Conquistadora (32 page)

Leonor sat by her son’s bed, counting Ave Marias on her rosary’s silver beads. Ramón slept—if sleep could be possible through so much whimpering and groaning. There was certainly no rest in it.

He smelled like the drunks that she avoided in the streets of the city, a stench of liquor and urine and sweat and, in her son’s case, the bitter scent of blood. Ciriaca and Bombón had wiped away much of the blood, but each fresh bandage around Ramón’s leg quickly became red. Leonor had volunteered in enough military hospitals to know just how bad a sign this was. Dr. Vieira set the leg in a fashion similar to what Ana and Damita had managed, but tighter and straighter. He hoped, he said, that he wouldn’t have to amputate.

Leonor wondered if Dr. Vieira was a trained surgeon, or if his missing fingers made him reluctant to inflict a similar injury on his patients. She didn’t dare question him because, whatever the answer, Ramón’s life was in his hands and he was trying his utmost, Leonor was sure, to save him.

Dr. Vieira asked Bombón to shave Ramón so that he could treat the scrapes and cuts on his cheeks and jaw. Leonor was grateful for this, because she could now see her son clean-shaven, as she’d always known him. His features were etched with deep creases around his eyes and from his nose to his lips. His forehead had drooped over his eyebrows. Two of his front teeth had been chipped long before his fall from the horse, judging from their yellowed edges.

“Mamá.” Leonor was unsure if she’d really heard the word, or if the sound was another variant of the croaks that from time to time escaped her son’s lips. “Mamá, take him with you,” Ramón said with such vehemence that Leonor was afraid the effort was too much for him.

“Who,
mi amor
? Take who?”

His eyes opened, and just as quickly, closed. “Miguel.” He fell silent again.

She pressed a cool cloth to his face. He was feverish, and since she’d taken over the watch, before dawn, his lips moved in an interminable garble punctuated by the moans that had kept everyone in the house unable to sleep through the night. In this case, however, his voice was clear. She was certain what she’d heard. Ramón wished her to take Miguel away from Los Gemelos, from Ana.

After that lucid moment, Ramón’s fever rose and he became delirious, carrying on a conversation with Inocente, mostly unintelligible to her except for a few phrases. “
Mira
, Inocente,” Ramón said, as if
he’d discovered something extraordinarily beautiful that his brother must see. “
No te vayas
, Ino,” he called, as if his brother had strayed too far.
“No fui yo,”
he contended another time, as if Inocente had accused Ramón of doing something that made him angry. In the hour since telling her she should take Miguel away, he’d not recognized or spoken directly to her.

Just as the sky lightened, the door creaked and a maid entered carrying a tray with a steaming pot and a dainty china cup and saucer.

“
Disculpe, señora
. I took the liberty. I thought you might like something to drink. It’s chocolate.”

“That’s kind of you,” Leonor said.

The maid set the tray on the bedside table, but her eyes fixed on Ramón, taking in every aspect of his appearance.
“Pobrecito señor,”
she said. “He was a good man.”

“Is a good man.”

“
Sí, señora
, is a good man,” she amended, flattening her upper lip over her protruding teeth as if to control a smile.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m Marta,
señora
, at your service. I was the cook at Los Gemelos before I came here.”

Leonor took a good look at her. She was big boned, brown, and flat nosed, with teeth too big for her mouth. She had broad shoulders, large breasts, a round belly, and masculine hands.

Ramón moaned and both women turned to him. “Inocente,” he called in a frightened, childish voice that tore through her. “Inocente,
no me dejes
.”

“
Aquí estoy, hijo
. Mamá is with you, son.” She took his hand, and with her other hand caressed his forehead and pushed strands of sweaty hair from his temples. Marta stood on the other side of the bed, avid, as if willing Ramón to recognize her. Her expression was strangely gleeful, the look of someone who delights in bearing witness, preferably if it puts her superiors in a bad light, so that she can later relate every detail, exaggerated for maximum effect.

Leonor frowned and Marta looked for something to do. “That’s all,” Leonor said tersely. “You can go.” Marta stood a moment, and a look of disdain crossed her features. She pressed her hands over her belly, and Leonor saw that she was not fat but pregnant. Holding her belly, Marta curtsied deeply, mockingly, before leaving the room.

“Mamá,” Ramón called again. “Inocente is going.”

His eyes darted from side to side, up and down, as if following the erratic movements of a hummingbird. His body tensed as his breathing grew shallow. With strength she didn’t know he had, Ramón half lifted off the bed and let out one piercing scream, then fell back gasping for air.

Eugenio ran into the room, followed by Luis, Faustina, Ciriaca, Bombón, and lastly, Dr. Vieira, who had been sleeping in Manolo’s room next door. The doctor took Ramón’s pulse, lifted his eyelids, and peered into his pupils. He examined the bandages and pressed his ear to Ramón’s chest.

None of what he did, Leonor knew, could save her son. Doctor Vieira could not reverse the wheezing of lungs that couldn’t take in enough air. Ramón gasped, released a long exhalation; his hand in hers relaxed and his features slackened. Somewhere outside a rooster crowed and dogs barked. Leonor wrapped her arms around her son, pressed her face to his chest, and sobbed. Her husband embraced her from behind, and his tears burned into her shoulder.

Dr. Vieira asked that Leonor leave while he prepared the body, but she wouldn’t move from Ramón’s side.

“There’s nothing more you can do for him, Dr. Vieira,” she said with more aplomb than she felt. “This is now women’s work.” Ciriaca and Bombón stood by her, and the doctor, faced with their determination, withdrew, and moments later he and his assistant rode out of the
batey
as the morning began to warm.

The three women rocked Ramón from one side of the bed to the other as they washed the blood, dirt, and grime that pain made impossible to wipe when he was alive. They washed his hair and trimmed it neatly around his face, shaved him again so that his cheeks were smooth, even if bruises and scratches marred his features. They clipped his nails and rubbed
manteca de cacao
over his body. They changed the soiled bedcovers and wrapped him in a linen shroud from a sheet that Faustina brought them. She thoughtfully removed the festive tatting along the borders but could do nothing about the embroidered initials under the Morales crest.

“Luis sent a messenger to Los Gemelos, to notify your daughter-in-law,”
she said. “We sent for Padre Xavier last night, but he’s attending another family on the other side of town. He’ll be here later today.”

Leonor had no idea when Ramón last confessed or took the Eucharist, but imagined it was the day before they set sail from San Juan, over four years earlier. He’d be buried far from his brother, from his homeland, from the family plot in the churchyard of their hometown of Villamartín in northwestern Cádiz province. Eugenio’s and Leonor’s ancestors were buried there, a hundred yards from one another on the same side of a tree-lined path. Ramón and Inocente would be the first of their clans to be scattered across the sea. Bombón covered Ramón’s head with the shroud. And as Ciriaca held her, Leonor let the full weight of her grief moisten the maid’s solid bosom, and her strong arms support her as Ciriaca led her away from the room decorated with the hopes and dreams of the Moraleses’ little boy, even as her own boy, aged before his time and broken, lay still and cold on the narrow bed.

For the second time in just over a week, Leonor was on her way down the mountain from Finca San Bernabé to the flatlands spiked with cane. She was too small for both Faustina’s mare and her riding skirt. On horseback, the slopes to the unseen bottoms were even more frightening than they looked from the closed coach. The surefooted mare stepped over the pebbled paths, away from the slippery edges. Leonor tried not to, but she couldn’t help looking, imagining Ramón tumbling down an embankment like the ones they passed, his body bouncing against sharp rocks and boulders into the depths.

Two men from Hacienda los Gemelos carried Ramón inside a hammock down the hill. They could maneuver more easily and quickly than riders, so they waited at the bottom of the hill.

Eugenio had gone ahead to make sure everyone was ready to receive them at Los Gemelos, but Severo Fuentes rode nearby. Once he’d ascertained that Leonor was a good rider, he left space between them, often riding ahead to cut low-hanging branches with one swift whack of his machete. Faustina insisted that Ciriaca accompany Leonor to Los Gemelos. The maid rode a mule uneasily. Raised as a domestic servant, she wasn’t used to being in the uncontrollable environment
of the
campo
. Were the occasion not so solemn, Leonor would’ve smiled at Ciriaca’s flapping the air ineffectually when insects flew into her face, and her fear of the movement and screeches of unseen birds and other creatures.

Leonor was moved by how many people were waiting for them when they reached Los Gemelos just before dusk. The slaves, the foremen, the
libertos
and
campesinos
stood to form a path toward the open
rancho
, their heads bowed. Their labor had transformed the
rancho
in just over a day. Benches formed a center aisle leading to an altar featuring Ana’s antique crucifix. There were flowers everywhere, and vines crept around the legs of sawhorses for the coffin. Next to the
rancho
was a closed tent, and in front of it, Ana, Eugenio, and Elena waited with Padre Xavier. The women were dressed in simple black dresses that were obviously hastily made and didn’t quite fit. Elena and Ciriaca helped Leonor upstairs, to the room next to Ana’s, where, on the bed, a black dress like the ones Ana and Elena wore was waiting for her.

In her room, the windows half shut, Ana cried until her eyes were swollen. She was twenty-three years old, a mother, and the wealth she’d brought into her marriage was invested in the hacienda. She’d sacrificed her fortune, youth, and looks to be a pioneer in a wilderness, had committed the sins of adultery and fornication without seeking penance. With Ramón’s death, it would all have been in vain. Hacienda los Gemelos belonged to don Eugenio, who, with both sons dead, was likely to sell it. She might be forced to return to San Juan or even to Spain—and worst of all, to be dependent on her in-laws or her parents, floating aimlessly through stifling rooms and indolent years of mourning as her son grew up.

When she saw the shrouded body, Ana couldn’t believe that Ramón was within the folds of the linen. Eugenio and Severo shouldered the poles holding the hammock and brought Ramón into the tent, followed by Padre Xavier. Ana was left under the sun, faced with the solemn hum of prayers. Flora took her elbow.

“Venga, mi señora,”
she said. “They ready now. You will see him one more time.” Damita took her other elbow, and Ana was grateful to have them there because she was scared.

The ground was littered with wood chips and sawdust. José had built the mahogany coffin in just a few hours but couldn’t control his decorative impulses. Compared with his furniture, however, the vines and flowers around a crucifix on the top of the box were beautiful and subdued. The men had placed Ramón inside, still wrapped in linen. His clean face looked so much younger than twenty-nine that it erased her last image of him, bearded, aged, and tormented. Ana ran her fingertips across his smooth cheeks, his lips that once
smiled so brightly, his eyelids. He was cold.
Te perdono
, she said silently, but the words sounded meaningless.
Perdóname
, she mouthed as she bent to kiss his forehead, and the smell of chocolate from the
manteca de cacao
was repugnant. She jerked back, and Flora and Siña Damita carried her away because she could no longer stand on her own.

Over the next days Ana moved as if within someone else’s life. She managed to get through the wake in the
rancho
, the prayers, and the condolences. The same mourners who’d come after Inocente’s death drove up in carriages or on horseback. These were the “charming people” Ramón liked so much, don so-and-so and doña
fulana de tal
wearing years-out-of-date European clothes and speaking in a babble of regional and national accents. They were subdued by the circumstances, but happy to break the isolation in their haciendas, even for a funeral. Men and women alike peered at her with unabashed interest. Ana felt less like a grieving widow and more like an exhibit in a museum. Faustina greeted every arrival with kisses on both cheeks for the women and squeezes of the hands for the men, then led them to the front of the
rancho
, where Ana sat with Eugenio, Leonor, and Elena before the coffin.