They entered their new home. One large room with a wood floor. No bed. Not even a shelf. A plain wood table with benches. Valentina was never happier to see a table in her whole life. Lourdes dropped her bundle on top of it.
“I hope it’s better at the end of the row.” Dolores stood in the doorway.
“Let’s take your rice to your new house,” Valentina said.
They passed round brick ovens with the insides burnt black from smoke, which they would later learn had been built by the Portuguese who had once been sugarcane workers like them. They looked inside a wood barrel.
“Rainwater,” Valentina said. “I hope there is a river or stream nearby.”
The smell became stronger as they walked. Dolores would soon realize her terrible mistake, but it wasn’t Valentina’s place to advise her. Look what happened the last time she stuck her nose into someone’s business.
Las puertorriqueñas were exhausted but there wasn’t time for rest. They had to unpack a few things and set about preparing dinner. Dolores talked about how hungry she was and how she couldn’t wait to cook up a banquet for her husband and son. Valentina had seen that stick of a husband of hers, hadn’t she? But then, they were all sticks, weren’t they?
“Mami, it smells so horrible,” Lourdes said.
She shook her head at her daughter.
“A little longer, Valentina,” Dolores said.
Something must be wrong with Dolores’s sense of smell. She claimed the last shanty and her new home. It was empty except for the usual insects. The woman next door watched them through the cracks in the wattle.
“Damas, I wish I’d drowned in the ocean,” the woman said.
“Don’t say that! This is the dama who lost her son at sea.” Dolores glanced at Valentina.
“Ay bendito, you’re that mujer,” the woman said. “Lo siento, but I still wish I had drowned in the ocean.”
“You’re attracting el mal de ojo.” Valentina wished it for the woman.
Dolores squashed a bug with her heel. They dropped the sack of rice on the table.
“How am I to cook? In Puerto Rico, even the poorest peona had a fogón.” Dolores wiped her hands on her skirt.
“Once upon a time, I had a stove.” Valentina recalled it like a dream, but it came out of her mouth like a lie.
“Bueno, at least I have rice.” Dolores patted the fifty-pound sack.
“Dolores, if you could share some of your rice with me, I would really appreciate it.” Valentina blinked tears from her eyes.
“Rice? You should have bought some at the store.”
“I know, I know, but I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I can give you something in return, or I can sew something for you.”
“You can sew? That’s wonderful,” Dolores said. “Of course I can give you rice.”
“And a little sugar?”
“Sugar? I hope you brought a needle with you,” Dolores said. “And thread.”
Valentina spread her mantilla on the table and helped Dolores lift the sack; the rice spilled like seed pearls on the black lace. Valentina thought she’d never seen anything so pretty.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
WE ARE MEN, NOT CATTLE
On the first day, the Puerto Ricans learned that sugar was called poho. They also learned to hate the men on horseback who shouted at them in Portuguese, which they didn’t understand; they learned to despise the boss, who was called the luna, and fear the plantation police with their guns and truncheons. The wagons rode over dirt roads no better than the trails in Puerto Rico. Only in Hawaii five minutes and already they were separated from their families, cabrones! Hombre, a man should be allowed to collapse! Instead they were loaded onto wagons like cattle! ¡Malditos cabrones! Vicente glanced back at the road that led to Valentina and Lulu. He hoped that Valentina would find a pretty little house with a bit of dirt where she could plant vegetables and herbs, and that Raulito would turn up soon.
Some of the Puerto Ricans like Vicente had their own machetes, but for those without, the cost of the machetes would be added to their accounts at the plantation store. At the luna’s bark, the cane workers bent to the cane. Vicente reached for a stalk and chopped it twice, then tossed it on the ground. He was so thirsty and the heat inside the cane so intense that he was sure he was in hell. When it began to rain, he cut a dozen more stalks before stopping. Surely they wouldn’t be expected to work when they could barely see the cane.
“Hana! Hana!” the luna shouted, and galloped off to round up the Puerto Ricans who had ceased to work. He and his henchmen rode up and down shouting “Hana! Hana!” By now los puertorriqueños knew it meant, “Work! Work!”
•
It was evening when the guards led los puertorriqueños off the cane fields. They didn’t have the energy to complain, even among themselves. They passed men still at work, and somebody said they were Japanese.
Vicente saw Valentina’s trunk in the dirt. He asked one of his compatriots to help him carry it.
Valentina told Lourdes to watch for her father from the open door. She’d planned to wave her hand around the hovel and say to Vicente, For this, you made us leave Puerto Rico? I left my sister and parents and Evita for this? I lost Javiercito for this? But one look at her husband, wet and exhausted, his hands blistered and swollen, one look at him, and instead she handed him a drying cloth.
For dinner, she served him a piece of bread and beef jerky.
When they finally lay together on the feather mattress, Vicente thought that he’d never been so tired. Lourdes was asleep on the floor, her face smushed on a bundle. He told Valentina how somebody had stood next to Raulito on the pier in Oahu and now that man was here but Raulito wasn’t. He must have been sent to another plantation, perhaps in Oahu. Damn the Americans! These malditos cabrones americanos doing things so slapdash, not giving a damn about the Puerto Ricans, but when had they ever? And did she know there was a woman who was left with a child and no husband to support her, her husband someplace else, just like Raulito?
“Poor things! How can they survive?”
“She’ll think of something.”
“You mean selling her body to the sugarcane workers? She won’t earn enough fucking peones for a bowl of rice.”
Vicente turned to look at his wife in the candlelight. “Valentina! You’ve never talked like that before! It’s not like you.”
She closed her eyes. “Let’s not quarrel, Vicente.”
The neighbors on the other side of the wall made loud love; they could hear everything through the wattle wall.
“They might as well be lying next to us,” Vicente said.
“They had a good idea,” Valentina said.
They laughed, and it surprised them.
Valentina jumped into Vicente’s arms at a terrible sound, a blaring noise so insistent and insidious that it shook them. Valentina looked over to Lourdes, who stirred but didn’t wake. They dressed and hurried outside, sure that the world was ending, sure that the heavy fragrance of flowers in the evening breeze would be the last thing they would remember as they traveled to the other side. Death came at them on a horse riding down the row of shanties, but as the rider drew nearer, they saw that it was a plantation policeman shouting at them and waving a truncheon until they went back inside. Finally the terrible noise ceased, and soon the Puerto Ricans would know it was the evening siren commanding them to sleep.
The next morning, the siren woke them from a sound sleep.
“Jiralue dem poro rico jana jana! Jiralue dem poro rico jana jana!” Someone pounded on the door. Vicente reached for his machete. The door of the hut flung open.
“Jiralue dem poro rico jana jana!” A plantation policeman cracked a whip against the floor.
Vicente sprang up, machete in hand.
“Vicente, don’t!” Valentina tugged at his arm.
“Jiralue dem poro rico jana jana!” the policeman said, before backing out of the shack.
/> Valentina closed the door. “You lunatic! What did you plan to do? Kill a policeman on your second day?”
“You’re naked!” Vicente set down the machete to pull on his pants.
“Of course I’m naked,” Valentina said. “You undressed me last night, don’t you remember?”
“That policeman saw you naked!” Vicente looked at his wife as if it were her fault.
“I can’t be the first naked woman he’s seen,” Valentina said.
“That policeman was lucky I didn’t slice him up!” Vicente waved his machete.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Valentina said. “What would happen to us if you went to jail?”
“What is it?” Lourdes, her dark hair in a braid down the back of her nightdress, sat up on the sleeping sack.
“Your father has to go to work.” Valentina slipped on her dress. “Go back to sleep.” Vicente went outside. Goddamn policeman. Piece-of-shit shack it might be, but while he lived in it, it was his piece of shit. Later Vicente and the other Puerto Ricans would learn that “Jiralue dem poro rico jana jana!” meant, “Get up, you Puerto Rican, work work!”
When the Japanese walked past their hovel, they stared straight ahead. Only the children snuck glances at the Puerto Ricans. All the men carried machetes, but the women and children carried what Valentina would learn was a hoe for weeding. Valentina claimed one of the brick Portuguese ovens. She would make a crude fogón for cooking until Vicente could make her something better. Lourdes helped her fold the bedding and she put it inside the trunk. Valentina placed on top of it the packets of gandules and annatto seeds she’d brought to plant. She and Lourdes went out in the light rain for kindling and rushes to make a broom. When the sun came out, Valentina spread them out in front of the hut to dry.
“Let’s look for the mother and daughter your papi told me about last night,” Valentina said.
But Sonia and her little girl found them.
“Doña, por favor, ten misericordia, have pity on us. We need a place to stay.” Sonia set down her bundle. She was a skinny woman with a big smile and green eyes. “This is my Mirta. She looks as old as your daughter.”
Valentina sent Lourdes with Mirta to get more kindling while Sonia told Valentina her story—she’d lost her husband somewhere on the journey, they’d stayed the night with Dolores, who had turned her and Mirta out that morning, but she was so grateful to Dolores, don’t think she wasn’t, because if it weren’t for Dolores, she and her daughter might have had to sleep in a cane field. She’d gone down the row of huts and asked for shelter at each. Every dama had said lo siento but the huts were so small, barely enough for her own family, and yes, it was true that the huts were small, but Señora Valentina, what would she do if someone didn’t have the heart to take them in? The only good thing was that each dama had given her a little something either out of mercy or guilt. Here Sonia offered her bundles.
Valentina took them. “If you stay, we’ll share everything.”
When Vicente returned from la caña, he found Sonia Fernández and her little girl in the hut.
“Don Vicente, I saw the spirit of my husband,” Sonia said.
“That kind of talk scares the children.” Vicente took off his shoes. It was important to preserve them; who knew when he could buy another pair of shoes.
“I saw mi Pedro like I see you at this very moment,” Sonia said. “He was always rambling on about how the Americans had stolen the island and money right out of the Puerto Ricans’ pockets.”
“He got that right,” Vicente said.
“I don’t know why he said that because we never had money,” Sonia said.
“Permit me to educate you,” Vicente said. “First, the American general said our silver pesos were only worth fifty cents, and then McKinley, el presidente americano, said that our dollars were worth sixty cents! So the Americans came with empty sacks and they filled them up with our pesos and took them back to America. You know what happened to our silver pesos? Those ladrones americanos added five cents’ worth of silver to our silver pesos!”
“Vicente, not again,” Valentina said.
“And you know what those ladrones americanos got?”
Sonia stared at Vicente, who pointed his fork at her.
“American silver dollars!”
“¡No me digas!” Sonia looked at Valentina.
Valentina dished up rice and bacalao onto a plate.
“Five cents!” Vicente took the plate of food.
“Eat your dinner.” Valentina placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“The Americans stole my farm.” Vicente looked down at his plate.
“I don’t understand these things,” Sonia said.
“The Americans are thieves. What’s there to understand?” Valentina washed the rice pot in the galvanized metal pail.
“And then they taxed our—” He stabbed his fork into a piece of bacalao.
“Please don’t start with the tariffs, Vicente.”
“The Americans may be devils, but you and your señora are angels, taking us into your home,” Sonia said.
“What’s this, Valentina?” Vicente’s fork clacked against the enamel plate.
“They have to sleep somewhere.”
“Not here,” Vicente said.
“Have mercy, Don Vicente!”
“It’s only until her husband turns up,” Valentina said.
“Take a look around.” Vicente waved his fork about the hut. “There isn’t room.”
“They slept in the cane fields,” Valentina said. “With the rats.”
“We’ll die in the cane fields,” Sonia said. “The rats will eat Mirta.”
Both little Mirta and Lourdes began to cry.
“Niñas, no need to cry,” Valentina said.
“Don Vicente, if you don’t open your heart, what will become of us?” Sonia knelt in front of Vicente. The little girls knelt down also.
“Everyone get up.” Valentina pulled Sonia to her feet.
“Valentina, you know it’s impossible,” Vicente said.
“That we are even here seems impossible,” Valentina said.
Vicente looked at the little girls’ tear-stained faces.
“Just for tonight.” Valentina put her arm around Sonia. “We can’t turn mother and child away.”
“Just for tonight,” Vicente said. Lourdes hugged him.
•
Sex always helped her forget—where she was, who she had been, who she had become. Whether the neighbors glimpsed them through the cracks in the wattle wall, whether Sonia closed her eyes or kept them open and watched them by the moonlight that silvered inside the hut, the lovers didn’t notice, certainly not Valentina. When it came to lovemaking, it went unspoken that it wasn’t proper to comment on it, not even by close friends and relatives; Sonia wouldn’t say anything the next morning. It was Valentina and her husband’s hovel, and she wasn’t even thirty years old, and if she wanted to make love, then coño carajo she would! And if their neighbors heard them, she didn’t care. She needed sex to fall asleep so she wouldn’t hear the rats hunt through the garbage beneath them; she needed sex to get up in the morning to face another day in this godforsaken place, this Hawaii. She had no proper house, no stove, no bed, no luxury of any kind. She was thousands of miles away from her family—she couldn’t even think of Javiercito, not yet—and she would be damned if she gave up sex!
Once when she was particularly loud, Vicente covered her mouth with his hand and it reminded her of another time long ago, when she had bitten the hand on her mouth and drawn the metallic taste of blood, and how its owner had let his hand slip from her mouth in surprise or, perhaps, pain.
Hilo, Hawaii
___Plantation
January 30, 1901
Dear Elena,
Our precious boy Javiercito was buried at sea somewhere in the cold Gulf of Mexico. One day he had a terrible fever—I can’t write more about this—only that he’s gone—my lovely boy—I try not to think of him—
I wanted you to know, tell our parents only if you believe it necessary, but I see no reason to do so. I wish that you could have helped us to avoid this journey—did you not get my last letter?—but here we are on the other side of the world. The day begins with a siren to wake the dead and “Jiralue dem poro rico jana jana! Hana! Hana! Hana!” shouted at us by the plantation policemen. The siren tells us when to wake and when to sleep. It’s as if we were indentured servants at the beck and call of a feudal lord. We live in a hut of the meanest sort that is not even good enough for pigs. There isn’t a school for Lourdes, as we were promised. No one speaks Spanish here, and as we don’t speak English, you can imagine the difficulties. Somehow we lost Vicente’s brother Raulito on the voyage—he was sent to another plantation, we don’t know where—and Vicente is beyond worried. We don’t know what to do or who to ask for help finding him. We’ve taken in Sonia Fernández, a puertorriqueña, whose husband Pedro has also been misplaced. She has a daughter who is company for Lourdes. If somehow you hear of Sonia’s husband, please tell him where to find his family. ¡Ay bendito, Elena! I don’t know how or when this letter will reach you, or even if ever. (I have little paper and ink to write more.) I fear I will never see you or our parents again, but you are always in my heart.
Siempre,
Valentina
Hilo, Hawaii
___Plantation
January 30, 1901
Dear Raúl,
Our precious Javiercito died at sea. It is almost more than I can bear to think about. Vicente is taking it so hard that we don’t even speak of it. We lost Raulito somewhere. Please don’t tell Gloria, but say instead that we are well and that our life here is a dream. Raúl, maybe we should have listened to you and stayed in Puerto Rico because it’s not what we expected it to be. Your son and nieta te envían recuerdos. My love to mi querida Gloria.
The Taste of Sugar Page 23