Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [175]
Don Luis was no longer the threat to Hacienda los Gemelos that so worried Ana in their first years. Then he was younger and mostly sober, all smiles and ingratiating charm. After Faustina and his older son died in the last days of cholera, Luis sank into liquor. Over the years he’d become a violent drunk who mistreated his remaining slaves more now that his wife wasn’t there to curb his temper. Severo only called on him so that San Bernabé didn’t dissolve into ruin like its owner. Luis was heavily mortgaged to him, and Severo expected that the farm and its slaves would fall into his hands. This certainty became greater when, in December 1860, don Luis suffered a stroke that paralyzed him from the waist down. He recovered his faculties but, in spite of Manolo’s entreaties, refused to leave San Bernabé. He hired an overseer and his sister to take care of him, both as abusive and vulgar as their employer.
After calling on don Luis, but before his Sunday nights with Consuelo, Severo rode through La Palanca, a hamlet of twenty shacks and bohíos that he’d allowed to develop on his less productive lands between Hacienda los Gemelos and Guares. During the zafra, the residents worked in the fields, and during el tiempo muerto they cultivated minor crops. A portion of their harvest belonged to Severo. The arrangement worked well. He’d created a reliable, more or less permanent community of indebted jornaleros who lived on land that would otherwise be fallow. What cash they earned during the zafra was spent on a colmado he provisioned, operated by a campesina and his illegitimate son, now eighteen years old.
The voice in his head had promised Severo that he’d ride the fields of Hacienda los Gemelos with his son, but since the cholera, Ana had lost interest in their lovemaking, and he wouldn’t force her. It appeared that, like Consuelo, she’d become barren. He loved them both, Ana because she was ambitious and a lady, Consuelo because she was neither. He wouldn’t give either woman up because she was unable to carry a live child of his seed. Instead, after ten years of marriage to Ana with no heir, he began to single out some of his illegitimate sons for the better jobs on the hacienda. The voice in his head hadn’t specified which of the thirty boys, by his last count from campesinas, so he kept an eye on them all, and kept them hopeful as he trained skilled laborers he could depend on. The boys lived on the expectation that if they did a good job Severo would increase their opportunities. A few dared imagine that he’d make one of them his heir and imagined themselves upon his fine Andalusian stallion, looking down on the valley from El Destino. Severo had once been a hungry young man, so he let them dream and compete against one another for his favor. But until he was sure which one of them would succeed him, he wouldn’t allow any of them to call him Father.
Like Severo, Conciencia had visions of the future. As she matured, her visions increased, although she didn’t report anything as dramatic or disturbing as cholera. She foresaw the arrival in Guares of two new doctors, who appeared a month later to introduce themselves to Ana. A year after that, Conciencia saw men running from the trapiche in a cloud of steam. When Severo and the engineer inspected the machinery, they noted that one of the spanners was improperly fitted and would have