Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [142]
That night, Nena lay on her pallet in the women’s barracón and dreamed that she was floating on a stream toward a placid ocean. She landed on an island, where her mother was pounding clothes against rocks.
“But, Mamá,” Nena protested in her dream, “you said never to wash clothes in seawater.”
Her mother ignored her and continued beating the fabric with a paddle. “Mamá,” Nena cried, because something hit her belly, except the pain seemed to be coming from her womb. She woke in a sweat. She had to sit over the waste bucket immediately.
She stumbled over sleeping bodies and under the hamacas to the corner, where she squatted and emptied her bowels without relief. She was very thirsty. She wanted to reach the jofaina with drinking water on the other side of the door, but was afraid of soiling herself on the way or, worse, of shitting over someone sleeping on the low pallets and on the floor. She sat over the bucket pressing her forearms into her belly in a vain attempt to take the edge off the cramps that discharged her bowels without any effort on her part.
“Water,” she called into the night. “Agua, por favor.”
“Be quiet and let folk sleep,” someone grumbled.
“Somebody please bring me water,” Nena sobbed, but her voice sounded as if it were coming from another body.
Strong hands pulled her off the bucket and led her to her pallet. Callused hands lifted her head and tipped a coconut shell to her lips. She must have passed out, because next thing she knew it was day and everyone had gone to work, but old Fela was with her. Fela removed Nena’s dress and washed her bottom because she’d soiled herself.
She was feverish, and mortified that she couldn’t control her body. But mostly she was thirsty, so thirsty. “Agua,” she begged, and wrinkled hands brought the coconut shell to her lips. Water dribbled down her chin to her chest, but it didn’t cool her. The few sips she swallowed renewed the cramps and diarrhea but didn’t slake her thirst.
The door to the barracón opened, and the rectangle of sun on the floor darkened with a woman’s silhouette.
“Es la lavandera,” Fela said to doña Ana. “She’s been sick all night.”
She knew she was dying when doña Ana’s face peered down at her and Nena saw fear.
“My name is Olivia,” she whispered to the patrona, then closed her eyes.
Seventy-year-old Fela and sixty-four-year-old Pabla washed Nena’s soiled body, finger-combed and plaited her hair. Nena didn’t have another dress, so the women wrapped her inside a tattered blanket that they didn’t have time to wash and dry in the sun. The girl who wanted to be called Olivia, who was always clean and smelled of fresh water, was swaddled in a sweaty, torn blanket that someone else was willing to give up because la patrona would now replace it with a new one.
José kept royal palm boards cut in two lengths, adult and child, to quickly assemble coffins for the slaves. They were simple narrow rectangles, and as Fela and Pabla washed and prepared Nena, José cut the boards, not as long as an adult male’s nor as small as a child’s. He found a scrap of laurel and whittled hands holding a pitcher, just like the one Nena used to capture water for the patrones under the filtering pot. He always tried to decorate the lids of the rough palm coffins he made. Inés nagged that he should use his time for the little animals that don Severo could sell for him in town.
“Who cares about adorning a coffin?” she said. “The box will be buried and no one will ever see it.”
“I care,” he said, “even if no one sees it again.”
By that evening, when the workers came from their jobs, Fela and Pabla had put Nena inside the box on sawhorses in