The Taste of Sugar

by The Taste of Sugar (retail) (epub)

  At six, she was given the shirt of one of her dead cousins. The sensation of the threadbare fabric on the little girl’s skin was a blessing and a curse because it protected her from insects, rain, and sun, but the weight of the cloth pressed heavy against her bloated belly.

  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.

  When Elena, two years older, married a tax collector transplanted from the capital of San Juan, Valentina was determined that she would be the r
omantic heroine in her own adventure—just like the mademoiselles in the French novelas Dalia passed on to her when she was finished. No dull tax collector for her. She dreamed of being a fine lady with many servants in a place far away from Puerto Rico. Un país where everyone was rich and had plenty to eat, and where there wouldn’t be barefoot mendigos with their knapsacks hooked on branches slung over their shoulders, and barrigones, small children with the bellies of pregnant women. Or where she’d never have to witness again the horror of a man or woman with grotesquely swollen legs or ankles, limping down the street.

  The evening that Valentina jeopardized her family’s honor, her father, with his usual hesitation, entered his daughter’s virginal chamber to hurry her along. It was their first attendance at a society wedding—and they’d been invited because of Valentina’s schoolgirl friendship with Dalia. Papá found Valentina dressed only in her corset and frilly pantaloons. His words of reprimand about her tardiness caught in his throat. His daughter, who only a few years before had resembled a ten-year-old boy, now possessed breasts, the likes of which he’d seen in the French postcards that arrived wrapped in discreet brown paper at his job at the pharmacy. He had first discovered the postcards of naked women in his brother-in-law’s account book, and he had since ordered them whenever he managed to save the money. He kept the postcards locked away in his own private drawer. When his brother-in-law left for the evening and Papá had secured the door after the last customer, he’d fan out his favorites on the medicine counter. But it was one thing to lust after the breasts of a mademoiselle in a French postcard, and quite another to be exposed to your daughter’s bosom.

  “Prudencia, is that really necessary?” He pulled at his collar.

  “It’s practically required.” His wife adjusted their daughter’s corset.

  “Mujer, what are you doing?” He waved in the general direction of Valentina.

  Prudencia dabbed Valentina’s breasts with white powder, so that they took on a translucent quality like a string of pearls.

  “Don’t you remember? I bought it at the pharmacy.” Prudencia inspected the puff of feathers tinged with powder. “It’s French. To make Valentina’s breasts very white.”

  “And smell like strawberries,” Valentina said. “Can’t you smell the strawberries, Papá?”

  Prudencia brought the feathers to her nose. “It does smell like strawberries! But the box said roses.”

  Teodoro tugged at his collar with both hands. “Strawberries! Roses! I should hope that no man would get close enough to your—your womanly attributes—to smell them!”

  “Let me be in charge of our daughter’s bosom.”

  Teodoro removed his collar. “Why is it necessary for Valentina to flaunt herself?”

  “How else is she to catch a husband?” Prudencia said. “Go away, Teodoro.”

  “No te preocupes, Papá.” Valentina embraced her father, the pillowy softness of her bosom pressed against his chest.

  He brushed the white powder from his suit and fled his daughter’s bedroom.

  Mamá returned to preparing her daughter for exhibition. Valentina and her mother had labored over her gown for weeks. They had sewn the dress on the English sewing machine with the hand crank, a hand-me-down from the wife of Mamá’s brother, the pharmacist. They embroidered the white cloth with silver thread; when Mamá’s fingers tired, Valentina took over. Mamá proclaimed that none of Dalia’s Parisian frocks could be more beautiful.

  After she helped Valentina step into her gown, Mamá attended to the various accouterments of her daughter’s dress; she brushed scented oil through Valentina’s glossy black hair and pinned Elena’s lace mantilla in the style of a Spanish señorita with the ivory combs borrowed from the pharmacy’s display counter. Valentina had lapsed into one of her favorite daydreams, that of two dashing caballeros fighting a duel for the pleasure of carrying her off to Madrid or, better yet, Paris.

  When you flaunt your bosom, smile like a little girl, because otherwise Juan Moscoso will think you a flirt; worse, so will his mother, it’s important to have his mother’s good opinion because Juan Moscoso wants to marry you; don’t frown, you’ll get those deep ridges between your eyes that will never go away, trust me, they won’t; think of your father’s sister, the spinster, your Tía Evangelina la solterona. Do you want to be like Tía Evangelina la solterona? No husband, no children, no home of her own, ridges between her eyes? There is nothing else for a woman, not in Puerto Rico, not en España, not even in your precious Paris. I’m sure nowhere in the world, so don’t be too full of yourself, Valentina. Tía Evangelina la solterona was once pretty like you, but now she is a middle-aged lady still in the home of her parents, and any day now los ancianos will die, and where will she go? We might have to take her in or else she’ll have to roam the streets like a mendiga, hand outstretched like any beggar; if you don’t want to die a solterona, be sure to smile at Juan Moscoso, but don’t show all your teeth or he will think you a tonta; take care around the mother of Juan Moscoso because it is always much worse for the man’s mother to think you a fool than for the man. Drop your handkerchief just so in front of Juan Moscoso, watch . . . watch . . . bend like this, the lace must slip from the fingertips just so. It must be done exactly this way because you are a proper señorita; bend a little more—now, you do it, yes, like that, exactly; you must do as I instructed so that Juan Moscoso can want your breasts like a thirsty man wants oranges; why do you think that the good Lord gave you such beauties, we can get a peona to nurse your babies, you’re not a jíbara; no, Juan Moscoso isn’t too old; he is forty, fifty years old, you are seventeen, you are perfect for each other, he will be like your second father; he is not handsome, it is true, but Juan Moscoso comes from a family with money, what girl in your circumstances could ask for more; we sent you to the nuns to learn that which is most necessary for a wife, to obey her husband; you will never read French novelas again once you are married because you will be too occupied with your new husband and his mother; take heart, Juan Moscoso may not bother you too much since he is of a certain age, especially once you give him a son; when you are married, let Juan Moscoso do what he pleases whenever he likes, it is a wife’s duty, it doesn’t matter if you don’t like it, because God said so; ask the priest if you’re so doubtful, he gets his instructions directly from the Son of God; remember that you are only a girl, your soul will be snatched away by the devil if you disobey the Son of God; by now you should know that one is born lucky or one isn’t, the moment you are born your destiny is written in the stars, and yours didn’t say Paris; go ask the curandera to make up a spell to change your destiny, if you want to get mixed up en brujería y cosas malas; happy, what do you mean you won’t be happy? Who is happy?

  Valentina had been obligated to dance the first dances, a waltz and a polka, with the decrepit Juan Moscoso. Twice, Juan Moscoso spun Valentina into the other dancers. Valentina stared up at the Baccarat crystal chandelier festooned with orchids for the occasion. The few times she’d been invited to Dalia’s home, she had been awed that such a beautiful thing had come from that magical place, France. She doubted that she would ever see the chandelier again. When Rudolfo Vargas (Dalia’s cousin, whom Valentina had known all her life) requested a dance, she flew into his arms like a freed bird.

  “Felicidades on the munificence of your bosom.” Rudolfo glanced down with discretion.

  “You once thought them pancitos,” Valentina said.

  “Because they were soft like bread rolls,” Rudolfo said.

  They laughed loud enough to draw the attention of her mother and the lady chaperones, las damas sitting in a row of gilded chairs.

  Rudolfo had grown into the kind of man that mothers wished their daughters would never meet—at least not until they were their husbands’ responsibility.

  “I’ve often dreamt about that time in the garden, except that in my dreams you always look like you do tonight,” Rudolfo said.

  That time when they were still children
, Valentina had wandered away from Dalia and sneaked into the grand garden with Rudolfo. A strand of her waist-length hair caught on a branch, and Rudolfo reached out to loosen it.

  They’d ducked behind a tree, where Rudolfo had considered Valentina’s girlish breasts the way her mother considered the family’s daily bread.

  “They’re small,” Rudolfo said.

  “Maybe they’ll grow.” Valentina looked down at her chest.

  “Maybe,” he said, the way Valentina’s mother would say to the peddler, Are you sure el pan was baked today? It doesn’t look very fresh.

  “Touch them,” Valentina said.

  Rudolfo patted them.

  “They’re not pancitos.” She took his hand. “Like this.”

  “Pull up your skirt, Valentina,” Rudolfo said.

  “Pull down your pants first,” Valentina said.

  He cradled his penis in his palm.

  “It’s kind of small,” Valentina said.

  “Touch it.”

  She patted it.

  “Like this.”

  It sprang like a snake in her hand.

  “Would you like to lick it?”