THE
TASTE
OF
SUGAR
A NOVEL
MARISEL VERA
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
For my husband and our children.
In memory of our ancestors.
THE TASTE OF
SUGAR
PROLOGUE
ONCE UPON A TIME ON THE ISLAND OF PUERTO RICO
In 1825, on the journey to Utuado to buy land, Vicente’s grandfather, Don Luis Manuel Vega, saw what he thought were piles of rubbish along the side of the road. But as his carriage drew nearer, the rubbish became rows of people—men, women, and children—passed out in a faint. When he stopped for supplies with his black slave Benedicto, Luis Manuel Vega learned that these poor souls were among los hambrientos, the starving, who had left the villages and countryside for the city of Ponce to beg for bread. Luis Manuel Vega felt sorry for the hungry people, but quickly turned his attention to the variety of goods at the market; it seemed everything was sold en la plaza, including black slaves punished for rebellion or disobedience with iron collars shackled around their necks. When his master’s back was turned, Benedicto and the other enslaved men nodded to each other. As they continued their journey, Luis Manuel Vega thought it prudent to remind Benedicto of how fortunate he was to have a kind master who would never think of putting him in manacles.
Luis Manuel Vega, father of Raúl Vega, grandfather of Vicente, had little knowledge of the reality of coffee farming. As a former merchant, he had been drawn to his new vocation by his coffee addiction and what he imagined would be an easy life such as that of a hacendado he had once known. The man had owned a large coffee hacienda and had spent his life in idleness because he had many slaves. But Luis Manuel Vega had only the young Benedicto, whom he had bought from a hacendado with a coffee plantation in Peñuelas. Benedicto turned out to be a good investment for Vicente’s grandfather because he knew how to prepare virgin land for planting shade trees like the banana and guava trees necessary to protect the coffee bushes. (Luis Manuel Vega supervised while Benedicto and some peones cleared the grass and weeds with machetes.) He taught Luis Manuel Vega, and later his son Raúl, who would become Vicente’s father, everything he knew about growing coffee: like how to drop the seeds in holes deep as a man’s hand, seeds that would take five years to bear good fruit. (Luis Manuel Vega was too cheap to buy the coffee shrubs that would flower within months, and his son Raúl too poor.)
Benedicto didn’t know that while many workers would be needed during la cosecha de café—the laborious coffee-cherry picking harvest—few workers in those early years were to be found among the meager population of Utuado. He didn’t know about the heavy expense of hiring oxen and experienced oxen drivers to transport coffee berries to the merchants from a mountainous region with poor or nonexistent roads. He didn’t know that during the rainy season, teams of oxen got stuck in the muddy trails. He didn’t know about the bandits who robbed and even killed the oxen drivers. Worse, Benedicto didn’t understand the complex system of coffee financing—the never-ending borrowing to meet expenses and subsequent mortgaging of the land, or the fact that the coffee market was at the mercy of foreign manipulation of coffee prices and import/export duties.
On his eightieth birthday, years after Benedicto had died from overwork, as Luis Manuel Vega drank a cup of café negro made from his own coffee beans, his heart ceased to beat and his son Raúl Vega found himself owner of a coffee plantation that belonged more to the island’s Spanish businessmen than to him. But even with the labor of his two sons, Vicente and Luisito, Raúl Vega was forced to sell all the land except for a hundred cuerdas, which he proceeded to mortgage as necessary. As the years passed, when the coffee harvests were good and prices high, Vicente’s father paid off his debts, and when the harvests weren’t as good and coffee prices sank, he went to the merchants for credit. Such was the life of a small coffee farmer.
PART ONE
PUERTO RICO
CHAPTER ONE
THERE ONCE WAS A PROMINENT FAMILY
Years before Vicente’s grandfather migrated to Utuado, la familia Cortés was a prominent landowning family. Like so many of the pioneer families, los Cortéses were analfabetos—they couldn’t read or write or do simple arithmetic, and were easily swindled by ladrones, the merchants and government officials who could.
When Juan Cortés and Margarita Fernández married in 1839, they had modest hopes—such as that they could send their children to bed with bellies full of rice and beans and maybe bacalao, and live in a decent house of their own where the cold rain from a good aguacero didn’t startle them awake. But Juan Cortés was forced to work as an agregado for Luis Manuel Vega, on land that had once belonged to his ancestors.
Now a tenant farmer, Juan Cortés was lent a parcel of land where he built his home, a bohío of coconut palms. Juan Cortés planted corn and tomatoes and root vegetables like ñame and malanga and batata. He raised a goat so his children could have milk. As agreed upon, he turned over to Luis Manuel Vega half of his crops and a quantity of goat milk.
Juan Cortés, whose destiny was to become the great-grandfather of Vicente’s half brother Raulito, managed most days to feed his family—six children in ten years—some kind of meal, even if only batatas that his wife boiled in salted water. His children, like many others in the countryside, were naked until they were seven or eight years old. Twice yearly, Juan Cortés was taxed on a third of a half year’s expected earnings. As the cost of basic necessities such as a pair of pants, a cooking pot, kerosene, sank Don Juan Cortés and Doña Margarita Fernández deeper into debt, the honorific don y doña titles were used only in reference to what la familia Cortés had once been.
Don Juan Cortés learned over the years to be grateful to have something to eat and a mat of dry straw to lay his head. Now the entire Cortés family woke at dawn. On good days, they drank their breakfast of café puya, black coffee without milk or sugar, and worked until the sun eased back into the earth. When their first daughter, Jesenia, died, Juan Cortés recalled a particular day when they had picked coffee in the rain. The little girl had cried as the cold raindrops fell on her skin, and he’d turned away.
Everything changed for la familia Cortés in 1849 because of “la falta de brazos,” the scarcity of workers. Puerto Rico’s new Spanish governor, the soon-to-be-despised Juan de la Pezuela, under the pretext of maintaining civil order, decreed that all free males from sixteen to sixty who owned less than four cuerdas of land, and had no other means of support, register as jornaleros. Dayworkers. It was illegal for landowners like Vicente’s grandfather to have agregados or sharecroppers. Now, instead of continuing as a tenant farmer, Juan Cortés was obligated to work a year at a time for a landowner under penalty of prison. He was paid una miseria. Jornaleros like Juan Cortés were required to work where they were assigned, often far from where they lived. Barefoot men carried the poles and the plant fiber walls of their bohíos from one place to the other with their families in tow.
When Juan Cortés registered as a jornalero, he insisted that his name be written down as Don Juan Cortés. It was true that he was little better than a slave, but he was still proud that he had come from buena familia. At any given time, the authorities could ask Juan Cortés to produce la libreta, the notebook he was required to carry that detailed his physical characteristics, his name, place of residence, debts, terms of current employment, specified hours of work, and in which his employers praised or condemned his labor—a libreta that he couldn’t read. Juan Cortés was paid with vales, tickets or scraps of scrip, which could be redeemed only at
the plantation store for goods at exorbitant prices.
Once a month Juan Cortés reported to the mayor with la libreta to prove that he’d worked the required number of days. Employers could add a complaint in the notebook for any reason—el jornalero had taken sick or broken the blade of the employer’s machete, or worked too slow or talked too much, and so on. After a third complaint, el jornalero would be sentenced to the penitentiary. No one sentenced to the chain gang at La Puntilla de San Juan had ever been seen again—like a vecino of Juan Cortés, his neighbor Ismael Pagán, the father of eight children.
The wife of Juan Cortés, Doña Margarita Fernández, and four of their six children died only a few years after the inception of la libreta from illnesses he could not name. He knew only that they’d been hungry and without proper clothing, and that they’d slept on the ground in a hut made of straw susceptible to wind and rain. His wife had cooked their daily meal of plantains or sweet potatoes or sometimes beans in an iron kettle over a fogón, a makeshift stove of sticks and stones. Smoke stained the walls and the ceiling, where spiders the size of a woman’s palm made their home between the plaited leaves. Juan Cortés had kept vigil with his children upon his beloved’s death. Days before, she had turned forty. People in the old days had lived much longer than forty years; why, his grandmother had lived to be ninety! When they first married, Margarita Fernández’s face had been so full and round that dimples flashed in her cheeks when she smiled. Juan Cortés hadn’t seen those dimples in years.
The day after Doña Margarita Fernández died, pallbearers carried her in a plain wood box down the mountain to the church graveyard in town. Juan Cortés followed the coffin. He hoped that he could persuade the priest to consent to say a prayer, although he didn’t know how he could pay him. His wife would have wanted it.
The next day, the hacendado registered his absence from work en la libreta.
“I wrote that you missed a day of work.” El hacendado was descended from merchants in Catalonia, and he prided himself on his scrupulous honesty. He made a point of explaining his notes to his illiterate jornaleros como Juan Cortés.
“Enterré a mi mujer ayer,” Juan Cortés said.
“Yes, it’s too bad about your wife, but my business is coffee.” El hacendado scribbled in the notebook.
Juan Cortés raised his hand to strike him. But what would become of his children if he were sent to prison at La Puntilla de San Juan? A poor man, a father of motherless children, could not afford to give a hacendado una bofetada even if el cabrón deserved it. He dropped his hand to his side.
When Ysabel and Claudina, the only two children of Juan Cortés and Margarita Fernández to survive to adulthood, fell in love, Juan Cortés gave them fatherly advice.
“No te juntes con los prietos,” Juan Cortés told Ysabel. “He is black and we are descended from familia blanca.”
To his daughter Claudina, “Ese hombre loves the card games more than he loves you.”
Though his daughters listened with respeto, they both chose to go off with their lovers. Juan Cortés was partly mollified to learn that when Ysabel’s husband, Alegro Villanueva, had registered as a jornalero at the mayor’s office, he had declared himself hijo de padre blanco.
It didn’t matter to Ysabel Cortés whether her bridegroom’s father was white or not because she had married Alegro Villanueva for love. She wanted to gaze forever into his eyes that were the brown of a coconut husk. Her fingertips brushed the softness of his hair that her father derided as grifo or pelo malo, but that she called pelo bueno because it was good hair the way Alegro Villanueva was a good man.
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 thei
r 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.
The Taste of Sugar Page 1