Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [3]
Their wealth, pride, and honor depended on male heirs, but Gustavo and Jesusa buried three consecutive sons within weeks of their birth. In the seventh year of their marriage, and after a day and a half of labor, Jesusa delivered a healthy girl on July 26, 1826, who looked nothing like her living relatives, all of whom were tall, sturdy, light-haired, light-eyed, long-nosed men and women whose supercilious lips curled in disdain at the smallest provocation. If Jesusa hadn’t suffered for twenty-nine hours to deliver her into the world, she wouldn’t have claimed the small-boned, black-haired, black-eyed girl who looked like no one but the portrait of don Agustín dominating the gallery. Jesusa named her Gloriosa Ana María de los Ángeles Larragoity Cubillas Nieves de Donostia, called Ana in praise of the Saint protectress of pregnant women, on whose Day Ana was born. A sturdy Gypsy was hired to nurse her, since it was unbefitting for elite women to offer their own breasts to their children. Ana thrived and survived beyond a few days, then three months, then six, then nine, and by her first year was wobbling and lurching from her nurse’s arms to those of her maid.
Jesusa doubled her prayers and charity work, hoping that Santa Ana would intercede on her behalf so that she’d conceive again, this time a boy. But her prayers faded into the quivering air before her candles, and her womb remained fallow. Jesusa blamed Ana as the reason she was barren, and whenever she looked at the girl, she saw her vanished hopes and her own failure to deliver an heir. With no male issue, Gustavo Larragoity Nieves’s homes, furnishings, and inherited wealth would, upon his death, pass to his younger brother, whose fertile wife had brought forth three healthy sons.
From infancy, her parents consigned Ana to North African maids. Almost as soon as Ana was used to one, Jesusa dismissed her and replaced her with another. She often complained to her friends that it was impossible to find reliable servants.
“We should have never freed the slaves in Spain,” she said, and her friends agreed.
Spanish slaves had been captured in wars or kidnapped from Africa and Spanish America. The practice was abolished in Spain in 1811, although not in its colonies. Nearly two decades later, Jesusa was still angry that her personal maid, Almudena, who had been with her family three generations, disappeared as soon as news arrived that slaves were free, never to be seen nor heard from again. Jesusa was imperious and demanding, and by the time Ana was five years old, she understood why Almudena had left as soon as she could.
Ana’s earliest memories were of being summoned to Jesusa’s parlor, where she had to impress her mother’s visitors with pretty curtsies and good manners. She was allowed a few minutes with the ladies, nearly smothered by their ruffles and tiers of shushing skirts. They ignored her almost as soon as she curtsied, and talked over her head until Jesusa remembered she was still there and ordered the maid to take Ana away.
At ten, Ana was sent to the same convent school in Huelva where Jesusa was educated near the Cubillas estate. Some of the nuns in the Convento de las Buenas Madres remembered Jesusa as a girl and unfavorably compared Ana to her mother, who, according to them, was everything Ana was not—devout, obedient, humble, and demure. Unlike Ana, Jesusa was never forced to chew a hot pepper because she stumbled over “ora pro nobis peccatoribus” during the Ave Maria. Her mother was never made to kneel in a corner barelegged on rice grains to cure her of unladylike constant fidgeting. Jesusa never skipped Mass so she could lie on the new grass of a dazzling spring morning, watching the floating redness where there was usually