Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [146]
“You can take her away now.”
She went upstairs, where no one could see her cry. She was la patrona, and if she broke, the whole structure she’d so carefully built would crumble beneath her. She stayed in her room the rest of the day.
That night, Flora was thrown into the fire, but there was no one to sing her into the next world.
———
On the eleventh day, thirty-three-year-old Inés, who nursed Miguel and Conciencia, was sent into the barracks. Inés, who loved gossip. Inés, who berated her husband for spending too much time decorating coffins.
“Please, patrón, please let me bury her, mi buen señor. She was the milk mother to la patrona’s son, the mother of my sons, his milk brothers.”
“I can make no exceptions.”
This time, Ana didn’t intercede. Cholera spared José and his sons twelve-year-old Efraín and eleven-year-old Indio, but it took his two youngest children, Pedrito, six, and Tati, four, who went into the fire hours after their mother. The only slave allowed to have tools without prior permission, José took refuge in his shop. While his sons toiled in the fields, and as his wife’s and two youngest children’s bodies smoldered, José chose and smoothed a mahogany board two heads taller than himself and two of his hands’ width. He studied the grain, caressed the length of the board, wiped sawdust and soot from both sides. Then, starting at the far left, he began to carve with the first death, Nena: hands pouring water from a pitcher. Then came a hoe, a machete, a horseshoe, a mortar and pestle, a lily, a hen with her chicks, a broom, another hoe, a shovel, a ham, two hibiscus flowers, a bell, another hoe, another machete, a cooking spoon, a top with its twine, a long-handled ladle used to skim boiling sugar syrup, a bellows, a kite, a butterfly, a rake, a bowl, a gourd. When he reached the spot for Flora he thought a long time, wishing he knew how to sculpt a song. Finally he settled on a malanga leaf because she once said it reminded her of the ones her people in Africa used for building their shelters. For Inés he carved full, shapely lips. And for his own two children, a sun and a moon.
In the meadow on the other side of the barracks, seven-year-old Conciencia stood on the periphery as red, orange, and blue fingers blazed to the heavens. In the transparent heat billowing from the flames and in the thick gray smoke of the consuming fires, she saw the spirits of the dead rise, some in song and others in writhing agony. Mesmerized, Conciencia directed her thoughts toward the spiraling clouds and asked her questions. The fire hissed and cackled answers in puffs and swirls that took shape before her eyes as its sizzle whispered in a tongue only she could understand.
During the worst of the scourge, no one looked healthier than Severo Fuentes. No one moved on foot or horseback with more authority; no one else’s eyes peered so closely into every nook and hollow of the plantation; no one else paid as much attention to the smallest details of the operations as Severo Fuentes. From the casona, Ana saw him coming and going, ordering men and beasts, his voice hardly raised but heard everywhere by everyone. If he slept, she didn’t see it. He was out all night patrolling the lanes and canebrakes with his dogs. He stopped to see how she was doing, to bring news, and to remind her not to go into the barracks, to have no contact with anyone except for Conciencia, who delivered her meals and bathed her. Night was the hardest time. When Conciencia walked into the room, Ana always expected Flora with her bowls, her smile, her songs. Conciencia was serious, silent unless spoken to.