Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [159]
“Pray for my husband,” doña Pati said. “He’s still sick.” The priest helped her climb into the cart. “Pray for their souls, Leonor. Pray for me.”
“Every day, Patricia.” Leonor crossed herself. “Que Dios te bendiga. Que Dios los bendiga a todos.” She prayed at the window until the cart turned the corner.
“Come, querido.” Elena took Miguel away. “Let’s go to your room.”
“Will you all die?” he asked as she wiped his face.
She knelt before him. Miguel was a frightened little boy, with a distant mother, a dead father. Behind his question was the fear that everyone else he cared about—her, doña Leonor, don Eugenio, Siña Ciriaca, Bombón and her husband, Mateo—would die and leave him alone. He couldn’t imagine himself dying, but it was possible to think that everyone he loved would.
“We’re all healthy and doing everything possible to stay safe from disease,” she said. “Only God knows when he wants us back in heaven. This is such a sad time, mi amor, that maybe Papá Dios needed Querubín by his side because he needed someone to make him smile.”
In 1857 Miguel turned twelve years old, the age when boys were sent abroad to continue their education. He was closer than ever to Andrés, and especially after Querubín died, the boys were more like brothers than friends. Andrés’s father had lost his wife and three other children to cholera, and was reluctant to send his son away. Leonor also wanted to keep Miguel nearby, so the adults chose to enroll both boys in the local parochial school. Don Simón would supervise and supplement their work and help them to prepare for exams and school projects. Miguel also studied at an art academy established by a recently exiled painter.
Outwardly, the boys were disappointed that they wouldn’t go to Europe, but Miguel, at least, was relieved. He wasn’t adventurous by nature, and were it not for the more fearless Andrés, he’d be just as happy in the big house on Calle Paloma, reading, painting, and being pampered and indulged by Abuela, Elena, Siña Ciriaca, and Bombón. While he enjoyed sketching, he didn’t like the public aspect of it, especially in a city where his every action was noticed and talked about by the vecinos. He eschewed landscapes and focused on still lifes and portraiture. He flattered friends and neighbors by asking them to sit for him, and their likenesses hung on their walls in a chronology of his evolving skill. He always signed his initials on the lower left side of the canvas—RMIALMC, for his official name, Ramón Miguel Inocente Argoso Larragoity Mendoza Cubillas. Three generations later, a collection of nineteenth-century Puerto Rican art and crafts was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, among them fifteen canvases with the enigmatic initials. The paintings were cataloged and stored in a warehouse near Andover, Massachusetts, where they languished alongside thousands of other paintings by dead artists no one remembered.
On the evening following Miguel’s fifteenth birthday party, Eugenio invited him for a walk. They frequently strolled around the plaza after dinner, sometimes with the ladies but more often alone. Before they left, Abuelo patted a stray hair from Miguel’s shoulder, buttoned his jacket, straightened his cravat, and pulled his sleeves until they showed evenly below his cuffs.
His grandfather’s attention to his appearance alerted Miguel that this would be no ordinary walk. Months earlier, Andrés related his visit, escorted by his father, to a house well known to nearly every man in San Juan, but that the decent women of the city pretended didn’t exist. Every young man of Miguel’s race and social standing had, around his fifteenth birthday, walked through the wide door and up the staircase to fragrant rooms overlooking a garden whose beauty was lost on them. The ground-floor parlors were spacious and comfortably furnished if a bit frayed from use and the stale smell of cigar smoke and spilled liquor. Upstairs, youngish women chosen for beauty, charm, and discretion, trained in their profession by Socorro and Tranquilina Alivio,