Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [190]
As he touched land in his native country, his throat swelled with emotion. During his months away, he’d often felt gusts of nostalgia. Puerto Rico, amado mío, tierra donde nací, he’d thought, feeling the passion of a separated lover yearning for his beloved. In countless rooms, over groaning tables, he’d embellished the wonders of his birthplace—the beauty of its countryside, its tranquil oceans, clear breezes, beautiful, clever women, and brave, dapper caballeros. He disregarded that slaves sustained Puerto Rico’s economy, and that his own wealth was dependent on their labor. As he looked around him now, he recalled that in the months he’d been away enjoying his intemperate adventures, men, women, and children were in bondage so that he could travel, paint uninspired landscapes, eat, drink, and whore. He was ashamed. His first instinct was to wonder when another ship was going back to the world where Puerto Rico was a mere speck on a map, unknown and forgotten by others. He wanted to be where Puerto Rico was what he wanted it to be: a source of pride for its children on other shores. In all the months he’d been gone it had been less painful to suffer homesickness than to see this reality and accept his part in it.
In the cities and towns he’d visited in Europe, Puerto Rico was a concept, an ideal, a place that lived in his imagination, not the actual debased humanity around him and his role in its degradation. I tried to free them, he told himself, but he well knew how feeble were his attempts. He now hoped that he’d learned more than dissipation in eighteen months. He remembered the men in don Benito’s botica, and Dr. Betances as an example of a man measured by his actions. As Miguel stepped on the precious soil—amada tierra donde nací—he swore to continue the struggle he had so easily abandoned, and with such cowardice.
There were more soldiers than he expected around the Guares port, their wary eyes darting from man to woman to man to child, rifles at the ready, index fingers crooked on triggers, and on their hips, incongruous swords and sabers. He remembered that soldiers came out in force whenever the local government was threatened by events outside the island. News had reached England that the Confederacy had collapsed in el norte, and that surrender was imminent. Slavery was a thing of the past in that vast country to the north, and Miguel had a moment of hope for the Antillean Confederation that Dr. Betances proposed. In Spain and France he’d met Puerto Ricans who continued to discuss, plan, and write about the same concerns he’d shared in Benito’s drugstore and in the secret society. But as on the island, Miguel lurked along the fringes there, too, neither opposing independence and abolition nor entirely committing to them.
Beyond the pier, humans and beasts, their bodies glistening and emitting the sharp stench and sounds of exertion under the sun, congested the streets. Before he could avoid it, Miguel stepped into dung. Within seconds a boy appeared out of nowhere to wipe his cordovans.
He gripped Miguel’s coin in one filthy hand. “Que Dios lo bendiga,” he croaked, giving one last swipe to the shoes and disappearing into the throng before Miguel could ask him where to find don Tibó’s inn.
He walked more cautiously now, around the piles of manure, over the puddles formed by a recent rain shower, past the stacks of tiles from Sevilla on an unharnessed cart. He stepped gingerly around a sleeping dog, his ribs bulging along blistered skin, what was left of his hair matted and knotted.
Guares was a small city. The skeleton of a second wharf stretched, like the first, beyond the rocky shallows. Nearly every building along the shoreline seemed to be under construction.