Conquistadora (13 page)

Six weeks after he left Madrid, Severo arrived at the port of Cádiz and shipped out as cabin boy, landing in the New World weak from seasickness and the physical and mental abuse heaped upon him by the captain and every seaman on board. The minute he stepped on terra firma in the steamy capital of the smallest of the Greater Antilles, Severo Fuentes swore never to set foot on a ship again.

Directly in front of the dock where the transfer boat dropped him there was a warehouse, and above its massive doors in delicate gold lettering was the legend
MARÍTIMA ARGOSO MARÍN
. Severo knew, of course, that the firm had offices in Spanish America, but never imagined he’d land almost literally on the doorstep of one of them.

Until then, listening to the voices in his head had worked well for Severo. He knew enough not to appear in the Argoso Marín office to ask for a job until after he’d regained his health and washed and put on the suit of clothes wrapped in canvas brought across the ocean. The alleys leading from the docks up the hill to the residential
district and beyond to the forts were packed with cheerless rooming houses just a few steps from disconsolate brothels. A doctor who treated mostly venereal diseases and who set bones broken in fights by men just off the ships attended to Severo’s ailments, which were no more nor less than what he saw day in and day out. After paying the doctor, Severo spent what he’d earned aboard ship on whores and liquor. A week later, he appeared at the door of Marítima Argoso Marín.

Rodrigo Argoso Marín took one look at Severo and saw what no one else had, or what perhaps only emerged after two years on the streets, four months in prison, two years sweeping floors and delivering dossiers, another three years hunched over boring ledgers, and seven cruel weeks at sea: Severo was a young man others would fear. The education that made it possible for him to advance far beyond his prospects hadn’t tamed him.

It was 1837, and while two years earlier the Spanish Crown had signed a treaty with Great Britain forbidding the trafficking of slaves from Africa, officials looked the other way if chattel first arrived on Martinique, for instance, or Guadeloupe, and were then shipped to Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the United States, where they were necessary for the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, cotton, and sugar. To avoid legal complexities, Rodrigo made sure that human cargo in vessels owned by Marítima Argoso Marín arrived in inconspicuous shallow harbors. He needed someone to transport the Africans from wherever he managed to land them near their destinations in sugarcane plantations, the main markets for the trade on the island. The right man for the job must be able to read and write so that he could handle the necessary paperwork. He must be fearless, because the slaves’ efforts to escape usually involved killing the boss. In addition, he must be ruthless, because slaves who attempted escape could be punished by death. The most important requirements, Rodrigo thought, were the man’s ability to instill fear and respect in another human being and his willingness to kill, if necessary, without thinking too much about it. Severo got the job.

Ana’s days were long and arduous. She was responsible for the slaves’ clothing, health, and weekly food allotment. She oversaw the
casona
’s cleaning and cooking, designed the kitchen gardens, and organized the care of the animals raised for food. With all
brazos—
“arms” as Severo referred to the workers—needed in the fields, she wasn’t above collecting eggs in the henhouse, picking a chayote for dinner or a grapefruit for dessert. Their clothes and linen were washed in a nearby river and soon showed the stress of being beaten against rocks and draped over bushes under the sun. Her mending basket was always full and she spent hours sewing, her mother’s complaints about her uneven stitches and careless seams a constant echo over three thousand miles of ocean from Sevilla.

After a week at Hacienda los Gemelos, Ana wrote to her parents admitting that her life was more austere than she’d expected, but that she was getting used to the privations.

“Cubillas and Larragoity blood course through my veins. I feel the spirit of our ancestors in this land and am mindful that they met their challenges with courage and curiosity. I’m fulfilled by the rewards of hard work. At the end of each day, I’m proud of how much I have accomplished.”

Ramón and Inocente weren’t good correspondents, so Ana wrote cheery reports to their parents. She let doña Leonor know that her sons were well and described the hacienda in sufficient detail to give her a sense of how they lived, without undue particulars about the hardships. Don Eugenio, Ana knew, was more interested in whether the inflated numbers of hogsheads of sugar and puncheons of molasses and rum that his sons promised before they left Spain were
being realized. Since they were short of workers and less than half the potential fields were cultivated, she explained, their first harvest would yield less than they’d hoped. However, from her cash dowry, she wrote, they’d purchased ten more strong men, each costing three hundred pesos each. Two more fields would be cleared and planted, expected to mature within twelve to eighteen months, to increase their harvest from thirty to forty
cuerdas
of cane cut and processed.

It was harder to write to Elena because there was much Ana wished she could say but couldn’t. Over the six months since her marriage, lovemaking had become the least satisfying of her chores. Other than being scrupulous about whose turn it was to have her, Ramón and Inocente had no interest in improving their sex lives. She didn’t know how to talk about it with them, and attempts to show them what she liked seemed to embarrass them more than they did her. Intercourse had become as unpleasant and unavoidable a task as mending.

But she couldn’t dwell on her yearning for romance and tenderness. Her longing felt like a weakness, vestiges of the unwanted girl who could never do right. She turned to her work instead, and wrote letters to the Argosos, to her parents, and to Elena about what she did but not about what she felt.

The correspondence was stashed in a pouch by the door to be taken if Severo, Ramón, or Inocente rode to Guares, the nearest town, a rough half day’s journey on horseback, or if a merchant ship like the one that brought them anchored off the beach to the south of the plantation. Ana only knew for sure if the letters were received when a response arrived, weeks later.

She drew up plans for a house far from the noise of the
batey
and the ash and smoke of the chimney over the boilers. It was a near replica of her grandfather’s rambling farmhouse in Huelva, but with bigger windows and doors and a covered gallery to provide shade. She abandoned the plans when she felt nostalgic for Abuelo Cubillas. She was sure she wouldn’t see him again, slowly puffing on his pipe, nor his gardens, orchards, and vineyards. He’d blessed her venture, and she now had to create her own place in the world.

She put away her city clothes and most of her fine linens and china in a locked
rancho
, to be brought out when they built a new house. Their table was now set with the crockery found in the kitchen. To
supplement it, José made wooden plates. For drinking, he polished coconut shells to a high sheen and made bowls from dried calabashes of all sizes. The gourd cups and bowls, called
ditas
, were the same as the ones given to the workers for their meals, except that José decorated the ones for the
casona
with fanciful birds, animals, and butterflies.

As a mostly neglected only child in Spain, Ana had staved off loneliness and isolation by keeping busy alongside the servants. They welcomed her company, were willing to teach her their skills, and imbued her with the courage that comes from practical knowledge. She didn’t mind getting her hands dirty. At Hacienda los Gemelos, she looked at her more unpleasant duties, like what to do about the foul-smelling coops and sties too close to the
casona
, as problems to be solved rather than avoided. At the same time, she was fully aware that the men and women who now worked alongside her weren’t paid servants but chattel. They were property, necessary to accomplish her goal to tame a wilderness, just as her ancestor had envisioned.

Ana had read that within a generation of the arrival of the conquistadores in Puerto Rico during the early sixteenth century, most of the
taínos
don Hernán had observed had escaped to other islands or were annihilated. To provide an alternative labor force, colonists kidnapped Africans. The survivors among the enslaved
taínos
were absorbed into the European and African populations.

The Crown forbade direct commerce between the island, a Spanish colony, and other countries. The
subsidio
, the Crown’s annual subsidy used to pay the thousands of soldiers and functionaries, was often late due to bad weather, piracy, and corruption. Unable to trade legally, the residents evolved a subsistence economy. With the exception of those living on grand cattle ranches that provided meat and skins, the vast majority of the island’s farmers were scattered among small plots, many of them on untitled lands. Travelers, commentators, and priests examined and reported on the conditions of Puerto Rican peasants—known as
jíbaros
—noting the appalling poverty and the rampant mixing of races.

Field Marshal Alejandro O’Reilly, Friar Íñigo Abad y Lasierra, the naturalist André Pierre Ledrú, and the mercenary George Flinter, among others, also noted the extraordinary fertility of the land but regarded the
campesinos
as shiftless. The
jíbaros
, they complained,
moved frequently, squatted on Crown-owned lands, and with a few whacks of the machete cut down palm branches and trunks for their cottages roofed with fronds and straw. The European travelers concluded that Puerto Rican
jíbaros
were content to grow just enough to feed their families so that they could spend the rest of the day swinging in a hammock or raising fighting cocks, drinking homemade
aguardiente
, and gambling. Why, the commentators asked, would
campesinos
want to work harder when they could dig a few
batatas
from the ground, pick a few mangos and avocados, collect a few eggs—enough for their simple needs? A survival economy, they warned the king, doesn’t grow and doesn’t generate revenue.

In the late eighteenth century, observers and officials recommended that the Spanish Crown increase the size and number of sugar plantations and import more Africans to provide a controllable alternative to the intractable local labor force. A cap was imposed so that slaves wouldn’t comprise more than 12 percent of the population.

As the number of slaves on the island increased, so did their maltreatment. In order to regulate the behavior of slaves and owners, the Spanish government issued slave codes, the most recent in 1842. Owners were to “diligently make [slaves] understand that they owed obedience to the authorities, that they were obliged to revere priests, to respect white persons, to behave courteously toward colored people, and to live in good harmony with fellow workers.” The code defined how much food slaves should be allotted, how many items of clothing should be given every year, and how many hours made up a workday (ten, but sixteen during harvests). Slaves were “obliged to obey and respect their owners,
mayordomos, mayorales
and other supervisors as if they are their fathers, and [they are obliged to] perform their chores and jobs they are assigned and if they do not fulfill any of their obligations, they are to be correctively punished by the person charged as boss according to the defect or excess, with prison, fetters, chains, stocks or clamps, which will be placed at the feet and never on the head, or with whips not to exceed twenty-five lashes.”

Owners were supposed to abide by the forty-eight articles of the code, but abuses were rampant, and if an owner was reported for mistreatment, he was rarely prosecuted.

In 1845, the same year that Ana, Ramón, and Inocente established Los Gemelos, the Spanish government banned the importation of
captured Africans into Puerto Rico. By then eighteen slaves—more than half the adult workforce at the hacienda—were
bozales:
men and women abducted from Africa. Most of them had worked on Danish St. Thomas or St. Croix, or on the sugar plantations of the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. In efforts to escape, they took to the sea, where ships trawling the horizon for runaways picked them up. Rather than return them to their original plantations, the captains sold the runaways at clandestine auctions on hidden coves and beaches on other islands. By buying them in covert sales, the new owners avoided the twenty-five-peso tax the Spanish government imposed for each. Ten of the thirty-five slaves owned by Hacienda los Gemelos were acquired in unauthorized sales by Severo Fuentes.

Severo, who leased them to the hacienda, owned the most-skilled slaves. José the carpenter, his wife, Inés, and their children belonged to Severo. So did Flora, Marta the cook, Teo the houseman, his wife, Paula, and a timid little girl called Nena, who carried water, cleaned the house, and washed clothes by the river.