Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [6]
“You exhaust me,” he said. “Leave me, and let her be.”
But perhaps because of doña Cristina’s concerns, Abuelo insisted that Ana make time for other pursuits.
“Fonso and Beba and the servants will teach you the practical and natural sciences,” he said, “the nuns will nourish your spirit, and your mother and your dueñas will teach you how to become a wife and mother and train you in the duties to manage a household. But I have the key to the greatest gift: an agile and creative mind.” He allowed her at will in his library, where she could read any book that interested her. It was there that she found the journals of her ancestor don Hernán Cubillas Cienfuegos. The ragged, yellowing pages scratched in his hurried cursive in fading, splotchy ink fired Ana’s hunger for adventure.
Don Hernán was among the conquistadores in the service of Juan Ponce de León during his first official expedition to San Juan Bautista in 1508. Don Hernán was there when most of the pioneers died in the insalubrious swamp Ponce de León first chose for his settlement in Caparra, and he was among the men to persuade the conquistador to move the colony to the breezy, healthful islet across the harbor. By 1521, when Ponce de León died, Borínquen was being renamed again by the españoles. The island was now called Puerto Rico and its fortress capital San Juan.
Don Hernán’s journals and letters were illustrated with landscapes, colorful birds and flowers, strangely shaped vegetables, barefoot men and women with feathers and shells in their hair. Most of the women were naked, but some wore a short apron that don Hernán labeled nagua. The men appeared to wear nothing at all, although it was hard to tell, since don Hernán always portrayed them in modest three-quarter profile, or from the side, or holding a stick, bow, or other prop that covered what Ana most wished to see.
Don Hernán wrote of a harsh existence punctuated by deadly raids by caribe warriors, by earthquakes, by fevers, by violent storms that destroyed everything in their path. But he also described gold nuggets gleaming in the sands along pristine rivers, unusual fruits that dangled from climbing vines, impassable forests, and tree trunks wider than the arm span of five men standing around them finger to finger. He saw endless possibilities in that mysterious land, he wrote. Like all the conquistadores, he was there to enrich himself, but to earn his bounty he first had to tame a wilderness.
Don Hernán’s letters stopped in 1526. A chest containing his journals and papers was delivered a year later by a soldier charged with letting his family know that he died of cholera, but he still lived in Ana’s imagination. As a girl, she spent hours reading his accounts, studying his drawings, trying to imagine what it was like for a pale, blue-eyed Spaniard to encounter the brown, black-eyed natives of the New World for the first time, and what it was like for the taínos to see men dropping from sailed vessels, rowing ashore wearing metal helmets and bright pantaloons, carrying gleaming Toledo swords, accompanied by hounds and a man in robes holding aloft a crucifix.
Late into the night, hunched over the tremulous candlelight that illuminated don Hernán’s journals, Ana despaired that she was born female and centuries too late to be an explorer and adventurer like her ancestors. She read every account she could find about the wondrous enterprise that Spain undertook to discover new lands, to pacify the natives and harness the riches of a hemisphere.
She learned that most of the conquistadores were impoverished men, second sons, and soldiers with many battles behind them but little future before them. She was none of those things, but she felt don Hernán’s hand reaching across the centuries toward her. She was a girl, cloistered and swaddled in the expectations of her class, but she identified with the audacity of the conquistadores, with the confidence that, if