Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [24]
“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