Vicente wished that Sevilla wouldn’t laugh.
The boys ran after their father; they heard the grunts of Sevilla’s pigs over the clamor of the tree frogs. Glimmers of morning sun streaked through the mist toward the vegetable patch where Raúl Vega had planted two different varieties of beans along with yuca and calabasa, tomatoes, and corn. The boys chased the pigs away, but Raúl Vega caught one and pinned it between his knees. His machete flashed silver as he slit the pig’s throat. Vicente saw the animal’s startled expression.
What did I do that was so wrong? I’m a pig!
Raúl Vega and Luisito carried the hog back to Sevilla’s finca. Vicente hurried after them, and when his shirt caught on a branch, he stifled a scream. He’d thought a spirit had grabbed him; people said that spirits wandered the countryside in the dark; Luisito would tease him for being such a miedoso. Vicente stepped over the pig’s blood that dripped on the ground; he couldn’t see the blood, but he knew it was there. He hoped that Sevilla wouldn’t shoot them. Pigs were for market or for special occasions like Christmas. Vicente loved the smell of pig cooking on a spit, a fragrance so delicious that it tantalized everyone who smelled it roasting from dawn until night, its skin toasting until it deepened to the dulce de leche color of caramelos. Only then would it be ready, only then would the skin crunch in one’s mouth and the succulent meat glide down one’s throat. His mother would share the lechón with the poor jíbaros who never had enough to eat, even at Christmastime, peones lured by the scent of roasting pig. The pig’s tail and nose, prized delicacies, were always saved for the old or the pregnant.
When they arrived at Sevilla’s house, Vicente’s father and brother dropped the pig on the ground with a thud that woke the whole mountain. The rooster and the chickens tiptoed on dainty feet to peck at the carcass. The boys followed their father back through the mountain; their footsteps vanished behind them in the fog. Vicente feared a bullet in his back; not until they arrived home did he breathe a sigh of relief.
Vicente’s mother stood at the window; she turned to look at her husband’s blood-splattered clothes. As long as Vicente could remember, his mother had stared at the horizon for hours. Often he had to call her name several times before she came back from wherever she’d been. Oh, it’s you, Vicente, she’d say.
A few nights after the pig tragedy, Raúl Vega was walking in the fog that shrouded Cerro Morales on his way to visit a woman. He had grown up on the mountain and knew well the slopes and ravines, as did Sevilla and his brothers. Sevilla left his knife inside the stomach of that maricón Raúl Vega. Before he lost consciousness, Vicente’s father thought: I’m going to die because of a fucking pig! A jíbaro, his horse loaded with plantains for market, found Raúl Vega before he bled to death. The man held the knife steady in Raúl Vega’s stomach all the way to the town of Utuado, where there was a doctor at the mental asylum. The knife saved Raúl Vega’s life and sent Sevilla to jail.
The months when Raúl Vega was forced to convalesce at home were the longest of Vicente’s life. Once Vicente thought he heard laughter when his mother was in the bedroom, but how could that be? Each night when the boys were called to report on their labor, Vicente folded his hands behind his back to hide their trembling.
CHAPTER FOUR
HOW ANGELINA WAS SAVED
One day when Vicente was still a boy, Angelina woke to the rooster’s crow and went to the river to drown herself. She stopped to disengage the hem of her nightgown when it caught on a branch. Only when she stepped on a twig did she realize that she was awake. Her bare feet were cold and wet with dew, but what of it? She reached the river where the laundress Destina washed the laundry and bedding. Her husband bathed here every night, but Angelina was of the class of woman for whom it was not proper. Angelina stepped forward and gasped at the water’s coldness. She had never learned to swim, but she felt a sense of peace. When next she opened her eyes, she was on the riverbank.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you crazy?” Raúl Vega shook her.
“Don’t save me next time,” Angelina said.
“I won’t,” Raúl Vega said.
Angelina spent her days in loneliness and drudgery. They didn’t have money to spare for her to visit her family, who lived only a few towns away; the roads were poor and would require a special carriage.
When los hambrientos—so underfed that they resembled stick people—came to their door to beg for food, she bit back her complaints. She gave what could be spared and granted permission for the hungry people to pluck grapefruit and oranges from their citrus trees. Some days she gave away her own meal and pretended that she had already eaten when she sat down with her husband and sons. There were evenings when she was alone at the table after dinner and smoked a cigar, filling her lungs with smoke as if it were her last breath.
There was a time when Angelina blamed her discontent on her husband because he had never loved her, but then she hadn’t loved him, either. It had been a simple matter of need: he for a wife and she for a husband. Angelina’s family gave some money for her marriage and it had saved the farm. But there were taxes and expenditures and always creditors. Every coffee farmer with a little education knew that the coffee harvest was at the mercy of the gods and the coffee market. Luckily, los peones who helped during the harvest could be paid in plátanos and bananas.
Angelina employed a single servant, Gloria, whose hands had not been created for handiwork, but rather to pound the giant pestle in the mortar carved from the trunk of an old tree, pound pound pound until the coffee beans were crushed into brown sand. Pound pound pound until Angelina wanted to scream and bang her head against the kitchen table. She restrained herself because she doubted that it would bring any relief, only a cracked head. Also she didn’t want to scare Gloria, who worked for room and board instead of wages, because, like most small coffee farmers, they had little hard cash.
No one could say that Angelina wasn’t a proper mother. As was the custom, upon the birth of each of her sons, she sent the baby off to live with a wet nurse, one of Raúl Vega’s peonas who had also recently given birth. Angelina preferred a nursing mother whose child had died and she lamented that she wasn’t so fortunate to find such a woman for baby Vicente. She insisted that the peona send her own baby away while she nursed Angelina’s son. She felt entitled in her demand because Raúl Vega provided rice and plátanos for the entire family. Angelina visited her child monthly to ensure his well-being, despite the steep climb up the mountain; the poorer the family, the higher up they lived. Other women of Angelina’s class had been known to leave a child in the care of a wet nurse without ever visiting for an entire year or even two, but she reclaimed her son upon the boy’s first birthday. It wasn’t uncommon for a woman to feel as if the child she was nursing were her own. When Angelina went for her firstborn Luisito, she and la peona were in a tug-of-war, with Angelina’s baby in the middle. Everybody screaming—Angelina, Luisito, la mujer who was nursing. The woman’s husband had come running, demanding that his mujer release the baby and begging la doña’s perdón. When it was time to retrieve Vicente, Angelina hadn’t forgotten the scene with Luisito, and Raúl Vega came along to extract the baby from the wet nurse’s arms.