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By Root 1223 0

But she noticed how they looked at the women and girls with hunger in their eyes, even though la patrona was young and fervent. The floor of the casona’s upstairs was one layer of planks, and the undersides were the ceiling where Marta and Flora slept downstairs. Almost every night Flora heard the pah-thump, pah-thump, pah-thump of a man pushing himself into a woman, and the groan at the end. Flora’s hearing was as acute as her vision. Even though don Ramón and don Inocente sounded and looked alike, she caught the higher timbre of one and the lower pitch of the other. She’d noticed how one was loose of limb and the other held himself tighter. She’d seen don Inocente coming out of the marital bedroom, and she’d caught a look here, a look there, in his exchanges with his brother. At first, Flora wasn’t sure whether la señora knew the difference between them, and whether the two brothers were playing a trick on her. But after a few days she was certain that doña Ana was complicit.

Flora watched don Ramón, don Inocente, and doña Ana, and she watched don Severo watching the other three and she learned. She’d worried at the beginning when she first met them that there were too many patrones. But within weeks she was sure that there was really one boss, and that the other three were working for her.

“WHOM THE TROPICS HAS COME TO HOLD …”

Ana worked harder than ever, but four months after their arrival at Hacienda los Gemelos, she still had no complaints and few requests for Papá Dios when she said her evening prayers. She was grateful for the day that was ending, and for what she accomplished in her busy waking hours. Her lonely childhood and passionate adolescence seemed like a long-ago dream, the hours in her grandfather’s farm and library like preparation for the rest of her life. She welcomed and was challenged by the privations of her days, the compromises of a life bereft of the luxury she once took for granted. But the more adversity she faced, the more certain she was that Hacienda los Gemelos was her destiny. Doña Leonor’s warnings, her mother’s terrors of what might lie across the sea, her own misgivings when she first set foot in the house too close to the ingenio, seemed as alien now as don Hernán’s journals were at first reading.

Days after Easter Sunday, Ana was in the kitchen storeroom with Marta inventorying the foodstuffs.

“Señora.” Flora ran in. “¡Visita!”

“I’m not expecting anyone,” Ana said, peering around the door toward the batey. Jacobo was leading two huge, well-fed horses to the stables.

“I help you, señora,” Flora said as she untied Ana’s apron. “I wipe face.” She flicked a spot of flour from Ana’s cheek and folded a few wayward strands into her hair. She patted and brushed the dust from Ana’s skirts.

Ramón was in the yard with a man and a woman, both a head taller than Ramón and at least twice as wide. The man was shaped like an egg on stilts. A tiny head sprouted from his oval-shaped body, from which protruded short, chubby arms and incongruously long, skinny legs. As if to aid in maintaining his balance, his feet were enormous. He didn’t walk so much as waddle; his feet turned diagonally from his body while his huge belly propelled him forward. The woman was equally round and ungainly, her voluminous skirts sweeping the ground.

Ramón introduced them as their closest neighbors, Luis Manuel Morales Font and his wife Faustina Moreau de Morales. They owned Finca San Bernabé, where they grew vegetables and fruits destined for town markets and supplied neighboring plantations with the staples of the slave diet: cassava, breadfruit, plantains, batatas, and cornmeal.

“It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” Faustina said, her voice a gurgle, as if she couldn’t contain her laughter. “Forgive us that we didn’t come sooner, but we know how busy it is during the zafra.…”

“Thank you. It was considerate of you to wait until things slowed a bit.”

Ana led their guests to the casona’s living room. She was mortified at their undisguised appraisal, taking in every detail of the scanty furnishings, the simple