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Carmen knelt beside the unmarked grave barely able to hold back her tears while she read the letter aloud that she had written for her love before his untimely death. She began to write it—like she had written all the others—while her husband slept in the dark hours before dawn. And she continued to write it during the day when Gonzalo left her in the morning without a kiss. She completed it in the evening when Gonzalo failed to return home at a decent hour.
He attended private meetings with members of his inner circle. Though he claimed they deliberated over civic matters on their personal time—as a show of commitment to Old Sienna—Carmen knew the truth of it. In part because the other wives had grown suspicious of their husbands who arrived home smelling of rum and perfume, which led to allocating funds for a new bath house in the basement of the civic center where the private meetings were held, and in part because Gonzalo had a penchant for talking in his sleep when he consumed too much rum.
Gonzalo muttered their names in a haze of dreams and shadows. Lorena, Claudia, Cecilia, Fermina, Gabriela, Magdalena, Patricia, Teresa and Beatriz. His whispers—a litany of empty promises and flattery to persuade the women to fulfill his desires—broke Carmen’s heart, killing her softly in the bed where he laid beside her, but refused to touch her.
She fell asleep shedding silent tears wondering why her husband did not want her and what she had done to lead him astray. It wasn’t until after she met El Prieto, Señor Gabriel Aquino, one morning when her carriage took her to the sea that her life had changed. She had never seen the man before that day, for he had just returned from America to bury his wife. He was standing in the water watching the sunrise when her carriage approached. He introduced himself when he returned to the shore and noted the redness in her eyes.
Carmen wiped away her tears but she could not hide the weariness in her gaze. She hadn’t slept in days. For several nights, she lay in bed waiting for her husband to return and she laid awake—pretending to be asleep—waiting for his caress. His snoring broke the silence and his whispers broke her heart.
She’d watch Gonzalo sleep. He always slept on his back. His round lips partially open beneath his thin black mustache with streaks of grey despite his youth. His short coarse hair also peppered with streaks of grey around his forehead complimented his caramel complexion. Gonzalo was a tall man with a robust frame who went to bed late and rose before the dawn.
Carmen laid in bed silent. She wanted to question him about his late nights and early mornings, but she feared his temper. Instead she waited until after he left before she climbed out of bed and had her carriage take her to the sea. She contemplated suicide by drowning, similar to the legend of La Llorona—the Nahua woman who served as Hernán Cortés’s mistress, only to be abandoned by her lover so that he could marry someone else—which spread throughout the region after the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
It was there in the early morning light when Gabriel Aquino ambled up to her on the sandy shore. He inquired about the sadness in her eyes. She averted her gaze and avoided his questions, but the man persisted with a gentle voice as calm as the ocean breeze. “No one comes to the water without questions in their heart.” Gabriel prepared to offer the compassion she needed. It would not be the first time he offered advice on matters of love, nor would it be the last.
Her tragic beauty surprised him. Lovely in her natural splendor like a flower left to grow in the wild and to be loved by no one.
“It is not appropriate for a woman to discuss her marital troubles with another man,” Carmen said without meeting his gaze.
“Indeed you are correct,” Gabriel Aquino turned toward the horizon. “Though I can assure you I have no intention of dishonoring your name.”
Carmen cast him a sidelong glance. In the four years of their marriage, Gonzalo had never said a kind thing to her. Here a stranger treated her like a woman, and she wondered about his motives.
“Only a man who does not understand the true nature of love will attempt to seduce another man’s woman under the guise of friendship.”
“What makes you an expert on such matters?” Carmen eyed him suspiciously.
“I would hardly consider myself an expert, but I daresay heartbreak is a great teacher.”
“What do you know of heartbreak?”
“It is the purest form of pain. It will shatter your soul and leave a scar on your heart that never heals.”
They sat on the patio of his boathouse facing the open sea. They conversed like old friends aware of each other’s lot in life. Gabriel Aquino met her at a time when she wanted to love her husband, even though Gonzalo had no intention of reciprocating her affections. And Carmen met Gabriel in a time when he was no longer open to falling in love, for he had already experienced that perfection and did not wish to taint the memory of his late wife by searching for love with another woman.
In that moment Gabriel became the brother she never had and they spoke without concern for the time that passed. She asked about the motives of men to better understand her husband’s behavior and he clarified the fragility of the male ego, which did not excuse immoral behavior, but provided the insight she sought. Insight he did not possess in his youth, for it is the wisdom that only comes with age and experience. He put on a pot of coffee with beans he brought back from his time in Colombia. The morning sun sauntered across the heavens as Carmen revealed her dilemma.
She was married to a man chosen by her father to secure her future without considering her need for love.
“Love is a fickle notion at your age and marriage under such circumstances never lasts!” Her father, a Colonel in the Army, had said. “You will marry for the future. It is there that love will greet you after your husband has exhausted his body’s desires and all that remains is his need for your company in the winter of his life.”
“What about my needs?” Carmen had protested.
“Your priority will be your family. Your needs will be theirs.”
Gabriel Aquino listened without interrupting, like a preacher in a confessional, as Carmen revealed her pain to a man she did not know. For it was as it has always been that we reveal more to strangers than we reveal to those we know. What she did know was that despite the dichotomy of their personal circumstances they shared a longing for love inherent in the heart of every romantic.
She understood this by the way he remembered his late wife. Her memory lingered like a ghost. He saw her often and felt her presence, but when he whispered his affections she did not reply. When he apologized for not being a better husband she would not forgive him. He never felt lonelier than when he woke in the morning and fell asleep at night.
They spoke about everything; in accordance with the method strangers use to become friends. What impressed him most about the well-educated Colonel’s daughter who possessed a natural instinct for love was her ability to articulate her thoughts and feelings as only someone who said intelligent things knew how to do.
She gained a profound understanding in that moment that it was possible to speak with a man about love and not have him misconstrue the conversation as an invitation to betray her vows.
Over time they came to enjoy each other’s company. Meeting on Saturday mornings at his boathouse to drink coffee and discuss literature. They conversed about the Romantic Period, the literary and intellectual movement of the second half of the 18th century and the implications the movement had across Europe. They debated whether Puerto Rico would have had greater success in achieving independence from Spain, and later the United States, through intellectually-inspired means, in lieu of the series of unsuccessful revolts and attacks that began with the Taíno rebellion of 1511 and continued protests during the American acquisition of Puerto Rico, which had been justified by American politicians as part of American Manifest Destiny.
It was difficult to imagine that a woman of noble standing would risk a scandal with her friendship to a widower who lived beyond the city limits and visited him on a weekly basis. Nevertheless, their friendship blossomed and when her chauffeur suggested if perhaps it would have been more prudent to cease her weekly visits before her husband learned about them and assumed the worst, she thanked him for his concern and carried on for several years with her innocent interactions. She did so with the same confidence she possessed when she engaged in intellectual discourse, certain of her position and certain about the outcome.
That certainty, however, was lost to her the day she met the love of her life. She was at the market in the Plaza of Los Rios. She navigated through the crowds with the grace of a swan dismissing the urgings of the merchants, the snake charmers and the charlatans. She negotiated prices in her favor for the items she needed, and paid with pieces of gold to remind the shopkeepers they needed her more than she needed them.
It was in that moment—with permission from God—when destiny and love conspired to answer her prayers.
He first caught her eye when he stood beneath the archway leading into the Alley of the Angels. The alley ran from the marketplace in the church square at the center of Old Sienna to the eastern entrance of the Cathedral of Santa Maria. The white and brown cobblestone path complimented the stonework of the buildings linked by the archway. Statues of angels stood in the crevices carved out of the alley walls as the midday sun cast angular shadows against the stones.
She froze at the sight of him. To her he seemed so handsome, so seductive, so different from any other man she had ever seen, that she could not understand how he stood there virtually unnoticed by every other woman in the crowd. His dark brown eyes locked with hers. He resembled a bronze statue with his caramel complexion and stoic expression as he studied her from a distance. The man remained motionless in his vest and dustcoat, with a thin beard and his hair parted neatly down the center.
She lowered her eyes when she met his intense gaze. That brief glance was the beginning of a tragic love that altered the fate of Old Sienna.
After she recovered from the seismic tremor of love at first sight Carmen Alicia de la Vega made to return to her carriage. She navigated through the bustling crowd forgetting to breathe. Absent was the doe’s gait she possessed moments ago. She bumped into people and they collided into her. Shoving her this way and that in the clamor of the market.
She glanced over her shoulder, but the stranger no longer stood beneath the arch. He hurried after her without letting himself be seen. Keeping her in his line of sight as he maneuvered through the crowd hoping to catch her before she escaped.
Amid the haggling between merchants and shoppers a thief was spotted and the crowd bottlenecked as an argument ensued. Carmen arrived at her carriage. Her chauffer held the door open. She stood in the carriage entrance with one foot on the ground and the other on the footboard. She turned back to face the crowded market and scanned the sea of unfamiliar faces. She hoped to catch another glimpse of the stranger, to gaze into his eyes and feel the intensity of his stare as he looked into her soul.
She spotted him, cornered and trying to push through the crowd. Their eyes met. He froze. A hint of a smile played on his lips. He shrugged. He surrendered the authority of his presence to the chaos and allowed himself to be carried away with the momentum of the mob. He lifted his satin top hat to bid her farewell.
Carmen struggled to suppress a smile as she climbed into the carriage. She stared, lost in thought, through the window on the opposite side of the carriage. It rocked as it traveled over the cobblestone streets. The moment was as Hesiod wrote in the Theogony, “From their eyelids as they glanced dripped love.”