Esmeralda Santiago - Conquistadora

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2011 by Esmeralda Santiago
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to reprint an excerpt from Adam by William Carlos Williams from The Collected Poems: Volume I: 19091939 , copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Santiago, Esmeralda.
Conquistadora : a novel / Esmeralda Santiago. 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59677-2
1. Women plantation ownersFiction. 2. Sugar plantations
Fiction. 3. Plantation lifeFiction. 4. SpanishPuerto Rico
Fiction. 5. Puerto RicoHistory19th centuryFiction. I. Title.
PS3569.A5452C66 2011
813.54dc22
2010051324

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket art: Fuensanta by Julio Romero de Torres Crdoba. Courtesy of
Sothebys Picture Library, private collection, Madrid
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

v3.1

For Lucas and Ila

Contents

EL ENCUENTRO /THE ENCOUNTER:
NOVEMBER 19, 1493

They came from the sea, their battered sails and black hull menacing the indigo horizon. The vessel was many times taller and longer than the peoples canoes and from them came the stench of unwashed bodies and pine tar. The men who dropped from the ship were monstrous creatures with shiny carapaces on their chests, upon their heads, and around their arms and shins. They carried spears, flags, and crosses.

The people of Bornquen were afraid to reveal themselves because their villages had been ravaged so many times that they knew nothing good ever came to their shores unbidden from the sea. The mighty goddess Guabancex often unleashed huracn winds and heavy rains from the ocean to sweep away their bohos , flood their cassava plots, and change the course of rivers. Fearsome caribe warriors paddled their long canoes to raid their land, steal their food, kidnap their women, and slaughter their men.

Although they were frightened, borinqueos were a brave, hospitable, and hopeful people. They called to Yucah, the mighty god of the seas, to protect them from horrors delivered from the ocean. Then they emerged from the forests.

Tano, the cacique greeted the men from the ship with the word meaning peace, even though armored men who carried weapons seemed anything but peaceful.

The sailors looked at the borinqueos as if theyd never seen humans. They gaped at the tattooed and pierced bodies, and swept their eyes over the women with an especial hunger. They stared at the cacique s feather headdress, at the golden disk he wore on his breast, at his gold bracelets, and at the small nuggets knotted with cotton thread around the warriors necks and arms. The cacique was a shrewd leader and noticed the covetous glances. He told his borinqueos to give the men the adornments given to them by Atabey, the goddess of sweet waters and of rivers. The cacique also gave away hammocks woven by the most gifted weavers in the village, baskets full of cassava bread, sweet potatoes, peanuts, guavas, and pineapples. The borinqueos filled barrels with clean drinking water. With these gifts, the borinqueos thought, these men encased in metal who rattled every time they moved would climb into their enormous sailed canoe and disappear into the same horizon that had delivered them, hopefully never to return.

They did leave on that November day, but waves of them came back, their vessels slicing across the horizon. Wherever they landed, they demanded tribute from the caciques and the cacicas , who offered more clear water, ever-larger baskets filled with food, the best hammocks, and more nuggets. The ships would leave. And more would return.

Because the first sound from the mouths of the borinqueos was the word tano , the men from the sea thought the people were describing themselves and renamed them for the word peace. The men from the sea also renamed Bornquen, meaning Great Land of the Valiant and Noble Lord, as San Juan Bautista, meaning Saint John the Baptist. They came with weapons that severed a mans head in one stroke. They brought animals that borinqueos had never seen: horses, pigs, hounds, goats, cattle. They trampled through the yuca fields, smoked the peoples tobacco, and raped the women.

The caciques and cacicas rallied the people. They charged their warriors to poison their arrows so that when the tips entered the mens unarmored flesh their blood would flame and boil inside their bodies. When a warrior dropped his heavy club over an unhelmeted head, the macana crushed his opponents skull as easily as if it were a calabash. They held the newcomers faces down in the clear, fresh water of Bornquens rivers until their bodies went limp. The women fed them unprocessed cassava to churn their guts into mush.

The men from the sea were too strong, their weapons lethal. They brought enormous dogs to chase and herd the people from their villages, and after a man in heavy robes sprinkled the borinqueos with water and made perplexing gestures over them, they changed the borinqueo ancestral and clan names to their own language. They forced the women to cover their breasts, their bellies, the hallowed parts from which their children reached into the sun. They called themselves catlicos; they called themselves espaoles; their chiefs called themselves caciques , even though none were born in Bornquen from borinqueas .

Their most famous chieftain was Juan Ponce de Len, who lined up the borinqueos and pointed at this one, at that one, at the other. He separated men from women, mothers from children, elders from their families. He formed them into groups. Then his men led the borinqueos from their villages to other parts of the island. They enslaved the borinqueos to labor in waist-deep water in the islands rivers, and forced them to rip from Atabeys pebbled, sandy veins the shiny nuggets shed so willingly gifted before the men came from the sea.

The borinqueos began to die from diseases theyd never known and from infected wounds opened on their backs and arms and legs from whips theyd never experienced. They died in rebellions, their numbers easily overwhelmed by men on horses carrying sharp swords. They died from exhaustion in the mines processing the shiny nuggets into blocks. They died from terror. They threw themselves into the chasms above the highest peaks of the mountains. They drowned in the sea. Sharks attacked them when rafts broke up as they paddled, searching for another island where they could rebuild their vegetable plots and their communities. They fled into the mountains, where they were chased and captured by hounds. They died of humiliation after hot irons branded their foreheads. They died in such numbers that their language began to die, too, and the names of their ancestors and most of their gods were silenced from tongues. The borinqueo culture, traditions, and history were chronicled by the conquerors who called them savages, who misinterpreted their customs and rituals, who told them that if they didnt renounce their own gods, they would live in flames in the next life.