“Precioso.” Sonia smiled at her son.
The plantation siren blared. Valentina glanced at the door; Vicente wasn’t home yet.
Valentina pushed the trunk behind her friend and helped her sit up. “I want you to sit with your back against this trunk so you can nurse your baby.”
The new mother put the baby to her breast.
The baby didn’t move; Sonia didn’t seem to notice.
Sonia looked up from her baby. “Can I be with Vicente now?”
“As soon as you’re strong enough, you can be with him the whole night long.” Valentina knelt by her friend; why didn’t Sonia see that her baby wasn’t nursing?
“Oh, thank you! I won’t let him drink my breast milk,” Sonia said. “No matter how much he begs.”
“How did you know he liked breast milk?” Valentina wiped her friend’s face with a wet cloth.
“What man doesn’t?” Sonia kissed her baby’s head. “I’ll call him Manuel, after my father.”
The women sat together, their backs against the trunk. Sonia talked about how happy her husband would be, how she felt in her heart that her husband would find her because she believed in miracles, didn’t Valentina?
“I always hope for miracles,” Valentina said.
Valentina held out her arms for the baby. “Let’s make sure that everything that was supposed to come out came out.”
She put the baby on the girls’ pallet and helped Sonia lie back down. Valentina pressed down on Sonia’s stomach. Sonia’s screams soared over the hovels; it entered the dreams of the sleeping cane workers in which plantation policemen raised their billy clubs and whips and shouted Hana! Hana!
Her baby next to her, Sonia slept on the feather mattress a few feet away. Valentina and Vicente lay on the grass-filled cloth bags.
“I’m so glad you’re safe.”
“They said the doctor wasn’t in.” Vicente reached for her.
“I can’t hoe hana anymore, I have to take care of Sonia.”
“I never wanted you to hoe hana.”
“If only the doctor had come.” Valentina buried her face in her husband’s shoulder.
“They said he wasn’t home.”
“Was that true?”
Valentina felt Vicente’s shrug.
Tomorrow she would have to tell her friend that her baby was dead.
Valentina didn’t wait her turn. She walked past the line of the sick, carrying the tiny body wrapped in a cloth like a small bundle of food.
“Get in the back of the line like everyone else,” somebody said.
She didn’t hear or she didn’t care, and she walked unannounced into the doctor’s office. Valentina shoved aside some of the jars of pills and laid the bundle on the desk.
“Lady, who said you could come in here?” The doctor’s assistant reached for her.
Valentina waved him away and unwrapped the bundle; the men looked down at the baby.
“Stillborn?”
The doctor examined the baby. “That’s what I’m putting in my report.”
“A boy,” the assistant said.
“Better bury it,” the doctor said.
Valentina made a sweeping bump over her stomach and pointed in the direction of the hovels.
“Señora. Lady. Mamá. Bebé. ¡Doctor, por favor!” She tugged at the doctor’s sleeve and he inspected it for fingerprints.
“Mamá.” Valentina pointed toward the plantation workers’ hovels.
“I think she wants you to see the mother,” the assistant said.
“You make one exception and you’ll be making house calls to every hut for a cold in the head,” the doctor said.
“You have a point,” the assistant said.
“These Porto Ricans are the most demanding of the lot, worse than the Portuguese,” the doctor said.
“But not worse than the Japanese,” the assistant said.
“Nobody’s worse than the Japanese,” the doctor said, as the assistant picked up the baby, but not without some care.
A few weeks went by with the little girls helping Valentina take care of Sonia. They pressed cool wet cloths on her forehead, held the cup of water to her lips, picked the aloe vera plant so that Valentina could smooth the gel on her skin, but Sonia spent her days staring out the open door.
“Sonia, please eat something, maybe just a spoonful of rice.” Valentina held the spoon to her lips.
Sonia ate a few grains, then turned her head. Valentina knew that she had to do more. If only she could get her hands on a live hen to make a sopón. That was the best remedy for a woman recovering from childbirth, that and hot milk made with chocolate from Spain. Valentina cut open an aloe vera leaf and massaged a little gel on Sonia’s bloated stomach. Only with Mirta did Valentina see a glimmer of the old Sonia. She had to get her to the doctor, but how? She couldn’t carry her; it was too far for Sonia to walk, and besides she didn’t have the strength. Vicente couldn’t take a day off from the cane without the plantation policeman coming to get him; Valentina didn’t want him sent back to jail. Yet the situation was desperate. Valentina couldn’t let her friend die; she didn’t think she could bear it. And Mirta needed her mother.
When Valentina saw the wheelbarrow in the plantation manager’s garden, she knew it was the answer. She could easily push Sonia in it. She would steal it somehow. Valentina looked around for the gardener, a middle-aged haole who threw rocks at the children for stealing vegetables. It was one of those sunny days when for a few minutes there was a soft rain. If she hurried, she could be gone before the rain ended and the gardener returned. She pushed the wheelbarrow.
A hand spun her around.
The gardener looked her up and down in the rude way a man looks at a woman that makes her cringe. Valentina wanted to slap him, but instead she smiled and pointed to the wheelbarrow, then to herself. She pantomimed wheeling it away. In turn, he made an indecent suggestion with his hand. Valentina backed away, ready to run. Her gaze fell again on the wheelbarrow. She needed that wheelbarrow. No! She still couldn’t do what he wanted. Not even for the wheelbarrow. But for Sonia? Could she do it for Sonia? How else could she get Sonia to the doctor? The haole gardener said something else that Valentina didn’t understand. She looked again at the wheelbarrow. Sonia would die without a doctor’s attention. If she did it . . . how revolting . . . Sonia was her friend . . . Sonia was like her sister, she reminded her of Elena . . . that she even considered it . . . shame on her. She couldn’t do it. Yet Sonia. The doctor would be gone in a few days, not to return for weeks. Sonia would die by then. If she did it . . . would it be so terrible? No one would ever need to know.
Valentina followed the haole into the shed.
His pants bagged around his ankles . . . dust mites floated in the air . . . guttural, foreign words tumbled on her head as she knelt . . . birds cooed outside the shed . . . the pressure of his hand.
Valentina pushed the wheelbarrow down the dirt road past the Japanese camp and stopped at the path that separated the Japanese camp from the Puerto Rican camp. She pushed the wheelbarrow by a tree, sitting down next to it in the shade. She covered her face with her hands, the tears hot on her palms. What had she done? Why had she done it? She should never have done it. It was terrible. She was terrible. Then she thought of Sonia. She’d done it for Sonia.
“Valentina?”
Valentina looked up through her tears.
Mikioki from hoe hana bowed.
“Okay?” Mikioki pointed to her.
Valentina shook her head. The thought passed through her mind that Mikioki should be working. The Japanese woman sat down next to her. They sat there for a few minutes without speaking and then Mikioki listened, nodding as if she understood what Valentina was telling her in whispered Spanish, the terrible secret that Valentina would never reveal to another soul.
After a time, the women stood, bowed to each other, and went their separate ways.
Dolores gasped.
“¡Que diablo! Tell me
everything,” she said, but Valentina pretended not to hear.
Valentina wheeled Sonia right past the line of people, apologizing, asking perdón of everyone. The doctor’s assistant carried Sonia to the infirmary as if she weighed no more than a sack of rice. Valentina worried that Sonia must be very ill since the doctor hadn’t sent her away with blue pills.
The infirmary was little more than a shed with cots, one of which was already occupied by a coughing Japanese woman. Valentina covered her mouth with her kerchief, hoping that the woman wasn’t suffering from tuberculosis; that would be sure to finish Sonia off. For a second, Valentina envied Sonia for sleeping in a real bed and was ashamed. Valentina held Sonia’s bony hand, which reminded her of chicken feet.
“Vicente fucked me last night,” Sonia said, with a glimmer of her old smile. “I didn’t dream it, did I, Valentina?”
“You rode him like a horse,” Valentina said, making the sign of the cross on her forehead, blessing her.
Valentina cried as she pushed the empty wheelbarrow to her hut. She cried for Sonia and she cried because of the wheelbarrow, what she’d done for it. She had never touched another man except for her husband. And now she had a secret to keep from Vicente, forever, because he could never know. She cried harder because it might have been for nothing.
When Valentina brought Mirta to see her mother, she again ignored the reproaches of the long line of the sick waiting in the rain. The infirmary was empty and she went to the office, where she found only the doctor’s assistant. She spoke to him in Spanish and he answered her in English. She wished, not for the first time, that the plantation had someone who could speak Spanish—if not the doctor, then at least his assistant.
Valentina held Mirta’s hand. He came around the desk to speak softly to her; she closed her eyes, opening them to his gentle touch on her arm. She nodded and he pointed to a shed up the road.
Mirta ran ahead as she walked past the line of patients again. The sound of a hammer could be heard as they approached the shed; a man in shirtsleeves was building a coffin. Valentina asked him about Sonia, and although he didn’t understand her words, he pointed to the shed.
Valentina bit back her scream. Sonia lay in a coffin made of plain wood planks; she was a pale, barefoot wraith playing dress-up in the clothes of a much larger woman. Sonia who was like her sister, Sonia who made her laugh. Sonia. Querida Sonia.
Valentina lifted Mirta over the coffin.
“Is Mami sleeping?” Mirta touched her mother’s cheek.
“No, darling,” Valentina said. “Your mami is with baby Manuel.”
“Is Mami an angel, too? Dolores said baby Manuel is an angel.” Mirta braced herself on the coffin’s edge.
“An angel like baby Manuel,” Valentina said, although she wasn’t sure if she believed in angels.
“Mami is an angel.” Mirta kissed her mother.
Valentina wondered what had happened to Sonia’s shoes. She would have to go back to the infirmary to get them. She could bargain with the shoes or save them for the little girls. But why was she thinking of shoes?
Valentina set Mirta down on the ground and bent over the coffin.
She kissed her friend and whispered, “Querida, I’m sorry I didn’t let you make love to Vicente.”
The little girl began to cry. “I don’t have a mami now.”
“You’ll always have us.” Valentina knelt and took Sonia’s daughter in her arms and she cried, too.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
TIBURÓN
When Raulito realized that Vicente wasn’t on the pier in Oahu, he tried to jump in the water to swim after his brother, but several of the Puerto Ricans pulled him back.
“¿Muchacho, estás loco? There are tiburones in the water!”
Raulito tried to break free. “I’d rather be shark meat than lose my brother!”
“Don’t be stupid! You won’t find your brother inside the stomach of a tiburón,” somebody said.
¡Vicente! ¡Hermano! Where are you?
Raulito turned twenty-one on the sugarcane plantation. His mother Eusemia finally started coming to him in dreams, with her hair tucked in a turban of bright colors. In his dreams, she always smiled. In life, her lips weren’t accustomed to turning up at the corners of her mouth, and they didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to quiver.
Brother, where are you?
It was a nightmare, this Hawaii.
From what Raulito had seen of Oahu, it wasn’t very beautiful, though it might be up in the mountains, where he heard there was no sugarcane. It couldn’t be as beautiful as Puerto Rico because that was impossible. Oahu was the green or yellow of the cane stalks that cut into his palms; it was the scratches on his neck; it was the silk that got caught in his fingernails and made him want to tear them out. It was his body bent to the will of the cane, to the will of the luna. Work, Work, Work. Hana, Hana, Hana. Oahu was lonely, lonely nights. He slept on a bare cot in the single men’s barracks, where there wasn’t even an escupidera to use as a chamber pot, as he and his mother had always had. He didn’t like to do his business outside in the middle of the night when the plantation policemen were patrolling. If they saw you, they threatened you with their guns or nightsticks.
Everyone said that life in the camp was trabajo y tristeza. Some unlucky puertorriqueñas had lost their husbands to death or the planters’ negligence and had to earn money however they could. People asked him why he didn’t take a wife—there were a dozen pretty girls in need of a husband. Men advised him to visit Nina Pagán, whose husband had drowned in a pond soon after el pobrecito arrived in Oahu.
When Raulito went to introduce himself to Nina, she sent her three children to gather kindling. Stale odors lingered in the one-room shack. He saw that there was no way to make his escape. The shack was crowded with a cot and a table and a bench for sitting. Cooking utensils and several bags of foodstuffs like coffee beans and cornmeal covered the table. An empty oil can was used as a fogón with scraps of kindling.
Nina took off her dress. “Don’t just sit there like a tonto. What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying.” Raulito wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Nina sat next to him on the cot.
“Didn’t you come to make el amor?”
Raulito looked down at the shoes Vicente had given him after he lost his in the hurricane. Vicente hadn’t said so, but he’d known that the shoes once belonged to their father.
“Then why—”
“I can’t—”
“You can’t? Or you don’t want to?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“Please let me stay,” Raulito said. “I’ll pay.”
Nina put her dress back on. From then on, Raulito visited Nina every week and he paid her to talk. He listened to stories of how once she had been la ama de casa of her own household. The arrangement suited them both.
“My husband Victorio was a very good man.” Nina mashed spices like garlic and onion in a small wood pilón while he smashed coffee beans in a larger one he had made her as a present.
“A very hard worker. Sometimes I think of Victorio and how hard he worked. What good was it? We come here and what happens? He goes to bathe in the reservoir and his foot slips. And he leaves me thousands of miles from home to fend for myself and the children.”
After the first few times, Raulito only needed to nod or murmur when she paused, to insert a sympathetic “ay bendito,” or an affirmative “claro” or “no me digas.” It got to be that he found it soothing to hear her voice in the background of his thoughts, the way he’d listen to the caw of a bird on the mountain. He’d think about how he lost his brother and how he would find him. Once, Raulito looked up at Nina’s hands paused in the act of snapping a bean pod. He took a chance and said, “¡No me digas!” Nina snapped the bean.
When Raulito left Nina’s house, he strutted around the camp like a rooster so everyone would know where he had been.
Raulito ate, slept, and woke at dawn to cut cane, ate, slept, and woke at dawn to cut cane. A day was forever when one was young and alone in a strange country, with nobody to love and nobody to love you. Others had their families or their women, but not him. He came to enjoy Nina’s company, but because he paid to visit, he knew that any friendship they shared would be over if he couldn’t pay her.
He ate with the family of a fellow puertorriqueño named Carlito Maldonado, whose wife Soraida cooked for him. Soraida asked why didn’t he find himself a woman and make a family? Carlito said he could marry a nice girl and still visit Nina, nothing wrong with that. It was a man’s right to have as many women as he wanted, especially if he could hide his querida from his wife. Raulito remembered his father Raúl Vega then. How he’d discarded his mother and never acknowledged him. If he ever had a woman—and he never would—he wouldn’t be like his father, no señor; he would be like his brother Vicente.
Raulito liked to go to the parties on Saturday nights. The Puerto Ricans took turns as hosts; they talked politics, lamented that they’d left Puerto Rico and their fate of trabajo y tristeza. But it was really a dancing and drinking party. Raulito, like most of the Puerto Ricans, loved to dance. The Puerto Ricans danced because they wanted to forget the cane, because it gave their hard lives joy, because they were young, because they were old, because the sun was bright, because the moon shone, because the stars twinkled and the sea was blue, because the music allowed them to pretend that they were still in Puerto Rico. Valentina had taught Raulito all the dances. La guaracha. El seis. La danza. El vals. The dance floor was the largest room of the sugarcane workers’ two-room house. El vals, la mazurca, and la polca required lots of spinning and space. The host would announce the numbers of partners and call the direction of the dance. The women waited for the men to ask them to dance after they finished their cigarettes outside. The rules were always the same: Don’t dance too close. Don’t cut in on another man’s dance. Possession rights for all dances were granted to the first man who asked a woman to dance. It didn’t matter if the woman didn’t like the man. Always ask the husband for the honor of a dance with his wife. To avoid trouble from a rejected suitor, a Puerto Rican girl was trained from a very young age to never, under any circumstances, refuse to dance with a man who asked her. It happened that sometimes a girl or woman would refuse a dance with a man she disliked, or because she preferred to wait for another partner, and then her punishment was to forfeit the rest of the dances. A man had his pride.
The Taste of Sugar Page 28