âI know,' said José, looking at him askance, âbut right now, just get some rest, and don't go dozing off. You might dream I'm a Spaniard and hack me to pieces with that machete.'
The day following the Battle of Tibisí, José strolled through the morning mist down towards the river to wash the blood and filth off himself. In the distance, he heard a deep, rasping sound and realised he was not alone. He could make out the figure of a woman scrubbing clothes against the stones by the riverbank and carefully crept towards her. Seeing how beautiful she was, he stood, transfixed.
Betina and her younger sister Malena lived alone in a little shack on the outskirts of Manzanillo. Her father had been the sort of man who, in a cheerful mood, would hit her and call her a stupid, ugly whore; in a black mood or in drink, he would lock her in the chicken coop and beat her until she howled in terror. Only then would he release her, telling her she was as dumb as her mother. He died in 1877, a year after General Martinez Campos marched into Havana. Betina’s mother was to die many years later in Weyler concentration camp.
It was Betina’s dream to find a kind and decent man, someone who would give her a family. Now twenty-five and no longer a virgin, her chances were slight. She had had lovers who beat her, stole the pittance she earned washing laundry at the creek, and then abandoned her. Whenever this happened, she would hole up for days, sometimes weeks, crying an ocean of tears and vowing to take her own life by eating raw earth like the Indians.
Time passed and she put her dreams behind her and became a tough, hard-headed, sometimes foul-mouthed woman who believed only in working to survive. She no longer washed her hair or shaved her armpits. Years of scrubbing laundry had made her delicate fingers as calloused as a farmhand’s. But though she neglected her appearance, her beauty was so startling that wherever she went, men threw themselves at her feet and women glared at her with passionate jealousy. Many a woman dreamed of possessing those lustrous locks, those brooding almond eyes, that body as curvaceous as a Greek amphora.
When he saw Betina kneeling, her hips swaying as she slapped the laundry against the rocks, something stirred in José and he felt his breeches swell. Lust coursed through him like a rutting animal. He wasted no time with words, but immediately proposed sex, showing her his bulging flies.
‘I don’t know what you’re thinking. I may be black and ignorant, but let me tell you now that I am a decent woman.’
‘Of course, señorita, that’s why I am attracted to you.’
‘Because I’m decent?’
‘No, because you’re ignorant.’
Betina angrily snatched up the laundry basket and was about to leave but José blocked her path. She was ignorant, he explained, just as he and all the Negroes he knew were ignorant; this was why he liked her.
‘I saw you kneeling there, swaying your hips, and I thought of my mother.’
‘How could you think about your mother with your breeches fit to burst?’
José replied that he loved his mother more than anything in the world and did not know whether this boundless love was the cause, but whenever his mother came back to the slave quarters after work, José felt a thrill run through him that paralysed his body and his breeches would begin to swell. It had first happened when he was fourteen. As he spoke, he stared down at his crotch with the mischievous, feline smile of a naughty child. Betina told José that she had not been born yesterday and asked him to be so good as to leave her in peace because she had too much laundry to do to waste time talking to him. Just then, José grabbed her roughly and clapped his hand over her mouth.
‘Shhh.’
He froze, staring up at the overgrown hill looking for some sign to confirm his suspicions. He picked up Betina’s laundry basket and, holding her firmly by the arm, dragged her into a dense thicket off the path then pointed to two Spanish soldiers riding towards the river. He signalled to Betina that he would be right back and, like a streak of lightning, vanished into the trees.
Betina felt a cramp in her shoulders and in her belly. She watched as one of the Spaniards dismounted and tethered his horse to a tree. Then, glancing warily around, he walked towards the river. Confident there was no one nearby, he walked back towards his horse. Betina stumbled, the trees around her rustled and the soldier glanced back in her direction. He walked towards Betina, cocking his rifle and signalling to the soldier he had left behind.
‘Don’t expect your friend to answer. He won’t be talking any more.’
Startled, the Spanish soldier spun round and found himself face to face with José who was holding a blood-smeared machete.
‘This whole area is surrounded by
mambís
. If I were you, I’d go back the way I came. Unless of course you want to die.’
The soldier froze, his rifle aimed at José’s chest, gauging the courage in those coal-black eyes and weighing it against his own. He hesitated, the rifle trembled in his hands.
‘So. Do you want to die?’ roared José.
The soldier fled. Racing back to his horse, he stumbled on a large boulder and, looking down, discovered it was the head of his friend, his hat still in place. In a flash, he leaped into the saddle and vanished.
‘Now that you’ve seen that I’m not all bad, I think I deserve to know your name . . . Mine is José.’
‘My name is Betina, but my opinion of you hasn’t changed.’
Betina covered her legs as best she could as she settled herself behind José on the horse. The Mandinga gave her a smile that was all his own, and a sly, passionate gaze. Betina’s lips parted to reveal teeth that looked as if they had been sculpted by an artist. It was the first time José saw her smile and he felt sure it would not be the last.
Having left her outside her shack, José headed back to the
mambí
camp. He told Oscar what had happened, adding that Betina had a beautiful sister who, to judge from her height, was a Kortico like him.
‘I’ve told you before,’ Oscar said, ‘I want nothing to do with women. They all want babies and I will never be able to rid myself of my loathing for children.’
José insisted that Oscar needed to root out the bitterness from his heart, that a good woman might do just that. But Oscar wanted to go on killing Spaniards.
‘You have already killed so many. If you carry on like this, you’ll turn into the orang-utan you despise so much.’
The Kortico sprang to his feet and drew his machete.
‘What are you saying?’
‘What I’m saying is I am not an animal and neither are you. We are both entitled to forget war and blood, fire and disease, to forget the dark past and begin again.’
Oscar simply frowned, staring into his friend’s eyes. Then he sheathed his machete and sat down again, muttering that he was not about to change his mind.
‘You do what you like. I’m going with General Maceo to the rally at Mangos de Baraguá.’
But the following day, José managed to drag his friend to the house where Betina and Malena lived. Just as he predicted, Oscar and Malena fell in love the moment they set eyes on each other and, with time and much effort on his part, Betina was persuaded to change her mind about José. The two couples were married beneath an avocado tree, settled in Pata de Puerco and lived happily in the little village as time slowly impelled them towards the inevitable: towards the dark, despised abyss, towards oblivion.
While the war against Spain raged on, Pata de Puerco huddled in its isolation and its misery, drawing slowly farther and farther away from the rest of the island. The villagers experienced the war from afar like a wound that throbs when one is asleep. For many, years of fighting and of hunger had killed off any hope that the war might be a temporary ache that would soon pass. And though the battle had not troubled to visit their tiny village, in the distance they heard the roar of cannons and the screams of the dying. The
patapuercanos
never truly understood the meaning of war, of so many dead; they went on living, forgetting and dying. Fried chicken wings and
churros
with chocolate. I don’t know why that suddenly popped into my head – maybe because I’ve been talking about war and famine, and the only war I know is the one being waged in my belly.
Now, I know it’s not like anyone is ever going to ask, but if they ever do, I want you to make it clear that my namesake, Oscar Kortico, with José, Malena and Betina were the true founders of the village of Pata de Puerco. At the time, many people believed that the area was still cursed after the Slaughter of the Santistebans. It was José and Oscar who cut the paths through the forest and dug the well with their bare hands. It was Betina and Malena who planted the red flame tree that marked the northern boundary, next to the cemetery for men and animals. It was they who encouraged the peasants from all around to move here. Slowly, from the four corners of the island, the hopeless began to trickle in, those searching for the end of the world, for some place where they could shut out the memory of war and begin again.
José and Oscar helped the Santacruz family build a shack next to the cabin of Ester the midwife. Shortly afterwards, Silvio and Rachel Aquelarre and their baby daughter arrived from Baracoa and built a simple house in a clearing behind that of Oscar and Malena. The pale-skinned Jabaos, a family of eleven, settled near the ruins of the old Santisteban sugar mill. They always roamed the plains and the uplands in groups of five at least. Gradually, Pata de Puerco filled with life, with youth. From nothing, it grew to become a hamlet of a dozen crude shacks connected by pathways like red veins.
El Callejón de la Rosa
– Rose Alley – was the dirt road that connected the hamlet to El Cobre, the nearest town, where there was a church and where respectable families lived.
It goes without saying that the inhabitants of Pata de Puerco were illiterate Negroes who lived off the land. Not one of them had money enough to buy livestock. My grandpa used to say that people moved slowly in those days, and still more slowly in that part of the world. Days seemed to last thirty-five hours rather than twenty-four. But there was no need to hurry since there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money with which to buy it. The only shop for miles around was Chinaman Li’s store a mile and a half along the road to El Cobre.
It was in 1896 that José and Betina had their first child, a beautiful little girl who had a reddish-black complexion, bushy eyebrows like her mother and the same mischievous eyes as her father. They named her Gertrudis. Her first birthday was another day of backbreaking labour for Oscar and José. Out in the fields digging yuca and picking beans, they got to talking about Yusi the Warrior. It all started when José stabbed his machete into the ground, killing a huge scorpion. Oscar chided him, saying that scorpion venom could be used to cure all manner of illness; that was how Yusi had healed his own wounds. José ventured the opinion that Yusi the Warrior had never existed, a comment that enraged his friend.
‘Besides, why do we need scorpions when we have someone in the village who can cure anything?’ José pointed his curved blade towards the path as Ester the midwife appeared. Ester was a fat, reclusive Negro woman with large breasts who almost always wore a smock smeared with coal dust and a brightly coloured scarf wrapped around her head. For her services as a midwife, she accepted whatever patients could afford to give – a chicken or a pair of rope sandals. Little was known about her, where she came from, or whether she had ever had a family. People said she was the lover of El Mozambique, the most hated man in all of Pata de Puerco whom she often visited.
José told Oscar that Ester’s tits could cure any illness, and not just the bellyache everyone suffered from. Ester’s breasts and buttocks might even have cured the fever that had killed his family in the Accursed Forest. Oscar paid no heed and went on filling his sack with cassava.
‘You know what I like best about babies?’ José went on. ‘The way they pee on you. It’s like a benediction. Geru used to pee on me all the time, but now she’s growing up she doesn’t do it any more. I can’t wait for our next child to be born so it can start all over.’
Hunched over his work, Oscar said nothing. José patted him on the shoulder and told him not to worry, that some day it would happen to him.
‘It’s already happened to me and I don’t want it to ever happen again.’
José looked at his friend for a moment, bewildered. Finally, he said, ‘I know it’s impossible to ever know anyone completely, but I’m sure that . . .’
‘They used to tie me to a post with ropes, José.’
‘Who?’
‘The children on the plantation. And do you know what they did?’
José shrugged.
‘One after another they pissed on my face. And I can tell you now it’s no benediction.’
The two men stood, staring at each other. The bitterness in Oscar’s eyes was so blatant that José felt his heart fill with an infinite sadness.
‘Six weeks, José,’ Ester the midwife called from the dirt road.
‘Six weeks to what?’
‘Betina is six weeks gone.’
‘Pregnant?’
‘Congratulations!’
Ester picked up her basket and hurried off. José hugged Oscar, lifting him off the ground, then gathered up his sacks of cassava and ran back to his house.