“On a day like this in Puerto Rico, I went home early to my wife and she was in bed with another man.”
“¡Coño carajo!”
“Hombre, mala suerte.”
“¿Un fulano? Or somebody you knew?”
“My younger brother.”
“Your brother!”
“Your wife!”
“What did you do?”
“What any man would do. I broke off a switch from a tree. I gave them both una pela they never forgot! No one blamed me, not my brother, or my mother, not even my wife.”
“Your own brother!”
“A man can’t trust anyone with his woman, not his brother, not his father.”
“You didn’t suspect?”
“Why do you think I came home early?”
“A man knows if he wants to know,” somebody said.
Vicente found his lunch of beans difficult to swallow. He’d always had an uneasy feeling when his father was around Valentina. There had been something curious about the way they stood apart, something that had worried him. But why did he have to think about that now? What did it matter when he was squatting in Hawaiian sugarcane? ¡Coño carajo! If only he could confront his father right now!
The luna rode his horse down the row of sugarcane only a few feet away from where the men ate.
“Look at how they treat us.” Vicente wanted to hit someone or something.
“It’s like slave times,” someone said. “I’ve got the luna’s whip marks to prove it.”
“No man except my father ever raised a hand to me in Puerto Rico.”
“¡Ay bendito, las pelas papi gave me!” someone said.
“A father is one thing, but I’m not a slave,” Vicente said. “We’re men, not cattle.”
“Hana! Hana!”
The men went back to the cane.
Vicente had stopped to wipe his forehead with his blue kerchief when the luna rode over to him on his horse, flicking his whip over Vicente’s back. He cried out at the fire on his skin. Not since he’d become a man had he been treated with such disrespect. Vicente wrestled the whip from the luna’s hand, pulling him down. The horse began to trot away, dragging the luna through the rows of cane, his leg caught in the stirrup. Vicente chased after them; he grabbed the reins, yanked them, and pulled the horse to a halt. The plantation policemen rode up on their horses and Vicente put up his hands, guns understood in any language.
CHAPTER FIFTY
SEÑORA, SEÑORITA
Somebody would bring her Vicente’s machete.
Valentina peered out the door at the men who passed them on their way to their huts. Despite the slight offensive odor in the air, except when they slept, she always kept the door open for the natural light since the shack didn’t have windows. Whenever she chased out a bird, she looked up at the sky, imagining that it was the same sky as in Puerto Rico.
Vicente was the kind of man who always came straight home. Of course, it was always possible that Vicente had a mujer, but he wouldn’t be able to keep another woman secret, given the way the Puerto Ricans lived. And if he spent a penny of la miseria he made on another woman, Valentina thought she just might kill him.
Where could he be? It could only mean trouble.
“It’s not like Vicente to be late,” Valentina said.
“Maybe he met someone and stopped to talk,” Sonia said.
When someone called her name, Valentina hurried out of the hut, Sonia and the girls right behind her. She hoped that Vicente hadn’t suffered an accident, like the man whose neighbor had chopped off his arm with the swing of his machete.
It was Eugenio, the husband of Dolores.
“Tranquila, Valentina.” He patted her arm. “They took Vicente.”
“Who took him? Where?” Valentina looked behind Eugenio as if she could see her husband.
“I don’t know,” Eugenio said. “Jail, maybe.”
The little girls began to cry.
“Niñas, a casa,” Sonia said to the girls, who ran back inside.
“He beat up the luna.” Eugenio held out the machete.
“That’s a lie!”
“I can’t say yes, I can’t say no, but that’s what they say,” Eugenio said. “I was too far away to see anything.”
“Who says he beat up the luna?” She took the machete from Eugenio, wary of the blade.
“The luna.”
“He’s a liar.”
“He did have a bloody nose.”
“Vicente?”
“The luna,” Eugenio said.
“That’s not like Vicente.”
Eugenio took out his blue kerchief and wiped his forehead. “The luna whipped Vicente.”
“ ‘The luna whipped Vicente.’ ” Valentina repeated the words as if she didn’t understand them.
“Tranquila, Valentina.” Sonia put her arm around her friend.
“Was he terribly hurt?” Her Vicente tan dulce. After everything he’d suffered, whipped.
“The luna? I think Vicente only punched him in the nose.”
“Not the luna! Vicente!” What was wrong with Eugenio? She wanted to drop the machete on the ground and take Eugenio by the collar and shake the details out of him.
“It didn’t seem so. The policemen marched him off the field,” Eugenio said.
Valentina looked out into the road. Somewhere down that road her husband was in jail.
“I’d better go,” Eugenio said. “Dolores will be wondering where I am.”
“You’re a good friend, Eugenio.” Valentina tried to sound grateful but she wasn’t grateful, she wanted to scream until her husband came home. Instead, she carried the machete inside and hung it on its hook on the wall.
“What will we do, Valentina?” Sonia looked as frightened as the little girls.
“Don’t worry. I’ll go to the manager tomorrow,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll have Vicente back home soon.”
The women put Vicente’s dinner away and then they worked on a dress for Dolores, who’d promised to pay them with rice and flour. Sonia was also a good seamstress. The girls went to sleep. At the blare of the plantation siren, the women put their needles down. Sonia settled on her straw-filled sleeping bag, and Valentina on the bedding they’d carried all the way from home. But Valentina couldn’t sleep.
She’d wanted Eugenio to go back to Dolores and the others and say, Esa Valentina, que brava. Didn’t collapse into tears because her husband is in jail and who knows when he will get out. You won’t see that woman having un ataque de nervios. But Eugenio didn’t know that she would get Vicente out of that jail tomorrow! The rats scavenged in the waste under the hut and Valentina plugged her fingers in her ears. Eyes squeezed shut because she wouldn’t couldn’t mustn’t cry, she thought of their little house in Puerto Rico and the very first night when all four of them had slept in the big bed together. Javiercito, still a toddler, had slept facedown in a little ball. She’d woken up to nurse their daughter, and Vicente had woken up, too, looking at her in a way that made her feel a little shy—that someone could love her like that.