Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [150]
EYES THAT DO NOT SEE,
HEART THAT DOES NOT FEEL
While cholera raged in the batey, Ana settled in the new casa grande accompanied by Conciencia, the houseman, Teo, and his wife, Paula. From the hill, she didn’t hear the wails from the barracks, didn’t smell the flux, didn’t see the emaciated bodies, pleading eyes. She plunged into her work. Hoe in hand, she broke into the dirt as if every seed and shoot might sprout a leaf, a bud, a flower to heal nuestra gente.
Still, over the two months of the epidemic, nearly half of Hacienda los Gemelos’ and almost two-thirds of Severo’s slaves died in successive waves of contagion relieved by days when it seemed the plague was over, only for the sickness to return in more virulent form. In the latter weeks, as more slaves survived than died, the pyres were doused and burials resumed. By the time it was over, Ana had logged forty-seven muertos of seventy-eight nuestra gente into her ledger. The last entries were for Fela and Pabla, who nursed a few slaves back to health but saw most of them die. They were put to rest in the very center of the graveyard, where José placed the largest, most elaborately carved crosses he could fashion.
No one suffered more than the gente de color in Puerto Rico during the months of the cholera epidemic and its aftermath. The disease hit hardest in the poorest barrios where free blacks, mulatos, and libertos lived. By February 1857, when the government declared the epidemic contained, more than twenty-seven thousand people had died—over half of them gente de color. Officials admitted that these figures were approximate, and that the number of deaths was probably higher.
Slaves fared no better than the free gente de color. Reports of nearly fifty-five hundred dead couldn’t account for every loss in every hacienda, or the men, women, and children bought in clandestine sales unreported to avoid taxes. The government estimated that a minimum of 12 percent of the slave population of Puerto Rico died.
With so many dead—most of them men in their prime—and with thousands who survived but were weak or incapacitated, a large percentage of the Puerto Rican workforce vanished. At the end of 1856, Ana estimated that twenty slaves were healthy enough to bring in the harvest, the same number as when she first arrived nearly twelve years earlier. Only now they had not thirty but four hundred cuerdas in cane ready to process.
So that she could keep abreast of what happened on the valley, Severo set up a telescope for Ana on the corner of the balcón. Two or three times a day she scanned the deep green canebrakes for pale lavender guajana buds to signal the harvest. One evening, she and Severo were sitting on matching rockers on the balcón, the valley below sprinkled with the flickering lights from bohíos.
“I don’t know how we’ll manage,” Ana said. “I expected this to be a good year. Sugar prices are slightly up, and the new equipment in my ingenio would have been paid for with this year’s profits.”
“It can’t be helped,” he said.
“I’ve never heard you say something is impossible.”
“Did I say that?”
“You sounded discouraged.”
“Not at all, and you shouldn’t be either. Al mal tiempo, buena cara,” he said.
The tip of his cigar glowed red. Ana inhaled the earthy, sweet smoke that surrounded him. “How can you be so calm in the midst of all this?”
“You haven’t fallen apart, either.”
“I’ve thought about it, but no, I’m too stubborn. I’d hate myself if I gave