Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [28]
“Perhaps once they’re settled, we can go there,” Elena suggested quietly. Ana and Leonor turned to her as if she shouldn’t have been there but were grateful not to be alone in the room.
“Yes, you must!” Ana said after a while with what sounded to both Elena and doña Leonor like false enthusiasm.
“Of course,” the older woman said with a tired, defeated sigh. “We’ll do that. We’ll come visit you at … at, what are you calling it again?”
HACIENDA LOS GEMELOS
They left San Juan on a blistering January morning from the same wharf that had received them over two months earlier. Doña Leonor and Elena insisted on seeing them off, and the last time Ana saw them, they were crying uncontrollably as don Eugenio herded them into a carriage. Ramón and Inocente waved from the deck of the Dafne long after it was possible for doña Leonor or Elena to see them. Their anxiety for their mother was touching, but Ana was glad to get away from her disapproval and animosity. It galled her, too, how her mother-in-law caressed and kissed her sons as if they were babies, and wept whenever Hacienda los Gemelos was mentioned.
“Who knows when I’ll see you again,” she kept saying, as if they were going to the end of the world, not to the other side of the island. Ana was glad to leave the citadel and the Argosos’ stone and stucco house with the cloying flowering pots in the balconies and Leonor’s brooding glances. Even placid Elena reached a level of hysteria. Ana couldn’t understand it. The departure from Spain hadn’t led to such displays or to so much reproach and constant need for reassurance.
The Dafne was a cargo vessel, and other than the crew, Ramón, Inocente, and Ana were the only passengers. The ship smelled of salted bacalao and of men too long at sea. They sailed along the northern coast of the island, its sinuous shape to port the whole time. Around midafternoon an ominous cloud raced from the eastern horizon and made straight for them. It engulfed them in heavy rain and strong winds that made the timbers moan like live creatures. This time it was Ana who spent most of the trip in the cramped cabin she shared with Ramón, alternately retching into a bucket and praying that the ship wouldn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean and prematurely end their adventure. She was dimly aware of Ramón or Inocente applying cold compresses to her forehead, of a cabin boy removing the bucket and replacing it with another, of darkness so complete she thought she’d died, of a sharp ray of sunlight through the porthole that stabbed through her closed eyelids and made her sneeze.
“How do you feel, querida?” Ramón asked as soon as she could adjust to the light. After the bouncing and pounding on the waves subsided, she was aware of still being at sea, and her stomach pitched. Ramón jumped for the bucket, but there was nothing to bring up, just the sour, bitter taste of bile in her mouth.
The tempest followed them for a day and a half, then faded into the horizon as swiftly as it had come just as they entered the Mona Passage. They had clear sailing again, but Ana was glad when they tacked toward land and above the thatch roofs she saw a steeple and heard church bells. The Dafne didn’t make for port, however; it followed a southeasterly course. Just after dawn the next morning, they sailed into a protected cove with no visible dwellings. Thick vegetation grew to the narrow sandy beach lined with coconut palms.
Ana, Ramón, and Inocente were helped down a rope ladder to a dinghy that bobbed and bounced next to the vessel. When she looked down, she saw the rippling, sandy sea bottom through the clear water. Fish in surprisingly bright colors darted this way and that as the oars hit the waves and the dinghy plied to the beach. There was something furtive about the approach, but one of the oarsmen told them that it was common for travelers to reach littoral destinations this way because of the island’s few deep-water harbors and notoriously poor roads. She peered into the vegetation along the shore,