PART ONE
PUERTO RICO
CHAPTER ONE
THERE ONCE WAS A PROMINENT FAMILY
Years before Vicente’s grandfather migrated to Utuado, la familia Cortés was a prominent landowning family. Like so many of the pioneer families, los Cortéses were analfabetos—they couldn’t read or write or do simple arithmetic, and were easily swindled by ladrones, the merchants and government officials who could.
When Juan Cortés and Margarita Fernández married in 1839, they had modest hopes—such as that they could send their children to bed with bellies full of rice and beans and maybe bacalao, and live in a decent house of their own where the cold rain from a good aguacero didn’t startle them awake. But Juan Cortés was forced to work as an agregado for Luis Manuel Vega, on land that had once belonged to his ancestors.
Now a tenant farmer, Juan Cortés was lent a parcel of land where he built his home, a bohío of coconut palms. Juan Cortés planted corn and tomatoes and root vegetables like ñame and malanga and batata. He raised a goat so his children could have milk. As agreed upon, he turned over to Luis Manuel Vega half of his crops and a quantity of goat milk.
Juan Cortés, whose destiny was to become the great-grandfather of Vicente’s half brother Raulito, managed most days to feed his family—six children in ten years—some kind of meal, even if only batatas that his wife boiled in salted water. His children, like many others in the countryside, were naked until they were seven or eight years old. Twice yearly, Juan Cortés was taxed on a third of a half year’s expected earnings. As the cost of basic necessities such as a pair of pants, a cooking pot, kerosene, sank Don Juan Cortés and Doña Margarita Fernández deeper into debt, the honorific don y doña titles were used only in reference to what la familia Cortés had once been.
Don Juan Cortés learned over the years to be grateful to have something to eat and a mat of dry straw to lay his head. Now the entire Cortés family woke at dawn. On good days, they drank their breakfast of café puya, black coffee without milk or sugar, and worked until the sun eased back into the earth. When their first daughter, Jesenia, died, Juan Cortés recalled a particular day when they had picked coffee in the rain. The little girl had cried as the cold raindrops fell on her skin, and he’d turned away.
Everything changed for la familia Cortés in 1849 because of “la falta de brazos,” the scarcity of workers. Puerto Rico’s new Spanish governor, the soon-to-be-despised Juan de la Pezuela, under the pretext of maintaining civil order, decreed that all free males from sixteen to sixty who owned less than four cuerdas of land, and had no other means of support, register as jornaleros. Dayworkers. It was illegal for landowners like Vicente’s grandfather to have agregados or sharecroppers. Now, instead of continuing as a tenant farmer, Juan Cortés was obligated to work a year at a time for a landowner under penalty of prison. He was paid una miseria. Jornaleros like Juan Cortés were required to work where they were assigned, often far from where they lived. Barefoot men carried the poles and the plant fiber walls of their bohíos from one place to the other with their families in tow.
When Juan Cortés registered as a jornalero, he insisted that his name be written down as Don Juan Cortés. It was true that he was little better than a slave, but he was still proud that he had come from buena familia. At any given time, the authorities could ask Juan Cortés to produce la libreta, the notebook he was required to carry that detailed his physical characteristics, his name, place of residence, debts, terms of current employment, specified hours of work, and in which his employers praised or condemned his labor—a libreta that he couldn’t read. Juan Cortés was paid with vales, tickets or scraps of scrip, which could be redeemed only at the plantation store for goods at exorbitant prices.
Once a month Juan Cortés reported to the mayor with la libreta to prove that he’d worked the required number of days. Employers could add a complaint in the notebook for any reason—el jornalero had taken sick or broken the blade of the employer’s machete, or worked too slow or talked too much, and so on. After a third complaint, el jornalero would be sentenced to the penitentiary. No one sentenced to the chain gang at La Puntilla de San Juan had ever been seen again—like a vecino of Juan Cortés, his neighbor Ismael Pagán, the father of eight children.
The wife of Juan Cortés, Doña Margarita Fernández, and four of their six children died only a few years after the inception of la libreta from illnesses he could not name. He knew only that they’d been hungry and without proper clothing, and that they’d slept on the ground in a hut made of straw susceptible to wind and rain. His wife had cooked their daily meal of plantains or sweet potatoes or sometimes beans in an iron kettle over a fogón, a makeshift stove of sticks and stones. Smoke stained the walls and the ceiling, where spiders the size of a woman’s palm made their home between the plaited leaves. Juan Cortés had kept vigil with his children upon his beloved’s death. Days before, she had turned forty. People in the old days had lived much longer than forty years; why, his grandmother had lived to be ninety! When they first married, Margarita Fernández’s face had been so full and round that dimples flashed in her cheeks when she smiled. Juan Cortés hadn’t seen those dimples in years.
The day after Doña Margarita Fernández died, pallbearers carried her in a plain wood box down the mountain to the church graveyard in town. Juan Cortés followed the coffin. He hoped that he could persuade the priest to consent to say a prayer, although he didn’t know how he could pay him. His wife would have wanted it.
The next day, the hacendado registered his absence from work en la libreta.
“I wrote that you missed a day of work.” El hacendado was descended from merchants in Catalonia, and he prided himself on his scrupulous honesty. He made a point of explaining his notes to his illiterate jornaleros como Juan Cortés.
“Enterré a mi mujer ayer,” Juan Cortés said.
“Yes, it’s too bad about your wife, but my business is coffee.” El hacendado scribbled in the notebook.
Juan Cortés raised his hand to strike him. But what would become of his children if he were sent to prison at La Puntilla de San Juan? A poor man, a father of motherless children, could not afford to give a hacendado una bofetada even if el cabrón deserved it. He dropped his hand to his side.
When Ysabel and Claudina, the only two children of Juan Cortés and Margarita Fernández to survive to adulthood, fell in love, Juan Cortés gave them fatherly advice.
“No te juntes con los prietos,” Juan Cortés told Ysabel. “He is black and we are descended from familia blanca.”
To his daughter Claudina, “Ese hombre loves the card games more than he loves you.”
Though his daughters listened with respeto, they both chose to go off with their lovers. Juan Cortés was partly mollified to learn that when Ysabel’s husband, Alegro Villanueva, had registered as a jornalero at the mayor’s office, he had declared himself hijo de padre blanco.
It didn’t matter to Ysabel Cortés whether her bridegroom’s father was white or not because she had married Alegro Villanueva for love. She wanted to gaze forever into his eyes that were the brown of a coconut husk. Her fingertips brushed the softness of his hair that her father derided as grifo or pelo malo, but that she called pelo bueno because it was good hair the way Alegro Villanueva was a good man.