Conquistadora (8 page)

“Why are there so many children?” asked Ana.

“No orphanage,” answered don Eugenio, “and for that matter, no lunatic asylum. There’s no place to put them. And the city has grown rapidly. The authorities can’t keep up.”

Don Eugenio continued his harangue, but Ana couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t bear the hot, humid air. Her clothes were heavy; the seven ruffled petticoats under her fine cambric skirt weighed against her thighs. Her scalp was on fire even under her parasol and bonnet. Droplets of sweat slid down her neck and back, dampening her chemise, soaking into her corset, the stays digging into her ribs.

“Are you all right,
querida
?” asked Ramón. “You look flushed.”

“It’s the heat. It will take getting used to.”

“We’ll be home soon,” don Eugenio promised.

She’d never seen such bright sun, nor shadows with such finely defined edges. The contrast between light and dark was so great that her eyes watered and strained, trying to make out the shapes inside buildings and beyond alleys.

Even away from the harbor, pedestrians vied for space with carts, carriages, and soldiers on horseback and on foot, with servants carrying baskets full of produce or stacks of kindling on their heads. Barefoot stevedores in tattered pants and shirts moved sacks and bundles from the wharves into the wooden buildings lining the waterfront and the streets leading to it. In Sevilla there were people from all over the world, but Ana had never seen so many black men, women, and children. And even along the busy waterfronts in Sevilla and Cádiz, human beings didn’t carry such huge loads.

Ana had expected San Juan to be pretty. It was the capital of the island, after all, settled three hundred years earlier. It surprised her that it was so unfinished. The road they were traveling on was deeply rutted. Trenches along one side or the other ran with streams of foul-smelling black water. Ana had read that the government decreed that all houses in San Juan should be masonry, but along the city walls, an amalgam of shacks and
ranchos
leaned against one another, most of them built from scraps and roofed with straw or layers of palm fronds. Dogs, pigs, and goats wandered unattended, eating whatever they could scavenge from the mounds of garbage. Hens
squawked, flailing their wings into short, ungainly flight to avoid the wheels of slow-moving carriages or the hooves of horses and beasts of burden. The people in the shacks were dressed in tatters, the children naked, the women in thin cotton skirts and blouses cut low on the shoulder, their unkempt hair tied up loosely or wrapped in turbans.

“This section of the city,” don Eugenio said, “is less well maintained, as you can see. Most of the people here are
libertos
. They were slaves who fought on the royalist side in the wars for independence in Spanish America, so the government allowed them to find asylum, and liberty, in Puerto Rico.”

“But there are whites here, too,” Ana said. “So they can’t all be
libertos
.”

“Doubtless you’ve read that this island was a penal colony for centuries. Some of the men here are
desterrados
, exiles who chose not to or couldn’t return to Spain after serving their sentences. Others came here as soldiers and established families. Some,” don Eugenio sighed, “came to make their fortune but were seduced by the bottle, by cards, by fighting cocks.”

As the carriage wheeled west, the dwellings were more what Ana expected: closely set masonry houses two or three stories high with overhanging balconies and terra-cotta roof tiles. Most had businesses on the ground floor with residences upstairs, evidenced by lace curtains waving in the breeze. The only women on the streets were servants and hawkers, most of them dark complexioned.

The higher they climbed, the newer the houses, and the fewer the businesses on the ground floors. Just as they turned the corner from a small plaza, they stopped in front of a solid, new two-story house with carved doors. A painted tile was embedded in the masonry: Calle Paloma 9.

“Here we are.” Don Eugenio helped Ana from the carriage. “Take care, my dear, the stones are slippery.” This street was narrower, paved with cobblestones and raised flagstone sidewalks on either side.

As they entered the foyer, Ana’s eyes adjusted to the dim, cool interior. The hall led to an open courtyard shaded by blooming plants and bushes. A gurgling fountain in the center masked the street sounds. Doña Leonor was waiting at the bottom of a wide set of
stairs to the left, and behind her, Elena. When their eyes met, Ana read in them Elena’s happiness and her longing.

A flurry of hugs, kisses, and blessings. A young, barefoot maid appeared to take their hats, gloves, Ana’s parasol, and the men’s walking sticks. Ana noticed Elena’s envious accounting of her fashionable pale green dress and lace pelerine.

“Take this, too,” she said to the maid, slipping the pelerine from her shoulders. She was immediately cooler. “My goodness, is it always this hot here?”

“The end of October marks the beginning of the dry season,” don Eugenio explained. “San Juan is known for its healthful breezes, and it’s unusual for the air to be so still this time of year.”

“It’s a disaster in the countryside,” doña Leonor said, snapping her fan open and leading them upstairs. “We’ve had no rain in weeks. The crops are suffering, and the cattle …”

“Come, my dear, no bad news. They’ve just arrived,” don Eugenio chided his wife.

“You’ve grown taller, I’m certain of it,” doña Leonor addressed her two sons as one. “And you, Ana, have filled out a bit. Your face is rounder. It’s most becoming.”

She led them into a parlor with tall louvered doors facing a balcony choked with potted geraniums and gardenias. The louvers were half open to cut down the sun, but fragrance weighted the air, and Ana again was assaulted by too much light, color, perfume, heat. Ramón led her to a chair away from the balcony in the cooler part of the room. She found comfort in the furnishings she recognized from the Argoso home in Cádiz by their heavy, carved wooden backs and armrests, their solid Spanishness.

“Your harp!” Ana exclaimed when she saw it in a corner.

“Yes, isn’t it lovely!” Doña Leonor looked fondly toward the instrument. “It arrived without a scratch, in spite of my fears. You can imagine how much I missed it.”

“She fussed and worried about it more than she worried about me!” Don Eugenio smiled.

Ana noticed that Elena seemed confused about where to place herself, as if the arrival of so many people had thrown off the natural balance. She settled in the chair don Eugenio held for her, next to his own. Elena kept glancing from Ramón to Inocente, bypassing Ana’s
gaze between them. Finally, she looked at Ana, blushed, lowered her lids, and pressed her lips together.

“Will you play for us later, Mamá?” Ramón asked.

“Of course,
hijo
. I’m so happy that we’re together again.” Doña Leonor wiped her eyes. “It’s been a most difficult adjustment—”

“Let’s have some coffee,” don Eugenio interrupted, and Elena jumped to ring for the maid.

“We missed you, too, Mamá.” Ramón held his mother’s hand. “We came as soon as we could.”

“But you’ll be leaving again.” She looked accusingly at Ana.

She avoided her mother-in law’s eyes and sought those of Elena, whose expression was noncommittal. How infuriating she is, Ana thought suddenly, so humble and unassuming. She longed to upset her composure, to reveal the true, passionate Elena.

“We must go to the hacienda, of course,” Inocente said. “But we’ll spend a couple of months with you in San Juan. You must show us the city. I’m sure you’ve already met everyone worth knowing.”

“She’s unstoppable, son,” don Eugenio said. “Your mother and Elena have made many friends. They’re always visiting someone or other.”

“We mostly see to the sick and housebound, don’t we, Elena?”

“There is much charity work.”

“Surely you saw the beggars on your way here.”

The maid entered with an ornate silver tray that Ana remembered from Cádiz. She served with the alert submissiveness of a woman who’d been a servant all her life.

“Would you prefer something cool?” Elena asked softly when Ana hesitated before the offered coffee. Her beautiful blue eyes wouldn’t meet Ana’s.

“Yes,” Ana said. “Yes, I would. Water for me, please.” She knows, Ana thought, about me and Ramón and Inocente. She knows.

They spent just over two months in San Juan. Afternoons, Ana accompanied Elena and doña Leonor on their visits, most of them to the wives, sisters, and daughters of the officers in charge of the garrison in El Morro. News from Spain took weeks to arrive on the island, and the local women were eager to hear about the latest developments
on the Continent, and to admire Ana’s trousseau. They attended Mass in the unostentatious Catedral de San Juan Bautista that smelled of moisture, candle wax, and prayers. They visited convents, stitched shifts for the Dominican nuns, attended a gala celebrating the opening of Puerto Rico’s first poorhouse, the Casa de Beneficiencia.

San Juan was Spanish enough to be familiar, but Ana was anxious in the city. She was aware of the capital as a way station, a necessary stop on the road to the real adventure on the other side of the mountain range.

Elena’s confusion over Inocente’s polite, distant behavior raised an invisible wall between her and Ana. Unlike in their schoolgirl days, they couldn’t hide under the covers of the other’s cot, whispering, giggling, touching forbidden places. There was nothing Ana could say or do to relieve Elena’s unhappiness. She certainly could not tell Elena about her unusual arrangement with the brothers, even though Elena seemed to have already guessed that Ramón and Inocente were both in love with Ana.

Elena wouldn’t forgive Ana for altering the scheme they’d devised to always be together. They’d be sisters-in-law, married to twins. No one would suspect their true relationship. They could live in the same house, or nearby, and no one would question it because identical twins would naturally want to live near each other. They’d fulfill their duties as wives to Ramón and Inocente, they’d make homes for them, have their children. Love for their husbands was not a part of the plan. On those nights when Ramón and Inocente went to their mistresses, as married men eventually did, Ana and Elena wouldn’t pace their rooms wringing handkerchiefs, begging their patron saints to return their husbands’ love, lighting candles, offering Masses and novenas at the cathedral. On those nights when they should be alone cursing their husbands’ perfidy, they’d have each other.

Ana, who was sixteen, and Elena, who was fourteen when they first came up with the idea that each should marry one of the brothers, had congratulated themselves on their cleverness. They would avoid the fate of women of their class, of marriage as a business arrangement. Ana and Elena found a way to conform and to rebel at the same time, and no one would be the wiser. When they’d dreamed
up the plan, Ana loved Elena with a passion, and her ardor had not cooled over the last ten weeks since her marriage. But Ana had decided that her sexual life with Ramón and Inocente, lackluster or even at times brutal as it was, was the price she had to pay for the world on the other side of the island. Ana’s gaze had turned toward her future and her attachment to Elena, though once powerful and satisfying, had already begun to recede like a ship sailing inexorably into the horizon.

If they didn’t have to escort the ladies in the evening, don Eugenio, Ramón, and Inocente went to the officers’ club or to one of the gambling houses. As in Spain, upper-class women were virtually cloistered in their homes. In a fortress city like San Juan, it was unusual to see them in the streets unless a servant or a relative escorted them. With the men away, Leonor took the opportunity to practice her instrument, but Ana and Elena did what other
sanjuaneras
did to get fresh air. They climbed to the flat roof that afforded a magical view of the city, the harbor, the gray Atlantic Ocean and the shadowed mountain range bisecting the island east to west.

As the day cooled, they walked in circles, elbows linked, their voices rising and falling in the moist breeze as the sweet thrums from doña Leonor’s harp rose into the night. Ana and Elena spoke of everything except what lay beneath their seeming closeness. Since her marriage to Ramón, Ana hadn’t come to Elena in the night. She’d married Ramón, but contrary to their plan, Inocente hadn’t proposed to Elena.

A few days before Ana and Ramón were scheduled to sail for the hacienda, Elena knocked on Ana’s door. She peeked into the room, her cheeks flushed, as if expecting to find Ramón and Ana in a marital position. Ana was with the maid, who was clearing her breakfast tray.

“Has he left already?” Elena asked.

“Oh, yes, they both went to meet with their lawyer.” The maid pulled up a chair for Elena next to the bed, where Ana laid several stiff petticoats, silk bodices with matching skirts, dainty kid shoes, and delicate lace gloves and mantillas. “I should’ve left these things in Sevilla. I certainly won’t need them where I’m going.”

Elena fingered a pale blue taffeta bodice. “Everything is so tiny. They look like doll’s clothes.”

“If you weren’t so much taller, I’d give them to you.”

“You talk as if you’re not coming back.”

“Well, it is unlikely we’ll travel to the city as much as we’d like. Ramón has learned that the roads between here and Hacienda los Gemelos are impassable half the year.”

“Hacienda los Gemelos?”

“They’ve decided to name the plantation after their twinship.”

“I see,” Elena said, the two words brimming with hurt.

Ana waved the maid toward the door, and she left the room on silent bare feet.

Elena stood and grabbed the chairback as if to keep from falling. Her eyes were moist, and her breath was shallow within her corset as she fought for control. “Inocente told doña Leonor—” She choked on her tears.

Ana wrapped her arms around Elena’s waist and let her cry on her shoulder.

“I know, I’m so sorry.…” Ana moved to kiss her cheek.

Elena jerked back. “You know?” She stood at least a head taller than Ana, and she now looked down at her like a mother who’d just discovered her child’s mischief.