had been flattened. The
bohíos
were gone, as well as the roof on the bachelors’ barracks and one wall of the unmarried women’s building. One of the barns had disappeared with the animals in it, leaving only the outline of where it had stood. The windmill was gone, and Ana imagined its huge vanes whirling over the land faster than they ever did over the crushers. Half of the
casona
’s metal roof had peeled away in pieces, but the walls held, as well as the ground floor, where the furniture and household items were moved before they went into the cave.

Clearing the fallen trees, repairing the damaged buildings, and restoring the flooded fields would take weeks. After a head count, Severo reported that no one had died but there were injuries.

“The infirmary is gone,” Ana said. She shook her head to clear it, set her shoulders, coughed so that her voice wouldn’t sound as small and scared as she was. “Can you get some men to move the furniture upstairs? I can set up the sick room on the ground floor.”

“Of course.” He placed a hand on her shoulder and she reached to squeeze it.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. He nodded and gave orders to the men while she moved amid the debris with her head high, organizing her people—the women, the old and maimed, the children—to clear the yard of branches and rubble, and put to rights nature’s fury.

The hurricane and its aftermath caused four women to go into labor. As she always did, before handing each baby to his or her mother, Siña Damita blessed it and whispered foroyaa in Mandingo into each infant’s ears so that the first word the child heard was “freedom.”

By the time she could return home, three days later, she was bone-tired. Her old mule had collapsed and died a year ago, and Siña Damita had been on foot ever since. She now walked through the mangled
cañaveral
, hoping that, magically, her cottage would still be standing so that she could take a deserved rest. She’d brought her belongings wrapped inside her hammock to the cave: three pots and pans, six gourd bowls and spoons, four tin cans used for drinking, one blouse, one skirt, two aprons, two head wraps. She now carried the bundle on her head. Each barefoot step was heavier, her toes gripping the muddy ground so that she wouldn’t slip. When she reached the square of land on the edge of the woods, the only signs that someone had lived there were the three stones of the
fogón
. Damita lowered her weary body into a squat, breathing hard, and pressed her hands over her pounding heart.

She wished Lucho or one of their two surviving sons were there to bemoan with her the loss of her home, the decimated gardens that enabled her livelihood. But don Severo had forbidden free time until the work buildings in the
batey
were repaired. With a sigh, Damita sent forth the prayers of her Mandinka ancestors, praised Allah, offered thanks for every breath, and begged for strength and patience. She had much to do.

She saved her money in a tin can buried in the rear yard, three paces toward the morning sun from her
fogón
. She identified what direction that would be on this overcast Sunday morning. Even though there was no one to see her, she looked around before she removed the debris over the pointy rock marking the spot and unearthed
her treasure. She didn’t want her secret stash in the open now that the guava and annatto trees that shaded the spot had blown away. She walked into the woods until she reached a majestic
ausubo
, its lower branches at least three times her height above the top of her head. Its wrinkled trunk was so wide that Siña Damita was sure it was already there when this land belonged to the
borinqueños
. The ground was covered with thick, oval leaves that had turned brown and orange, covering small caves around the trunk. She found a hole under a curving root on the other side, buried the can, covered it with earth, bark, and leaves until it looked undisturbed. She prayed to Allah to protect her money and, just in case, put a curse on anyone who dared to take it. Whether it was the prayer or the curse, no one found it.

When she came from the forest, the sun had cut through the clouds and was directly overhead. Ordinarily, after their chores, her husband, two sons, and their wives and children spent Sunday afternoons like this one with her. With no help, Siña Damita would have to rebuild her
bohío
, or accept Ana’s offer to stay with Flora and Conciencia under the
casona
until her husband and sons could help.

Damita was forty-six, thirty of those years lived as a slave. When her owner manumitted her a decade earlier, she swore that she’d never sleep in a slave dwelling again. She had her little piece of land, not owned, but given for her use by don Severo in return for her services in the hacienda. After Artemio’s death, he questioned her and her family until he was convinced that Artemio had acted alone. He then interceded with the authorities so that she wouldn’t be punished. Don Severo was pitiless if you broke his rules, but he was not spiteful like doña Ana, who held grudges. Damita believed that people who held grudges couldn’t be trusted.

Damita removed the fallen branches from the same spot where she, Lucho, Poldo, and Jorge had built her
bohío
over a week of Sundays. With her bare hands now, because she had no tools or machete, she pounded thick branches into the yielding ground with a stone and used
bejuco
vines to tie walls and a roof with brush and palm leaves. The shelter came out to be a few inches shorter than she was, so she scooted inside, but it would be home until her husband and sons could build something better.

By the time she finished, the sun was setting. She was exhausted
and had numerous cuts on her hands from the afternoon’s work, especially a nasty one from the ragged lid of the tin can that held her money. She had no fire, no water to drink or wash with, no food. Siña Damita lined up her belongings along the sides and, on her knees, prayed for Artemio, whom she imagined a free man in a paradise very much like her village in Africa. As she did every night, she also appealed to Allah to protect her enslaved husband, her living sons, her daughters-in-law, and her grandchildren and to safeguard every child she’d delivered into slavery.

The branches that made up her shelter weren’t strong enough to hold her hammock, so she wrapped herself inside it and fell asleep almost immediately on the still-moist earth. Sometime in the night, she startled awake gasping for breath; the bone between her breasts felt heavy. She was in utter darkness. The pressure on her chest spread to her shoulders, down her arms.

“¡Me muero!”
she cried, but there was no one to hear her.

She called to Allah, closed her eyes, and never opened them again.

Three days later, nine-year-old Efraín was sent to fetch Siña Damita; another woman was in labor. The first thing he noticed was the lopsided, leaf-covered shack. Then the smell of decay reached him as he approached. Then he saw the flies. Because he was a curious boy, he looked inside. No one who smelled like that could be alive, but Efraín knew that
el patrón
would want to know for sure, so, covering his nose and mouth, he resisted the urge to vomit and lifted the fold of the hammock from where he thought her face was—and then he did throw up, even though he tried not to. He crawled from the shelter, heaving and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.