Ines of My Soul Read Online Free Page B

freedom. There, far from everyone who knew me, I could take command of my life.
    My body burned with impatience. My nights were a hell. I tossed and turned in bed, reliving the joyous embraces with Juan in the days when we desired each other, hot even in the depths of winter and furious with myself and the world for having been born a woman and being condemned to the prison of tradition. I brewed sleeping potions following the advice of the nuns at the hospital, but they had no effect. I tried prayer, as the priest urged, but I was unable to finish an Our Father without straying into dark thoughts, because the Devil, who weaves his way through every part of life, was venting his cruelty on me.
    â€œYou need a man, Inés. You can do anything if you’re discreet,” my mother sighed, always the practical one. For a woman in my situation, it was easy to get a man, starting with my confessor, a bad-smelling, lascivious priest who wanted us to sin together in his dusty confessional in exchange for indulgences that would shorten my days in purgatory. Vicious old man; it never happened. If I had wanted, men would never have been in short supply. Occasionally, pricked by the devil’s pitchfork, I would embrace a man, but only out of need; there was no future for me there. I was tied to the ghost of Juan, and condemned to solitude. I was not truly a widow. I could not marry again; my role was to wait. Only wait. Wouldn’t it be better to face the perils of the sea and savage lands rather than grow old and die without having lived?
    Finally I obtained a royal permit to embark for the Americas, after negotiating for years. The Crown protected matrimonial ties and tried to reunite husband and wife in order to populate the New World with legitimate Christian families, but they did not rush to their decisions. Things move very slowly in Spain. They issued permits to married women to join their husbands only if a family member or another respectable companion went with them. In my case, that person was Constanza, my fifteen-year-old niece, the daughter of my sister, Asunción, a timid girl with a religious vocation, whom I chose as being the healthiest member of the family. The New World is not for the delicate. We did not ask her, but from the fit she threw, I have to believe that she was not attracted by the prospect of the journey. Her parents put her in my care with a promise, written and sealed before a scribe, that once I was reunited with my husband, I would send her back to Spain and would provide the dowry for her to enter a convent—a promise I was not able to fulfill, not for lack of honor on my part, but on hers, as will be seen later. To obtain my papers, two witnesses had to swear that I had no tainted blood—that I was not a Moor or a Jew, but an old Christian. I threatened the priest with revealing his lust before the Ecclesiastic Tribunal, and coerced him into writing a testimony of my moral quality. With my savings I bought what I needed for the journey, a list too long to detail here, although I remember it perfectly. Enough to say that I took food for three months, including a cage of chickens, in addition to the clothing and household utensils I needed to establish myself in the Americas.
    Pedro de Valdivia grew up in a timeworn stone house in Castuera, the land of poor hidalgos, more or less three days’ march south of Plasencia. I regret that we did not meet in our youth, when he was a handsome lieutenant passing through my city on his way back from some military campaign. We may have walked its twisting streets the same day. He was already a man wearing the colorful uniform of the king’s cavalry, and with a sword at his belt, and I still a girl with braided red hair—which color it was then, although later it grew darker. We might have passed each other in the church. His hand could have brushed mine at the holy water font, and we could have exchanged glances without