CHAPTER XVI.
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.