“Eusemia wouldn’t come,” Vicente told him, “and Raulito wouldn’t come without her.”
“It’s going to be a bad one.” His father put down his newspaper. “Did you notice the moon?”
“Maybe if you had gone it would have been different.” Vicente waited for his father to defend his negligence or to express remorse.
“Only if I’d forced them a la mala,” Raúl Vega said.
“I hope that you locked up your house very well.” Gloria handed Vicente a cup of coffee.
“I even locked up the pig.” Vicente smiled.
“Not in our house?” Valentina looked up from a half-peeled batata.
“No, querida.” He sipped his coffee. “Luisito isn’t coming?”
“Your brother probably decided to stay with his wife’s family.” Angelina lit one of her tiny cigars. “They live closer to them than to us.”
Vicente sat down at the table, picking up the newspaper pages his father had discarded. Lourdes climbed into his lap. Javier sat next to Raúl Vega.
They ate Gloria’s homemade blood sausage with boiled malanga and yucca and batata and Eusemia’s mangos. Lourdes helped Gloria wash the dishes.
And they waited.
Raúl Vega went to a cupboard and took out a bottle of rum. Gloria got up for glasses and he poured rum for everyone, even a splash for Javier; Valentina put her hand over the glass meant for Lourdes.
And they waited.
When they needed to relieve themselves, they stepped into the other room, where Gloria had set an escupidera, and then they hurried back.
Gloria lit candles; Inés brought over the kerosene lamp. Valentina looked at Inés’s long fingers, bereft of her mundillo, restless on the tabletop, tapping out a song that no one could hear.
Lourdes fell asleep on her father’s lap while Javier slept with his arms cushioning his head on the table.
In the hour between night and day, the leaves on the trees ceased to whisper, animals became mute, and nature held its breath.
Then there was wind and rain that came in torrents; lightning buried electrical bolts into the ground. They sat at the table listening to the sounds of crashing objects outside; one thunderous clamor and violent vibrations shook the ground beneath the house. Vicente thought the earth might crack open.
They wouldn’t have been able to hear each other if they had spoken. Huddled together, the adults sat wide-eyed, the children hid under the table. The rain pounded the house, and lightning flashed through the cracks in the boarded-up windows, illuminating the fear on their faces.
In the early hours of the morning, Angelina and Inés rose from the table. What they said was lost in the rain. Vicente put his arms around his mother, his words imploring her to stay unheard. Valentina grasped Inés by the hand and Inés kissed it; she made a tiny sign of the cross on the younger woman’s forehead. Then Angelina and Inés took one of the candles and left.
The rain pounded the door of the house, demanding entrance. Vicente realized that he’d never heard such wind. He thought of his brother Raulito and Eusemia, just two of the peones who lived in the countryside in their huts made of straw and coconut palm; how could they survive such a storm? Would they? Yes, yes, they would, he told himself. And his coffee trees, could they survive? Soon the coffee would be ready for picking. Vicente rubbed his forehead to banish the vision of his coffee trees tossed on the ground like matchsticks, the berries scattered to the ends of the earth.
Finally, there was a lull in the wind.
Vicente went to check on his mother and Inés but the women weren’t in their bedroom or in the house.
“Mamá and Inés aren’t here!”
Vicente ran to the entrance of the house, his father behind him. When they couldn’t open the door because the wind pushed against it on the other side, Vicente ran to the wall for the pick to pry open the shuttered window.
Raúl Vega tossed one end of a heavy rope to Vicente.
“Tie it around your waist and knot it well,” he said.
Vicente followed his father out the window and bumped into him when he stopped short.
Gone were the citrus trees—lemon, orange, and grapefruit—that had provided fruit and perfumed the air. Mango trees, gone. Vines of roses and orchids that his mother had planted, the trellises she’d wrapped them round, gone. Bushes of herbs—cilantro, recao, marjoram—everything, gone. Gloria had often sent Valentina annatto seeds from the achiote tree that grew alongside the house. Gone. The chicken coop, gone. The shed with the sacks of coffee from last year’s harvest that no one wanted to buy—gone. The horses, gone.
The day had the darkness of night.
The rain slashed their faces. The rope gripped tight in his hands, Vicente followed his father like a blind man. They stumbled over the trunk of a twenty-foot palm tree that had been snapped in half. It seemed like hours before they reached the river, now swollen to twice its usual depth. A wild procession of dogs and cats and cows and horses and uprooted trees and beds and chairs flowed downward as if a giant hand had hurled them onto a river of mud. Men and women and children bobbled up and down and then disappeared, the river swallowing their screams. Bohíos, intact and with their occupants still inside, careened in the water. The wind picked up again, and the men knew it was the second front of the hurricane. They risked being carried away. Father and son turned back toward the house, pushing against the wind. A cow flew over them, upside down on its back, hooves and udders flapping like wings. A boy, his arm sliced off at the elbow by a flying blade of zinc, appeared, then disappeared, like an apparition. Vicente shouted over the din; he felt his breath in his diaphragm, but he couldn’t hear a sound.
Raulito clutched his mother Eusemia’s hands as they sat huddled together on the cot. It reminded him of how as a small boy, his mother had carried him to her bed when he had woken up crying about spirits; he was forever dreaming about spirits. (It didn’t help that Eusemia often saw her dead relatives—her mother and father and grandparents wandering the mountainside or next to her when she picked coffee.) His mother had explained that the spirits had once been human beings, but because of terrible tragedies they had suffered when they were alive, they couldn’t make their way into the spirit part of the world. There is only one world, Eusemia had said, everyone lives in it—the living and the dead. Raulito had cried because he didn’t want to live with his dead relatives. The spirits meant him no harm, his mother had reassured him, but they were among them always, whether he wanted them to be or not.
Now he pledged to protect his mother, this woman whose hands were rough like bark. Rain came through the thatched roof. His eardrums felt as if they would burst. Hours later, when the wind abated, his ears popped, and he clutched his head in pain. Mother and son stood outside their bohío, staring in silent horror. The few trees that remained had been snapped like kindling. The huge mango tree from which Eusemia had picked mangos for Vicente’s mother the day before, gone. Many of the bohíos had vanished. Some of their neighbors drifted in dazed circles or ran about in a crazed state; toward what, or away from what, it was impossible to tell. Later Raulito would realize that the people were naked.
The wind picked up again and they returned to their home of straw and plaited palm. Raulito reached for his mother’s hands again. He was sure that the terror on her face was reflected in his own. He fought against the scream that rose in his throat, even though no one would hear it. The rain came down in furious waves and carried off the hut’s thatched roof. Water gushed down over them like a waterfall. He felt himself lifted up.
When Raulito was a small boy, his father Raúl Vega picked him up and tossed him high up in the air and he flew up up up; Raulito flew up into the sky.
The mosquitoes and the rains came the day after the hurricane, but still the men prepared to go out to look for the missing women. They didn’t know that it would rain for twenty-eight days. Together, they set out; Raúl Vega and Vicente found the road to town impassable. They stepped over or arou
nd corpses of dogs, cats, oxen, horses, and sometimes, people. They turned over the bodies of young men and women who might have been Raulito and las damas. Each time, Vicente breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t one of his loved ones. As they followed the river a ways to look for the women, bodies floated past them. On a bank they found two little girls, facedown in the mud. Vicente couldn’t help crying out for a moment remembering Evita, even as he turned them over on the chance that they might still be alive. They returned home before dark, their shirts fashioned into slings filled with what fruit and vegetables they had picked up along the way.
The next day the men went out again; the women had brushed the dry mud off their clothes that morning while they ate their breakfast of coffee and cornbread spread with Gloria’s pasta de naranja, a sweet orange marmalade that was Vicente’s favorite. The women and children were instructed to stay inside because it was too dangerous. Valentina promised to preserve what she could of the fruit and vegetables they had found.
Father and son took the opposite direction from the day before. The trails they’d known well had disappeared; they walked one behind the other up the mountain using broken branches as walking sticks. Sometimes they stopped to get their bearings, other times they stopped because they were dumbfounded by the devastation. Where once there had been a hill with groves of coffee trees or with dozens of straw bohíos, some with families they had known well, now there was just sunken earth.
Another day they were able to make it all the way to Raúl’s coffee farm. The hurricane had picked up the coffee trees and shaken them like maracas, scattering the still-green coffee berries all over the mountainside before tossing a few trees back down. Vicente snuck a look at his father, but he’d pulled his hat low on his face to protect it from the rain. Most of the shade trees had disappeared—the banana, the plantain, the guama, and the guava. The few that were left bowed their giant leaves in surrender.
They helped pull corpses out of the river. Each time they turned over a woman who could have been his mother or Inés, Vicente cried, his tears disguised by rain. Each time it wasn’t either of las damas, he felt ashamed of his relief.
On the tenth day of rain, they were able to reach Vicente’s farm. He told himself that whatever they found, he still had his health, his wife, his children, Gloria, and even his father. And perhaps he would find Raulito and las damas. People were what mattered. People. Not coffee. Not land.
All the trees had been carried off, and the ground was saturated with water. Vicente stood in the batey, his shoes sunk in the mud. He stared at the house that he had built and where he had lived with Valentina and their children. Where they had kept vigil through the night for their little girl, where Evita had lain in a tiny white coffin set on the fine table his father had built. A huge palm tree had fallen on the house; the hurricane had taken the roof. It was as if someone had punched him in the gut.
His father stood beside him; they didn’t speak.
The shed he had used to store coffee still stood. It seemed impossible that it had survived while the house had not. Perhaps the pig had survived. Inside, Vicente found a naked man on the ground.
“¡Raulito!” Vicente shook his shoulder.
Raulito sprang up and threw his arms around his brother.
“The hurricane took her,” Raulito mumbled into his brother’s shoulder.
“You’re coming with me.” Vicente patted his brother’s back.
“But your house—”
“To our father’s house.”
“He won’t want me.” Raulito tried to cover his nakedness with his hands.
Vicente took off his shirt and gave it to him.
“He’s here, don’t worry.” Vicente put his arm around his brother.
It had begun to rain again. They walked around the palm tree inside Vicente’s house. Raúl was looking at the broken pieces of the table he’d made for Valentina.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell Valentina about the table just yet.”
“Papá, I found Raulito in the shed.”
“¿Raulito?” Raúl Vega turned around.
“Don Raúl.” Raulito didn’t raise his eyes from the floor.
Raúl Vega looked at his sons, one naked from the waist up, the other from the waist down. For once, he didn’t make a sarcastic comment.
“And Eusemia?” he said.
“Desapareció.” Raulito tried not to cry.
Raúl Vega nodded as if he had expected it.
Vicente found Raulito a pair of pants and a shirt; the clothes were wet, but then so were they. They carried what they could salvage and walked home in the rain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE PUEBLO ASKS FOR WORK AND BREAD
They were to learn that almost two thousand people had died in their district; that the hurricane had been named San Ciriaco because it had landed on the saint’s day; that every single bohío in Utuado’s countryside had vanished, the inhabitants presumed dead; that the rivers had swept up more than five hundred houses, with a hundred persons drowned in a single house, forty people in another; that the entire town had flooded, the current dragging twenty houses and their occupants down to the river; that the hurricane destroyed most of the houses, including the infirmary, the telegraph station, the Catholic church, the schools, and the cemetery; that almost the entire coffee crop and most of the food crops had vanished, even the tubers in the ground had been blown away. Later they would learn that in one town on the island, people saved themselves by passing from balcony to balcony and climbing into borrowed boats; they would learn of the deaths and devastation in other parts of Puerto Rico including the city of Ponce, where over five hundred people had drowned, most of them los pobres who lived in shanties; ships arriving in the port of Ponce reported dead bodies floating in the sea. The island-wide damages totaled over twenty million dollars. Three thousand three hundred and sixty-nine people dead, and thousands more homeless.
Utuado had sent a contingent to San Juan to meet with Governor Davis en La Fortaleza to plead for immediate help, informing him of the desperation of its citizens, of the many hundreds homeless and starving. General Davis pledged to provide money to construct a bridge at the entrance to Utuado after the rainy season ended, but unfortunately, Puerto Rico would have to wait for emergency funds until they figured out how to distribute them in an organized manner.
At the post office and the ayuntamiento, Vicente added Angelina and Inés and also Eusemia to the list of the missing. He reasoned that as long as they didn’t find his mother’s body, there was the possibility that she was still alive. One night he dreamt of his mother and Inés hand in hand at the edge of the raging river during the night of the hurricane. In his dream, he shouted at them to turn back, but they didn’t hear him.
More than half of the island’s food supply was destroyed. One-fourth of Puerto Rico’s population, half a million people, were destitute or homeless. The newspapers were filled with horror stories. Vicente read in El Pan del Pobre that a man had slumped over dead from hunger on Calle San Francisco, and that campesinos from the town of Morovis had taken to roasting cadillo seeds instead of coffee beans to make a breakfast of dandelion coffee. Armies of los hambrientos spent their days in aimless walks around the pueblos. Skeletons in tattered clothing slipped barefoot down country roads swollen with mud. Only up close was it possible to see that the walking bones had once been José Valderrama or Joaquín Sandoval Hernández or Cristina Mercado Ortiz or fulano Santiago or fulana Castillo or any of thousands of puertorriqueños. Rather than watch their children starve, people drowned themselves in the streams and rivers. Girls and women sold themselves for a piece of bread. More than once, Vicente came upon a man dangling from a tree branch.
When Vicente met other Puerto Ricans after the usual greeting of Buenas, how are you, and the answer, Luchando, at least I’m alive, the questions they asked each other were always the same: Why don’t the Americans help us? Why are so many American soldiers doing nothing but eating g
ood food and sleeping in real beds? Why didn’t the American military feed the people—the thousands of starving men, women, and children?
They read the newspaper editorials that asked: Where was the help that the people of Puerto Rico had expected from the great Republic to the North, the country of Washington and Hamilton and Lincoln?
A letter sent by the representatives of Utuado to the newspaper La Correspondencia said: “The pueblo asks for work and bread. Tomorrow thousands of campesinos from twenty-five barrios will arrive in Utuado, calling for trabajo y pan. How can we provide that when in all of Utuado there aren’t provisions enough for eight days?”
Vicente and Valentina read that the United States didn’t have a special budget for calamities, but that the two million dollars that had been collected from taxes on Puerto Rican products imported to the US since the military occupation would be returned to the island to help the Puerto Rican people. The newspaper El Diario de Puerto Rico wrote that because the US government shouldn’t have charged the tariffs in the first place, the money returned was justice, not charity.
Then, on August 22, 1899, another tropical storm hit the island, causing extensive damage in the capital of San Juan.
They didn’t know that only a week after the hurricane, President McKinley ordered the military in Puerto Rico to pass out rations. The military government didn’t know how to help—they’d never before had such a human catastrophe on their hands. They came up with a plan for charity and offered a sweet deal to the planters. All they had to do was make sure that the hurricane victims worked for their food and clothing, which the charity board would provide from funds donated by the American people. The planters would get free labor to repair their properties and plant and harvest their crops. With the help of the military government, in September 1899, less than two months after the hurricane, the plantation owners had reestablished Puerto Rico’s centuries-old feudal society.
Raúl Vega told Vicente that the best thing that ever happened to the owners of the big coffee haciendas and sugarcane plantations was Hurricane San Ciriaco.
The Taste of Sugar Page 16