Conquistadora (23 page)

As he watched Ramón, Inocente, and Ana, Severo’s suspicions became a certainty. They were too comfortable around one another. She was as familiar and open as a wife toward Inocente, not observing the affectionate-but-respectful distance due a brother-in-law.

Severo finished clearing the weeds and saplings and mounted his horse. Burro seemed confused about where the trail started downhill, so he guided him toward an opening in the brambles. In a few minutes the bell would toll, the workers would trudge to the fields, and the planting of next season’s crop would resume. He was short two slaves and one foreman. The loss of Alejo and Curro was greater than the loss of Pepe, who could more easily be replaced.

Severo had joined the lieutenant and two soldiers on the search for Alejo and Curro. Severo’s hounds flushed them from a cave with the other three
cimarrones
three days’ ride from Los Gemelos. Severo and the soldiers flayed them, then marched them to the ceiba tree. Severo hog-tied and hanged the five men from the same branches they used for Inocente and Pepe, but lower. He let his hounds play with them until the men begged for forgiveness for their deeds. He made them say the Lord’s prayer, then slit each of their throats. The lieutenant went into the bushes to vomit because, he said, he’d never seen so much blood.

One morning three weeks after the news of Inocente’s murder, Ramón delivered the hacienda books and two bulging portfolios to Ana. He was sheepish, as if he’d been forced to turn them over against his will.

“I can’t do this. Inocente was in charge and I can’t make sense of any of it.” He stood like a boy expecting a scolding.

Ana frowned over the portfolios but didn’t open them. She skimmed the ledgers. The figures were in a neat, clerkish hand. “This is not Inocente’s handwriting,” she said.

“Severo,” Ramón said.

Thank goodness, Ana thought. “I see. Would you like me to take care of this from now on, as I used to?”

Ramón grimaced, then: “Please.”

“Is there anything I need to know that is not here? Papers. Invoices. Loans.”

“Everything should be there.” He was uncomfortable, as if by relinquishing the materials, he was divulging more than the financial necessaries of the business.

“Muy bien,”
she said.

“If you have any questions, Severo can probably explain.”

She almost laughed. “I’ll see him later”—she pressed the portfolios and ledgers to her bosom—“after I go through these.”

She spent the better part of that Saturday comparing paid from unpaid invoices, bills of lading, balances on customs and tax demands, deeds for the purchased lands, promissory notes from don Luis and from don Eugenio. The figures showed her what her husband had been unwilling to share: that they now owned almost six hundred
cuerdas
, mostly woods and forest that at least paid lower taxes than cultivated fields. There were three farmhouses, excluding the one by the river that Ramón had given Severo. Sixteen of the seventy-one slaves in the hacienda belonged to Severo, even though they lived in the
cuarteles
and were treated the same as the de Argosos’. In the slave log the ones who belonged to Severo were entered with their first name followed by “de Fuentes.” The most surprising item in the portfolios, however, was that another four hundred
cuerdas
contiguous to the southern boundary of Los Gemelos, including the cove, belonged to Severo. Ana had no idea he had the resources to own so much land and so many slaves. Contraband, she concluded, was more lucrative than agriculture.

Over the next months following Inocente’s murder, Ramón’s eyes lost even more of their brightness; his features slackened as joy faded from them. He was often in a doddering confusion more appropriate for someone far older than his twenty-seven years. He stumbled frequently, as if he’d lost the connection between intention and action. He carried Miguel around as if the boy shouldn’t touch the ground, while Inés and Flora followed close behind. He constantly caressed and kissed Miguel, but seemed irritated if Ana touched him or stood too close when they were alone. She had the impression that her presence was painful to him. Ramón had condemned her for their sexual situation. Did he also blame her for Inocente’s death? She didn’t know how to broach the subject without sounding defensive or accusatory.

Doña Leonor’s letters became longer and more frequent after Inocente’s death, and left no doubt whom she blamed for her son’s murder. “I begged Ana,” she wrote to her one remaining son, “not to put romantic notions into your heads, and now look at what happened.” Had Leonor forgotten that she read every piece of correspondence that came to Los Gemelos? Neither Ramón nor Inocente was fond of writing the long letters expected by their parents. It was in Ana’s hand that the chatty responses to Leonor’s questions were drafted; Ramón and Inocente later copied and signed them. After his brother’s death, however, Ramón answered his parents in his own sprawling hand but didn’t ask Ana to stop reading his mother’s letters. She was sure he was speaking to her through doña Leonor.

———

One night, Ana and Ramón were having their coffee on the porch while listening to the tree frogs:
coquí-coquí-coquí
. A candle burned by the door, its flame sputtering every time an insect flew into it. When she noticed him staring at her, Ana expected him to speak. Instead, he blinked without acknowledging her, then turned his gaze to the treetops beyond the railing and took a long drag from his cigarette. The gesture was so offensive that she stood abruptly and went into the bedroom, expecting him to follow, asking what was wrong, or at least to apologize. But a while later, when her door opened, it was Flora who entered with her bowls and cloths and cheerful hum. There was a moment when Ana’s mood showed enough to change Flora’s smile into a worried frown.

“I do something wrong,
señora
?” she asked, instinctively stepping back.

“No, Flora.” Ana let Flora bathe her, but the usually relaxing ritual was marred by anger.

Ana had experienced reactions like Ramón’s in the mirrored salons of Sevilla society, in the waxed halls of the Convento de las Buenas Madres, on the streets of Cádiz and San Juan. It was a look that said, “I see you, but I deign not to speak to you.” It said, “I see you but I do not share the high opinion you have of yourself.” It said, “I see you but you’re not who I want to see.” It said, “To me, you don’t exist.”

After her bath, Ana sent Flora to let Ramón know she was ready for bed, but the maid returned with a sheepish expression.
“El señor no está.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know,
señora
.” Flora looked away.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” Ana asked, and the maid seemed to be caught between wanting to please her and wanting to protect someone else’s secret.

“No le sé decir, señora,”
she finally said. The phrase could mean “I don’t know how to tell you” or “I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” but Ana suspected that Flora meant the former.

“I order you to tell me what you do know.”

“Por favor, señora.”
Flora shrank away, but she couldn’t leave the
room without permission and couldn’t refuse to obey.
“No sé nada,”
she whimpered, but Ana knew she was lying. Before Ana even realized what she was doing, she slapped her. Flora dropped and quickly folded into a position that exposed only her back and her hands wrapped around her head.

Ana had never hit anyone before. In the orange glow of the candle, she stared at the protective lump Flora had become and she was filled with shame. Her hand smarted, and it would be Flora she’d complain to about the hurt. Flora would examine her fingers one by one, then rub something on them to stop the pain. But Flora was now whimpering at her feet, expecting another blow, protecting her face, her breasts, and her belly from the woman whose naked body she’d just washed and powdered. Ana turned and walked off with a heavy tread so that Flora could hear her moving and expect no more blows.

“¿Señora?”
Flora knelt, prepared, Ana thought, to curl up again if she should strike.

Ana walked as far as the candlelight reached, to the shelf that held her brushes and hairpins. “You can go, Flora,” she said, but the maid didn’t budge.
“Vete,”
Ana repeated, but Flora stayed on the floor, staring in front of her and wringing her hands.

“What is it now?” Ana asked with undisguised exasperation.

“If you didn’t ask,” Flora said.

Ana heard a buzz in her ears, like when she stood up too quickly. A deafening ringing followed, but it couldn’t silence Flora’s words.

“He goes to Marta,
señora
. Like don Inocente used to.”

Wide-bottomed, gossipy Marta, the bucktoothed cook who, weeks before Ana gave birth, was moved from the room on the ground floor to her own
bohío
on the path beyond the barracks. Ana thought that Severo had settled her there for himself, but it hadn’t occurred to Ana that Ramón or Inocente would go to the slaves. Least of all Marta.

Flora hadn’t moved from her kneeling position and kept her eyes lowered, but Ana felt that she guessed what Ana was feeling and thinking. Were some of those children Ramón’s or Inocente’s? It also seemed to Ana that the maid, dismissed before she spoke, released the information to get even for the slap.

“Vete,”
she repeated. The room was lit with just one candle, but was that a smile on Flora’s face as she turned to go?

Ana tossed all night between sleep and wakefulness, jerking with every creak of the house timbers, the shrill call of night birds. She listened for Ramón’s steps and the groan of the hammock ropes. Several times that night, Miguel woke up crying, and Flora shushed and hummed until the child quieted. Flora had stopped singing to Miguel after Inocente’s death and didn’t resume until after over a year of mourning, when Ana changed from black garments to blue. Ana didn’t intend to put an end to the mourning, but her black clothes had been mended too many times. After river washings and sun dryings, the black faded to an uneven, dirty gray. On Severo’s next trip to town, she instructed him to purchase black cotton for the simple skirts and blouses that were her uniform. He showed up with a length of navy blue fabric, full of apologies that he wasn’t able to secure black.

“It can be dyed, I was told, if you wish,” he said.

She made a skirt and blouse and wore it for the first time on an October Sunday morning when Ramón was to read a pamphlet that related the story of St. Luke that began: “Many have attempted to write in an orderly manner, the history of the absolutely true events that have taken place among us.”

The slaves listened patiently and some even devoutly, but fidgeted and silently tapped their knees with their fingertips, counting the minutes until the reading would be over. They noticed her blue clothes. Within days, the women resumed their colorful head wrappings and every night there was more and louder singing and playing of instruments in the barracks.

When they first arrived at Los Gemelos, Ana had enjoyed riding to the farthest edges of the hacienda in self-satisfied ownership. After Inocente’s murder, however, she never ventured beyond the property’s original boundaries and never left the
casona
alone after dark. Though her days were filled with the same hard work as ever, the nights in Los Gemelos were as full of mystery as if she were still reading about them in Spain. When she sat on the porch, or when she lay at night, sleepless, she tried to identify the sounds around her. The music and singing from the barracks were easy, as was the ubiquitous
coquí
. The dogs barked sometimes. The mournful lowing of cattle at night always sent a shiver down her spine. But there were also rattlings, creaks, thuds, splats, bumps, and rustlings that made her wonder what could possibly be moving beyond the thin walls
of her house. When Ramón was home, his snores were a comfort, a reminder that she wasn’t alone in a wilderness. Miguel’s cries, too, even when they awakened her from deepest sleep, made Ana feel accomplished, purposeful. Her work here, she told herself, was meant not just to finish what her ancestor began and to fulfill her own destiny, but also to extend her lineage and to secure Miguel’s patrimony. With Inocente dead and Ramón slipping into his strange, premature old age, Ana needed a reason to justify her refusal to leave Los Gemelos, in spite of the letters from Elena, don Eugenio, and doña Leonor begging them to return to the city.

A squeak on the boards, a soft step, the slow rasping of a hinge as Ramón came back minutes before the sun broke through the gaps in the walls. Outside, Marta was cracking twigs to feed the smoldering
fogón
.

Ana jumped from bed as if the sheets were on fire and, barefoot, ran from her room and into Ramón’s without knocking or even thinking about what she was doing.

“How dare you,” she hissed, “deceive me with that … that woman?”

The room was unlit, but she could distinguish Ramón’s shirtless figure near the hammock. He sighed, long and low, emptying himself of air. She could smell his warm, tobacco breath and pungent sweat.