Alegro Villanueva had a slave for a mother and un hijo de la gran puta for a father, who had sold his son to pay off family debts. Alegro Villanueva’s master in Ponce had a deathbed revelation, involving an angel and a goat, that in 1863, a decade before slavery was abolished throughout the island, somehow led to Alegro Villanueva’s freedom. Alegro Villanueva didn’t stay long enough to hear his master’s reasoning; he fled up to Utuado, where he worked from dawn to dusk and slept on a pallet of straw. In some ways, he found the life of a jornalero similar to his life as a slave. La gente needed permission for everything from the Spanish authorities—even a fiesta or dance required a license and a fee, dinero that nobody had; they were even charged a few centavos to sing un aguinaldo, which was always sung at Christmastime. So many laws to break a person’s spirit, so many laws that had to be broken.
When Alegro Villanueva and Ysabel Cortés got together, they didn’t wish for anything, as Ysabel’s parents had on their wedding day. Ysabel Cortés had witnessed how wishes turned out for her parents; and Alegro Villanueva already had his wish granted—he was a free man, at least as free as a jornalero was permitted to be. Alegro Villanueva took on credit from the plantation’s tienda de raya a few essentials like a roll of cloth for a hammock, candles, a pot, but not plates. They were lovers; they could eat from the same pot. There was much food for sale: rice, sugar, bacalao, lard, beans. Alegro Villanueva couldn’t afford rice at four centavos a pound, or American lard at twenty-four centavos a pound. They would have to be satisfied with plantains and bananas. Bacalao and rice and beans were only for when times were good, and they were never good, especially for jornaleros in 1863. In seven years, Alegro Villanueva and Ysabel Cortés had five children who were always hungry. When Alegro Villanueva grew malanga, a root vegetable, on a tiny plot of land that didn’t belong to him, he told his wife, “Hay que vivir por la izquierda aquí en Puerto Rico pero sin perjudicarse.” When Ysabel worried that if he were caught, he’d be sent to the penitentiary, he agreed that it was a risk. But shouldn’t a father do what was necessary so that his children wouldn’t starve?
Years before, Alegro Villanueva had eaten arroz con gandules with eggs in his late master’s house. When he told his wife, who had never eaten arroz con gandules or even an egg, it sounded like a fairy tale. Alegro Villanueva would tell the story to his family often throughout the years as if the dish could fill their empty bellies. Sometimes he would embellish the tale. Golden eggs had smiled at him on top of the fluffy rice seasoned with chunks of pork like treasures and studded with so many freshly picked gandules that it had been impossible to count them; the delicate fragrance of the rice had lingered in his mouth for days. But one night Ysabel Cortés yelled at him not to utter another word of that maldita meal! Not unless he wanted her to slit his throat with his own machete. She had never before raised her voice to him. He looked at her as if she had el demonio inside her. He took the children with him when he went to ask at the other bohíos if anyone knew of a spell that would cast off his wife’s demon.
Alegro Villanueva was known all over the mountain because he was one of a handful of black men, and when people spoke of him, they said, Alegro Villanueva was un negrito pero buena gente. Alegro Villanueva filled the basket strapped around his neck six, seven, and sometimes even eight times a day. He could strip a branch of coffee cherries without ever breaking the branches. After all the ripe berries were picked came el raspe, so called because it was like scraping the bottom of the pot for grains of rice. The pickers scoured the trees for green or pink berries concealed among the leaves.
In the early years of their marriage—although neither Alegro Villanueva nor Ysabel Cortés knew it—the American Civil War ended and Puerto Rico’s exports like sugar and coffee were no longer needed. Men like Vicente’s grandfather, Don Luis Manuel Vega, lost to their creditors much of their land, which they had mortgaged on expectation that they would recoup their expenditures for supplies and labor. In 1873, only months before both slavery and la libreta system were abolished on the island of Puerto Rico, Alegro Villanueva was sentenced to La Puntilla de San Juan for picking pomarrosas in someone’s orchard. His wife Ysabel Cortés cried out in mourning. Later everyone would wonder how she had known that her husband would soon be dead. La Guardia Civil took Alegro Villanueva away at gunpoint. She ran after him, pulling at his clothes until the policemen pointed their guns at her, shouting ¡Alto! Alegro Villanueva begged his wife to return to their children, and she fell to the ground in a faint.
Alegro Villanueva’s body was discovered sprawled alongside the dirt road near the town of Adjuntas. A pair of jornaleros dumped him in a ravine. Better for him to wash down into the river and out to the sea than to let the vultures feed off him, wasn’t that so? The men hoped that they had done right. Ysabel Cortés would learn that Alegro Villanueva had been shot while trying to escape.
Ysabel Cortés and her two surviving children, Angelito y Eusemia, went to work for the coffee farmer Don Raúl Vega, Vicente’s father. They lived the life of serfs, what Juan Cortés called la vida de perro.
Ten-year-old Eusemia was already an experienced coffee picker. Her first memory was of a red berry in the palm of her hand. When she was three years old, her mother sat her under the coffee branches and showed her how to harvest. Ysabel Cortés smacked her tiny hand when she plucked the green ones, and it didn’t take her long to learn to only pick the red. When she popped a berry in her mouth, her mother squeezed her jaw until she spit it out. Eusemia didn’t do that again, either.
The coffee pickers were at the mercy of insects like the plumillas, which resembled white caterpillars and dropped from the shade of the guava trees. Tiny fire ants called aballardes left red welts from their merciless attacks. When Alegro Villaneuva was still alive, he’d search in the dark for the aloe vera plant when his daughter suffered terribly from insect bites. Ysabel Cortés sliced the leaf and scooped out the pulp to smooth over the little girl’s sores.
With the exception of Angelito, her younger brother, all of Eusemia’s siblings died in childhood from illnesses like smallpox or tuberculosis, or from la pobreza, because poverty was a disease, too. Eusemia thought the ache in her belly was a monster grumbling about the plátano she fed it or the few beans that were her daily meal. She imagined it growing as she grew, stretching along her torso, tapping against it, clamoring to be fed. She tried appeasing it by eating dirt, but that only made her vomit. She searched the ground for half-eaten fruit like quenepas discarded by birds. Still, the monster wasn’t satisfied. Its growls often kept her awake at night. The monster became a steady companion, accompanying her when she picked coffee or went to the stream to fetch water; the old tin that years ago had been filled with imported oil pressed against her stomach, the coldness shocking the monster into momentary stillness. On the rare occasions that she went a whole day without feeling the monster’s rumbling, Eusemia pinched her stomach to awaken it.
At six, she was given the shirt of one of her dead cousins. The sensation of the threadbare fabric on the little girl’s skin was a blessing and a curse because it protected her from insects, rain, and sun, but the weight of the cloth pressed heavy against her bloated belly.