Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [136]
Consuelo waited, but she wasn’t idle. She grew vegetables and flowers, she fished, she improved her cottage. Nearby campesinas came to visit because even though Consuelo had been a puta, she was the mistress of the man who owned the land they lived on. Consuelo was also generous. Any campesina could come to her for a handful of rice, for a sweet papaya or a bunch of quenepas. Their sons caught turtles or fished for octopus and always brought her some of their catch. She sent them home with a penca of salted codfish or a bunch of dried manzanilla. Sometimes the campesinas brought their children to bathe at her beach.
Over the first three years Consuelo was Severo’s woman, she delivered three convulsing infants gasping for breath who died within hours. Siña Damita had told her that a powerful curse had been placed on her womb.
“A jealous woman, the worst kind.” Damita suggested baths and invocations to the full moon, and gave her cuttings of vara prieta, tártago, and cariaquillo to grow along her fence near the gate. “They protect from bad spirits. You mash leaves, boil in much water, mix with cool water, and pour over you every day for one week. The curse will be washed away.”
Six years ago, Severo came one night, desesperado, smelling of blood and death, and Consuelo was sure she’d conceived again. Nine months later she delivered a baby girl the color of amber. She was tiny, and like the others, thrashing and jerking, unable to take in air.
“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.
CONCIENCIA’S VISIONS
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