Hunger and thirst, the new masters of their existence, subjugated him and his offspring faster than any whip.
Anselmo Espiricueta heard the cart approaching on the same day his wife told him her breasts no longer produced milk. Better we crush the kid than let it starve, Anselmo. But he was proud of one thing that set him apart from most: all his children had been born alive, and all had survived. They had not lost any to the runs, to fevers, to anything. Nor would they lose any to hunger, he promised himself. So, when he heard the horses’ hooves and the wheels of a heavy cart grow nearer, he ordered his eldest sons and daughters to position themselves, threateningly, on each side of the track of fine, dry, airborne yellow dirt that now covered the members of his family.
Now, years later, he would not know exactly how to explain why he went out to meet the cart. He wanted something. He wanted to save his family. He wanted to block the path through his property, to rob the people on the cart of something, even if just their feeling of safety. If their efforts were interpreted by the group they intended to accost as a plea for help, it was only because of the arrogance of the driver, the leader of the group.
Francisco Morales glanced at the pathetic troop that blocked his path and did not think for one moment that his life was in danger. It never occurred to him that he was looking at desperate souls who would have killed him for a drink of water. So bedraggled were they—covered in dry and desiccating dirt, their cheekbones protruding, their dark skin turned deathly pale, their lips parted and covered in a thick layer of white foam, and their eyes bulging—that to him, they looked like nothing more than hopeless beggars. He thought them so poor, so insignificant, that when he saw the shack they had built, he never suspected an invasion or an attempt to appropriate his land.
It soon became clear to Anselmo, despite the thirst and hunger also thickening his mental processes, that this enormous, pale-skinned, fair-haired man was the real lord and master of every stick and every stone the Espiricueta family had used in those days when he had thought he had his land and freedom. Conveniently, he quickly forgot his initial attempt at aggression and felt that servile part of his soul, that backbone of the spirit so accustomed to bowing down, do so again—defeated by the presence of a great lord prepared to help them, by the humiliation of being stripped of everything in an instant, yes, but also overcome by the ambition to survive above all else.
Were they lost? Yes, lost, he replied, swigging water. Did they stop because of the baby? Yes, cause of the little one, he said, looking at his children, now restoring the moisture to their dried-out cells. Can you work the land? I know a little. Are you from the South? The south of the South. Do you have anywhere to stay? He could feel his moist tongue’s gratitude, but looking at the humble shack they had built themselves when they still had strength in their bodies, he answered, No. Do you need work? Yes, Boss, I need work.
Yes, Boss. Yes, Boss.
Since then, they had remained in this North sometimes of fire and sometimes of ice, prisoners of their will to live and the unexpected and cruel kindness of these people who offered only false hope, taking from them the land that had begun to feel like their own, preventing them from continuing their journey farther north with their Not a good idea and their Why go there when you don’t even speak the language?
The greatest cruelty was the offer of land and a home, which rekindled Anselmo’s hopes of independence.
Spanish was not Anselmo’s mother tongue, and his previous experience did not include speaking to the landowner, only with foremen, who switched between the first language they shared with Anselmo and Spanish at their convenience. The fast, relentless words of this northern landowner entered one ear, reached his mind like a whirlwind inside his head, and then escaped out of the other ear as quickly as they had arrived. He managed to retain only the words that invaded his heart.
Would he like to have his own plot, his own house? Yes, Boss.
Morales had him taken to the two-room house.
He understood the apologetic words that the men who took him there spoke on the way. It’s a very basic house, and it’s been empty for a long time. And it’s far away, but it’s better than nothing.
While the other workers’ houses had been built more recently to form a little community, with a plot of land for each one, the one allocated to Espiricueta was separate from the hacienda’s cluster of buildings. Espiricueta did not care: when he saw it, he thought it a much better and bigger house than any he could have imagined.
He understood that wild animals had made their nests there, since it was cool and dark, but it would be easy to flush them out and make it habitable again. Since neither of the two windows had shutters, he would find a tree and make some himself at the next opportunity. As for the isolation, Espiricueta had no interest in having neighbors snooping on them or criticizing his wife or children. They had lived crammed together with other families in the South, and this house gave them the chance to do as they pleased. The house was also built directly on the field he was offered—his house, his field—where he would work shoulder to shoulder with his sons.
He understood that the boss was a fair man who paid well, as the men told him when they instructed him to turn up early the next day to work. That with his first wages, he would buy his first seeds to sow the allocated family plot, and that they, or someone, would lend him the tools needed to fix the house and prepare the field.
The problem arose when Espiricueta realized that Morales was making a promise in which the land would belong to him, but it did not, and that the house would also be his, but it was not. He would have to work double time—work the boss’s land and his own—to pay rent with each harvest so that eventually, if he saved, he could buy the plot and leave it to his children when he died.
Anselmo Espiricueta did not have the patience for all that saving and waiting. Why wait until he was so old he could no longer straighten his back before he owned his own plot? Why must he live life bowing to a master, any master? He did not care whether it was a southern or a northern master. He had left the South, risking his own neck and his children’s, in order to escape poverty. In his eagerness to start a new life, he had not hesitated to leave behind the language of his childhood, the moist earth of his birthplace. Why would he want to wait patiently in this land of biting cold and searing heat?
At first, Señora Beatriz had seen to it that they received supplies for several weeks and used clothes for the whole family. They had accepted it: the only clothing they possessed was what they had been wearing when, in total darkness, they left the tobacco estate where they had been predestined to spend their lives. They were also sent soap and a lotion for lice, fleas, and ticks, which they had been forced to accept. They don’t want dirty, foul-smelling folks near them, thought Anselmo. Is that why they gave us a house so far from the others?
Then came the worst insult: the offer to pay for the Espiricueta children’s schooling. To send his daughters to the charity school for girls, his sons to the one for boys. They’re good schools, the señora assured him. The Morales girls went to the same school, though they called it “college,” because they went to the side for elegant señoritas of high society, the side for those who could afford to pay. Then she spoke to them about the opportunity to better themselves by learning their letters and numbers, but Señor Morales was not present, so Anselmo set aside his reverence and put an end to the monologue.