Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [140]
Nena held on to her mother even tighter then, but over the screams and moans she heard wood snapping and cracking, and the ropes holding the lumber and bamboo unknotted and the floor drifted in opposite directions. People splashed into the sea, and the planks knocked their heads, and hands and feet swished and slapped the ocean as they paddled toward the flotsam that remained of the raft that had brought them so far from land and home.
Nena didn’t remember when she lost her grip on Mamá, or when she found a plank to float upon, or how many others survived. She woke up inside the stinking hold of a ship, surrounded by many more terrified men, women, and children than had left with her and Mamá.
Sailors who trawled the ocean for the survivors of escape attempts found them. They could return the escapees to their owners for the reward, but they made more money selling them far away from where they plucked them from the sea.
A few days later Nena was again on the open sea, her small hands gripping the edges of a dinghy rowed by two bearded, smelly white men. She didn’t recognize the six men and three women who sat terrified on the wet floor of the dinghy as it approached a beach where don Severo waited with another man and two frothy-mouthed dogs. Once they landed, don Severo and the other man tied ropes around the people’s hands and necks. Because Nena was small, her wrists were bound to a woman whom she came to know as Marta.
They walked for a long time away from the sea until they reached a derelict sugar plantation too big, Nena could tell, for the paltry number of slaves in its batey. Behind the tumbledown barns, what were once cultivated fields and meadows had been reclaimed by quick-growing, luscious vegetation. It was not called Los Gemelos then. That happened after doña Ana, don Ramón, and don Inocente came.
Nena didn’t know how don Severo could tell that she’d worked alongside her mother at a river’s edge.
“You, nena,” he said. “Here’s a pail.”
In addition to washing clothes by this river, she was to keep the barracones and casona supplied with water. Several times a day Nena walked below the rapids, where the river ran clearest, and filled her pail. She sat on her haunches, lifted the pail to her head, and balanced it on a rag twisted into a cushion. She then walked the half mile to the barracks, where she added to whatever rainwater collected inside a large drum by the door.
She returned to the river and came back to the casona’s kitchen, where she poured water into a tall funnel-shaped terra-cotta vase inside a wooden frame. Below it a pitcher collected the water filtered through the coned bottom. Nena would like to know what that water tasted like, but she wasn’t allowed to drink from the pitcher reserved for the patrones.
Another of her jobs was to check whether the chamber pots needed emptying in the casona. Everyone else pissed and shat wherever the urge struck them if they were in the cañaveral, or if they were closer to the batey, they squatted over a hole on the open platform jutting over the hill behind the barn near the pond. But the patrones used china pots and wiped their bottoms with perfumed linen strips that they dropped into a basket for Nena to collect and wash daily.
She also emptied the waste bucket in the male and female barracks that were locked overnight. Once she emptied the chamber pots and waste buckets behind the barn, she rinsed them in the pond until she saw no signs of shit and piss. She did observe, however, that the masters’ neither looked nor smelled any better than that of the slaves.
Nena’s life improved somewhat after one of the patrones noticed her and asked don Severo to bring her to the finca. Soon after her twelfth birthday, one of the patrones, she couldn’t tell which, took her virginity. After don Inocente died, she realized he was the one who liked to slap and choke. Don Severo moved her to a bohío and ordered her to look after don Ramón. Don Ramón wanted