The third and final daughter

What about the third and final daughter, Hypatia Belicia Cabral, who was only two months old when her mother died, who never met her father, who was held by her sisters only a few times before they too disappeared, who spent no time inside Casa Hatüey, who was the literal Child of the Apocalypse?

What about her? She was not as easy to place as Astrid or Jackie; she was a newborn, after all, and, well, the scuttlebutt around the family has it that as she was so dark no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her. To make matters worse, she was born bakiní — underweight, sickly. She had problems crying, problems nursing, and no one outside the family wanted the dark child to live. I know it’s taboo to make this accusation, but I doubt that anybody inside the family wanted her to live, either. For a couple of weeks it was touch and go, and if it hadn’t been for a kindly dark-skinned woman named Zoila who gave her some of her own baby’s breast milk and held her for hours a day she probably wouldn’t have made it. By the end of her fourth month the baby seemed to be staging a comeback. She was still bakiní central, but she was starting to put on weight, and her crying, which before had sounded like a murmur from the grave, was growing more and more piercing. Zoila (who had become a guardian angel of sorts) stroked the baby’s mottled head and declared: Another six months, mi’jita, and you’ll be mas fuerte que Lílis.

Beli didn’t have six months. (Stability was not in our girl’s stars, only Change.) Without any warning a group of Socorro’s distant relatives showed up and claimed the child, tore her clean out of Zoila’s arms (the very same relatives Socorro had happily put behind her when she married Abelard). I suspect these people hadn’t actually intended to take care of the girl for any length of time, were only doing it because they expected some monetary reward from the Cabrals, and when no loot was forthcoming, the Fall was total, the brutos passed the girl on to some even more distant relatives on the outskirts of Azua. And here’s where the trail gets funky. These people in Azua seemed to be some real wack jobs, what my moms calls salvages. After only a month of caring for the unhappy infant, the moms of the family disappeared one afternoon with the baby, and when she returned to her village the baby didn’t. She told her vecinos that the baby had died. Some people believed her. Beli, after all, had been ailing for a while. The tiniest little negrita on the planet. fukú, part three. But most folks figured that she had sold the girl to some other family. Back then, as now, the buying and selling of children, common enough.

And that’s exactly what happened. Like a character in one of Oscar’s fantasy books, the orphan (who may or may not have been the object of a supernatural vendetta) was sold to complete strangers in another part of Azua. That’s right — she was sold. Became a criada, a restavek. Lived anonymously among the poorest sectors on the Island, never knowing who her real people were, and subsequently she was lost from sight for a long long time.↓ ≡ I lived in Santo Domingo only until I was nine, and even I knew criadas. Two of them lived in the callejón behind our house, and these girls were the most demolished, overworked human beings I’d known at that time. One girl, Sobeida, did all the cooking, all the cleaning, fetched all the water, and took care of two infants for a family of eight — and chickie was only seven years old! She never went to school, and if my brother’s first girlfriend, Yohana, hadn’t taken the time — stolen behind her people’s back — to teach her her ABCs, she wouldn’t have known nada. Every year I came home from the States, it was the same thing; quiet hardworking Sobeida would stop in for a second to say a word to my abuela and my mother (and also to watch a couple of minutes of a novela) before running off to finish her next chore. (My mother always brought her a gift of cash; the one time she brought her a dress, her ‘people’ were wearing it the next day.) I tried to talk to her, of course Mr. Community Activist — but she would skitter away from me and my stupid questions. What can you two talk about? my moms demanded. La probrecita can’t even write her own name. And then when she was fifteen, one of the callejón idiots knocked her up, and now, my mother tells me, the family has got her kid working for them too, bringing in the water for his mother.