Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [138]
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