Conquistadora (47 page)

“Ask her where I can find ten more
jornaleros
, then.”

“It doesn’t work that way. She doesn’t do tricks. She has a true gift, but she’s a child and doesn’t understand what she sees.”

A few days later, Conciencia told Ana that she’d envisioned a crazy bull butting his head against a fence until he broke through. Ana told Severo, and although skeptical, he alerted the men in charge of the cattle to be watchful. But Conciencia’s visions didn’t come with a specific date and time when something would happen. Three weeks passed and the vigilance over the most aggressive bulls waned, if not vanished. Sure enough, one afternoon, Coloso, the biggest and strongest of the bulls, ripped his stake from the ground, ran straight for a fence, butted until he splintered it, and, foamy mouthed, chased around the
batey
while men, women, and children jumped out of his way to avoid his horns and massive hooves. He stood in the middle of the yard bellowing triumphantly, then plunged into the pond, where the mud sucked him into the soft bottom the more he tried to extricate himself. Every effort to save him failed.

After that, Severo listened more closely whenever Ana mentioned one of Conciencia’s visions.

One morning as she prepared to go down to the fields, Ana found Conciencia agitated.

“What is it,
niña
?”

“A dream,
señora
.”

Ana’s heart jumped. “Tell me.”

“There was a man on fire—”

“Like the pyres,
niña
?”

“No,
señora
, not those
muertos
. It was a white man. It was El Caminante,
señora
.”

“Ramón? You never knew him.”

“I saw him,
señora
. He was on fire in the
cañaveral
.” She was distraught, partly because the vision must have been terrifying, partly because she didn’t really know what she’d seen.

“Calm down, little one. Your dream must have been about don Severo.”

“No,
señora—
”

“Ramón is dead, Conciencia, and he didn’t die in a fire. Your dream was scary, but I’m glad you told me. It was a warning, and you might have just saved
el patrón
’s life. I’ll tell him to be careful when they burn the fields.”

Conciencia hung her head as if she’d done something wrong.

There were moments, like now, when the girl looked less like a child and more like an ancient, wise woman whose eyes could peer into her soul. When Ana baptized her, she’d whispered that she would be her conscience, and sometimes when she looked at the girl, memories washed over Ana unbidden, and often unwelcome.

She left Conciencia in the infirmary and rode Marigalante to her
ingenio
. She crossed herself as she skirted the slave cemetery, Fela’s and Pabla’s crosses sentinels over the other graves. José had asked if he could add over the gate a board he’d sculpted. Severo later told Ana that it was José’s monument to suffering.

Across a brook and up the hill was the ancient ceiba near Ramón’s grave. Again she crossed herself, and as she did, she remembered what Conciencia had just said—El Caminante in flames. Ana broke into a cold sweat and shook her head to rattle the image from her brain. Lately she was shaking her head more often, and wondered whether Severo had noticed. I’ve seen too many deaths, she said to herself. Again she shook her head and ordered herself to stop thinking.

She rode across the fields, where the foremen drove the workers with curses and threats, with shoves and lashes. Ana turned away from them. Severo had made it clear that he managed the workforce and she shouldn’t interfere. Over the following weeks she didn’t complain to the foremen or to Severo that the slaves, particularly, were being pushed harder than ever. She was the
patrona
, and could have insisted that pregnant women be given less demanding tasks. She could have argued that they should not be forced to constantly bend over the long stalks the
macheteros
dropped as they moved into the canebrakes, to collect and carry the heavy bundles of cane to the carts. So far, three women had already miscarried. She didn’t protest that children were doing work usually performed by adults. She didn’t exempt elders who had toiled all their lives, who miraculously survived cholera, whom the slave codes expressly required that owners allow to sit quietly in the shade for the last years left to them.

During that
zafra
of 1857, Ana rode Marigalante from one boundary of Hacienda los Gemelos to the other, secure on the silver-studded saddle Abuelo Cubillas gave her, high over the bent backs of the men and women she called
nuestra gente
, and she didn’t say or even think of words like “abuse” or “injustice.” She had a job to do, so she closed her eyes, hardened her heart, and didn’t say a word. Now she sensed their hostile glances, the silent curses.

The kitchen for the field workers was halfway up the hill to Ingenio Diana. Two cauldrons hung over fire pits where the plantains and tubers bubbled. Fatback sputtered in an enormous iron skillet on a third
fogón
raised from the ground. The men usually called for water the minute they sat to eat their meals, so boys and girls were huddled by the barrels, filling the long gourds dangling from ropes over their shoulders.

Severo helped Ana dismount. He could tell she was upset, but before he could ask, the bell tolled, and as the first clang echoed across the fields, the workers dropped their tools in front of their foremen and rushed to the trestle tables where two cooks were setting up the meal. Two lines formed, slaves on the left, free people on the right.

“If they were as fast in the fields as to the food line,” Severo said, trying to lighten her mood, “we’d have finished the
zafra
by now.”

He was interrupted by a scuffle.

“Don’t touch me!” Moncho, a new day laborer, shoved Jacobo, who shoved Moncho back, and the two men wrestled to the ground. The others backed into their own groups, pushing the women behind the line while they urged the fighters with insults and curses.

“Go to the house,” Severo said to Ana as he uncoiled his whip and bolted toward the men. “Efraín, the
patrona
’s horse,” he called to the boy.

Ana had never seen Severo’s whip fully extended. The moment it unfurled, the two lines of workers backed even farther away from Jacobo and Moncho. The whip snapped into precise arcs, once across Jacobo’s legs, then Moncho’s, Jacobo’s again, then Moncho’s, and a third time as the men scrabbled from it and each other.

“I didn’t do anything,
patrón
!” Jacobo called, and another arc formed and fell across his thighs, then almost immediately, across Moncho’s calves.

“That whip is for slaves,” Moncho yelled. “I’m a free man and a
blanco
!”

He lunged at Severo, swinging fists, spitting threats. Ana would never forget the silence when Moncho dared to attack Severo, as every man, woman, and child held their breath. Moncho was a smallish man, thin, sinewy, and before he could strike more than a couple of ineffective punches, Severo heaved him off the ground and threw him several feet.

Moncho crashed against the raised
fogón
, toppling its contents. A sizzle. A shriek. Ana didn’t think. She sprinted toward the voice behind the raised
fogón
where the skillet filled with fatback had overturned. On the ground was a little girl, one of the cholera orphans, her left side shimmering with boiling lard.

Her name was Meri. Severo had brought her and her older sister, Gloria, from a bankrupt hacienda. Ana had hardly noticed her before, her attention focused on the adults who did the brunt of the work. She ripped the child’s clothes off her body and used her own skirts to absorb the hot grease from Meri’s arm, shoulder, and back.

“Bring some water,” Ana said.

The women surrounded Ana and Meri, holding full gourds. Ana
poured water on Meri’s arm and shoulder to cool her skin. Meri’s stick-thin limbs jerked with every touch. A woman appeared with aloe leaves, her hands scratched and bleeding because she’d pulled the spiky leaves from the ground with her bare fingers, and split them open with her nails. Ana scooped the gel from the leaves and slid it over the burns. Once she’d covered every burn with the aloe, she carried Meri down the aisle dividing enslaved from free laborers to where Severo held her horse.

She moved as if in a trance, detached from her actions but exquisitely aware of every step, every breath.
Another death
the engines clacked and banged.
Another death
the cattle snuffled and stomped.
Another death
the bells around their necks jangled.
Another death
bare feet dragged across the littered ground as workers backed away. Each sound was distinct from the others but dull, as if her ears were stuffed with cotton. She saw no bodies, just huge eyes following her progress toward Marigalante.
Another death
black, brown, blue pupils bored into her as sharp as needles. She walked upon dry cane leaves and stalks, carrying a burden too heavy yet much too light.
Another death
. She handed Meri to Severo while she mounted, then took the child from his arms and draped her across the saddle in front of her. Wordlessly, still in her strange daze, she galloped to the infirmary, to her unguents and leaves, her only remedies against calamity.

After so many, she couldn’t let this child she hardly knew die. She rode across the paths where towering cane eradicated the horizon and didn’t cross herself when she passed Ramón’s grave.
Too many deaths
, as she rode beyond the slaves’ cemetery. I didn’t save them, but this one—she will not die.

Ana treated Meri with raw potato poultices, honey, palmarosa and helichrysum unguent, and the soothing aloe gel. She was seriously burned along her neck and left arm, on her chest and foot. No matter how tender Ana’s ministrations, Meri squealed when she was touched, even in places where the hot grease hadn’t reached. After her throat swelled from crying, she continued to emit gut-wrenching sounds that made the hair along the back of Ana’s neck stand on end.

She was sitting by Meri’s pallet, forcing sweetened tisanes through
her lips, when Severo appeared. “You’ve been at her side for three days straight. Let Conciencia watch her for a while.”

“If I leave her she will die.”

“What difference does it make? If she survives she’ll be crippled.”

She checked the dressing above Meri’s elbow. “She might be.”

He watched her for a few moments. “Why are you all of a sudden taking such interest in a useless child?”

“She’s not useless!” She looked up fast enough to notice him flinch. “Not a single one of them is useless. You have surely noticed that nothing can be done around here without them.”

He stepped closer but didn’t try to touch her. “Don’t talk to me like that, Ana.”

He was like ice, and for a moment, he scared her. She gathered her wits and stood up, which forced him to step back.

“I’m sorry to have raised my voice,” she said. He acknowledged her apology with a nod. “When she recovers I’ll put her to work in the sewing room.”

“You don’t need to reward her,” he said, “for surviving.”

Meri whimpered. Ana returned to the stool by her side, dropped more liquid into the girl’s mouth. When she looked up again, Severo was peering at her like a
guaraguao
at a
pitirre
.

“
Buenas noches
, then.” He inclined his head again, eyes dark as a forest. He turned toward the door but stopped. “You might save her,” he said before he left. “But don’t believe that after all you’ve done she will be grateful.”

After ten days of constant attention and care, Ana was confident that Meri would live, even if her arm, shoulder, and chest would be permanently scarred. She had the worst injuries but wasn’t the only patient in the infirmary. Every day someone was brought in with cuts, bruises, sprains, or infections. To discourage
jornaleros
from missing work when they didn’t feel well, Ana and Conciencia treated them and delivered their babies. During the harvest months, the adults, free or chattel, were kept too busy for sexual relations. The months of
el tiempo muerto
, then, were actually the beginning of life, when most children were conceived, to be born in March, April, and May, at the peak of the harvest.

Besides the women in labor and newborns in the infirmary, there were other victims of the canebrakes. Severo had trained the workers to set controlled fires that scorched the leaves but left the juice-rich stalks exposed and easier to cut. Even during these burns there were accidents. The spectacular flames often entranced the boys who managed the bullocks until the heat singed their skin and hair. A barefoot worker might step on a smoldering patch that seemed doused. A calm day could turn windy and sparks might jump over rows, starting fires in a completely different area from what was planned, causing panic and isolating workers inside walls of flames and smoke.

While Severo avoided setting fires at night, it wasn’t unusual for the work to extend after sundown. This presented its own problems. Men, women, and children were in smoky darkness, swinging machetes, shovels, hoes, and pikes. It was more likely they’d be wounded by the tools used to combat the fire than by the heat and flames.

Even before Meri’s accident, Ana spent much of her day in and around the infirmary, assisted by Conciencia, Teo, and Paula. This year, she noted that there were more serious injuries, miscarriages, and stillbirths than ever, all due to the brutal pace. In this, her thirteenth harvest at Hacienda los Gemelos, there was also an alarming number of workers who’d been whipped. The scars on the workers’ bodies were the most conspicuous sign that as the months ground toward the end, Severo was frantic to bring in a complete harvest, as he’d promised. She didn’t challenge or encourage him. She both admired and despised him for the same reason: his ability to set aside compassion in the service of a single-minded goal. But when she thought about it, she saw the same quality in herself, except that she believed she was not, like Severo, inured to the suffering of
nuestra gente
. She felt it, even if she wouldn’t sacrifice her own ambitions to change their circumstances.