Conquistadora (42 page)

“Give breast,” Siña Damita suggested, but the child flailed and gasped and couldn’t suckle.

“Take her away, Siña Damita,” Consuelo said. “I can’t bear to see another one die.”

The midwife took the baby to a woman whose own child had died two days earlier. Magda nursed and cuddled the jaundiced girl back from near death, and when Damita came to see how she was doing, Magda gave the
partera
ten Spanish pesos so that she could keep the girl, and so that Siña Damita would keep her secret, a secret she took to the grave.

Hurricane San Lorenzo, so named because it made landfall on that saint’s day, moved east to west over the Cordillera Central and changed the landscape on either side of the mountains. At Hacienda los Gemelos, the river altered course and flooded nearly five
cuerdas
of cane. The roots drowned in spite of efforts to drain the fields. After the harvest, which began in February and ended in late April, a full month earlier than usual, Ana reported to don Eugenio that it would take two years to recover from the loss, due to the slow growth of the plants. In spite of this, she planned to increase the number of cultivated fields, from 250 to 300
cuerdas
.

That summer of 1853, two years after she and Severo married, Ana noticed that the
campesinas
living on the boundaries of the hacienda began to deliver babies with green eyes, golden hair, compact bodies. She had no doubt that they were Severo’s offspring. She was furious and hurt, but she wasn’t about to repeat the scene with Ramón. She remembered her conversations with Elena, their plan that when their husbands turned to their mistresses, they’d turn to each other. But on Los Gemelos, there was no one for her to turn to but Severo.

At least he was loving and passionate in bed, and treated her courteously before others. Culture and tradition had accustomed women, even one as perceptive as Ana, that this was the most they could expect from a husband. That didn’t mean that she accepted the situation without a way to retaliate for his infidelity. Severo wanted a legitimate heir, so now it was Ana’s turn to take pains to avoid getting pregnant. Over years of daily contact with people who knew more about plants and herbs than the trained doctors of Europe,
she’d learned remedies to keep herself infertile. Besides regular douches, she prepared strong infusions of artemisia or
ruda
sweetened with honey that she drank instead of water. Every menstrual period felt like a reprisal, and he was no wiser. He never rebuked her and she never apologized.

Before the 1854
zafra
, Severo purchased five more men. Their inventory increased to fifty-three slaves; thirty-seven owned by the hacienda and sixteen by Severo. Of this number, forty-two were able and healthy enough to do the work. Twenty
jornaleros
were already committed to the harvest, but they hoped to get more.

In January Severo took Ana’s report for Mr. Worthy to the post station in Guares, and returned with a letter from Sevilla in Jesusa’s looping hand, posted a month earlier:

“What does this mean?” Ana asked Severo. “Was there another letter?”

“No, that was all. Is something wrong?”

Ana sat down hard and read the letter again as a benumbing chill washed over her. “I can’t … it seems … My father is dead and my mother is …”

In the nine years Severo and Ana had known each other, it had been inappropriate for him to comfort her when Inocente, her Cubillas
abuelo
, and then Ramón died. She now sat stunned, reading the
letter a second time, then a third, as if more would be revealed by repetition. He lifted her by the elbows, drew her against his chest, and waited for her to reach around him, but her arms remained as limp and unresponsive as a marionette’s. He raised her chin and she looked at him searchingly, as if trying to recognize him. Her black eyes were moist, but there were no tears, although her face was drawn in sorrow. It was the Ana he knew, but a different one, childlike, afraid.

“Ana,” he said low against her ear.
“Mi Anita.”
As if her name awakened her, she responded, her arms around his neck, her shoulders heaving.

The black-edged envelope arrived a week later, even though it had been sent a month before the other. Her father had fallen down the stairs from the second floor of their home in Plaza de Pilatos and was found broken but alive at the feet of the crusader. In spite of every effort, Jesusa wrote, he didn’t regain consciousness.

Don Gustavo was sixty-one years old, and when Ana last saw him, he still looked young and vigorous, even if he almost always wore a frown. Ana was now twenty-seven, and it didn’t seem possible that the girl who left Plaza de Pilatos as a bride could be the woman who now sat on a stump by the pond, mourning the death of yet another man in her life.

Over the last ten years, she’d thought little about her parents. They were as distant in memory as in miles. She hardly remembered what they looked like, and as she tried to recall them now, glimpses flickered like sparkles over the water’s surface.

Don Gustavo planted his heels into the earth, knees straight, shoulders back, his chest puffed from his waist. He wore his dignity as heavily as an anchor. Had all those ancestors and their exploits been an encumbrance as much as an honor? He’d done nothing significant with his life. His arrogant but discontented gaze was that of a man who’d failed to leave a mark, who hadn’t even discharged his duty to father a son to carry his own name.

Her mother, no longer a wife, was erasing her identity under a veil, her finite days given to prayer and to begging forgiveness for her failures. It angered Ana that both would die awash in regret.

Nearby, four-and-a-half-year-old Conciencia harvested watercress
along the pond’s shore. Ana thought about her son. She hadn’t seen Miguel in nearly five years, but her letters to him were frequent, and he dutifully answered. Elena wrote with more specifics about Miguel’s health and his progress in school. Does he remember me? Ana answered her own question; of course not. She was a darker shadow in Miguel’s life than her parents were in hers. She felt a pang of remorse but waved it away like a fly that came too near. If she allowed it, she might look at her life too closely, might review her choices and decisions and perhaps even bend under repentance. No, she said, no regrets.

She looked across the pond. Severo waved as if he’d been waiting for her to acknowledge him. Over the last week, he’d made sure to be in her sight, and if she gestured, he’d come, his eyes darkened to emeralds. Since the news of her father’s death, he’d been more affectionate. At first she resisted his advances, but then she felt so alone that she eventually succumbed. When he caressed and stroked her, when he called her sweet names and kissed her where she never thought to be kissed again, Ana cried as if his attentions were unwelcome and as if she didn’t want him. But she did. She did.

Just before her marriage to Severo, Ana had moved Conciencia to the downstairs servants’ quarters with Flora. She asked Ana’s permission to train Conciencia to hold her bowls and rags while she bathed Ana at night. Conciencia learned how Flora’s sure hands washed her mistress, powdered her, brushed her long hair into braids tied at the ends with ribbons. Soon Conciencia was able to bathe one side of Ana’s body while Flora did the other.

While she now slept with Flora, during the day Conciencia was inseparable from Ana. The two could be seen working in the gardens, Ana shorter than most women, Conciencia smaller than most girls her age, always a step behind her mistress. Behind their backs, the slaves called them La Pulga y La Pulguita, Flea and Little Flea.

“What plant is that,
señora
?”

“That one is sage,
niña
. The leaves are used to treat sore throats, and in compresses for cuts and wounds.”

As she matured, Conciencia spent hours listening to the elders who remembered Africa, asking about this or that plant or cure until
she extracted from them knowledge they didn’t even know they had. Gathering information as assiduously as she gathered herbs, Conciencia eventually surpassed Ana in knowledge and ability.

Conciencia had a gift for mixing the right combination of leaves, flowers, and twigs into teas that relieved symptoms from stomachaches to melancholy. For burns she made a cataplasm of ground raw potato applied directly to the skin, which healed with minimum peeling. Ana’s seldom-used embroidery needles became lances for boils and infected sores that Conciencia salved with ground flower petals in coconut oil or lard. After a while, the women didn’t bother to ask Ana to cure their children or examine an infected cut. Even while she was still a child, they called on Conciencia, whose body, humpbacked, bent over to one side, made her look like an old woman and gave her an authority she might not otherwise have. Her short, bowed legs were powerful. She moved with a swiftness that surprised those who saw her run from the
casona
to the barracks to the garden to the fields. She seemed to be everywhere at once and appeared out of nowhere when least expected.

As she grew older, it was Conciencia who took care of the sick and injured, who assisted in births and helped prepare the dead. By the time she entered puberty, she had greater knowledge of human suffering than could be expected from a girl who never traveled farther than the gates of Los Gemelos.

Constant exposure to the cycle of life from its beginning until its often painful and violent end showed in her behavior. The evenness of temper she displayed on her very first day of life evolved into a silent, watchful character that reassured some and frightened others. Inevitably, people said that she was a witch, a label that didn’t seem to bother her.

“You’re fearless, my little one,” Ana often told her, and Conciencia smiled.

One morning, when Conciencia was six years old, Ana found her staring into the fire in the kitchen shack.

“What is it,
niña
? Did your food fall into the ashes?”

“The workers will get sick and die,” Conciencia said in a monotone, her eyes following the smoky spirals over the
fogón
. “They will burn.”

Ana looked at the fire as if it held a secret for her, but saw nothing
but smoke. “You had a nightmare,
niña
, that’s all.” She cupped the girl’s cheek in her palm.

“I see it,
señora
,” Conciencia said. “They will get sick. A soldier will tell don Severo to burn them.”

“Where did you hear such a thing?”

“The fire,
señora
.”

Ana shuddered. Her foundling, who preferred collecting herbs to playing with other children, seemed to speak with secret knowledge. Ana knelt and took Conciencia in her arms. “You mustn’t say such things,
niña
, it’s heresy. Get on your knees and let’s say a Lord’s prayer.”

“But I see it,
señora
. They will get sick and soldiers—”

“Hush, Conciencia! Fire can’t speak. Now kneel and pray.”

Conciencia did as told, but Ana couldn’t help the dread that wrapped itself around her at the girl’s intense gaze and un-childlike certainty.

She was so preoccupied with Conciencia’s words that she didn’t see the laundress returning from the river with a bucket of water balanced on her head. As Ana stood to brush the dust from her skirt, Nena la Lavandera passed close enough that Ana bumped into her, making the young woman lose her balance. The bucket tipped and fell, splashing both of them with the water intended for the barracks.

“Ay, señora, disculpe, por favor, lo siento,”
the laundress begged, backing to a safe distance and bowing her head.

“It was an accident, Nena,” Ana said as Conciencia used her skirt to wipe Ana’s dress dry.

Flora came running from the other side of the house. “Stupid girl, look what you done,” she yelled at Nena, leading Ana away from the wet circle at her feet, patting dry her arms and the front of her blouse with a kitchen rag.

“It was an accident,” Nena repeated Ana’s words.

“Pick up your bucket and go about your work,” Flora ordered, her higher status as Ana’s personal maid giving her some of the authority of her
patrona
.

La Lavandera grabbed the upended bucket and ran to refill it at the pond while Flora and Conciencia tended to Ana, who crossed herself and stared fearfully at the dark red stain blooming on the hard tamped clay of the
batey
.

———

Nena la Lavandera had spent her life near, on, in, and around water. Her earliest memory was of being strapped on her mother’s back as Mamá washed clothes in a river. She was born near the sea, on another sugar plantation where the bosses spoke a different language.