Ines of My Soul Read Online Free Page A

the contrary, they came back miserable, ill, and insane. The ones who made a fortune lost it, and the owners of the enormous haciendas it was said were available there could not bring them home with them. Nevertheless, these and other facts evaporated before the powerful attraction of the New World. Hadn’t carts filled with bars of gold from the Americas been seen in the streets of Madrid? Unlike Juan, I did not believe there was any such thing as a city of gold, or magical waters that bestowed eternal youth, or Amazons who made merry with men and then sent them on their way laden with jewels, but I suspected there was something even more prized to be found there: freedom. In the Americas every man was his own master; he never had to bow to anyone, he could begin anew, be a different person, live a different life. There no one bore his dishonor for years, and even the humblest could rise in the world. “Higher than me, only my plumed cap,” Juan used to say. How could I reproach my husband for that adventure when I myself, had I been a man, would have done the same?
    Once Juan left, I returned to Plasencia to live with my mother and my sister’s family, because by that time my grandfather had died. I had become another “widow of the Americas,” like so many others in Extremadura. In accord with custom, I had to dress in mourning and wear a heavy veil over my face, renounce social life, and submit to the watchful eyes of my family, my confessor, and the authorities. Prayer, work, and solitude, that was my future, only that . . . but I do not have a martyr’s nature. If the conquistadors found hard times in the Americas, their wives had it much harder in Spain.
    I found ways to slip out of the custody of my sister and my brother-in-law; they feared me almost as much as they feared my mother, and to keep from having to confront me, they did not delve into my private life. They were satisfied as long as I did not create a scandal. I kept serving clients for my sewing and selling empanadas in the Plaza Mayor. I even gave myself the pleasure of attending fiestas. I also went to the hospital to help the nuns with the sick and the victims of plague and knife, because from the time I was young I had been interested in healing, with no idea that later in life that knowledge, along with my talent for cooking and locating water, would be indispensable. For like my mother, I was born with the gift of dousing. Often she and I would go out to the country with a laborer—or sometimes a señor—to show him where to dig his well. It’s easy. You hold a long stick from a healthy tree loosely in your hands and slowly walk across the terrain until the divining rod, sensing the presence of water, dips and points to the ground. That is where to dig. People said that my mother and I could make ourselves rich with that talent because a well in Extremadura is a treasure, but we always did it for nothing. If you charge for that favor, you lose the gift. Much later it would help me save an army.
    I waited for several years with very little news of my husband, except for three brief messages that came by way of Venezuela, which the priest read to me and helped me answer. Juan said that he was working hard and encountering danger, that vicious men were everywhere, that he was always looking over his shoulder and had to have his weapon ready anywhere he went, that there was gold in abundance, although he hadn’t seen it yet, and that he would return a rich man and build me a palace and I would live the life of a duchess. In the meantime, my days dragged by, slow, tedious, always in want. I spent only enough to subsist, and hid the rest in a hole in the floor. I did not tell anyone—I did not want to fuel gossip—but I intended to follow Juan in his adventure, whatever the cost, not out of love, which I no longer had for him, not out of loyalty, which he did not deserve, but to follow the lure of