Pig's Foot (2 page)

It was here in Pata de Puerco that Don Manuel Santisteban decided to live out the rest of his days. There are many stories about how he came to build his house, but the way my grandpa told it to me, one day Don Manuel stopped by the ruins of the oldest sugar plantation on the island, a ruined mansion that had once belonged to the conquistador Hernán Cortés back when Santiago de Cuba was the capital of the colony. ‘Here shall I die,' announced the powerful slave trader and, without wasting a minute, ordered a new plantation house be built over the crumbling ruins. No crocodile was ever seen in the area again after Doña Isabel Santisteban ordered that all the lush vegetation be hacked down. Cuba, she insisted, was a country of sunshine and not a single ray could pierce the shade of the towering trees. And so the parrots, the hummingbirds and the tocororos also vanished for ever from this beautiful place.

A number of small squat, rustic houses were planted like sombreros around a vast estate measuring some twenty
caballerías
. Between these houses rose the majestic residence of Don Manuel, his señora and their two children, a mansion with tall windows and labyrinthine corridors. The slave quarters, situated 200 metres from the main house, were built of brick and tiles and had a single door and a lone, barred window on one side which allowed in scarcely enough air to breathe. A watchtower, used to keep a lookout for runaways and to keep an eye on the workers, was erected between the slave quarters and the sugar mill and from the top you could see all the way to the stables and the canebrakes.

Among the seven thousand slaves living on the plantation itself was Oscar Kortico, who came from a long line of Korticos: Negroes barely four feet tall who were shipped to Cuba in small numbers and in time vanished from the face of the earth leaving no sign that they had ever existed. A pygmy race from East Africa, from a land as cracked and barren as the surface of the planet Mars, the Korticos were expert hunters and knew the secret ways of plants. Too late did Don Manuel realise just how strong these people were, for when he tried to order a new consignment of Korticos, he was told there were none to be found on or off the island – the earth had opened up and swallowed them. He had been planning to replace the Mandingas – the tallest Negroes and those most suited to forced labour – with Korticos whose appearance belied not only their strength, but the laws of physics. Despite their height, they were as strong and sturdy as the Mandingas and much cheaper to keep, since they ate half as much as other Negroes. But after the shipment that brought Oscar, his mother and his father to Pata de Puerco, no Kortico ever came to Cuba again.

To his dying day, my namesake Oscar Kortico had the same diminutive body, the same thin, slightly elongated childlike face, the same round, black eyes, the same prominent cheekbones that looked like runnels for those tears he never shed. This is how my grandpa described him to me, adding that although Oscar Kortico was a bitter man (something many people confirm) he had known happiness (something many more deny) if only as a child; this inexplicable, elusive feeling was embodied by his mother, the creature he most adored and who returned his great, his boundless love.

Her name was Macuta Dos and she worked on the plantation feeding the animals, cleaning the grounds and drawing water from the well. Since she was a strong, muscular Negress, they set her to cutting cane with the menfolk and gave her so many backbreaking chores that often she worked twenty-two hours a day. The two hours she had to herself, she devoted to her son Oscar who had learned never to complain, though already in his heart he sensed that something was amiss with the world. Those two hours were enough for Oscar: shrugging off her tiredness, his mother would play with him and sometimes tell him stories and fables, like the legend of Yusi the Warrior, a God of the Kortico pantheon, a creature gifted with exceptional powers who, it was said, could lift a cow with just one hand.

After much insistence from Oscar – an insistence that involved howls and wails but never tears – Macuta Dos explained to him that his grandparents had died of old age; that one of his uncles had been shot as a runaway slave and the other carried off by a terrible disease – some curse, some horrifying thing that had caused first his ears and then his testicles to swell. She told him that his father had escaped into the mountains at dawn one morning only to be dragged back that same afternoon dead, the skin flayed from his body, his face unrecognisable. Her only legacy, she told him, was an ancient amulet, a leather necklet strung with a shrivelled pig's foot. Oscar and this amulet were her only fortune.

Oscar Kortico immediately rushed to tell this story to his best friend José Mandinga, who clapped his hand to his mouth in horror. José tried to cheer him, saying that what had happened was destined to happen and that surely now his luck would change for the better. But one night the overseer came to the slave quarters to take Oscar's mother to a small dark room where she was to be bred with one of the tall, brawny Negro bucks because, by Don Manuel's reckoning, such a pairing would produce a good litter of whelps. The boy clung to his mother like a tick to a dog. Macuta Dos pressed the pig's-foot amulet into his hand and told him she would never forget him. Oscar begged to know why she was being taken from him.

‘Because such is the lot of a slave.'

‘What is a slave?'

‘An animal,
hijo
, an animal.'

With a vicious tug, two men wrenched the pair apart and took Macuta Dos from Oscar's side for ever.

In this moment was the wellspring of Oscar Kortico's bitterness. For a whole month, he murmured the story of Yusi the Warrior to himself and refused to play with his friend José. He looked for his mother only in the darkness, expecting that she would suddenly appear through a wall or that at least the men might come and take him to be with her in that small dark cell. Every day he pressed the amulet to his chest, trying to lose himself in the scent of pig's foot that reminded him of his mother. He could not imagine he would never see her again. Six months later, he was sold to an Italian merchant named Giacomo Benvenuto, who lived some ten miles from El Cobre. There, Oscar was given the surname Benvenuto and set to work as a houseboy in the kitchen and doing chores around the residence.

Though they dressed him in finery, still the other children called him ‘the black flea' because of his diminutive stature and treated him like a circus freak. It was here that Oscar truly learned what it meant to be a slave. Little by little there blossomed within him a hatred of the world and most especially of children; a hatred he would carry with him to his grave. He felt as though there was no one he could trust; that he had been forsaken by love, by friendship, by peace. By everything, in fact, but the bitterness that burned like an eternal flame in his chest, reminding him of his miserable existence. He brooded about the meaning of the word slave. ‘You are an animal.' This was how he felt, like a brute beast, something confirmed one day when, while he was fixing some kitchen shelves that had been eaten away by termites, he found himself surrounded by a gang of children led by the plantation owner's son. Striking the pose of a lion tamer, the Italian boy informed his entourage that Oscar was living proof of simian intelligence.

‘As you can see,' said Giacomo, ‘a monkey can fix shelves. He doesn't feel anything inside because he's an animal, but he can talk, he can even read if you teach him. And see – he's proved he knows how to use a hammer. Let's give this magnificent creature a round of applause.'

‘Oscar, Oscar, Oscar the orang-utan,' chanted the other children.

Suddenly, Oscar saw black. His teeth drew blood from the Italian boy. Not enough blood to warrant the death sentence, but enough to have him put in the stocks and given several lashes, then locked up in a dark cell for a week.

On his release, he was relieved of his domestic chores and set to work in the fields; it was here that he spent his adolescence and grew to become a man. In all that time he never met a woman who made him happy. He believed that no woman would ever be able to love his diminutive stature, or the bleak pessimism that had become his distinguishing trait. And so he had no choice but to lose his virginity to a sow. It happened one day when Benvenuto's overseer ordered Oscar to work in the barnyard. After the sow came a boss-eyed nanny goat that wouldn't stop bleating. Before long, Oscar Kortico's fame had spread to nanny goats, sows and mares for miles around.

Then came the war of independence which, as I'm sure you know, began in 1868 (10 October, if I'm not mistaken . . .). By now, Oscar had turned eighteen. Giacomo Benvenuto and his family had fled back to the country they'd come from. It was Oscar who brandished the torch that set the sugar mill ablaze. The following day, he set off for the Santisteban plantation in search of his mother. He found only a heap of ashes and charred bricks. It was then that he joined forces with the Mambí Liberation Army under the command of General Maceo at their camp east of Baracoa.

Meanwhile, José Mandinga, Oscar's best friend, was skulking through the streets and the taverns of El Cobre.

Unlike Oscar, who never had much luck with women, and seemed to have inherited from his mother the curse of enduring a life without love, José was always lucky with the opposite sex. At thirteen, he had lost his virginity to Mamaíta, a Negress who worked in the infirmary and could easily have been his grandmother. In secret, he learned from Mamaíta the mysteries of how women should be kissed and caressed in what she called ‘touchy-touchy lessons' held every Sunday when the other slaves went out, some to have fun in the local taverns, others to go swimming in the river. On the pretext of curing his cold or scolding him for some misdeed, Mamaíta would take José to the infirmary. He would arrive back in the slave quarters late at night, tired and sore. ‘A pig fell on me,' was his invariable excuse. His mother peered at him with her eagle eyes, secretly thinking that the more pigs fell on her son, the better equipped he would be for life.

José was a Mandinga like his father Evaristo and his mother Rosario, who worked in the sugar mill, turning the wheel, sowing, cutting and harvesting cane. Sometimes Evaristo would send José to have a horse shod or Rosario would give him chores around the infirmary, where the slaves used as wet nurses were housed. By the time he turned eighteen, José was a six-foot, broad-shouldered, muscular Negro. He had had sex with almost all the unmarried female slaves on the plantation. His blood brothers admired him, and longed to be like him since José had a charm that led others to treat him with affection and respect.

José often asked his parents what had become of Oscar and when finally they told him his friend had been sold, the boy spent a long time fretting about their answer. For months afterwards, he kept a close watch on the white overseer; he would peer through a chink in the door of the slave quarters at night before he went to sleep and every time he saw the overseer he would run and hide, terrified the man was coming to take him and sell him. But neither he nor his brothers nor his parents were ever sold. His was a different fate.

Some months before war broke out, the slaves led an uprising that would go down in history as the Slaughter of the Santistebans. Beginning with the dogs and ending with the family, not a soul on the property was left alive. The bodies of Don Manuel and Isabel Santisteban and their children were strung up from the watchtower. After the slaves had burned everything, they went their separate ways, fleeing for the caves or the hills. José, his parents and his brothers hid out in the Accursed Forest where they quickly contracted yellow fever. Within a week all but José had died. This is how the young Mandinga boy, like so many who had lost everything, came to be roaming the streets of Santiago.

When word finally reached Oscar that José, whom he thought of as his only surviving family, was now a vagrant and set out in search of him, scouring the streets, the taverns and the dive bars. Finally, among the ruins of the sugar plantation where both boys had been born, he stumbled upon a bundle of foul-smelling rags.

Oscar asked what had happened and José told him about the Slaughter of the Santistebans. Most of the slaves, he told Oscar, had been caught and hanged. He told his friend how his own family had died of a strange sickness that had turned their bodies into human furnaces. The Kortico shook his friend by the shoulder and said: ‘You should join the
mambí
army. Killing those bastards is the only way we will ever be free.' José spat on the red earth and turned back to sleep.

‘Damn it, José, these white men are the ones who brought the sickness to Cuba.'

Hearing this, José suddenly sat up and stared hard into Oscar's eyes. His friend explained that many times he had seen the Spanish spreading disease through the swamplands, that this was why runaway slaves were always found stiff-legged long before they reached the refuge of the caves.

‘I'm telling you, they are the ones who brought the sickness,' Oscar said. ‘Now is the time to avenge your family for all the pain they suffered.'

The Mandinga spat on the ground again, but this time to let the Kortico know that he was prepared to fight. José extricated himself from the pile of putrid rags and climbed up behind Oscar on his horse and together they rode back to the
mambí
camp.

During the ambush on the Palma Sopriano convoy in Victoria, José slew fifteen Spaniards with a machete and returned to camp with two horses and eight rifles. In the Battle of Juan Mulato, Oscar and José killed forty-two Spaniards. When, during the fighting at Tibisí, Oscar and José each slew thirty enemy soldiers, the
mambí
soldiers christened them ‘The Duo of Death', and General Maceo personally decided to take them with him to the rally at Mangos de Baraguá in March 1878. Lounging in their hammocks after the battle, Oscar confessed to his friend that he loved war, because ‘you get to go to so many different places, places you've never been'.