Excerpt:
The Powerful Part
Zabolo ya pembe.
Mama used to say zabolo ya pembe. I didn’t know why.
I remember Mama. I remember earth. I remember home. Heat. The heat of fire, not of sun. Fire burns more than sun. Fire kills.
Amari ran faster than a nkosi. I remember my brother Amari. He ran like nkosi, like lion, and still he could not escape the claw of the white man. White devil. Zabolo ya pembe.
Mama always said: beware the zabolo ya pembe.
Amari died on the masuwa, the ship, before we reached land. I remember Amari’s body shaking. I remember his belly hollowing in. Yellow eyes. Grey skin. I remember a man throwing Amari into the water.
The masuwa reached another land first and left some people there. I remember my friend Nayah. I met her on the ship, in the hold beside me. She spoke my language, and when the men slept, we whispered prayers and songs from Congo, our land. Very soft, so the men wouldn’t hear and kick us. Nayah stayed there, and the ship continued to Buenos Ayres. I never knew of her again. I don’t know if a family bought her or if she died before that.
Many days after we arrived, ladies and men began to come to take us away. The Orechano family took me. I remember Doña Irene’s gaze. She looked at my feet and my hands, and then at my chest. Ngai Ebelé, I said my name to her. She looked at my face. She had the same eyes as the men on the ship. Devil’s eyes. Ebelé, I said again, and the captain whipped my back. Doña Irene looked at my face, and I said it again: ngai Ebelé. The captain shouted and struck me again. He hit my leg and I fell. The lady said something to the captain and took me with her. We were three women and three men, in a mpunda cart. The lady came close, looked at us all, looked at me, and said: Belén.
In the Orechano house, at first, I was a washer. I scrubbed floors and did the laundry. Don Orechano had died of plague, and the lady lived with five children. Two boys, three girls. We baombo ate and slept in the cellar. She ordered her children not to go near us. While we worked the house, the children played in the yard, with the cats always around, or rested in their rooms. They had a white maid.
Often, Don Castelli visited Doña Irene. He spent many hours in the house. Sometimes he even stayed the night. He spoke to us baombo and treated us kindly. The lady grew angry with him. By then, I already knew this language and I cooked in the house, because the lady had sold Juana. When Castelli dined with Doña Irene, we served them meat and wine, and we were allowed to eat the leftovers. One of those nights, I saw for the first time the devil’s eyes in Castelli as I poured his wine. Later I heard him speak of us baombo, and the lady shouted that he was mad.
The gentleman returned one cold, rainy night. Doña Irene was not there; she had left the day before with chests of silver and silk dresses in three mpunda carts. Castelli was dirty and bruised and soaked by the rain. I let him in, took off his wet cloak and boots, and prepared a tub with hot water. He asked me to wash him.
As I bathed him, Castelli kept his eyes closed, but then he opened them and watched my hands washing his body, watched my chest and my face. His eyes were not like the lady’s when she bought me, but his look did not please me either. That night, while I washed him for the first time, the gentleman took my hand and placed it between his legs, under the water. I scrubbed with the cloth and tried to pull away, but he gripped harder and made me keep my hand there, rubbing more. I saw again, in his gaze, the eyes of the zabolo.
Afterward I dried him and served soup and wine. He asked me to sit by his side and spoke words I did not understand, though I remember he talked about offering baombo to the army, to the Church, to the council. He said that way we baombo could become free.
Castelli kept visiting Doña Irene and asking that I bathe him. The lady told me to do whatever Señor Castelli wanted. Every time I washed him, I had to rub harder his libolo. He also asked me to loosen the bow at the chest of my dress.
The last time I saw him was some time before the lady threw me out of the house. That night, the lady was sick in bed, and Castelli came again. After the bath, I served food, and once more he told me to sit beside him while he ate the rice pudding I had prepared. That time, besides talking, he stroked my face and touched my body. Don Castelli spoke of going far from Buenos Ayres, and then Doña Irene entered the dining room.
First, the lady punished me. She locked me in the cellar, without a dress and with nothing to eat. I slept little because there were many mpuku in the cellar and no cats. I feared they would bite me and infect me. I felt again as on the masuwa.
Many days later, the lady brought me out. She said she had sold me, but before handing me over I had to beg her forgiveness. She dragged me to the street, naked, and beat me with a sharpened rod. She screamed: witch, black witch, ungrateful black, useless. She screamed and struck. She hit my chest the most. It hurt terribly. This mark on my leg, my child, comes from that night at the clock street. The same night your father bought me and brought me to this house.
When Castelli returned to Buenos Ayres, he came to this house looking for me. You were already inside my libumu. Your father saw Castelli arriving on his mpunda and hid me in this very room. I only heard your father speaking. He spoke alone. Went silent. Spoke again. Then I looked through the keyhole and saw Castelli’s back at the table. He wore the same cloak as always—the one I used to remove when bathing him at the Orechano house. It was filthy and torn. He wrote and showed a paper to your father, who read and replied. Your father said he knew nothing of me, and they spoke of other things. Of politics. Of England, your grandfather’s land. Then Señor Castelli left.
I asked your father why Castelli did not speak. He told me he had a sickness in his tong…, in his…tongue, his lolemo. He also said he searched for me, brought a paper with my name. My name from there: the one the lady gave me—Belén.
Some time later, Señor Castelli died of the sickness in his lolemo...
..."
–Continue reading in its original Castilian language at https://fictograma.com/ , an open source Spanish community of writers–