Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [125]
She’d probably never marry. She’d be the devoted daughter the Argosos didn’t have, the only one left to take care of them in their last years. They’d been generous, had educated her and provided her a comfortable life. What could a man give her that she didn’t have? Well, her own child. But now she had Miguel, and she loved him as if he’d come from her womb. Sometimes an expression or a gesture recalled Ramón and Inocente, but mostly it was Ana she saw in him. She couldn’t have Ana, but she had Miguel safe and secure nearby.
She smiled into her mirror again, and happiness flushed her cheeks and brightened her eyes. Every time she confessed, she admitted to vanity and to the pleasure she derived from her own image.
She dropped a black shawl over her shoulders and walked down the hall to the narrow stairs to the roof. The Argosos were at the novena for a neighbor, and the rhythmic prayers of the mourners rose from the courtyard three doors down the street. A slivered moon hung in a velvet sky dotted with diamonds. She listened to the city murmur and sing, talk, pray, and cry as the surf crashed against the rocky shore. From the roof, San Juan harbor was a darkness as deep and vast as the sky above. Lights on docked ships twinkled orange and yellow, the only way to distinguish the shore from the thick vegetation rising into the mountains that cut across the island like a spine. What would Ana be doing right now in that humble house surrounded by cane in the middle of nowhere? Almost every night Elena stood on this roof and faced southwest, sending her thoughts toward Hacienda los Gemelos, as if they could reach her lover.
She said her prayers under the sparkling heaven. The humming city was alive, its sounds a lullaby. When she heard familiar footfalls coming down the street, she hurried to her bedroom. The sound stopped below her window. Two years ago, she’d extinguished her candle and peeked through a chink in the shutters. Simón’s slight figure crept down the street, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as if she’d rejected him. But he didn’t declare himself, and she was certain that he wouldn’t. He loved her like the troubadours of olden days, for whom sighs and poetry and repressed emotion were enough.
She put away Ana’s jewelry, then blew out her candle. A few minutes later she heard Simón walk away. Before she fell asleep, she roamed her lovely body, remembering other fingers, other tongues, reveling in the violent release.
HURACÁN
Two years, it seemed to Severo Fuentes, was an appropriate mourning period before a widow could receive the attentions of a suitor. Even though he wasn’t as highborn or as well educated as Ana, he was the only unmarried, rich white man within a day’s ride remotely appropriate for a señora de buena familia. Not that there was any competition for her hand. No one came to Hacienda los Gemelos without some legitimate business.
Ramón and Inocente had excused Ana’s reticence by telling the neighbors that she was an aristocratic lady from Sevilla who was used to greater comforts and embarrassed that they now lived so humbly. The visits after the two brothers’ deaths gave the vecinos enough information to keep them curious and interested about Ana, but Severo made sure that no one came to the hacienda unannounced. Only Padre Xavier and occasional traveling salesmen dared ride into the Los Gemelos batey with no warning, except for the lieutenant and his men, which always meant bad news.
It impressed Severo that Ana didn’t mind her isolation. She welcomed it. She had no interest in local gossip, no curiosity about how her neighbors lived, didn’t require the stimulation of the closest town nor the attentions of women of her own class. She still walked with the entitled air of an aristocrat, but she’d discarded most of the conventions of the well-bred señorita. The parasols she’d brought from Spain were swaddled