Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [179]
“We’ll take a big loss on this harvest, then.”
“If we sell it. I think we should warehouse our products until prices go up.”
“We don’t know how long the war will last. The prices might go even lower.”
“That’s true, but their plantations are in disarray. Sugar and molasses from the Southern states are not making it to the distilleries and markets in the North. Even if the war ended tomorrow, it would be a while before they could. Whenever the war ends, there will be an even greater demand.”
He grinned. “Ana, I never imagined you as a speculator.”
She was caught between pride and the uncomfortable feeling that she’d descended to another level. “I’m just trying to keep our business healthy.”
Within days, Severo had workers building another warehouse behind the mill at Ingenio Diana. Ana wanted to plant another fifty cuerdas, but insufficient brazos continued to be a major obstacle. Campesinos were moving to the hills, where coffee was a major product, and enslaved workers were almost impossible to find. If Severo found any, they were costly. The last time contraband human cargo arrived in the hidden cove was in 1860, when a captain delivered five strong men, two women, and four children.
“I’m bringing two more men from San Bernabé tomorrow,” he told her at the height of the 1862 zafra.
“Are we renting them from don Luis?”
“No, they’re mine now.”
Severo was swallowing San Bernabé one cuerda at a time, one slave at a time, especially after don Luis had his stroke. Ana had never let go of her rancor toward don Luis, and felt particular satisfaction that he was losing his property to Severo and, by extension, to her.
She rode to the valley every morning, looked in on the infirmary, then went to Ingenio Diana. Since she’d owned it, the mill had been enlarged. The new iron crushers from the United States now produced twenty times more cane juice than the animal-powered trapiche had pressed and probably fifty times what the original windmill had squeezed. The purgery, where the sugar bricks were formed and where the molasses dripped into barrels, had also been expanded, as well as the warehouses. Her mill was so efficient that the time to harvest had been halved even as the number of fields increased. With the profits from Ingenio Diana, she’d bought 243 woodland cuerdas, now being turned to cane.
She was toying with a new, possibly even more lucrative idea. Nearby haciendas couldn’t produce as much as Hacienda los Gemelos and Ingenio Diana. Ana could continue to buy fields, but cultivated land was expensive and taxed at a high rate. Why couldn’t she buy the cane from their neighbors? If she could get it at a reasonable price, she wouldn’t have to worry about the chronic scarcity of workers because the stalks would be delivered cut and ready to press. The smaller hacendados could focus on growing the product without the expense of building, maintaining, and operating a mill.
When she rode from and to El Destino, or when she galloped on the now familiar paths surrounded by cane, Ana felt pride that she’d rescued Hacienda los Gemelos and Ingenio Diana from decades of neglect. Those moments of joy she’d told Elena about, the sparks of happiness that she didn’t expect but was grateful for, came more often as these, her creations, flourished.
It felt to Ana that after the cholera the world outside the gates of Hacienda los Gemelos shrank, while within its borders her world grew. The flatlands in the valley, once covered by woods, brush, fruit trees, and coconut palms were now a ripple of cane in every direction. Even the forested slopes she’d seen from the casona in 1845 were being cleared and planted with the majestic stalks. This world, narrow outside her borders, expansive and beautiful beyond imagining within, was hers in deed if not in fact, and as the hacienda prospered, her feelings toward Severo Fuentes began to change again.
In late October 1862 she was riding from the casona to the ingenio when she crested a knoll between two newly planted fields. The midafternoon sun created long shadows,