Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [141]
When don Ramón died, Nena was again charged with the chamber pots and the slaves’ buckets, and had to endure the derision of the other women who’d been jealous of her easier job when don Ramón was alive. Don Severo returned her to the barracones, and it was there that her daughter was stillborn just two weeks after the patrona found Conciencia at her door.
Every day, Nena repeated this history to herself as she carried water, rinsed chamber pots, scrubbed clothes, starched and pressed don Severo’s shirts and pants and doña Ana’s plain skirts and blouses. Every day she added something new to it, like the hours she spent in the cave with the patrones during the hurricane, or the time she slipped on rocks and slashed her thigh, where she now had a long scar. She wanted to remember her story because someday she’d tell a living child from her womb that her name was not Nena, and not La Lavandera. She’d tell her child that her name was Olivia, a name with a soft, pretty sound. She’d tell her child that she’d always lived near, on, in, and around water. She was collecting stories for her future children because her own mamá told her nothing. Nena didn’t even know her birth name or her mother’s name because the sea swallowed Mamá before Nena learned who she was and what her life was like before she was born.
“I will not be like Mamá,” Nena vowed as she lifted the filled bucket of water to her head and, with a grunt, stood and began the long walk through the woods to the casona. “I will not die nameless.”
NUESTRA GENTE
Ana had forgotten Conciencia’s strange prediction by the time the rains battered Los Gemelos in May, June, and July 1856, four years after the hurricane had caused so much destruction. The batey’s ground softened into a muddy expanse of slipping and sliding men, women, children, and beasts. Ana’s gardens, which once bloomed in riotous plenty following gentle showers, drooped into soggy despair, and the herbs and medicinal plants threatened to wash away over fast-flowing gullies.
Soaked to the soul, Ana, Flora, and Conciencia worked in the mud, propping up and staking plants, hoeing trenches to divert water from the gardens that had taken years to mature.
Nena couldn’t go to the dangerously swollen river to fetch water or wash clothes, so José set a hollowed trunk on sawhorses near the barracks to create a washtub that filled with rainwater. But the sun couldn’t break through the persistent clouds and she had to press everything dry. She couldn’t empty the chamber pots behind the barn because the hill slid into the pond in a sludge of stinking mud. The contents of the casona’s chamber pots and the slaves’ buckets now went directly into the pond, where rain dissipated the waste until it was neither visible nor foul smelling.
The fields were waterlogged. Severo deployed all brazos to dig channels between rows of germinating cane so that the crop wouldn’t drown. The summer was usually when the slaves were kept busy with maintenance and repairs, clearing land, cleaning or forming new irrigation ditches. The unrelenting storms disrupted the order of work, and for nearly a month every available worker battled the damage caused by the vaguadas.
Once the sun finally burned through the clouds, visible steam rose from the soaked earth in mirage-inducing ripples. The days and nights became unbearably still and hot. Moisture lingered over the land, without the slightest breeze to push it toward the ocean.
When Nena resumed her daily trips to the river, she found that it had changed course again. Runnels had broken through into new paths and hollows. The rock platform downstream of the waterfall where she used to wash clothes was