Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [22]
“Thank you. We’re fine now.” Don Eugenio saluted back. “Just trying to get home.”
The soldier cleared the road in front of them, and soon they entered the gate and were heading uphill. Don Eugenio brushed the sleeves and lapels of his white suit, even though none of the beggars had touched him. “Disgraceful! Something must be done about these people.”
“Every city has beggars, Papá,” said Ramón, “and orphans and lunatics. San Juan wouldn’t be a proper city without them.”
“You might think it’s funny, but your mother and cousin can’t leave the house without being harassed. It’s outrageous.”
“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