Your sister,
Elena
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EXILE
Querida, we built the house on stilts to protect it from flooding during the rainy season; it’s the way of the country, you’ll get used to it. Look, two barrels for rain so that you don’t have to always go to the stream; I rigged up a ducha to catch rainwater so my strawberry girl can have her showers, I built this tiny shed so you’ll have privacy from passersby—you don’t care if the birds see you, do you? Out there, only a little ways, is the outhouse, I put in a floor, that way it wouldn’t get all muddy and disgusting, but we’ll have to keep an escupidera to use at night, don’t look at me like that, mujer, it’s too dark at night to walk all the way to the letrina, what do you mean, who will empty the chamber pot? You’re a country girl now, bueno, I will, but we have a son who will soon be peeing like un macho, and you’ll be glad of it. Yes, I will teach him not to miss. Valentina, we put in a window in each of the rooms except the children’s, houses like ours don’t have so many windows! Luisito doesn’t have as many windows in his house, but I wanted to make it extra nice for you. Did you notice the furniture? I built it. Mostly. Yes, me. I built the bureau in our bedroom and the smaller one in the children’s room, you didn’t know I could do that, did you? Papá taught us to work with wood when we were boys; I built the cupboard for the dishes. I know there isn’t any furniture in la sala yet, but that will come, you’ll see, don’t forget, Mamá promised that you could have her rocking chair; do you like the kitchen table? Yes, it is beautiful. No, I didn’t make it, no, it wasn’t Luisito, either, it was Papá, yes, my father; he insisted that he wanted to give you something special; the old man came around, didn’t he?
“I can’t believe Raúl made this.” Valentina passed her hand over the table of fine reddish wood that resembled mahogany. She switched three-month-old Evita to her other hip. “Is this caoba? It smells like cedar.”
“Cedro español as good as caoba,” Vicente said. “Papá wanted you to have the best.”
Raúl’s table was devoid of flourishes yet it was something to be passed down through the generations. Why had he gone to such trouble and expense? It was a matter she would have to ponder later, perhaps even discuss with Gloria and Inés.
Valentina sat down in one of the cane-backed chairs that Angelina had given them. Two-year-old Javiercito, sitting on his father’s shoulders, demanded to be set down. He ran to his mother and she took him on her knee.
The lean-to shed housed el fogón on a narrow table that Vicente had built for it.
Vicente opened two wooden shutters the size and width of the window. “You can let out the smoke from el fogón. Here is the palangana. You can wash dishes while you look out the window. When you’re done, you just tilt the basin with the dirty water out the window. Luisito and I put in the window specially.”
He looked at her, waiting.
Valentina, the baby on her lap, Javiercito clutching her shirt, stared out the window—an opening without glass or a screen. Cook on a fogón, throw the dirty dishwater out the window like a peona—she couldn’t believe she had come to this.
“Querida, don’t you like it?” Her husband’s smile had faded.
She roused herself. He’d tried to please her, to help make her chores easier.
“Claro, que sí.”
“I know it’s not like Mamá’s house—”
“It’s not that, I’m just a little overwhelmed.”
“Mamá said she would send Gloria to help you to get settled.” Vicente gave her a look she knew well. “Let’s put the children down for a nap and then we can go to bed, too.”
“But what if Gloria comes and we’re—”
“You don’t want to?” Vicente’s smile was hard to resist.
Valentina opened her blouse to nurse her children. “I’ll hurry.”
There was much that she liked about the house. It was on a particularly beautiful spot surrounded by flowers like orchids and dalias and margaritas. A variety of fruit trees perfumed the air with citrus like toronja or china. There were mango trees and a tree that grew her favorite lechosa—they grew so big she had to carry one with both hands. She fashioned a sling along her chest to carry Evita around the new property, and she enlisted Javiercito to help pick aguacates or delicate fresas that grew the size of his thumb. They popped red berries into their mouths right off the bushes, the sweet juice dripping down their chins. Valentina would sit under the shade of a tree, shrug off her blouse, and nurse a child at each breast. Sometimes she untied her ribbon and let her hair cover them like a curtain, but mostly, she didn’t bother.
The hours between her husband’s departure and return were long and lonely. She yearned for company, for another woman’s kind voice, for a helping hand. Valentina had long ago realized that her mother and sister had been right. Here she was on a mountain where nothing exciting ever happened, where no one interesting ever came to visit or passed by except for barefoot jíbaros. She missed Inés and Gloria, who had become like mother and aunt to her. In her loneliest moments, she even missed Doña Angelina.
It was a hard life, la campesina life—too many chores like filling the water containers, the preparation of food, the making of the fire, the cooking, the cleaning, the nursing of the baby and toddler, who wasn’t ready to wean himself. There were days when she didn’t have Vicente’s midday meal ready; it seemed as if she just set the pot on el fogón and there he was. She cried the first time that happened. He’d taken her in his arms, reassuring her that he wasn’t that hungry. There were days when he tried to make it easier for her and didn’t come home for lunch but went to his mother’s house instead. Valentina felt the sting of his absence, but she was also relieved. She had to draw on everything she had in her to prepare a simple meal, and some days that was all she could do.
And so months passed for the young family in the little wood house with Valentina doing her best as a jíbara wife, putting to use what Gloria and Angelina had taught her and even recalling some of the lessons of economía from her mother. Not a single scrap of paper went to waste. For example, the brown papel de estraza that the country store used to wrap food and bacalao was washed, dried, folded, and put away to be used for writing lists, for covering a hole that had appeared in the outhouse roof, etc. They grew their own tubers like yautía and batata and also tomatoes and cucumbers. Corn and other vegetables came from Vicente’s parents. They raised chickens. They bought rice and bacalao at the country store with the money Vicente made from selling aparejos or mangos or bananas. When she cooked a chicken on the occasional Sunday—Vicente had to kill the bird, pluck the feathers, and chop it for her—she simmered the remains of the carcass with a diced potato, an onion, and a few cloves of garlic smashed with the back of the knife to make a broth that she fed to the children. One Sunday, while the children were napping, Valentina and Vicente sat at the kitchen table drinking café puro. Vicente was rhapsodizing about coffee. Although his trees were still young, he knew that they would one day bequeath berries as red as little Evita’s lips, and that when roasted, they would be the color of Valentina’s eyes. Remember he’d told her that Puerto Rican coffee was the only one good enough for the Vatican? One day the pope would drink their coffee! ¡El Papa!