On the outskirts of Ponce, they rode past a settlement of bohíos of yagua leaves. Poles separated two huts shaded by palm trees. A white woman and her barefoot children of various black and white hues watched them as they rode past their hut. Some of the children held out their hands, and Valentina gave one of the little girls a piece of bread from their basket. They passed a quartet of black women on their way to market; the women were mounted on small island horses, their straw baskets empty, kerchiefs tied over their hair.
Vicente commented to his bride that there were many more black people in Ponce than on the mountain where he lived. There had probably been more slaves in Ponce, she pointed out. Then he told her about his brother Raulito, who had a black mother. Valentina said that she always wanted a brother.
It would take the newlyweds six days to traverse the distance up from Ponce to Utuado, one day more than it had taken Vicente to make the trip down. Because Valentina wasn’t used to the hard traveling, they would stop to rest often. To reach Utuado, Vicente explained, they would travel la carretera, the excellent road from Ponce to Adjuntas, and from there they would follow the mountain trails called vecinales that joined one town to the other. These roads were rough, Vicente warned, but at least the rainy season had ended in November. Then, it was almost impossible to travel because there were many places where there weren’t bridges, and when the rivers became swollen, bueno, people had been known to drown.
Did Valentina know that, for years, Puerto Rican prisoners had worked on the construction of la carretera, but because it was taking too long, slaves and prisoners had been brought in from Cuba and Spain? Did she know that Cuba had Chinese prisoners? That many prisoners had died because it was brutal work? When the carretera was completed, the king of Spain had commuted the sentences of the survivors. The Spaniards promised to take back los chinos who wanted to return to China, but the story is that the Spaniards threw all the Chinese overboard. Vicente shrugged. Is it true? ¿Quién sabe? My father says so. No Chinaman ever wrote to say he made it home. Did she know that every man from sixteen to sixty years old who lived near the carretera had been required by law to work one day a week on the road? Had her father worked on the road near Ponce? Valentina laughed. Papá breaking rock with a pick and ax? The idea!
After just an hour, Valentina’s waist and back ached from riding sidesaddle. From then on, she rode astride, her skirts bunched up, her legs in white stockings for all to see—the birds, the trees, the sky, people they passed on the road—despite her bridegroom’s protests that he felt the vergüenza that she lacked.
They stopped for coffee and pan de agua at little roadside shacks; they bought limonada and alcapurrias, fried fritters made from yuca. Vicente was grateful for the small purse of coins that Valentina’s father had given them for food and shelter during the journey; he’d tried to refuse it out of pride, but his father-in-law had insisted that it was a wedding present. The other wedding gifts would come later, when they could find someone to make the journey.
•
They rode nineteen miles in five hours on the excellent limestone road, finding surprises at each twist: a gorge six hundred feet below; the hollow roar of hidden cataracts that shouted to them but were too shy to appear; another twist, and a waterfall for the gods gushed from a great height onto the rocks. Tree ferns cascaded in nature’s haphazard, playful beauty. At every turn, there were rivers or streams that shimmered over glossy stones. Valentina cavorted with her new husband with the joie de vivre of any French mademoiselle under a waterfall whose showers transformed the mountain rock into the turquoise of the Caribbean Sea. They stopped at the casilla de camineros built of limestone and inhabited by el peón caminero responsible for the upkeep of a section of the carretera between Ponce and Adjuntas. Valentina found it curious that the house had two corbertizos: one shed was for cooking with two large fogones, and the second was a letrina with a toilet. El caminero’s wife insisted that Valentina rest in front of one of the large windows while she prepared café con leche. Valentina played the role of the married dama as she imagined Elena or Mamá would—she was polite and friendly but not too friendly, as was appropriate when others were only peones. She and Vicente rode through thick forests into a world inhabited only by trees. Valentina was grateful for her long sleeves as branches brushe∆2d her arms. Mosquitoes flew into her face and bit her through her clothes. A bee followed them some distance because Valentina didn’t ignore it as Vicente had instructed.
“The road gets rougher from here,” Vicente said. “Don’t be scared.”
It seemed to Valentina as if the journey had no end.
Adjuntas could only be reached through the mountains by this camino real. They rode up and down and up the steep mountain road for miles and miles. Only Vicente’s surety quelled Valentina’s fear that they were lost. On one particular stretch that Valentina would never be able to recall without a shudder, Vicente kept the horse on the well-traveled path despite a smooth length of road. When Valentina pointed to it, Vicente said that travelers never used it because it was too close to the edge. At various times, Vicente called out to his bride to duck under a branch or hold on tight over the next uphill path whose vertical plane terrified her, and she was sure that they would fall backwards to their deaths. When they didn’t, she exclaimed to her new husband that she’d never experienced anything more thrilling. Once they reached the high, sharp crest of the mountain range, seventeen hundred feet above sea level, they looked down at the valley of Adjuntas. Vicente pointed in the direction of the ocean.
“I imagine that only one other place on earth could possibly be more beautiful,” Valentina said.
“What could possibly be more beautiful than Puerto Rico?” Vicente removed a canteen of water from the saddlebag.
“Paris, of course.” Valentina drank from the canteen.
“In France? That Paris?”
“Tontito, is there any other?”
“My cousin Dalia is in Paris,” Vicente said, as if Valentina didn’t know.
“When we visit, she will insist that we stay with her.” Valentina wiped water from her lips with the back of her hand.
“We’ll never see Paris.” Vicente drank from the canteen.
“Never see Paris?” Valentina stared at him as if he had threatened to throw her off the cliff. What did she know about him, this stranger?
They turned at the flutter of wings: an eagle swooping overhead. Vicente laughed because now that he had a wife, he doubted that he would ever again dream of eagles.
Valentina wondered if the eagle could fly as far as Paris.
A family of beggars slept under a tree en la Plaza Pública de Adjuntas. For Valentina, the ordinariness of Adjuntas’s Catholic church and its brick plaza was a disappointing reward after their perilous journey. When she said so, Vicente pointed out the homes of some of the people persecuted in 1887, a few years previous, during El Componte, the year of terror that the newspapers called “El Año Terrible.”
“I’ll have to write Papá and tell him,” Valentina said.
“Your father? Why?”
“Papá read to us the stories in the newspapers about how la Guardia Civil tortured people who didn’t like the Spanish government,” Valentina said. “Did you know that a favorite torture was los palillos? They would take these small sticks and pegs, about three, six or seven inches long, tie the smaller ends close together, and insert them with string between the fingers of the victim, pressing them together to crush the bones!”