LITMIR.BIZ

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both banks of the river, they were unable to find the bodies of the two Luises.

      ***

      Although a cart had been offered to carry Ana from where she had been found, Pedro refused to relinquish her care to another. Accompanied by black-robed men, whose mumbled prayers seemed to lack both rhyme and reason, he carried her from the bank of the river to the home of his father-in-law, Alonso Lopez, where Catalina, Diego and Lucia had been taken. Here Catalina and the children were lodged in their mother’s old bedroom, the room in which Ana and each of the children had been born. Surrounded by a throng of black-robed men, Ana was placed on her mother’s bed, which had been draped in black. In the flickering light of the priests’ candles, Diego and Lucia could see Ana wrapped in a small cotton blanket and cradled in their mother’s arms as if asleep. Outside the room, Pedro’s grief exploded in angry words regarding the unwelcome procession from the river. In his anguish, he likened it to “the pagan observance of the Robigalia,” the procession through fields of corn to pray for the preservation of the crops from mildew. “My God,” he exclaimed to his father-in-law who had attempted to console him, “have they nothing better to do? God save us from them!” He later apologized to the priests for his outburst, but they often had to deal with the peoples’ anger as they provided for their spiritual needs and had been little put off by his display.

      Catalina, ordinarily frail-looking, gentle, and perhaps a bit hesitant in her manner, had inevitably begun to crumble. Her conduct, if not yet that of one insane, was certainly that of an individual laboring under extreme distress. Mute and benumbed, she first lay with Ana in her room until the child was taken from her to prepare her for her burial. She then sat alone in her cell, an alcove which opened onto the zaguan, or vestibule, but which was completely dark and had previously served only for sleeping. There, draped in black, she sat with her head seemingly nailed to her hand and appeared to be involved in a battle to retain her senses. Asking repeatedly for Luis, she seemingly did not comprehend the responses she received. She sat like this through the day, refusing to leave Ana who had now been returned to her in a small pine box. Before Ana was removed from her room to the church, Catalina required that Pedro pry open the pine shell in which she had been placed. Then, with no alteration of demeanor, she looked at, and even put her hands on, Ana’s body, which was now wrapped in a white linen shroud, perfectly white and clean. Afterward, Catalina became totally closed off and listless.

      The coffin was placed on a poor catafalque before the great cathedral, a vast edifice of marble and granite, where the coffin was opened again, the box of wood pried apart, and her cerements again revealed. The grief stricken observers, among whom were Catalina’s children, were required to affirm that the body was truly Ana’s. Then the coffin was closed again and draped in black.

      Night was coming on by the time a cart was provided and the grim cortege was arranged in the cobbled street before the cathedral. There King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel had prayed before the tomb of their great- great-grandfather exactly a hundred years before. Catalina, supported by Pedro and followed by her two surviving children, walked barefoot behind the cart with a crush of priests chanting prayers for the dead as they began to wind their way toward the river.

      An opacous cloud of fog hugged the earth, “the heaviest cloud in the world,” noted Diego, and soon it became so dense that they were barely able to move along the road. They pushed on, however, stopping seven times along their route of desolation until Catalina, whose strength had been ebbing, was unable to walk any further. She was placed in the cart with Ana, and again they went forward.

      The procession continued along the river until the mourners arrived at an ancient and beautiful stone bridge across from which was the burial place. There the coffin was opened for a final time. Catalina kissed Ana’s hands and feet. And then, for what seemed like hours, the small group, wrapped in their plain trappings, huddled around the small coffin, their wax torches guttering in the wind. The service, like the procession itself, was the essence of simplicity and equality. “God is the true judge,” said one of the priests. “May her death be an atonement for all sins she may have committed, and may she come to her place in peace.”

      Pedro felt they were speaking of him and not of Ana. For what sins could this child have possibly committed? he asked himself.

      With the final words of the priest now spoken, they tore their garments to put the mark of a broken heart upon their clothing. Then, with the dark of night nearly upon them, they picked up the small box and lowered it into the virgin ground, the sound of the first fall of earth on the coffin providing an air of finality

      _____________

      That evening after their return from the burial ground, Pedro and his father-in-law walked through the entire house making an inventory of its contents.

      “You’ll take whatever you need Pedro,” his father-in-law said.

      “I’ll repay you, don Alonso,” Pedro responded quietly as they made their way from room to room.

      “We’re not going to worry about that now,” the older man said. “You’ll take what you need. And when you get to Sevilla, the cargo there will also be yours.”

      “I can’t repay you for that, don Alonso,” Pedro said. “I don’t think we can accept it.”

      “You’ll accept it, damn it!” his father-in-law said with a brief display of anger. “It’ll be your nest egg. It was to go to your cousin, Miguel de Sandoval, God rest his soul. But with him dead now, and with his wife, Catalina Sanchez now returned from New Spain, it’ll go to you.”

      “But if I go, don Alonso,” Pedro said emphatically, continuing the conversation in which they had been engaged, “it won’t be as a fugitive.”

      “However you go, Pedro,” his father-in-law responded as he closed the door to the storeroom they were leaving, “your days here are numbered.”

      “But as a free man,” don Alonso, Pedro said, “never as a renegade.”

      “Oh, your pride, Pedro,” Catalina’s father responded in exasperation, his lips tightening as though he was trying to control some emotion. “Your pride kept you from working for me, Pedro, and it’s going to get you killed.”

      “It wasn’t my pride that killed my children, don Alonso,” Pedro responded. “It was my fear . . . and my stupidity.”

      “What stupidity?” the older man asked as they ascended the worn stairs from the zaguan. “No one could have known the river would be in flood, Pedro. Do you think God is under an obligation to give notice of a coming misfortune? No one could have known,” he continued softly, his anguish now spent. “It was just an accident, Pedro,” he said while turning away from his son-in-law so that Pedro would not see the tears. He was silent before going on. “It was a tragic accident, that’s all,” he said quietly as he continued covering mirrors and emptying standing water throughout the house.

      Pedro sat on a stool that stood on one side of don Alonso’s estrado de cumplimiento, or state salon. From there he could see the pictures, the heavy, carved wooden chests, the delicate chests of drawers and the sideboards inside the room, as well as the salon’s balcony which stood outside its full length windows whose silken curtains now billowed in the wind. The balcony of forged iron, the angles of which were decorated with balls of copper, overlooked the towers and spires of the city and faced the damnable river, a sullen dark thing without obvious movement. As he looked at the balcony through the open windows, a rush of emotion seized him as he thought of the memories the balcony evoked. It was here that he had first held Diego and each of his children.

      “She was the most perfect child,” Pedro said of Ana, speaking more to himself than to Catalina’s father as he rose and moved toward the windows. “So bright and eager to learn. Nose to everything. If it was there, she had to know what and why. Questions all through the day,” he said of his five-year-old. “And Luis,” he continued with a catch in his throat, “he was just a baby. My poor innocent lambs,” he said. “There’s been such suffering and I alone am responsible.”

      He stood for a moment, lost in his own thoughts,

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