Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [176]
Conciencia told Ana that her visions were flashes or shadows in the smoke, and she didn’t understand everything she saw.
“I wish you could see them, too, señora.” She finished patting Ana dry, then powdered her underarms, back, and inner thighs before dropping a fresh nightgown over her head.
“Do they frighten you?” Ana sat on a stool for Conciencia to braid her hair.
The girl stopped a moment, and Ana watched her eyes focus on a spot across the room, the brush in midair. Still with that faraway stare, Conciencia nodded as if conversing with a ghost. Ana shuddered.
“Are you cold, señora?” Conciencia returned from where she’d mentally retreated.
“It was like you flew away.”
“Disculpe, señora, but you asked if I’m scared.” She dropped to her knees and covered her face. “Sometimes the fire shows me things I don’t want to see.”
“What sorts of things?”
“If someone appears in the smoke dead, he or she will die no matter how many herbs I give them.” Her eyes were moist. “I do everything I can to save them, in case the fire is wrong, but if they’re dead in the smoke, they die, no matter what I do.”
“You poor child.” Ana gathered her in her arms.
“I wish the fire didn’t show a thing.”
“Maybe instead of wasting your effort trying to save those who are supposed to die, you can help them to die well.”
“Sí, señora.”
“You can help them to go tranquilos.” Ana held Conciencia for a few minutes, then let her go. The girl resumed brushing her hair as if their conversation never took place.
Ana thought for a few moments. “Conciencia, remember when Meri was burned? Was she supposed to die?”
“The fire doesn’t tell me about everyone.” She braided the right side of Ana’s head.
“Have you seen how I will die?”
“Ay, señora, I don’t want to think about that!”
“You’ve seen it? Is it so soon?”
“No, señora mía, no. You will be a very old woman!”
Conciencia was eleven, and to her, old could be thirty-four, Ana’s age. “How old, Conciencia?”
“I don’t know how to count so high.” In spite of Ana’s efforts to teach her to read, write, and figure, Conciencia was as illiterate as on the day she was born. Again she thought a moment before answering. “The fire says many things I don’t understand. Most of the time I only know what it was saying after things happen.”
“What’s the use of a vision of the future if we can’t do anything about it?”
“Maybe we’re supposed to prepare, not change what will happen.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“I saw a big fire, señora, on San Bernabé.”
“When, Conciencia? When will it burn?”
“No le sé decir, señora.”
She hated that infuriating phrase. “Next week, next month?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“What else?”
“I saw him again, señora. El Caminante. Burning in the fields.”
Ana’s visions didn’t come from internal voices, nor did they appear as swirls of smoke. They were plans in her journals, lists on ledgers, practical goals to be compared with previous targets, weighed, and measured. She was in her study one morning when she looked down at her fingers, stained to the knuckles from the entries she’d been inking onto her pages. When did my life become an endless line of figures and numbers? She turned to the stacks on her desk, the ledgers on her shelf, the catalogs for machinery and parts, brochures for chandlery and agricultural implements. What happened to the girl bent over don Hernán’s journals, imagining the romantic land he wrote about and sketched? She remembered believing that Puerto Rico meant freedom, but it now seemed like the long-ago dream of a naive girl.
She had to get away from her desk. Being outdoors always calmed and soothed the anxiety that niggled at her conscience.
Paula, who was snipping herbs near the kitchen, looked up when she heard Ana talking to herself.
“¿Señora?”
“Nada, Paula.”
She plunged into the flower-lined path to the newly finished open-air chapel, the whitewashed niche featuring her antique crucifix. It was a quiet spot, well shaded by mango and avocado trees. With the small knife Beba