Our Lives Are the Rivers Read online

  Jonatás and I discovered that if we sang to her, Manuela would fall asleep quickly and peacefully. In her bedroom, at night, after everyone went to bed, we sang so softly nobody heard us. We remembered a few songs we’d learned in San Basilio.

  “Sing the one about your mothers,” Manuela would request. After she learned the words, she sang with us:

  O Mama, O Mama, where are you, Mama?

  Good-bye, Mama; good-bye everybody.

  Good-bye to our people.

  Good-bye to the platanal.

  Good-bye, Hallelujah.

  Good-bye, Mama, sweet Mama.

  Good-bye to your kisses

  And the sweet sea where we bathed.

  Good-bye, sweet-milked cocoteros.

  Good-bye, dear Mama.

  Good-bye, dear friends.

  Good-bye all, good-bye.

  After Manuela fell asleep, Jonotás and I would huddle in the darkness and shed tears for our own families. We reserved our sadness for the darkness—if we were caught crying in daylight, we’d be punished for being ungrateful.

  The more time that passed, the blurrier my mother’s features became. It was as if I saw her through a curtain of fog; the sound of her voice and the smell of her breasts as she hugged me became fainter, the feel of her fingers on my head as she combed my hair looking for lice before she braided it faded. Jonotás and I used to play a game. We’d say to each other, “Tell me what my ma looked like,” and then we would recall details about the other’s mother. One day I realized what I remembered was not Ma, but Jonotás’s version of her.

  I never stopped longing for Mama. Years later, when we were brought from Catahuango to Quito to live in Don Simón’s house, every time I saw a Negro woman of a certain age walking the streets I’d follow her for a few blocks, wondering whether or not she was my mother. Sometimes in the market, I would see a Negro I didn’t recognize, whether a man or a woman, who looked as if he or she had been brought to Quito from Nueva Granada. I would approach these strangers, introduce myself, and ask if they knew a Negro woman named Julia, about forty years old, married to Nemesio, from the palenque of San Basilio in Nueva Granada. People always shook their heads—no one knew anything. It was as if my mother had been thrown into the mouth of the smoking volcano I now lived near and had turned to dust. I refused to give up the hope that my mother was somewhere in Ecuador, perhaps not even far from Quito. When I found her, I would ask Manuela to buy her from her owners and bring her to live with us.

  MANUELA STOPPED ASKING about her mother, and only once in a while would she cry at night, calling for Doña Joaquina. Manuela’s aunt and grandmother did not try to console her. It was as if the sight of her reminded them of something bad. When Manuela sensed that the Aispurus would never give her affection, she turned to us. It was then that we became her family, the only people at Catahuango she could trust, and we grew to love her, and she us, despite the difference in the color of our skin.

  Jonotás and I were young girls but we knew that slaves were bought and sold, and that the defiant ones were branded with hot irons; the women were branded on their foreheads and cheeks with their master’s initials. We had heard about cruel masters who routinely killed their rebellious slaves, without having to answer to the law. We understood that our best chances of living the most tolerable life a slave girl could expect would come from Manuela’s protection. We belonged to her by law, and only Manuela could dispose of us.

  Those few years after Doña Joaquina’s death, and before Manuela, at age seven, was sent away to Quito to board with the nuns, were—despite the loss of our families, despite our not being free—among the happiest years of my life. With Manuela we were allowed to play, to be children, to sing and laugh. As long as we kept Manuela out of trouble, we were fed, clothed, and spared the angry lash of the slavemaster’s whip, the ultimate sign of the hellish life of a slave.

  3

  QUITO AND PANAMA

  1800–1817

  Manuela

  I have only one blurry memory of my mother: bedridden and gaunt, eyes dilated, clutching a handkerchief spotted scarlet. One day my mother was taken to Quito and I was not allowed to say good-bye. Eventually I understood that my mother was never coming back to Catahuango, that she was dead. A heavy lock was placed on the door of her bedroom, never to be opened again, at least not in my presence. I longed for something that reminded me of my mother—a cameo, a lace handkerchief, a ring, a fan, but all her personal objects disappeared. Worse, her name was never spoken, as if she had never existed. I cherished the only measure of her existence, that one memory of her, sickly and in bed.

  Of my father, on the other hand, I had no memory at all. I grew up wondering who he was. I waited and waited for my relatives to tell me about my father. They never did. I was afraid to ask, afraid of the answer. Was he dead, too? And if he was alive, why didn’t he come to see me?

  Shortly after my sixth birthday, I finally summoned the courage to question Aunt Ignacia about him. “Manuela, you ask too many questions,” she snapped. The way Ignacia spoke, as though any mention of my father were a taboo subject, instantly silenced me. I would have to figure out another way to find out who my father was, and where he lived.

  One day, playing with Jonotás and Natán in the orchard, I asked them if they knew where their parents were.

  “They don’t tell slaves where they take their families after they sell them,” said Jonotás.

  “Was my father sold, too?”

  The girls giggled nervously. Natán said, “No, Manuela, you’re white. You are our mistress. White people are not sold. Your father was not a slave.”

  I pondered why some people were bought and sold and others were not, but it seemed like too big a question to ask. “I know my mother is in heaven. But where is my father?”

  Jonotás said, “I don’t know.” She screwed up her face in that way she had that told me she was thinking. “If you like, I can try to find out from one of the servants.”

  That night, in my bedroom, after the candle was snuffed, Jonotás got up from her mattress on the floor and climbed into my bed. She whispered in my ear, “Cook says your papá lives in Quito.” I embraced and kissed Jonotás and thanked her for this news. Happiness and curiosity kept me wide awake that night.

  The next morning, during my daily reading lesson with Aunt Ignacia, shaking with excitement and fear, I said, “Tía, I know my father lives in Quito. I want to meet him.”

  She clapped shut the catechism we were reading. “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody,” I said, not wanting Jonotás to get in trouble. Before my aunt had a chance to question me further, I flung the book against the wall, stomped on the wooden floor, and screamed, “I want to see my father! I want to see him!”

  “Listen to me, Manuela,” Ignacia barked, “your father has a wife and children of his own. He doesn’t want to see you. You’re his illegitimate child. You’re an embarrassment to him. Just like you are to us.”

  “You’re a liar! My father loves me!” I yelled. I got up from the chair, shoved it aside, disregarding whatever punishment Ignacia would surely devise for me. I bolted from the room and ran out of the house to the orchard, where I found a grassy spot under a peach tree, threw myself down, and sobbed, while tearing out clumps of grass with my hands and teeth. Jonotás and Natán found me, and Jonotás took me in her arms, and Natán stroked my forehead, but I continued shaking and screaming until finally I collapsed, exhausted.

  That night, by the candle in my bedroom, I composed the first of countless letters I would write to my father. Dipping a quill in the inkwell, I wrote: “Dear Papá: I am Manuela. I live in Catahuango. Can you come to see me? Your daughter.”

  I blew my breath on the ink to dry it, folded the letter, put it inside an envelope I had taken from my uncle’s office, and used his seal to close it. When this was done, I realized I did not know how to send a letter. Worse, I realized I did not know what my father’s name was. I felt as insignific
ant in this world as a tiny ant. My heart filled with venom for Aunt Ignacia.

  The day she told me the truth was the first time I heard the words “illegitimate child.” From then on, until I became a grown woman, those words, more than any others, had the power to wound and humiliate me. I would hear them used against me by the nuns at school. They used “illegitimate” as a way of setting me apart from the other girls, as a way of marking me tainted, impure. As I grew older, I understood that all of us criollos were “illegitimate”—and therefore inferior—in the eyes of the Spaniards. It was from this that my lifelong contempt for the Spanish Crown grew. Long before I knew there were battles being fought in South America to liberate my people, the descendants of the Spaniards born on South American soil, I wanted more than anything else to see the Spaniards, with their smug superiority, with their hypocritical Catholicism, thrown off our land and sent back to Spain, humiliated. I wanted them to have a taste of the shame and disgrace I suffered at the hands of my family and the nuns. I became convinced even as a child that I would never be free of the label of illegitimacy until we were free of Spain.

  WHEN I WAS seven, my aunt informed me that I was being sent to Santa Catalina, a school in Quito where the daughters of “good” families were educated by the Concepta nuns. “We had to pay them a fortune,” Ignacia said at dinner the night before I left Catahuango for school, “so they would overlook the circumstances of your birth. Make sure you do well in school, Manuela. We’re making a great sacrifice for you, and I’m not sure you deserve it. But it’s the least we can do. After all, you carry our name.”

  I was sad to part from Jonotás and Natán, but I looked forward to moving away from my loveless relatives and meeting other girls my age. I had hopes that the sisters, who were married to Christ and devoted to doing good works, would be kind and maternal. I so longed to have a mother. My hopes were quickly dashed. In class, when I raised my hand if I knew an answer, other girls were called on first. I never received any praise for my homework, even when I consistently got the highest grades, and I never got treats at dinner—a piece of fruit or a pastry—like some of the other girls did.

  The Virgin Mary, Mother of God, was my only consolation. I prayed to her, so full of love for all humans, to ease my misery. If no grown-up showed me affection, she would be my source of love. I became a devotee of the Virgin, and learned many prayers to her. Often, during our daily noon break, when all the other girls went out on the grounds for some fresh air, I would head for the chapel and pray on my knees to the Blessed Mother, begging her to make the nuns treat me as kindly as they treated the girls of “good” families.

  During my first year in school, as May, the month devoted to the Virgin, approached, preparations were made for daily celebrations to be held. All the girls were assigned duties to perform, to show their devotion to the Virgin. Some were put in charge of arranging the flowers on the altar, or changing the water in the vases every day, or lighting the candles in the chapel and scraping the wax of the candles that melted onto the wooden floors. I waited and waited for a task to be assigned to me, but I was one of the few girls who was not chosen to serve in the Virgin’s name. Even though the nuns frightened me—I had seen them use a length of cane to spank the few girls who dared to raise their voices in protest—I went to see the Mother Superior in her office. Dizzy with fear, I heard her say, “Come in.”

  “Manuela Sáenz,” she said frowning, “what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in class.”

  My knees were knocking against each other, but I had to speak. “I want to know why I haven’t been chosen to serve the Virgin Mary during the month of May, Reverend Mother,” I piped.

  “Come here,” the Mother Superior said, motioning me to approach her desk. I felt faint. When I was so close I could feel her breath on my face, she said, “Children like you, Manuela Sáenz, born of unholy unions, are not worthy of serving the Mother of God. The Virgin only accepts girls who are innocent. You’re lucky that we took you in. But I’m warning you, if you’re going to be a troublemaker, we will send you back to your aunt. Understood? Now, for the rest of the time you’re a pupil here, I forbid you to mention this subject again. Remember, you’re an unfortunate girl unworthy of serving the Holy Mother of Our Savior Jesus Christ. Go to class—at once.”

  My hatred of the Catholic Church was born that very day. I stopped praying to the Virgin after that. If it was true that I was unworthy of serving her, if she could not protect me from the cruelty of the nuns, why should I spend hours on my knees asking for her help? With the passage of the years, that poisonous feeling evolved into the conviction that there could not be a God if he allowed so much suffering and injustice on earth. And if he did exist, then what good was he to us?

  FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS, the black-veiled bloodless Conceptas kept me on my knees, every day for hours praying and reciting the rosary, sometimes for weeks at a time, during what should have been the most carefree days of my life. The nuns believed in mortification of the flesh: cold baths in the winter and hot baths in the summer, and endless fasts, as if we were training to be fakirs, or soldiers in the armies of Sparta.

  The school day began at five-thirty, when every object we touched was still coated by an icy film left by the glacial night air. After we washed our faces in cold water and got dressed, we were herded into the chapel for a period of introspection, which was followed by the Holy Mass. By the time mass was over, I was grateful to receive my one cup of chocolate and slice of unbuttered bread.

  There were two more masses during the day: one before the noon meal and the other one at vespers. To cap the day, before we went to bed we had to say an interminable rosary. We had to endure this torture to learn how to embroider gold on silk, to knit and darn stockings, to make ribbons and lace, to sew on buttons, to stitch shirts, skirts, shawls, and all sorts of white plain undergarments, to indicate virginal purity. The nuns also taught us to read Latin so we could recite archaic prayers, and study pious texts about the lives of saints who mortified their flesh.

  Those days in school were like being interred in a chilly mausoleum. Indeed, in many parts of the building, one could smell the faintly sweet stench of the nuns buried in the convent. Each day we had to pass through the terrifying galleries hung with large portraits of dead nuns, painted in their coffins, their faces withered, severe. Though the nuns were wearing crowns of flowers and lavish shrouds, they did not look as they did in life, but as if they had been mummified for centuries. Almost without exception, an expression of contempt for the world showed on each of their faces, which seem to be saying, “Life is suffering, the world is a terrible place.”

  The nuns’ favorite texts to instruct us with were hagiographies of other nuns, especially those who had become holy saints, a reward for their terrifying visions of mortification. We memorized long passages from these books and recited them in class every day. These visions were violent, bloody, filled with cannibalism and dismemberments. They gave me nightmares. During the day, when I found myself alone in the chapel or walking down a corridor with a portrait of a beheaded saint, my throat would close and I could not breathe. Of all the visions, none was more hair-raising than those of Jerónima, a nun who had lived sequestered in a convent in Santa Fe de Bogotá. Her vision of being placed inside an oven ablaze, watching her own body charring, but feeling her heart still beating, made me ill. Often, before we were put to bed, Sister Carmenza would read us one of Jerónima’s visions, just to remind us that we were put in the world to suffer. Nightly, before the candle was snuffed, we listened to Carmenza repeat in a lugubrious tone: “You do not know death, you yourselves are death; it has the face of each and everyone of you, and you are nothing but the reflections of your own death. What you call to die, is to finish dying and what you call to be born is to begin to die and what you call to live is the slow death of dying.”

  Many years later I discovered that the great poet Francisco de Quevedo had written that passage. Yet the nuns had manag
ed to take out of context his poetic words and turned them into something so harrowing that I often cried myself to sleep.

  Most distressing of all was that the shutters of all the windows of the school that faced the street were nailed shut. This was to prevent us from setting our eyes on men other than the priests who visited the school. The nuns explained that the only way for us to pray to God in a state of purity was to never be tempted by images of men. Our souls must be like stainless crystals, they said, so that our prayers could reach Christ’s ears. Seeing men, even from afar, would prevent us from hearing the secret voice with which Christ—our intended husband—spoke to his future wives.

  IT WAS DURING THIS TIME that I learned my father had been born in a hamlet in the region of Burgos, that he had left Spain as a young man and settled in Ecuador, where he prospered serving as tax collector of the bishopric of Quito and president for life of the Council of the Catholic Church. He was married to Juana del Campo, a lady from the city of Popayán, in Nueva Granada, with whom he had several children. All this news was gathered by my only friend at school, Rosita Campusano, a girl from Guayaquil who on weekends went to see her guardian in Quito. As our friendship grew, Rosita confided in me that she, too, was “illegitimate.” Like me, she had been accepted by the nuns because of her family’s wealth. In order to get an illegitimate girl accepted, the family had to make a large monetary donation to the school. Our education, like our lives themselves, was nothing more than the end result of a series of corrupt choices.

  WHAT GIRL DOES NOT love her father, even if he is a bad one? I would daydream in class about the day—soon, very soon—when he would come see me and explain the reasons for his silence. My father would be kind and loving, and he would rescue me from the Aispurus and be my protector for the rest of my life. Rosita found out his address and I wrote to him, introducing myself and asking him to visit me at Santa Catalina. Whenever we received our mail, I held my breath, hoping there would be a reply from him. But though I wrote to him many times, begging him to take me away from Santa Catalina, I never got a word from him.