Gabriel was setting the table for his masters and the guests who had just entered the farm to have breakfast. It had dawned without clouds and the first light of day made the leaves of the trees and plants in the garden shine. Gabriel was smiling because he liked these visitors. Olivia was very kind and Felipe always joked with him and called him “buddy.”
“Gabriel, sit with us,” Mariano told him.
“I appreciate it. I would like to but I can't because the cook gets nervous when I ask her to make Spanish dishes. The garlic soup and also the Madrid Stew turn out very well, but when you turn the potato omelet it breaks and that's why today I want to make it myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about her. The woman is a marvel at preparing the delicacies of our land.”
“Leave the omelet behind and stay with us.”
The four of them sat smiling under the shade of the vine and Gabriel, after giving orders to the cook, sat with them for a while.
“Do you no longer live in Havana?” Nieves asked them.
“No, we've moved,” Olivia said.
“We bought a property very close to here, it was the surprise we wanted to give you today,” Felipe said happily.
“Don't tell me, it's the same one I told you about a long time ago?” Mariano exclaimed, smiling.
“Yes, it's the Bonanza Farm," Olivia said.
“What a joy! I can't believe we're going to be neighbors!” Nieves said.
“It was a bargain since the property was abandoned. We have only been able to renovate one part of the mansion, the one that was in better condition. We have demolished the other and converted it into a large patio. The garden has also been remodeled and many fruit trees have been planted. Our gardener and a team of bricklayers have worked tirelessly. We still have things to do, but we can now settle in. We arrived last night to stay,” Felipe told them.
“What a rogue you are! If you had told me before I would have helped you,” Mariano said.
“You already know that I like to hide news from you so that when you discover it you will be amazed!” Felipe answered laughing.
“I had noticed cars coming and going on the Bonanza property, and when I asked the master builder who had bought the house, he told me that the owners were a couple from Havana, but I would never have imagined it was you,” Mariano told them.
“I already told you that my former master paid me for the years of slavery and I was able to study, but perhaps I didn't tell you that last year, when he died, he named me in his will, leaving me a good amount of money. With this gift, Olivia and I can live comfortably.”
“To celebrate, we invite you to dinner,” Nieves told them.
“Thank you, we gladly accept your invitation," Olivia replied.
“This afternoon I want to introduce you to our carpenter Lucas, Isabel's son. It's a shame he's not here now, he's gone to town to pick up some pieces of wood at the Las Ovas train stop,” Nieves announced to them. “I didn't know Isabel had a son!” Olivia answered.
“We didn't know it either! Isabel had him before I met her, but she hid it from everyone. He was raised by Rogelia, the woman who also acted as her mother,” Mariano told them.
“Lucas is a magnificent cabinet maker. In addition to dedicating himself to carpentry, he is making us mahogany tables and chairs. They are beautiful! We are delighted with him, he has settled in Gabriel’s little white house,” Nieves told them.
“Lucas is a very good boy, we get along well. Now forgive me, but I have to go back to the kitchen,” Gabriel dared to say.
”How is Isabel?” Felipe asked Mariano.
“She is doing well, I am glad you asked. A priest patiently taught her to read and write. Now she sends me long letters, and little by little she has been improving her handwriting and spelling.”
“You did tell me Isabel's story! When I met her at your wedding, I really liked her,” Olivia told them, smiling.
His reunion with Felipe was like a recharge of enthusiasm for Mariano. Since then, the two couples grew closer, spending long evenings together. Olivia was a great babysitter and loved playing with the children in the yard, while Felipe taught Ángel board games.
Time went by and Ángel, at the age of twenty, fell madly in love with Eloína, a girl from Las Ovas, and stopped playing chess and dominoes with Felipe. His future in-laws raised cattle and when the farm's old accountant died, they hired him to keep the accounts.
Mariano let Olivia and Felipe start taking care of the school he had founded. The couple, in addition to touring the region in a horse-drawn carriage to pick up illiterate children, dedicated themselves body and soul to teaching them to read and write. Later, they founded a traveling school for adults that consisted of a cart full of books, a small blackboard, and some wooden boards with notebooks and pencils. At dusk, when the workers finished the work day, the cart would stop at a different farm each day, the supplies would be unloaded from the cart, and the laborers would sit in front of the blackboard to learn to read and do accounts.
The students' families were very grateful to them and gave them chickens, rabbits, hams, and vegetables; and when they could, they gave them a hand with the chores on the Bonanza farm.
Olivia couldn't have children. She was raped several times by the plantation foremen and after two abortions she became sterile. “I am a barren woman,” she said to Felipe one day, sobbing. “You are an extraordinary woman, I love you very much. I don't care that we don't have children. There are so many orphans in Cuba!” Felipe answered her, kissing her.
The two farms, Esperanza and Bonanza, had a chunk of adjacent land, but were separated by a stream. The first had immense cereal fields, an orchard, a large water storage tank, stables and corrals, a large garden with flowers and tropical plants, and a forest on the mountain side with royal palms that reached twenty-five meters in height, oaks, cedars, mahoganies and low-growing plants. In addition to the mansion, which Ángel's grandfather had built, there were other buildings: the school, the hermitage, the laborers' barracks and the little white house. The Bonanza estate was much smaller, since after the war one wing of the old mansion was demolished and the most fertile pieces of land were expropriated by the Spaniards. The gardener who cultivated their garden before they arrived saved some trees from the land burned during the war and planted others, so that the masters could pick bananas, pineapples, coconuts, avocados and mangoes. Little by little the Bonanza estate became a dense tropical jungle. However, the garden and patio that Olivia cared for and watered was sparser, with some ornamental plants and large flower pots.
When the weather was good, the two friends, during their morning walks, would go to the stream, from where they called each other. Year after year, the two did not stop joking, shouting with their hands close to their mouths. ”Do you have lemons?” Mariano shouted.
“I have bushes, but I haven't seen lemons,” answered Felipe.
“Don't play dumb, I can see them from here.”
“Do you have lynx eyesight?”
“Don't trick me - you’re hiding the lemons from me.”
“I wish I had them," Felipe shouted.
“I can't hear you!”
“You're deaf?”
The years were passing quickly. On the Esperanza farm, the children were becoming adults without their parents realizing it, and little by little they began to pair up with girls or boys from the surrounding area. The first one to get married was Ángel who went to live at Eloína's parents' house in Las Ovas, but every now and then he returned to visit his parents.
Two years after the wedding, Mariano went to Eloína's parents' farm, riding his mare, to meet Eloísa, his first granddaughter. Nieves had gone the night before to help the midwife, since the birth was difficult.
That night Ángel passed by the farm on his way to Ovas, to tell his mother that his wife's water had broken. Nieves wanted to accompany him to look for the doctor, but they could not find him because he was assisting another woman who was in labor with the whites' midwife. The doctor's wife told them to go look for Octavia, the blacks' midwife. Octavia lived with her mother in a neighborhood in Las Ovas and when Ángel asked her to follow him, she took off her apron and silently got into the horse-drawn carriage. Ángel and Nieves were in front and Octavia behind, the journey was brief and they hardly spoke. It was raining when they arrived. Octavia, after washing her hands, ran to the bedroom where the woman in labor was.
“The baby comes breech," Octavia said, after putting a hand inside Eloína's body.
Octavia was a small woman of few words who had learned the trade by observing her grandmother, a black slave who had a good hand for difficult births of cows and horses.
Eloína pushed and screamed in pain for long hours without any result. Ángel was desperate hearing the screams. Her mother-in-law, who was a very delicate woman, was waiting outside the door with Angel and did not let him in; however, in a fit of exasperation, he entered the bedroom and hugged his wife. Shortly afterwards, Nieves and Octavia immediately saw that Ángel was very pale and advised him to leave the room. While Octavia was pulling the baby's legs and buttocks, Nieves hit Eloína on the cheeks, as she seemed to have lost consciousness.
“Hold on woman, the girl is about to be born,” Octavia told her sweetly, but with determination.
Eloína regained strength upon hearing the midwife's words and asked her almost breathless, “It's a girl? She is alive?”
“Yes, she is alive. Push! We already have her here.”
At that moment, Octavia pulled out the baby, which immediately began to cry. The mulatto midwife achieved what few doctors would have achieved - the newborn emerged from the mother's womb without trauma or other consequences derived from the long breech delivery. The baby's parents and the four grandparents cried with happiness when they saw her, so small and so cute.
At first, Eloína did not want to have another child because she was scared by how much it cost her to give birth. However, three years later everyone was jumping for joy again after her new pregnancy. Octavio was born so quickly that Eloína wanted to name him after the midwife. Andrés, Josefina, Bernardo, Esther, Leonardo, and Maria de los Ángeles were also born in a short time, but Eloína always wanted Octavia to be by her side.
Juan, the first-born of Nieves and Mariano, married Manuela, a girl from Puerta de Golpe and they went to live a few kilometers from the Esperanza farm. They had eight children, the first five were girls: Gudelia, Nieves, Mariana, Esther, and Cristina (called Cuca). Juan had given up hope, when two boys were born, Enrique and Gilberto. José, the second born, had five children, the first three, Joseito, Alfonso, who was very small and everyone called him Chiquitín, and Tití, who was called Mariano like his grandfather. Many years later, José had two more children with his second wife. Teresa also gave birth to five children: Mariano, Emilio, Regino, Pedro and Nena. Nieves and Mariano's little daughters, Ramona and Clotilde, were slow to marry and neither of them had children. More than a house, the Esperanza farm looked like a school as children of all ages ran around the patio and garden.
Nieves and Mariano were very entertained and happy with their grandchildren, who grew to be twenty-five in number. However, there was also mourning in the family: María de los Ángeles died at the age of seven from a mysterious stomach illness and Caridad, Enrique's twin, died during infancy. Another misfortune came years later: José was left a widower with three children when his wife Pastora, who was in very poor health, died of typhoid fever. Nieves and Mariano welcomed José at the Esperanza farm for a few years, until he returned home after marrying a very pretty girl, whom everyone called La Niña and with whom he had two more boys, Armando and Roberto.
Olivia and Felipe enjoyed babysitting when they went to the Esperanza farm. Gabriel also loved to play with the children and patiently taught each of them to ride horses on the foals that he raised himself. Lucas was making beds and high chairs for that group of children.
Gabriel's hair was turning gray, but he never wanted to stop working on the farm. He had been born in Angelito's grandfather's tobacco barracks and had never left Las Ovas. He married Nélida, the cook's daughter, and Mariano gave the couple the keys to the little white house where he had lived for the first few years. Gabriel was widowed very soon when his wife died giving birth to a stillborn child. When Lucas arrived, Gabriel welcomed him into his little white house. Lucas had gotten used to being hidden, so when the Spanish withdrew and he was no longer a fugitive he did not want to leave the farm. Every morning he went down to his carpentry workshop where the smell of wood lifted his spirits and he set to work diligently. At the age of thirty, he took a girlfriend and married her a year later, then went to live in the little white house. The girl, a beautiful mulatto, lived with Lucas for a short time, as she eloped with a stranger, a street vendor. Gabriel and Lucas were left alone in the little house and instead of despairing over their bad streak, they became good friends and enthusiastically devoted themselves to the care of the inhabitants of the farm. The two helped organize the parties and willingly participated in them, becoming true members of the Defaus-Herrera family. When everyone got together for lunch or a snack, Olivia and Felipe never failed. One afternoon, Enrique, one of Nieves and Mariano's grandchildren, asked Felipe, “Tell us a feat from the war of independence.”
Felipe told the children that before achieving independence, Cuba had managed to abolish slavery, but at a dear price for the blacks, because during the Great War the plantation slaves fought on the side of the separatists who promised freedom and equality, but they never achieved anything, since most of them fell at the front or were brutally murdered by the Spaniards in retaliation.
“That was a great injustice!” declared Mariano.
“I want to talk to you about the death on the battlefield of the two great Cuban leaders, Manuel de Céspedes and José Martí, so that you understand that armed conflicts lead nowhere," Felipe told them. When Felipe finished narrating the war episodes that day, he stood up and with a theatrical gesture said, “When I was young, I was a peaceful revolutionary. I walked the streets, taking on the world. My companions and I were convinced that the future was in our hands, that our actions today would create the future of tomorrow, but I did not in any way accept that blood would be shed. Tell them Mariano . . . tell them that you and I wanted independence without wars.”
“Yes, and another thing that Felipe fought for was equality between whites and blacks. In our family we have achieved it - black blood runs through your veins and I am very proud of it,” Mariano told them.
“Even blacker blood runs through mine," Felipe told them, bursting into laughter.
