Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [205]
Padre Xavier’s incantations rose and fell in waves that drowned the clatter through the cane.
“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.”
The Latin prayers were automatic. How many thousands of times had she repeated these phrases, starting with her innocent belief as a child that there was a God who heard every word, saw every action?
Manolo Morales Moreau, his wife, Angustias, and his mother-in-law, Almudena, stood in the shade of the tent Severo had erected for the mourners. Ana had just met them that day and was surprised by their grief, considering that Miguel had spent only a few hours with them. The doctor, who’d arrived with the dawn, too late, was there, as were the lieutenant and two soldiers. One of the men from the militia had also come. Luis Morales Font sat on a specially fixed seat on a cart, his frozen, debauched face in shadows beneath an umbrella held by a boy pulled from the fields.
“Viejo apestoso,” Ana couldn’t help insulting him mentally, even as the prayers to usher her son toward God’s arms dropped from her lips.
Behind her was Conciencia, holding a parasol over her head, and a few steps farther back, José and his two sons, Efraín and Indio, who’d been Miguel’s milk brothers, nursed from the same breast, and Teo and Paula, her oldest living house servants, who remembered Miguel as a child. She’d left Segundo at home with Pepita. The rest were at their jobs. The stalks had to be cut, pressed; the juice had to be boiled, limed, and stirred; the sugar granules had to be spread on the purgery tables; the syrup had to be poured into the barrels. The zafra could not be postponed, even for the funeral of the young owner of Hacienda los Gemelos.
Below the knoll, the valley stretched vast and open, the purple guajana and less mature green fields stained by large brown swatches. Smoke still billowed from the middle of one of the fields, twenty cuerdas lost at a cost of tens of thousands of pesos in product and hundreds of hours to restore the land.
“Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescat in pace.”
“Amen,” repeated the mourners.
Ana gripped Severo’s arm as if he were her anchor. There was nothing else, no one else in the world but the two of them, clinging to each other on this land they had claimed and held, that claimed and held them. Don’t let go, she said voicelessly, and his green gaze peered through the black veil. He squeezed her hand to let her know it was time to lower Miguel’s casket. He led her closer, and she caressed the smooth mahogany as she’d never caressed the living child. I loved you the best way I knew how, but I was far too late, she thought. Not enough, not enough … Severo stepped back and Conciencia was at her elbow.
“Anima eius, et animae omnium fidelium defunctorum …”
The ropes stretched as Severo, Manolo, the lieutenant, and the militiaman lowered the coffin and settled Miguel into the ground.
“… per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace.”
The first thud of earth on the lid made her flinch. My son. My poor, dead son. You came, but you did not even have a chance to see what I created. Created on your behalf. A sudden breeze fluttered the mantilla against her cheeks and she turned her face toward the cane. The voices of men and women, of children, of creatures and trees and every living thing whispered a protest. “You did not do it for him; he made this possible for you.” But Ana didn’t hear.
“Amen.”
The immense waving stalks beckoned, drew her from her husband’s grave, her son’s, from the hollows where the spirits that haunt the living sleep beneath the ceiba tree. There was life beyond the gate where Ramón and Miguel rested. There was life outside the fenced cemetery where Pabla and Fela watched over the slaves who’d toiled for her, beyond José’s monument to suffering. There was life in the rich soil she’d nurtured, in the canebrakes, yes, but also in the orchards and gardens, in the vegetable patches and flower beds. There was life in El Destino, where Segundo, her young