Conquistadora (2 page)

Borinqueñas
were made to lie with the newcomers because the men from the sea didn’t bring their own women, and another race grew from their children. The last full-blooded
borinqueño
saw another kind of people walking upon Borínquen’s ground—men, women,
and children kidnapped, chained, and transported on groaning ships across the ocean from lands beyond the dawn. Like the
borinqueños
, they knew the ways of the forest, but they were darker skinned and spoke different languages. They, too, were branded, dragged, pushed, and whipped to work in the rivers, and when the goddess Atabey refused to give up more gold, the black men were made to cut down trees, to build dwellings made from wood and from stone for their masters. The sacred yuca fields were razed so that other crops more amenable to the conquerors could grow, because even though there was no more gold in Borínquen, men, and even women, kept coming from the sea.

CONQUISTADORES
1826–1849

Ana was a descendant of one of the first men to sail with the Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself, don Cristóbal Colón. Three men on her father’s side were among the first conquistadores, Basque sailors with intimate knowledge of the sea and fearless curiosity about what lay beyond the sunset. Two of her Larragoiti ancestors died at the hands of fierce
caribes
on Hispaniola. The third, Agustín, distinguished himself as a bold civilizer and Christianizer and in 1509 was rewarded with an entire village of natives on the island of San Juan Bautista.

The
taínos
collected enough gold to allow Agustín to return to Spain, where, for reasons the family never learned, he chose to retire in Sevilla rather than in his ancestral village. He also changed the spelling of his surname, dropping the final
i
and substituting it with a
y
, a letter that didn’t exist in the Basque language. Ana surmised that for Agustín, the homely
i
at the end of Larragoiti was not quite as grand as the looped, curlicued
y
that bespoke affluence and masculine aggression. Subsequent generations of Larragoity sons and nephews sailed down the Río Guadalquivir from Sevilla, hoping to repeat Agustín’s success. According to Ana’s father, Gustavo, there were Larragoity descendants in Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, all said to be rich beyond imagining.

On the Cubillas side, her mother, Jesusa, boasted three soldiers, two Franciscan friars, and three merchants whose journals and letters describing the rigors and rewards of settling in the West Indies were passed down the generations, read and discussed at solemn gatherings. Cubillas descendants, too, were scattered all over the New World, their fortunes secure, and said to be among the leading families of the Antilles.

The feats over man and nature that brought such pride, however, were speculation. Neither the Larragoity nor Cubillas families in Spain knew for certain what happened to the conquistadores, merchants, and
religiosos
after 1757, when letters from the last correspondent in the colonies, a tobacco grower in Cuba, stopped. Their written exploits, by then mythologized and exaggerated so that they bore little resemblance to the firsthand accounts, were kept in safe boxes in the homes of the current patriarchs of the Larragoity and Cubillas clans.

Their wealth, pride, and honor depended on male heirs, but Gustavo and Jesusa buried three consecutive sons within weeks of their birth. In the seventh year of their marriage, and after a day and a half of labor, Jesusa delivered a healthy girl on July 26, 1826, who looked nothing like her living relatives, all of whom were tall, sturdy, light-haired, light-eyed, long-nosed men and women whose supercilious lips curled in disdain at the smallest provocation. If Jesusa hadn’t suffered for twenty-nine hours to deliver her into the world, she wouldn’t have claimed the small-boned, black-haired, black-eyed girl who looked like no one but the portrait of don Agustín dominating the gallery. Jesusa named her Gloriosa Ana María de los Ángeles Larragoity Cubillas Nieves de Donostia, called Ana in praise of the Saint protectress of pregnant women, on whose Day Ana was born. A sturdy Gypsy was hired to nurse her, since it was unbefitting for elite women to offer their own breasts to their children. Ana thrived and survived beyond a few days, then three months, then six, then nine, and by her first year was wobbling and lurching from her nurse’s arms to those of her maid.

Jesusa doubled her prayers and charity work, hoping that Santa Ana would intercede on her behalf so that she’d conceive again, this time a boy. But her prayers faded into the quivering air before her candles, and her womb remained fallow. Jesusa blamed Ana as the reason she was barren, and whenever she looked at the girl, she saw her vanished hopes and her own failure to deliver an heir. With no male issue, Gustavo Larragoity Nieves’s homes, furnishings, and inherited wealth would, upon his death, pass to his younger brother, whose fertile wife had brought forth three healthy sons.

From infancy, her parents consigned Ana to North African maids. Almost as soon as Ana was used to one, Jesusa dismissed her and replaced
her with another. She often complained to her friends that it was impossible to find reliable servants.

“We should have never freed the slaves in Spain,” she said, and her friends agreed.

Spanish slaves had been captured in wars or kidnapped from Africa and Spanish America. The practice was abolished in Spain in 1811, although not in its colonies. Nearly two decades later, Jesusa was still angry that her personal maid, Almudena, who had been with her family three generations, disappeared as soon as news arrived that slaves were free, never to be seen nor heard from again. Jesusa was imperious and demanding, and by the time Ana was five years old, she understood why Almudena had left as soon as she could.

Ana’s earliest memories were of being summoned to Jesusa’s parlor, where she had to impress her mother’s visitors with pretty curtsies and good manners. She was allowed a few minutes with the ladies, nearly smothered by their ruffles and tiers of shushing skirts. They ignored her almost as soon as she curtsied, and talked over her head until Jesusa remembered she was still there and ordered the maid to take Ana away.

At ten, Ana was sent to the same convent school in Huelva where Jesusa was educated near the Cubillas estate. Some of the nuns in the Convento de las Buenas Madres remembered Jesusa as a girl and unfavorably compared Ana to her mother, who, according to them, was everything Ana was not—devout, obedient, humble, and demure. Unlike Ana, Jesusa was never forced to chew a hot pepper because she stumbled over
“ora pro nobis peccatoribus”
during the Ave Maria. Her mother was never made to kneel in a corner barelegged on rice grains to cure her of unladylike constant fidgeting. Jesusa never skipped Mass so she could lie on the new grass of a dazzling spring morning, watching the floating redness where there was usually blackness with her eyes closed. For that infraction, Ana had to lie an entire day and night facedown on the stone floor of the chapel, with no food or water, praying loud enough for the nuns who took turns during the vigil to hear her.

Ana spent her Christmas vacation and Holy Week with her parents in Sevilla, where she was allowed to take the air in the courtyard, but not permitted to go into the teeming city without her
mother and a footman. Like many
sevillanas
, Jesusa veiled her face when she went out, as if she were too beautiful to be seen. Ana was happy that she was still a girl and could look around as they walked through the city.

The streets were crowded with vendors, pickpockets, nuns and monks, sailors and merchants, Gypsies, vagrants. Ana and Jesusa heard daily Mass in one of the chapels at the magnificent Catedral de Santa María de la Sede, built in the fifteenth century, its construction and decoration paid for by the riches streaming into Sevilla from the Spanish Empire. The vast Gothic arches, the gold-encrusted saints and virgins, the elaborate altar and numerous niches manifested the wealth of the city and Spain’s glorious history. Ana felt small and insignificant under the vault. Its towering columns were like fingers reaching toward purgatory, where she was heading, the nuns assured her, if she continued to be so defiant.

Ana and Jesusa lit candles before the gilded saints, and dropped a coin or two to the beggars on the steps. They walked to the cemetery to leave posies over the graves of the three dead boys for whom Ana was no substitute. They delivered remedies to housebound neighbors. They exchanged gossip with women and girls who visited and must be visited in return, and evenings, when she was old enough, they attended balls meant to display Ana to prospective suitors. In between religious obligations and social engagements, Ana was confined indoors, sewing or embroidering alongside Jesusa while two fat pugs grunted and snored in a cushioned basket at her feet.

“Keep your eyes on your work,” her mother snapped when Ana’s gaze strayed to the sliver of sky through the richly draped, narrow window. “That’s why your seams are so crooked. You don’t pay attention.”

Her mother criticized Ana for never sitting still, for speaking as if her opinion mattered, for not dressing her hair properly, for not having friends in Sevilla.

“How can I have friends here? You’ve banished me to a convent.”

“Swallow your sharp tongue,” Jesusa warned. “No one talks to you because you’re so disagreeable.”

She wondered if other girls felt as she did, that she was of no consequence and unwanted by her parents. She resented Jesusa’s obvious disenchantment at the same time as she tried, unsuccessfully, to
earn her love. She avoided her father, who scowled whenever she was near, as if she offended him by being female.

She reached puberty at the same time Jesusa entered menopause. When least expected, Ana caught her mother’s gaze, a combination of envy and disgust that confused them both. Were it not for Iris, her maid, Ana would have believed she was dying the first time blood appeared on her pantalets. She was embarrassed by the changes in her body and her heightened emotions, mirrored by Jesusa. But she was discouraged from discussing or even thinking about any of her bewildering, disjointed feelings. She explored the new sensations in her body, but envisioned God frowning whenever she brushed her fingers against her budding breasts to feel the pleasure at the touch, so even her thoughts were forbidden.

Her schoolmates talked about the increased closeness to their mothers as they became young women, and Ana wished that Jesusa could be like them—loving, warm, attentive, encouraging, and willing to answer her questions. But Jesusa had buried maternal love with her three dead boys.

“I love you, Mamá,” Ana had once said to Jesusa.

“Of course you do,” Jesusa responded. Every time she remembered that day, Ana felt even more abandoned because Jesusa didn’t say “I love you” back.

While there was no affection at home, Ana knew that at least there was concern about her future. So that she wouldn’t be dependent on her haughty uncle upon Gustavo’s death, her parents expected her to marry a rich man. Ana didn’t think that freedom from dependency could come through marriage—rather the opposite. Her life would be like Jesusa’s, closeted behind thick drapes within stone walls, trapped in duty and daily repentance for her trespasses. Whenever she imagined that life, Ana was overcome with rage at the thought that she wasn’t in control of her own destiny. It made her want to run away.

Ana would come with a dowry, but not a fortune, so it was unlikely that any of the most eligible bachelors haunting salons and ballrooms would look her way first when there was richer prey. She was also aware that she wasn’t a typical
señorita
. She was moderately pretty, especially when she smiled, but she wasn’t a good dancer, played no instrument, abhorred chitchat, refused to flatter the young
men paraded before her, and couldn’t abide the intrusions of
dueñas
and possible mothers-in-law who appraised her narrow hips even through the seven petticoats Jesusa insisted she wear to make her small, thin figure more shapely.