Conquistadora (3 page)

She counted the days until her summer vacation in her maternal grandfather’s farm in Huelva, near her school. The old widower wasn’t more affectionate than her parents, but Abuelo Cubillas didn’t consistently point out that she was a disappointment. He hired a
dueña
to keep her company when Ana lived at the farm. Doña Cristina was a local widow of modest means, impeccable character, and no imagination. As soon as Ana could, she ran from doña Cristina’s religious tracts and embroidery hoops.

Abuelo let Ana do as she pleased so long as she didn’t interfere with his rituals of eating, sipping wine, smoking his pipe, and reading on a cushioned leather chair, his legs on a footstool, his lap and thighs covered by a quilt hand-stitched by his mother. Abuelo was born during an earthquake in 1755, and spent as much of his life thereafter in stillness, as if waiting for the aftershocks to subside.

After prayers, Ana had breakfast with Abuelo and doña Cristina, then went outdoors. She learned to ride horses astride like a Gypsy from Fonso, the groom, chaperoned by his sturdy, widowed daughter, Beba.

“A woman should know how to defend herself,” Beba told her, and gave Ana a small folding knife to keep in a pocket. “Don’t be afraid to use it if you have to.”

Fonso set up targets beyond the pasture, where Ana learned to shoot a rifle. She once shot a boar. She went on exhilarating rides through the countryside, the wind whizzing around her ears, her face flushed, her heart pounding. She was free and strong and capable, everything she never felt in Sevilla.

Every morning Beba fed the chickens, ducks, and geese, and found the fattest, meatiest ones for the cook. She collected eggs and showed Ana that she must always leave enough for the hens to hatch into chicks. Beba also taught Ana how to slaughter fowl (break their necks) and how to pluck and save the down from ducks and geese for pillows and quilts, and the feathers for beds.

She demonstrated as she pulled tail feathers from peacocks and pheasants. “Let the shaft dry. You can use them to make fans and to decorate your bonnets.”

Ana learned to milk cows, sheep, and goats from the milkmaids, and the gardener’s wife taught her to make cheese. She loved the cool, damp cave where the cheese was aged, the first whiff of the musky curds, the sharp scent of whey. She learned to wield a sharp knife when she helped graft fruit trees with the ancient gardener. She churned butter with his wife. She was happier in the gardens, fields, and orchards around the farm than in the parqueted salons of Sevilla.

Doña Cristina was scandalized by Ana’s attachment to the lower classes, but Abuelo was delighted with his granddaughter’s democratic impulses.

“I hate nothing more than a prejudiced, narrow-minded woman,” he said.

“Why,
señor
, if you think I’m either of those things …”

“I accuse you of nothing,” he said.

“I’m not criticizing your beloved granddaughter,
señor
. I simply point out that it’s—well, she’s a
señorita de buena familia
and she consorts with—”

“You exhaust me,” he said. “Leave me, and let her be.”

But perhaps because of doña Cristina’s concerns, Abuelo insisted that Ana make time for other pursuits.

“Fonso and Beba and the servants will teach you the practical and natural sciences,” he said, “the nuns will nourish your spirit, and your mother and your
dueñas
will teach you how to become a wife and mother and train you in the duties to manage a household. But I have the key to the greatest gift: an agile and creative mind.” He allowed her at will in his library, where she could read any book that interested her. It was there that she found the journals of her ancestor don Hernán Cubillas Cienfuegos. The ragged, yellowing pages scratched in his hurried cursive in fading, splotchy ink fired Ana’s hunger for adventure.

Don Hernán was among the conquistadores in the service of Juan Ponce de León during his first official expedition to San Juan Bautista in 1508. Don Hernán was there when most of the pioneers died in the insalubrious swamp Ponce de León first chose for his settlement in Caparra, and he was among the men to persuade the conquistador to move the colony to the breezy, healthful islet across the harbor. By 1521, when Ponce de León died, Borínquen was being renamed again by the
españoles
. The island was now called Puerto Rico and its fortress capital San Juan.

Don Hernán’s journals and letters were illustrated with landscapes, colorful birds and flowers, strangely shaped vegetables, barefoot men and women with feathers and shells in their hair. Most of the women were naked, but some wore a short apron that don Hernán labeled
nagua
. The men appeared to wear nothing at all, although it was hard to tell, since don Hernán always portrayed them in modest three-quarter profile, or from the side, or holding a stick, bow, or other prop that covered what Ana most wished to see.

Don Hernán wrote of a harsh existence punctuated by deadly raids by
caribe
warriors, by earthquakes, by fevers, by violent storms that destroyed everything in their path. But he also described gold nuggets gleaming in the sands along pristine rivers, unusual fruits that dangled from climbing vines, impassable forests, and tree trunks wider than the arm span of five men standing around them finger to finger. He saw endless possibilities in that mysterious land, he wrote. Like all the conquistadores, he was there to enrich himself, but to earn his bounty he first had to tame a wilderness.

Don Hernán’s letters stopped in 1526. A chest containing his journals and papers was delivered a year later by a soldier charged with letting his family know that he died of cholera, but he still lived in Ana’s imagination. As a girl, she spent hours reading his accounts, studying his drawings, trying to imagine what it was like for a pale, blue-eyed Spaniard to encounter the brown, black-eyed natives of the New World for the first time, and what it was like for the
taínos
to see men dropping from sailed vessels, rowing ashore wearing metal helmets and bright pantaloons, carrying gleaming Toledo swords, accompanied by hounds and a man in robes holding aloft a crucifix.

Late into the night, hunched over the tremulous candlelight that illuminated don Hernán’s journals, Ana despaired that she was born female and centuries too late to be an explorer and adventurer like her ancestors. She read every account she could find about the wondrous enterprise that Spain undertook to discover new lands, to pacify the natives and harness the riches of a hemisphere.

She learned that most of the conquistadores were impoverished men, second sons, and soldiers with many battles behind them but little future before them. She was none of those things, but she felt don Hernán’s hand reaching across the centuries toward her. She
was a girl, cloistered and swaddled in the expectations of her class, but she identified with the audacity of the conquistadores, with the confidence that, if they turned their backs on country, family, and custom, they could make fortunes and more exciting lives through the work of their hands, the might of their swords. The more she read, the more Ana longed for a world beyond her balcony, far from the echoing halls of her convent school, home, and disappointed parents.

Ana and her schoolmate Elena Alegría Feliz had rooms next to each other in the Convento de las Buenas Madres. Elena’s face was a perfect, pale oval surrounded by thick, chestnut hair. Her blue eyes were large and innocent. Her lips were shaped like a V, so she always wore a beatific smile. In school the other girls nicknamed Elena La Madona, because she looked as beautiful and pure as the paintings of the Holy Mother. They called Ana Bastoncito, because she was so short that, next to Elena, Ana looked like her walking stick.

After candles off, and against rules, they curled on one or the other’s cot in their cell-like rooms, sharing the secrets and fantasies of schoolgirls with lively imaginations. One night, while Ana was telling her about don Hernán’s exploits, the ribbon that closed Elena’s nightgown loosened, revealing one perfectly formed breast. Elena stared at it as if she’d never seen it, then looked at Ana, who was just as mesmerized. Ana’s uncertain fingers reached to stroke Elena’s breast, and the nipple hardened. Elena gasped. Ana recoiled. Elena pressed Ana’s hand to her breast and unfastened the ribbons so that the gown dropped off her shoulders. Tentatively, Ana caressed, and as Elena responded, she kissed, then used her tongue. They explored each other with furtive, fluttery fingers, hot mouths on cool flesh, wet tongues in salty crevices. So much sensation left her weak. Embarrassed, she pressed her bony back against Elena’s belly. Elena slid her middle and ring fingers into Ana’s mouth to suck until they both fell asleep.

They confessed once a week to fusty, nearly deaf Padre Buenaventura, who was sometimes heard to snore from behind the screen of the confessional.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” In the list of schoolgirl transgressions (“I’m guilty of vanity, Padre. I looked in the mirror three times yesterday”), buried within the urges that beset adolescent girls (“I’m guilty of envy, Padre. I wished my hair were as long and shiny as María’s”), there was always mention of carnal thoughts, but never of carnal acts. In the stale, airless confessional, Ana and Elena risked the eternal fires of hell, crossed themselves, and sinned by omission, their fingers still stained with the other’s pudendum.

Elena was an
hija de crianza
, raised in the same household as twin boys. Orphaned at four years old, Elena was raised by don Eugenio Argoso Marín and his wife, doña Leonor Mendoza Sánchez, relations so distant that Elena was unsure whether they were related at all. In any case, she grew up as niece to don Eugenio and doña Leonor, and cousin to their sons, Ramón and Inocente.

Ramón, as the eldest by twelve minutes, was expected to marry an heiress to increase the family’s fortune and status. His younger brother, Inocente, would marry Elena, who was then penniless but was due an inheritance from doña Leonor’s parents on her eighteenth birthday. While the engagement was not formal, it was understood that Elena was meant for Inocente.

“But you should marry Ramón,” Elena suggested. “We’ll be sisters then, and we’ll always be together. Ramón and Inocente are rich and handsome,” she added, “and the Argosos are from a distinguished family. Their father is a colonel in the cavalry.…”

“Is Ramón a soldier?”

“He was, but now both brothers work in an office,” Elena explained. “They’re learning how to take over their uncle’s business.”

No
caballero
of Ana’s acquaintance, including her father and grandfathers, worked, or at least, not in the sense that they went to an office. “I don’t know.…”

“They’re not boring or dull,” Elena said. “They only go there in the mornings. I know you’ll like them. They’re charming and like to have fun.”

“How would I meet them?” Ana was still a bit doubtful.

“Come for my fifteenth birthday and stay for a while. Doña Leonor will surely allow me to have my best friend with me on my birthday. Yes, please do, come to Cádiz.…” Elena squeezed Ana’s hands so tightly they hurt.

———

Ana had never met identical twins. Two days after Elena introduced them, Ana was still unsure which one was Ramón, which Inocente.

“You look so much alike,” she said one morning, as they waited for Elena to come downstairs. “How can I know the difference between you when you also dress the same?”

“If you can tell us apart, we’ll marry you,” one joked.

“Can Elena tell you apart?”

“No one can,” the other answered.

“So you’ll both marry the one girl who can distinguish Ramón from Inocente?”

“We will,” they said in unison.

“You can’t do that!”

“Of course we can. Who would know?”

Until her visit to Elena, Ana had never been alone with a man, including her father and grandfather, but doña Leonor was not as vigilant as doña Cristina or her mother. In spite of her youth and inexperience, Ana was certain that Ramón and Inocente played tricks on her. If one offered to walk her in the garden after breakfast, she thought it was the other who appeared. Or one offered to fetch her shawl inside the house, and the other brought it. That they thought it would be so easy to fool her made her determined to learn to distinguish Ramón from Inocente.

Their pale eyes held the mystery of their identity. Ramón’s were playful and seemed to always seek amusement. Inocente’s were solemn and critical, and his jokes sometimes had a cruel edge. She didn’t understand how no one else saw this, but she realized that the brothers were experts at being the other.

Once she was certain of their different gazes, Ana noticed that they moved unalike, too. Ramón’s playful nature was revealed in a looseness of limb and grace that seemed studied in the more serious Inocente. Ramón also talked more, was usually the one to start a joke, the most likely to tell an amusing story. Ana teased them about it, but neither admitted to pretending to be the other. It was as if in their own minds they were interchangeable, one twenty-three-year-old man in two bodies.