Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [9]
The Argosos had no guest room, so Ana and Elena shared a bed and slept wrapped in each other’s arms. Elena always heard the maid coming in the morning to draw the drapes open. She pushed Ana to her side and they settled back-to-back with plenty of space between them. It was the loneliest moment of Ana’s day.
Doña Leonor was hospitable and polite, but she looked worried as Ramón and Inocente increasingly turned to Ana for amusement and conversation. She appeared befuddled about which of the twins was wooing Ana, and Ana added to her perplexity by being equally agreeable to both men. She liked their attention, and enjoyed the envious looks of other señoritas whose fluttering lashes and powdered bosoms vibrated at the approach of the two handsome young men. Ana was elated as the denied señoritas and their dueñas practically collapsed when Ramón and Inocente went past them, toward her.
Next to the other girls, and especially beside the willowy Elena, Ana was at a disadvantage. She was petite, just barely five feet tall, but with none of the vulnerability expected from a small woman. She was healthy, tanned and freckled from exposure to the outdoors. Neither dance masters, nuns, nor Jesusa’s lessons in deportment could refine her brisk, efficient movements into grace. Ana’s own scrutiny showed that she was pretty enough but no beauty. She thought her black eyes were just a little too close together and her lips not full enough. She had the habit of staring at something or someone who interested her with too much intensity, according to the nuns and dueñas. She was awkward in society. In spite of her prodigious reading, or because of it, she avoided chitchat. It was an act of will to pretend to be interested in gossip, fashion, and home decor. She disliked little dogs and ignored children. She learned the artifices of the salon but disdained its constraints and pettiness. Women sensed her snobbishness and shunned her. Other than Elena, she had no friends.
Ana knew, however, that whether or not she fulfilled the expectations of her equals, her family names and ancestry held an important place in Spain’s vertical society. To people like the Argosos, wealthier but lower down the slope, her pedigree made her more attractive than the coiffed, accomplished, fan-flickering señoritas paraded before every bachelor with more money but less dazzling lineage. She also noticed that don Eugenio encouraged Ramón’s attentions toward her. She and Elena congratulated each other that their plan might work.
Ana liked Ramón enough to enjoy his company. But when he told her that the Argosos owned land in Puerto Rico, she decided to marry him.
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Don Eugenio was the younger brother of two in a family of merchants and military men. Two months before Ana’s visit, a message arrived in Cádiz to let him know that his childless, widowed brother, Rodrigo, had died in Puerto Rico. Eugenio, who’d spent his adult life in the cavalry, was now the main shareholder in a huge—and hugely profitable—shipping business with offices in St. Thomas, San Juan, Cádiz, and Madrid. In addition to his share of the business, Marítima Argoso Marín, he now owned a house in San Juan, a farm in the outskirts, and a two-hundred-cuerda sugar hacienda with twenty-five slaves on the southwestern side of the island.
He had little knowledge of Rodrigo’s businesses. Twice a year Eugenio received a statement and a notice that his share of profits and interest had been transferred into his bank account in Cádiz. The amounts differed from year to year, depending on the vagaries of trade and harvests, taxes, duties, insurance payments, investments in materials and labor, rents, docking, wharfage, losses, and loans. Eugenio trusted his brother implicitly and was grateful for the income that Rodrigo’s investments made possible. From their birth, and