Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [41]
But she couldn’t dwell on her yearning for romance and tenderness. Her longing felt like a weakness, vestiges of the unwanted girl who could never do right. She turned to her work instead, and wrote letters to the Argosos, to her parents, and to Elena about what she did but not about what she felt.
The correspondence was stashed in a pouch by the door to be taken if Severo, Ramón, or Inocente rode to Guares, the nearest town, a rough half day’s journey on horseback, or if a merchant ship like the one that brought them anchored off the beach to the south of the plantation. Ana only knew for sure if the letters were received when a response arrived, weeks later.
She drew up plans for a house far from the noise of the batey and the ash and smoke of the chimney over the boilers. It was a near replica of her grandfather’s rambling farmhouse in Huelva, but with bigger windows and doors and a covered gallery to provide shade. She abandoned the plans when she felt nostalgic for Abuelo Cubillas. She was sure she wouldn’t see him again, slowly puffing on his pipe, nor his gardens, orchards, and vineyards. He’d blessed her venture, and she now had to create her own place in the world.
She put away her city clothes and most of her fine linens and china in a locked rancho, to be brought out when they built a new house. Their table was now set with the crockery found in the kitchen. To supplement it, José made wooden plates. For drinking, he polished coconut shells to a high sheen and made bowls from dried calabashes of all sizes. The gourd cups and bowls, called ditas, were the same as the ones given to the workers for their meals, except that José decorated the ones for the casona with fanciful birds, animals, and butterflies.
As a mostly neglected only child in Spain, Ana had staved off loneliness and isolation by keeping busy alongside the servants. They welcomed her company, were willing to teach her their skills, and imbued her with the courage that comes from practical knowledge. She didn’t mind getting her hands dirty. At Hacienda los Gemelos, she looked at her more unpleasant duties, like what to do about the foul-smelling coops and sties too close to the casona, as problems to be solved rather than avoided. At the same time, she was fully aware that the men and women who now worked alongside her weren’t paid servants but chattel. They were property, necessary to accomplish her goal to tame a wilderness, just as her ancestor had envisioned.
Ana had read that within a generation of the arrival of the conquistadores in Puerto Rico during the early sixteenth century, most of the taínos don Hernán had observed had escaped to other islands or were annihilated. To provide an alternative labor force, colonists kidnapped Africans. The survivors among the enslaved taínos were absorbed into the European and African populations.
The Crown forbade direct commerce between the island, a Spanish colony, and other countries. The subsidio, the Crown’s annual subsidy used to pay the thousands of soldiers and functionaries, was often late due to bad weather, piracy, and corruption. Unable to trade legally, the residents evolved a subsistence economy. With the exception of those living on grand cattle ranches that provided meat and skins, the vast majority of the island’s farmers were scattered among small plots, many of them on untitled lands. Travelers, commentators, and priests examined and reported on the conditions of Puerto Rican peasants—known as jíbaros—noting the appalling poverty and the rampant mixing of races.
Field Marshal Alejandro O’Reilly, Friar Íñigo Abad y Lasierra, the naturalist André Pierre Ledrú, and the mercenary George Flinter, among others, also noted the extraordinary fertility of the land but regarded the campesinos as shiftless. The jíbaros, they complained, moved frequently, squatted on