When Vicente Vega came to know Eusemia, the granddaughter of Juan Cortés, she would never tell him that her grandfather had called her his beloved negrita. Although Juan Cortés lamented the blackness of his granddaughter’s skin, while he was alive, no man dared to approach her with bad intentions. Juan Cortés had once said that at least el patrono Raúl Vega paid his workers in bananas and plantains instead of paper scraps. But Juan Cortés added that was only because Raúl Vega didn’t own a plantation store.
In 1880, Eusemia was thirteen, her father had been dead seven years, and her grandfather only months. Raúl Vega called down to her from the height of his horse.
“Muchacha,” Raúl Vega said, “what do they call you?”
Eusemia stared into the basket of coffee berries she had just picked. Her mother spoke for her.
“She is Eusemia Villanueva Cortés,” she said. “Soy la mamá, Ysabel Cortés.”
Raúl Vega looked first at the white mother and then at the black daughter. “Your daughter must be deaf and dumb,” he said.
“She doesn’t talk much,” Ysabel Cortés said.
“That’s good.” Raúl Vega rode off on his horse.
Ysabel Cortés didn’t need to explain why el patrono’s interest in Eusemia must be welcomed. Not when she and her daughter lived in a house of straw and ate only a plantain or a sweet potato for their daily meal. They ate the plantain while it was still green because they were too hungry to wait for it to ripen, and sometimes they ate it raw because they couldn’t muster the strength to cook it. If el patrono favored Eusemia, it would be good for both of them.
Vicente’s father, Raúl Vega, came for Eusemia during el tiempo muerto—the dead season—when mother and daughter spent their days like all the other unemployed and hungry jíbaros, scrounging for something to eat. They came out of their bohío at the sound of the horse.
“Me la llevo,” Raúl Vega said.
Ysabel Cortés nodded.
Raúl Vega scooped up the girl, lifting her onto his horse.
Eusemia turned to look at her mother.
“No te muevas.” His grip was firm around her waist.
Eusemia stayed still, as he commanded; her mother watched until she couldn’t see them anymore.
That first time, Eusemia feared that the horse would bite her and she would fall. In the period of months since he had first spoken to her mother, Raúl Vega had ascertained everything he needed to know about Eusemia: her father was dead, her grandfather was dead, her brother, gone off no one knew where, and she had no lovers.
He rode the horse up the mountain and stopped at a bohío. He dismounted and tied his horse to a tree. His large hands gripped her beneath her armpits, then he dropped her on the ground like a sack of coffee beans. He removed the plaited palm door of the bohío so that she could enter.
The hut appeared to be like that of any peón’s—with a plant fiber roof and straw walls—but Eusemia saw that it was in better condition than the one she lived in with her mother. Sacks of coffee beans were stacked against the walls. She was surprised that there was a table and a bench and a second room with a cot. On the table were an empty coffeepot and tin cups. There was a kettle next to a fogón. She wondered if someone lived there.
When el patrono entered the shack, his body blocked the sun. Eusemia kept her gaze on the saddlebag he dropped on the uneven planks of the floor. She heard the rustle of clothes and was startled by the thud of his boots. He led her to the cot. Eusemia bit her lip to keep from crying. She hoped it would be quick and that there was food in the saddlebag. She imagined pulling out a tin of coffee. Another tin of crackers. Then sugar and apples, one for her, one for her mother. Maybe there would be a jar of honey like the one her father had once received for a day’s pay. Bread. Cans of food that she had seen in the tienda de raya. She wouldn’t eat too much so that she could take food back to her mother. After Ysabel ate, she would heat water in the kettle on the fogón. She would dip a rag into the warm water and wash Eusemia, gently.
When Eusemia became pregnant, she was still thirteen; her mother Ysabel Cortés helped deliver the baby, whom they named Raulito after el patrono Raúl Vega. They sent word of the boy’s birth and asked el patrono to send food. One of his peones brought root vegetables like ñame and yaútia and yuca and also salted codfish, bacalao, which they’d never dreamed they would ever be so fortunate to eat. There was even coffee and sugar. Eggs! Her mother Ysabel Cortés cried when she saw the eggs. El peón told them that the food came from Doña Angelina, the patrono’s wife.
CHAPTER TWO
FRENCH MADEMOISELLES CIRCA 1889
Before Valentina Sánchez met Vicente Vega, she was just a girl wishing for romance and adventure like in the French novels she loved. Her best friend, the wealthy Dalia, was to marry the Spanish caballero she’d met in Paris on a visit to a new exhibit called the Eiffel Tower. (At night it was lit by gaslight! It reached the clouds, Valentina!) Valentina feared that the closest she would ever get to the Eiffel Tower was the drawing Dalia had sketched on the back of a missal.
In the tiny bedroom of her parents’ small house in Ponce, Valentina woke to the woodpecker’s tap on a tree, to the footsteps of the tradespeople walking to la plaza to sell their wares. The slant of morning sun sneaked in through the shuttered windows and caught her in the mosquito netting draped over her bed.
Mamá told her daughters not to complain because there were no trips abroad or fans of peacock feathers. Valentina and her sister Elena had food to eat, didn’t they? They slept in beds with mosquito netting and not in doorways, didn’t they? Did they notice the mother and her naked children sleeping on the steps of the alcaldía? Not even the mayor would help them; he said that he couldn’t because tax money went first to Spain, and then there was the town’s sanitation, and on top of that, he had to pay the salaries of administrators, and then—bueno, always something. Listen to me, muchachas, count your blessings like raindrops.
Valentina’s hometown of Ponce was a city of the very rich and the very poor, including many former slaves; mostly, the poor worked for the rich in their grand houses. But there was also a tiny middle class to which Valentina’s family belonged, mainly due to the family connections on her mother’s side, something that Mamá reminded her husband as often as she deemed necessary.
Mamá was always economizando. She made do with a single servant, and a woman came just once a week to scrub the floors while she stood over her, supervising. Valentina’s mother went daily to the market, cooked most of the meals, and mended the family’s clothing with her daughters’ help. La lavandera Claudia la negra came with her children to collect the family’s dirty laundry; the littlest child of four years carried a bundle of towels on her head with the care of an experienced laundress. Valentina had once heard her mother say that she didn’t know how one person could eat, let alone feed a family, on the earnings of a laundress.
Everywhere they saw the indignities and tragedies that came from lack of money. When the girls accompanied their mother to the cemetery to say prayers at the graves of dead relatives, they often saw silent funeral processions of barefoot men carrying a plain three-sided wood box balanced on long poles like a crude hammock, a black cloth thrown over the cadaver. The gravediggers would flip the coffin over a newly empty grave and dump the pauper’s body—headfirst. Beyond the marble mausoleums decorated with exquisite French porcelain roses, Elena led Valentina to an area surrounded by a wall of stone. Valentina, see over there? That’s for los pobres. It’s la huesera, the boneyard, where the skeletons are tossed to make room for more muertos.