Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [39]
She was bony and long-legged, and smelled of ashes and garlic. But she didn’t laugh when his excitement was greater than his skill. She was as eager as he was but also patient. While he subsequently had many women over the course of his life, Severo never learned as much from any one of them as he did from Noela, whose greatest gift was to teach him that women don’t have to be pretty to be desirable.
Severo’s supervisors at Marítima Argoso Marín were impressed with his disciplined habits and his ability to read and write. In his thirteenth year he won a promotion from floor sweeper and message boy to assistant clerk. After two years, he was moved to apprentice escríbano, scrivener. From time to time Padre Gregorio came around to the Delgados’ to see how Severo was doing. The priest died happy that he had extended his protection and friendship to the sort of young man who not only needed it, but who would surely succeed in life only because of timely pastoral intervention.
However, a cobbler’s son, even a moderately educated one; a convict, even for petty crimes committed in his youth; a poor man, albeit one with a job could only go so far in Spain’s capital. One morning, just as he received his wages, Severo heard an internal voice telling him that, once again, it was time to go. He cleaned his pen nibs, stoppered the inkwells, stacked his papers neatly in their appropriate archives, and walked out of the office where he was tied to a desk from early morning to late evening transferring figures from one ledger to another. He collected his only other change of clothes, the purse where he hid his money under a stone in the floor in his shed, and the five books he owned, two purchased, three stolen. Noela was at the market, the Delgados were in their rooms, the street was congested with servants, vendors, children walking to school. Three señoritas selecting ribbons from a dry goods counter turned to watch him go by, and the coachman of the Delgados’ neighbor waved hello but asked himself why Severo was on the street at this time of day when he would ordinarily be at work. He noted the bundle he was carrying, and the coachman later told Noela that she should make sure that nothing was missing in the house. “I didn’t trust that boy,” he said, even though in the five years he’d seen him coming in and out of the Delgado house he hadn’t voiced his concerns about their boarder.
Six weeks after he left Madrid, Severo arrived at the port of Cádiz and shipped out as cabin boy, landing in the New World weak from seasickness and the physical and mental abuse heaped upon him by the captain and every seaman on board. The minute he stepped on terra firma in the steamy capital of the smallest of the Greater Antilles, Severo Fuentes swore never to set foot on a ship again.
Directly in front of the dock where the transfer boat dropped him there was a warehouse, and above its massive doors in delicate gold lettering was the legend MARÍTIMA ARGOSO MARÍN. Severo knew, of course, that the firm had offices in Spanish America, but never imagined he’d land almost literally on the doorstep of one of them.
Until then, listening to the voices in his head had worked well for Severo. He knew enough not to appear in the Argoso Marín office to ask for a job until after he’d regained his health and washed and put on the suit of clothes wrapped in canvas brought across the ocean. The alleys leading from the docks up the hill to the residential district and beyond to the forts were packed with cheerless rooming houses just a few steps from disconsolate brothels. A doctor who treated mostly venereal diseases and who set bones broken in fights by men just off the ships attended to Severo’s ailments, which were no more nor less than what he saw day in and day out. After paying the doctor, Severo spent what he’d earned aboard ship on whores and liquor. A week later, he appeared at the door of Marítima Argoso Marín.
Rodrigo Argoso Marín took one look at Severo and saw what no one else had, or what perhaps only emerged