Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [8]
“Come for my fifteenth birthday and stay for a while. Doña Leonor will surely allow me to have my best friend with me on my birthday. Yes, please do, come to Cádiz.…” Elena squeezed Ana’s hands so tightly they hurt.
———
Ana had never met identical twins. Two days after Elena introduced them, Ana was still unsure which one was Ramón, which Inocente.
“You look so much alike,” she said one morning, as they waited for Elena to come downstairs. “How can I know the difference between you when you also dress the same?”
“If you can tell us apart, we’ll marry you,” one joked.
“Can Elena tell you apart?”
“No one can,” the other answered.
“So you’ll both marry the one girl who can distinguish Ramón from Inocente?”
“We will,” they said in unison.
“You can’t do that!”
“Of course we can. Who would know?”
Until her visit to Elena, Ana had never been alone with a man, including her father and grandfather, but doña Leonor was not as vigilant as doña Cristina or her mother. In spite of her youth and inexperience, Ana was certain that Ramón and Inocente played tricks on her. If one offered to walk her in the garden after breakfast, she thought it was the other who appeared. Or one offered to fetch her shawl inside the house, and the other brought it. That they thought it would be so easy to fool her made her determined to learn to distinguish Ramón from Inocente.
Their pale eyes held the mystery of their identity. Ramón’s were playful and seemed to always seek amusement. Inocente’s were solemn and critical, and his jokes sometimes had a cruel edge. She didn’t understand how no one else saw this, but she realized that the brothers were experts at being the other.
Once she was certain of their different gazes, Ana noticed that they moved unalike, too. Ramón’s playful nature was revealed in a looseness of limb and grace that seemed studied in the more serious Inocente. Ramón also talked more, was usually the one to start a joke, the most likely to tell an amusing story. Ana teased them about it, but neither admitted to pretending to be the other. It was as if in their own minds they were interchangeable, one twenty-three-year-old man in two bodies.
Four mornings a week the twins walked to an office over a warehouse by the wharf and were usually back for the midday meal followed by a siesta, awakened by the sweet airs of harp music as doña Leonor practiced her instrument.
“They don’t work very hard,” Ana told Elena.
“They’re gentlemen; they shouldn’t be at an office all day long.”
“But how can they run a business if they’re just there a couple of hours a day?”
“Clerks and managers and people like that take care of the details. Ramón and Inocente check on what the employees do.”
It occurred to Ana that none of the Argosos had any idea of the intricacies of commerce. Neither did she, if it came down to it, but her practical nature guessed that a business needed the active engagement of its owners, not just the appearance of ownership.
At dusk, Ramón and Inocente joined other young people on promenade around the Plaza de la Catedral or Plaza de San Antonio. They went out every evening, and Ana heard them stumbling over the furniture in the early hours.
One day the brothers hired a carriage and drove Ana and Elena to the beach. Once they settled the girls, Ramón and Inocente ran back and forth, laughing, lifting a kite into the air, their childlike joy enhanced by Ana’s and Elena’s enthusiastic applause.
Their mother, doña Leonor, like doña Jesusa, visited and was visited by friends and neighbors to share the local gossip. Ana and Elena smiled demurely as doña Leonor and her friends discussed who was engaged to whom, which officer was promoted, and who failed to impress their superiors. The girls sat straitlaced during these visits, their hands on their laps, their eyes modestly lowered, knowing that they must make a good impression on the dueñas, who would, in turn, talk about them the minute they left the sitting rooms.
Several evenings, doña Leonor and don Eugenio escorted Ana and Elena to high-ceilinged,