Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [75]
Wide-bottomed, gossipy Marta, the bucktoothed cook who, weeks before Ana gave birth, was moved from the room on the ground floor to her own bohío on the path beyond the barracks. Ana thought that Severo had settled her there for himself, but it hadn’t occurred to Ana that Ramón or Inocente would go to the slaves. Least of all Marta.
Flora hadn’t moved from her kneeling position and kept her eyes lowered, but Ana felt that she guessed what Ana was feeling and thinking. Were some of those children Ramón’s or Inocente’s? It also seemed to Ana that the maid, dismissed before she spoke, released the information to get even for the slap.
“Vete,” she repeated. The room was lit with just one candle, but was that a smile on Flora’s face as she turned to go?
Ana tossed all night between sleep and wakefulness, jerking with every creak of the house timbers, the shrill call of night birds. She listened for Ramón’s steps and the groan of the hammock ropes. Several times that night, Miguel woke up crying, and Flora shushed and hummed until the child quieted. Flora had stopped singing to Miguel after Inocente’s death and didn’t resume until after over a year of mourning, when Ana changed from black garments to blue. Ana didn’t intend to put an end to the mourning, but her black clothes had been mended too many times. After river washings and sun dryings, the black faded to an uneven, dirty gray. On Severo’s next trip to town, she instructed him to purchase black cotton for the simple skirts and blouses that were her uniform. He showed up with a length of navy blue fabric, full of apologies that he wasn’t able to secure black.
“It can be dyed, I was told, if you wish,” he said.
She made a skirt and blouse and wore it for the first time on an October Sunday morning when Ramón was to read a pamphlet that related the story of St. Luke that began: “Many have attempted to write in an orderly manner, the history of the absolutely true events that have taken place among us.”
The slaves listened patiently and some even devoutly, but fidgeted and silently tapped their knees with their fingertips, counting the minutes until the reading would be over. They noticed her blue clothes. Within days, the women resumed their colorful head wrappings and every night there was more and louder singing and playing of instruments in the barracks.
When they first arrived at Los Gemelos, Ana had enjoyed riding to the farthest edges of the hacienda in self-satisfied ownership. After Inocente’s murder, however, she never ventured beyond the property’s original boundaries and never left the casona alone after dark. Though her days were filled with the same hard work as ever, the nights in Los Gemelos were as full of mystery as if she were still reading about them in Spain. When she sat on the porch, or when she lay at night, sleepless, she tried to identify the sounds around her. The music and singing from the barracks were easy, as was the ubiquitous coquí. The dogs barked sometimes. The mournful lowing of cattle at night always sent a shiver down her spine. But there were also rattlings, creaks, thuds, splats, bumps, and rustlings that made her wonder what could possibly be moving beyond the thin walls of her house. When Ramón was home, his snores were a comfort, a reminder that she wasn’t alone in a wilderness. Miguel’s cries, too, even when they awakened her from deepest sleep, made Ana feel accomplished, purposeful. Her work here, she told herself, was meant not just to finish what her ancestor began and to fulfill her own destiny, but also to extend her lineage and to secure Miguel’s patrimony. With Inocente dead and Ramón slipping into his strange, premature old age, Ana needed a reason to justify her refusal to leave Los Gemelos, in spite of the letters from Elena, don Eugenio, and doña Leonor begging them to return to the city.
A squeak on the boards, a soft step, the slow rasping of a hinge as Ramón came back minutes before the sun broke through the gaps in the walls. Outside, Marta was cracking twigs to feed the smoldering fogón.
Ana jumped