Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [15]
Until they moved to Sevilla to be near Ana, Ramón and Inocente hadn’t lived on their own or far from Leonor’s eye. When they were boys, she prepared them for the indoor life of gentlemen, but they grew up among soldiers, on the periphery of battles, tented along dusty roads, amid the splendid Spanish cavalry. They were educated haphazardly by tutors and by their mother, who refused to send them to boarding school while they followed Eugenio’s career. She drilled them in etiquette, dancing, and repartee while their father taught them the manly arts of chivalry, riding, fighting, drinking, and swordsmanship. They saw battles against the Carlists, led by their father, who could kill an enemy on a bloody field but could also step lightly and gracefully to violin music around a polished floor. The ladies who danced with Ramón and Inocente at a candlelit ball the night before wouldn’t recognize them the next day, muddy and sweaty, tramping across a pasture, cursing or singing bawdy coplas.
Friends and relatives who’d known them since childhood had never seen Ramón without Inocente. They looked so much alike that people didn’t even try to tell them apart. Inocente said that people were lazy and it was easier to find the twins’ similarities than their differences. It had become a perverse game to test whether others saw them as individuals by deliberately confusing them.
They’d confounded Elena for years. She lived in the school most of the time because Leonor thought it was inappropriate to have a beautiful young woman among so many soldiers. Whenever Elena came home for vacation, Ramón and Inocente took pains to groom and dress alike. Señoritas at social events had trouble distinguishing one from the other, but the brothers wanted to know whether one who lived with them would, too. They were sure that Elena couldn’t tell them apart. Even their mother frequently confused Ramón with Inocente and vice versa.
From childhood, the brothers had slept entwined until Leonor announced they were big boys and should have their own beds. Still, they set up their cots inches from each other’s and often woke up holding hands. They’d compared their penises when they pissed outdoors, arguing over whose stream went the farthest. In early adolescence, they masturbated side by side, competing over which would orgasm first. One morning, however, Ramón woke up to Inocente’s hand on his exposed belly, centimeters from his swollen penis. He wasn’t sure if Inocente was awake or asleep, so he waited, curious whether the hand would move closer, willing it to do so. It did. Face up, his eyes closed, his hand crept slowly up Inocente’s right hip to discover that he, too, was naked and erect. It was much more exciting to have Inocente’s fingers on his penis than his own, and he knew that his brother was feeling the same thing.
Long before their father brought them to a brothel to be initiated into sex, they’d already found pleasure in each other without talking about it, aware that the minute they discussed it, all the injunctions against touching each other that way would inhibit them.
They were stunned to learn that their father frequented prostitutes.
“But if you love Mamá,” Inocente asked, “why do you visit whorehouses?”
“Men’s urges are different from women’s,” he said. “I love and admire your mother too much to ask from her what I expect from putas. Marriage is holy, designed for procreation, yes, but also to elevate us from savagery. A man honors his wife by protecting her from his baser instincts. That’s what putas are for.”
The explanation gave them license to indulge their most ignoble impulses so long as they safeguarded their future wives from them. They’d never, for example, admit to their wives that they liked to watch each other take the same woman.
It’s like watching myself in the mirror, Ramón thought.
The only times they didn’t share their sexual adventures was when Inocente began to experiment with bizarre contraptions in underlit rooms that spooked Ramón.
“It’s