Conquistadora (43 page)

One night, when Nena was about ten, her mother woke and then shushed her as she led her through the loosened boards on the back wall of the barracks. They crept through the woods toward the rocky cove where boys went fishing for octopus.

Mamá and Nena joined other men and women scrambling over sharp rocks toward a raft that bumped this way and that while two men tried to hold it steady against the tide. After everyone had crawled onto the log-and-bamboo surface, the men swam alongside, pushing the raft away from the rocks until the wind caught the lone sail in the center. The others helped them on board, and they watched in awe as the black mound that was land and home faded into the horizon. Once on the open sea, Mamá hugged Nena closer and she fell asleep in her mother’s embrace.

She woke to Mamá’s arms crushing her against her bosom, and to the sound of “no, no, no,” as if one word could have an impact on what was happening. The sun was unfiltered by clouds in a sky so pale and bright that it hurt to look up, but around them the sea lifted the raft over high, rolling waves, then dropped it into deep troughs. The sail had vanished. Over Mamá’s shoulder Nena saw a woman clutching the air, frantic to stay aboard. In her need, she grabbed the closest body, that of a child. Other hands stretched toward them as they both slid over the edge and disappeared into the waves.

Nena held on to her mother even tighter then, but over the screams and moans she heard wood snapping and cracking, and the ropes holding the lumber and bamboo unknotted and the floor drifted in opposite directions. People splashed into the sea, and the planks knocked their heads, and hands and feet swished and slapped the ocean as they paddled toward the flotsam that remained of the raft that had brought them so far from land and home.

Nena didn’t remember when she lost her grip on Mamá, or when she found a plank to float upon, or how many others survived. She woke up inside the stinking hold of a ship, surrounded by many
more terrified men, women, and children than had left with her and Mamá.

Sailors who trawled the ocean for the survivors of escape attempts found them. They could return the escapees to their owners for the reward, but they made more money selling them far away from where they plucked them from the sea.

A few days later Nena was again on the open sea, her small hands gripping the edges of a dinghy rowed by two bearded, smelly white men. She didn’t recognize the six men and three women who sat terrified on the wet floor of the dinghy as it approached a beach where don Severo waited with another man and two frothy-mouthed dogs. Once they landed, don Severo and the other man tied ropes around the people’s hands and necks. Because Nena was small, her wrists were bound to a woman whom she came to know as Marta.

They walked for a long time away from the sea until they reached a derelict sugar plantation too big, Nena could tell, for the paltry number of slaves in its
batey
. Behind the tumbledown barns, what were once cultivated fields and meadows had been reclaimed by quick-growing, luscious vegetation. It was not called Los Gemelos then. That happened after doña Ana, don Ramón, and don Inocente came.

Nena didn’t know how don Severo could tell that she’d worked alongside her mother at a river’s edge.

“You,
nena
,” he said. “Here’s a pail.”

In addition to washing clothes by this river, she was to keep the
barracones
and
casona
supplied with water. Several times a day Nena walked below the rapids, where the river ran clearest, and filled her pail. She sat on her haunches, lifted the pail to her head, and balanced it on a rag twisted into a cushion. She then walked the half mile to the barracks, where she added to whatever rainwater collected inside a large drum by the door.

She returned to the river and came back to the
casona
’s kitchen, where she poured water into a tall funnel-shaped terra-cotta vase inside a wooden frame. Below it a pitcher collected the water filtered through the coned bottom. Nena would like to know what that water tasted like, but she wasn’t allowed to drink from the pitcher reserved for the
patrones
.

Another of her jobs was to check whether the chamber pots needed
emptying in the
casona
. Everyone else pissed and shat wherever the urge struck them if they were in the
cañaveral
, or if they were closer to the
batey
, they squatted over a hole on the open platform jutting over the hill behind the barn near the pond. But the
patrones
used china pots and wiped their bottoms with perfumed linen strips that they dropped into a basket for Nena to collect and wash daily.

She also emptied the waste bucket in the male and female barracks that were locked overnight. Once she emptied the chamber pots and waste buckets behind the barn, she rinsed them in the pond until she saw no signs of shit and piss. She did observe, however, that the masters’ neither looked nor smelled any better than that of the slaves.

Nena’s life improved somewhat after one of the
patrones
noticed her and asked don Severo to bring her to the
finca
. Soon after her twelfth birthday, one of the
patrones
, she couldn’t tell which, took her virginity. After don Inocente died, she realized he was the one who liked to slap and choke. Don Severo moved her to a
bohío
and ordered her to look after don Ramón. Don Ramón wanted her to hold him close and to run her fingers through his hair, but not all the time. Another girl was given the tasks of emptying the chamber pots and fetching water for the
casona
, while Nena spent most of her days by the river, washing the
patrones’
clothes and linens, or in her
bohío
, pressing them with the heavy iron heated on smoldering coals. Her first child, a boy, was born dead.

When don Ramón died, Nena was again charged with the chamber pots and the slaves’ buckets, and had to endure the derision of the other women who’d been jealous of her easier job when don Ramón was alive. Don Severo returned her to the
barracones
, and it was there that her daughter was stillborn just two weeks after the
patrona
found Conciencia at her door.

Every day, Nena repeated this history to herself as she carried water, rinsed chamber pots, scrubbed clothes, starched and pressed don Severo’s shirts and pants and doña Ana’s plain skirts and blouses. Every day she added something new to it, like the hours she spent in the cave with the
patrones
during the hurricane, or the time she slipped on rocks and slashed her thigh, where she now had a long scar. She wanted to remember her story because someday she’d tell a living child from her womb that her name was not Nena, and not
La Lavandera. She’d tell her child that her name was Olivia, a name with a soft, pretty sound. She’d tell her child that she’d always lived near, on, in, and around water. She was collecting stories for her future children because her own
mamá
told her nothing. Nena didn’t even know her birth name or her mother’s name because the sea swallowed Mamá before Nena learned who she was and what her life was like before she was born.

“I will not be like Mamá,” Nena vowed as she lifted the filled bucket of water to her head and, with a grunt, stood and began the long walk through the woods to the
casona
. “I will not die nameless.”

Ana had forgotten Conciencia’s strange prediction by the time the rains battered Los Gemelos in May, June, and July 1856, four years after the hurricane had caused so much destruction. The
batey
’s ground softened into a muddy expanse of slipping and sliding men, women, children, and beasts. Ana’s gardens, which once bloomed in riotous plenty following gentle showers, drooped into soggy despair, and the herbs and medicinal plants threatened to wash away over fast-flowing gullies.

Soaked to the soul, Ana, Flora, and Conciencia worked in the mud, propping up and staking plants, hoeing trenches to divert water from the gardens that had taken years to mature.

Nena couldn’t go to the dangerously swollen river to fetch water or wash clothes, so José set a hollowed trunk on sawhorses near the barracks to create a washtub that filled with rainwater. But the sun couldn’t break through the persistent clouds and she had to press everything dry. She couldn’t empty the chamber pots behind the barn because the hill slid into the pond in a sludge of stinking mud. The contents of the
casona
’s chamber pots and the slaves’ buckets now went directly into the pond, where rain dissipated the waste until it was neither visible nor foul smelling.

The fields were waterlogged. Severo deployed all
brazos
to dig channels between rows of germinating cane so that the crop wouldn’t drown. The summer was usually when the slaves were kept busy with maintenance and repairs, clearing land, cleaning or forming new irrigation ditches. The unrelenting storms disrupted the order of work, and for nearly a month every available worker battled the damage caused by the
vaguadas
.

Once the sun finally burned through the clouds, visible steam rose
from the soaked earth in mirage-inducing ripples. The days and nights became unbearably still and hot. Moisture lingered over the land, without the slightest breeze to push it toward the ocean.

When Nena resumed her daily trips to the river, she found that it had changed course again. Runnels had broken through into new paths and hollows. The rock platform downstream of the waterfall where she used to wash clothes was completely submerged, and the stones of the
fogón
for boiling linens had been swept away. The river seemed angry, its waters turbid, its banks dislocated by uprooted trees, branches, and the bloated carcasses of drowned animals. It would be several more days before she could wash there. Fortunately, there was enough rainwater for drinking in the drums by the barracks, which she supplemented with water from the overflowing pond.

That night, Nena lay on her pallet in the women’s
barracón
and dreamed that she was floating on a stream toward a placid ocean. She landed on an island, where her mother was pounding clothes against rocks.

“But, Mamá,” Nena protested in her dream, “you said never to wash clothes in seawater.”

Her mother ignored her and continued beating the fabric with a paddle. “Mamá,” Nena cried, because something hit her belly, except the pain seemed to be coming from her womb. She woke in a sweat. She had to sit over the waste bucket immediately.

She stumbled over sleeping bodies and under the
hamacas
to the corner, where she squatted and emptied her bowels without relief. She was very thirsty. She wanted to reach the
jofaina
with drinking water on the other side of the door, but was afraid of soiling herself on the way or, worse, of shitting over someone sleeping on the low pallets and on the floor. She sat over the bucket pressing her forearms into her belly in a vain attempt to take the edge off the cramps that discharged her bowels without any effort on her part.

“Water,” she called into the night.
“Agua, por favor.”

“Be quiet and let folk sleep,” someone grumbled.

“Somebody please bring me water,” Nena sobbed, but her voice sounded as if it were coming from another body.

Strong hands pulled her off the bucket and led her to her pallet. Callused hands lifted her head and tipped a coconut shell to her lips.
She must have passed out, because next thing she knew it was day and everyone had gone to work, but old Fela was with her. Fela removed Nena’s dress and washed her bottom because she’d soiled herself.

She was feverish, and mortified that she couldn’t control her body. But mostly she was thirsty, so thirsty.
“Agua,”
she begged, and wrinkled hands brought the coconut shell to her lips. Water dribbled down her chin to her chest, but it didn’t cool her. The few sips she swallowed renewed the cramps and diarrhea but didn’t slake her thirst.

The door to the
barracón
opened, and the rectangle of sun on the floor darkened with a woman’s silhouette.

“Es la lavandera,”
Fela said to doña Ana. “She’s been sick all night.”

She knew she was dying when doña Ana’s face peered down at her and Nena saw fear.

“My name is Olivia,” she whispered to the
patrona
, then closed her eyes.

Seventy-year-old Fela and sixty-four-year-old Pabla washed Nena’s soiled body, finger-combed and plaited her hair. Nena didn’t have another dress, so the women wrapped her inside a tattered blanket that they didn’t have time to wash and dry in the sun. The girl who wanted to be called Olivia, who was always clean and smelled of fresh water, was swaddled in a sweaty, torn blanket that someone else was willing to give up because
la patrona
would now replace it with a new one.

José kept royal palm boards cut in two lengths, adult and child, to quickly assemble coffins for the slaves. They were simple narrow rectangles, and as Fela and Pabla washed and prepared Nena, José cut the boards, not as long as an adult male’s nor as small as a child’s. He found a scrap of laurel and whittled hands holding a pitcher, just like the one Nena used to capture water for the
patrones
under the filtering pot. He always tried to decorate the lids of the rough palm coffins he made. Inés nagged that he should use his time for the little animals that don Severo could sell for him in town.