Pig's Foot Read Free

that no woman would ever be able to love his diminutive stature, or the bleak pessimism that had become his distinguishing trait. And so he had no choice but to lose his virginity to a sow. It happened one day when Benvenuto’s overseer ordered Oscar to work in the barnyard. After the sow came a boss-eyed nanny goat that wouldn’t stop bleating. Before long, Oscar Kortico’s fame had spread to nanny goats, sows and mares for miles around.
    Then came the war of independence which, as I’m sure you know, began in 1868 (10 October, if I’m not mistaken . . .). By now, Oscar had turned eighteen. Giacomo Benvenuto and his family had fled back to the country they’d come from. It was Oscar who brandished the torch that set the sugar mill ablaze. The following day, he set off for the Santisteban plantation in search of his mother. He found only a heap of ashes and charred bricks. It was then that he joined forces with the Mambí Liberation Army under the command of General Maceo at their camp east of Baracoa.
    Meanwhile, José Mandinga, Oscar’s best friend, was skulking through the streets and the taverns of El Cobre.
    Unlike Oscar, who never had much luck with women, and seemed to have inherited from his mother the curse of enduring a life without love, José was always lucky with the opposite sex. At thirteen, he had lost his virginity to Mamaíta, a Negress who worked in the infirmary and could easily have been his grandmother. In secret, he learned from Mamaíta the mysteries of how women should be kissed and caressed in what she called ‘touchy-touchy lessons’ held every Sunday when the other slaves went out, some to have fun in the local taverns, others to go swimming in the river. On the pretext of curing his cold or scolding him for some misdeed, Mamaíta would take José to the infirmary. He would arrive back in the slave quarters late at night, tired and sore. ‘A pig fell on me,’ was his invariable excuse. His mother peered at him with her eagle eyes, secretly thinking that the more pigs fell on her son, the better equipped he would be for life.
    José was a Mandinga like his father Evaristo and his mother Rosario, who worked in the sugar mill, turning the wheel, sowing, cutting and harvesting cane. Sometimes Evaristo would send José to have a horse shod or Rosario would give him chores around the infirmary, where the slaves used as wet nurses were housed. By the time he turned eighteen, José was a six-foot, broad-shouldered, muscular Negro. He had had sex with almost all the unmarried female slaves on the plantation. His blood brothers admired him, and longed to be like him since José had a charm that led others to treat him with affection and respect.
    José often asked his parents what had become of Oscar and when finally they told him his friend had been sold, the boy spent a long time fretting about their answer. For months afterwards, he kept a close watch on the white overseer; he would peer through a chink in the door of the slave quarters at night before he went to sleep and every time he saw the overseer he would run and hide, terrified the man was coming to take him and sell him. But neither he nor his brothers nor his parents were ever sold. His was a different fate.
    Some months before war broke out, the slaves led an uprising that would go down in history as the Slaughter of the Santistebans. Beginning with the dogs and ending with the family, not a soul on the property was left alive. The bodies of Don Manuel and Isabel Santisteban and their children were strung up from the watchtower. After the slaves had burned everything, they went their separate ways, fleeing for the caves or the hills. José, his parents and his brothers hid out in the Accursed Forest where they quickly contracted yellow fever. Within a week all but José had died. This is how the young Mandinga boy, like so many who had lost everything, came to be roaming the