Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [153]
After that, Severo listened more closely whenever Ana mentioned one of Conciencia’s visions.
One morning as she prepared to go down to the fields, Ana found Conciencia agitated.
“What is it, niña?”
“A dream, señora.”
Ana’s heart jumped. “Tell me.”
“There was a man on fire—”
“Like the pyres, niña?”
“No, señora, not those muertos. It was a white man. It was El Caminante, señora.”
“Ramón? You never knew him.”
“I saw him, señora. He was on fire in the cañaveral.” She was distraught, partly because the vision must have been terrifying, partly because she didn’t really know what she’d seen.
“Calm down, little one. Your dream must have been about don Severo.”
“No, señora—”
“Ramón is dead, Conciencia, and he didn’t die in a fire. Your dream was scary, but I’m glad you told me. It was a warning, and you might have just saved el patrón’s life. I’ll tell him to be careful when they burn the fields.”
Conciencia hung her head as if she’d done something wrong.
There were moments, like now, when the girl looked less like a child and more like an ancient, wise woman whose eyes could peer into her soul. When Ana baptized her, she’d whispered that she would be her conscience, and sometimes when she looked at the girl, memories washed over Ana unbidden, and often unwelcome.
She left Conciencia in the infirmary and rode Marigalante to her ingenio. She crossed herself as she skirted the slave cemetery, Fela’s and Pabla’s crosses sentinels over the other graves. José had asked if he could add over the gate a board he’d sculpted. Severo later told Ana that it was José’s monument to suffering.
Across a brook and up the hill was the ancient ceiba near Ramón’s grave. Again she crossed herself, and as she did, she remembered what Conciencia had just said—El Caminante in flames. Ana broke into a cold sweat and shook her head to rattle the image from her brain. Lately she was shaking her head more often, and wondered whether Severo had noticed. I’ve seen too many deaths, she said to herself. Again she shook her head and ordered herself to stop thinking.
She rode across the fields, where the foremen drove the workers with curses and threats, with shoves and lashes. Ana turned away from them. Severo had made it clear that he managed the workforce and she shouldn’t interfere. Over the following weeks she didn’t complain to the foremen or to Severo that the slaves, particularly, were being pushed harder than ever. She was the patrona, and could have insisted that pregnant women be given less demanding tasks. She could have argued that they should not be forced to constantly bend over the long stalks the macheteros dropped as they moved into the canebrakes, to collect and carry the heavy bundles of cane to the carts. So far, three women had already miscarried. She didn’t protest that children were doing work usually performed by adults. She didn’t exempt elders who had toiled all their lives, who miraculously survived cholera, whom the slave codes expressly required that owners allow to sit quietly in the shade for the last years left to them.
During that zafra of 1857, Ana rode Marigalante from one boundary of Hacienda los Gemelos to the other, secure on the silver-studded saddle Abuelo Cubillas gave her, high over the bent backs of the men and women she called nuestra gente, and she didn’t say or even think of words like “abuse” or “injustice.” She had a job to do, so she closed her eyes, hardened her heart, and didn’t say a word. Now she sensed their hostile glances, the silent curses.
The kitchen for the field workers was halfway up the hill to Ingenio Diana. Two cauldrons hung