Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [131]
When they first went into the cave, the workers didn’t know how to behave with Ana and Severo in such close quarters. Severo kept his machete, whip, and rifle nearby, and the first few hours were tense with mistrust and fear. But as the storm ravaged the countryside, everyone adjusted to the forced intimacy. Flora laid a quilt for Ana and Severo to rest upon. The others sat or squatted on the ground until sleep overcame them. Some told stories in hushed voices, in a patois of Spanish and African tongues. Others gossiped and hummed. Ana prayed, and the women came closer and followed the clicks of her rosary.
When they emerged, two days later, the world was upside down. Were she not la patrona, Ana would have joined the laments of the women, children, and old men as they walked the sodden grounds. The gardens and orchards had been flattened. The bohíos were gone, as well as the roof on the bachelors’ barracks and one wall of the unmarried women’s building. One of the barns had disappeared with the animals in it, leaving only the outline of where it had stood. The windmill was gone, and Ana imagined its huge vanes whirling over the land faster than they ever did over the crushers. Half of the casona’s metal roof had peeled away in pieces, but the walls held, as well as the ground floor, where the furniture and household items were moved before they went into the cave.
Clearing the fallen trees, repairing the damaged buildings, and restoring the flooded fields would take weeks. After a head count, Severo reported that no one had died but there were injuries.
“The infirmary is gone,” Ana said. She shook her head to clear it, set her shoulders, coughed so that her voice wouldn’t sound as small and scared as she was. “Can you get some men to move the furniture upstairs? I can set up the sick room on the ground floor.”
“Of course.” He placed a hand on her shoulder and she reached to squeeze it.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. He nodded and gave orders to the men while she moved amid the debris with her head high, organizing her people—the women, the old and maimed, the children—to clear the yard of branches and rubble, and put to rights nature’s fury.
The hurricane and its aftermath caused four women to go into labor. As she always did, before handing each baby to his or her mother, Siña Damita blessed it and whispered foroyaa in Mandingo into each infant’s ears so that the first word the child heard was “freedom.”
By the time she could return home, three days later, she was bone-tired. Her old mule had collapsed and died a year ago, and Siña Damita had been on foot ever since. She now walked through the mangled cañaveral, hoping that, magically, her cottage would still be standing so that she could take a deserved rest. She’d brought her belongings wrapped inside her hammock to the cave: three pots and pans, six gourd bowls and spoons, four tin cans used for drinking, one blouse, one skirt, two aprons, two head wraps. She now carried the bundle on her head. Each barefoot step was heavier, her toes gripping the muddy ground so that she wouldn’t slip. When she reached the square of land on the edge of the woods, the only signs that someone had lived there were the three stones of the fogón. Damita lowered her weary body into a squat, breathing hard, and pressed her hands over her pounding heart.
She wished Lucho or one of their two surviving sons were there to bemoan with her the loss of her home, the decimated gardens that enabled her livelihood. But don Severo had forbidden free time until the work buildings in the batey were repaired. With a sigh, Damita sent forth the prayers of her Mandinka ancestors, praised Allah, offered thanks for every breath, and begged for strength and patience. She had much to do.
She saved her money in a tin can buried in the rear yard, three paces toward the morning sun from her fogón. She identified what direction that would be on this overcast Sunday morning.