PLANTATION PURCHASED--LIFE AT “DESENGAÑO”--AT WORK ONCE MORE.
At last my husband found a sugar-plantation for sale--“positively to
be sold.” It would be hard to tell how many he went to inspect, and
found the titles imperfect. This one was encumbered by a minor’s lien.
The old man who owned that one was crazy, and could not make a title.
A third belonged to a whole family of heirs, who had fallen out among
themselves, and would not agree upon terms of sale. Another was in the
merciless grasp of the city merchant, who would ultimately sequestrate
it. And so on, through an appalling list of disappointments. At last a
plantation was found, so hopelessly in debt, so wretchedly managed, in
such bad repute from lack of energy and care, that the owners (three
brothers) offered to sell it, or rather consented to allow it to be
sold, under the heavy mortgage. As it had been settled originally by
their ancestors, and descended in unbroken line, the chain of title
was perfect. We closed the bargain, and in May moved our little
belongings, Martha and Zell included, to “_Desengaño_,” sixty-five
miles from Havana. As the lives of these two devoted and faithful
servants were interwoven so closely with our own, it might be well to
give them a more personal introduction. Martha was a mulatto whose
profile, albeit no beauty, strangely resembled that of the famous St.
Cecilia; while Zell was a full-blooded creole negro, black as ebony,
tall, broad-shouldered, with a big mouth, full of dazzling ivories--one
of the best-natured, jolliest souls that ever lived.
In Cuba the laws are so complex, the officials so full of dishonest
trickery, that oftentimes the laws seem framed to obstruct rather than
to facilitate justice. We were permitted to take possession in May,
though the final transfer was not completed until August. While Lamo
(a contraction of _el amo_, the master, as my husband was now called)
had entire possession in the field, I had not similar advantages in the
house, which was still full of the furniture and other movables of the
Señores Royo, the late owners. Wretched pictures of “Nuestra Señora
de Cobre” hung in every room of the house; and we were told, whenever
the engine broke down, or the cane-fields were on fire, and the whole
neighborhood was responding to the tones of the alarm-bell, the Royos
prostrated themselves in agony of prayer before the “Señora.”
The dwelling-house at Desengaño was the most pretentious and
substantial in the Matanzas district. Eighty feet front, one hundred
and twenty feet deep, of one story about twenty feet in height, built
of stone and cement, the walls were three feet thick, with immense
beams of solid cedar sustaining the ceiling. The floors of concrete,
covered with a preparation of clay and milk, admitted a high polish.
From a wide veranda you entered the parlor; the dining-room, back of
this salon, was inclosed its entire rear width with venetian blinds;
there was a series of rooms on each side the parlor extending back six
deep, forming a square court when the great gates in the rear, reaching
from side to side, were closed. No wood-work, except the heavy doors
and solid window-shutters. The windows were protected by strong iron
bars, extending from top to bottom, and imbedded in the stone walls.
The veranda, of solid stone, protected by an iron railing, commanded a
view of the avenue a third of a mile, with stately palms a hundred feet
high, bordering the drive on either side.
Never can I forget the horrors of the early days at Desengaño. When
the black woman, in a dirty, low-necked, sleeveless, trailing dress, a
cigar in her mouth, and a naked, sick, and whining child on one arm,
went about spreading the table, scrupulously wiping Royo’s plates with
an exceedingly suspicious-looking ghost of a towel, the prospect for
dinner was not inviting. I had eaten kid stewed in blood, craw-fish,
frogs, and _chili colorado_--and nobody knows what’s in _that_
mess--in my journeyings, so one might have thought my stomach had no
weak point in it; but its weakness developed that day, and I dined on
boiled eggs and roast sweet-potatoes.
Until a tidy Chinaman was installed in the kitchen I was very dainty,
and thought and talked more of what I was eating, or intended to eat,
than in all my previous life or since.
“Martha, that water has a wretched taste.”
“Miss ’Liza, I b’lieve dere’s something in the bottom of dis
_tenajo_, but, bein’ as it ain’t ourn, I don’t want to meddle wid
it”--and she pointed to the inevitable water-cooler, the rotund jar
of porous pottery, so indispensable in that climate. I ventured to
have Royo’s jar scalded: out came fragments, legs, bodies, beards,
and heads of cockroaches, that had formed such a solid mass at the
bottom that nothing less than scalding water and a thorough shaking
could disintegrate and bring it forth! We never drank from a doubtful
_tenajo_ after that.
Among the belongings was an old-fashioned piano, with faded and
somewhat damaged pink silk flutings over the upright front. One day I
raised the cover, dusted the old yellow keys, and ran my fingers up and
down with a loud rattle; out sprang myriads of cockroaches from all the
folds and crevices of that faded, dingy silk; the unwonted noise roused
them as nothing else had ever done.
There was no cleaning house, no settling down, with all that dirty
plunder cumbering the floor. Many and active were the scampers we
had after great horny cockroaches, that glared at us in a way almost
human, their backs so hard that, when we got a fair rap at one, the
shell broke with a loud crack. The evenings were rather dull and
listless. Lamo was too tired with his day’s occupations to entertain
us. The heat, together with mosquitoes and all manner of flying bugs
attracted by the light, kept us remote from lamps. I do not know what
we should have done, but for the ubiquitous cockroaches. In the dim
light of evening they sallied forth from crack and crevice; from the
silk-covered piano to the humble foot-stool they crept out. Ellie,
Martha, and I, each armed with a flexible slipper, watched, jumped,
slapped, ran, and laughed to our hearts’ content. The hunt was the
more vigorous as the game was so wary. An old grayish fellow would
glare at you with glistening, beady eyes, and wave his long feelers
like a challenge; you ran, made a dashing slap with the slipper, and,
like the Irishman’s flea--he wasn’t there! The vigor and voracity of
these pests were beyond belief. They scampered all over the house;
sometimes strayed into mouse-traps, and were caught by the neck like
a mouse. Books, papers, and clothing they nibbled and destroyed
freely, as though regular articles of diet. Driven by persistent and
vigilant warfare from the dwelling-house, they seemed to increase
about the adjoining buildings of the plantation, and were intolerable
even at the _infermeria_ where medicines for plantation use were
kept, devouring quantities of ipecac, Dover’s powders, rhubarb, and
even lucifer-matches; in fact, anything and everything that could
be reached. On one occasion a package of pulverized borax, intended
to be mixed with sugar and scattered about their haunts, for the
express purpose of destroying them, was partly devoured in a night,
indicating conclusively that the internal organs of a Cuban cockroach
are fearfully and wonderfully made. By reason of their intolerant,
pugnacious, omnivorous nature, which leads them to make warfare upon
every other insect that crosses their path, the negroes refrain from
molesting them, as they are less objectionable in their estimation than
a multitude of others, and their barracoons are strongholds from which
they issue to colonize wherever and whenever vigilance is relaxed.
Royo’s furniture was carted off at last; the unsavory water-jar, and
the untidy house-maid in whose care the belongings had been left,
disappeared together. Our scanty furniture was soon disposed to the
best advantage, and quickly that dirty house was scalded, scrubbed, and
whitewashed. With all things made clean, floors washed every day, and a
deal of turning up and out, the horrid cockroaches had no rest, day nor
night; and the rapidity with which those sly old scamps disappeared
from about our feet challenges belief.
We soon settled down to a life that was almost as new to us as if we
had dropped from the moon. The mixture of bad Spanish and African
jargon of the negroes I never did understand--nor did Lamo--but in
time they understood me. Henry and Zell, and by-and-by Martha, could
interpret for black and white, while Ellie and I could talk to and
understand the whites. We worked with an energy, born of a more
vigorous clime, that amazed our apathetic neighbors. The money had to
be dug and plowed out of the ground to pay for that beautiful place. We
had never dug nor plowed, but Lamo knew how it ought to be done; so,
while he was in the field teaching the stupid negroes and dazed Chinese
to dig and plow, I was busy in the house with its manifold surroundings
and dependencies. Not an idle hour did we have, we so greatly enjoyed
the new excitement of work with the certainty of reward. Lamo was in
the fields before the first blush of day tinged the sky, and I was up
with the sun’s first slanting rays--busy all day long, and tired enough
to sleep soundly at night.