Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [137]
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:
Mine has been a melancholy task, hija mía, as I choose what to give away to whom, and prepare to leave my home of thirty-five years. I wish you were with me so that we could both cry and pray together, and find solace in each other. Perhaps you’re so overcome with grief that you’re unable to reply. Or maybe our letters went astray. I begin my journey day after tomorrow, and will reach the convent two days later. Pray for me in my new life of silence and contemplation and know that, while we will never see each other again, you will be in every prayer.
Your loving mother,
Jesusa
“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,