Free Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende

and shiny as olives. Belalcázar first got her to pose for him, then he convinced her to take the scarf off her head, and finally, she agreed to undo her old woman’s bun and allow the breeze to toss her black curls. No matter what the documents with official seals say about our family’s purity of blood, I suspect that a good dose of Saracen blood runs through our veins. Constanza, liberated from her habit, resembled one of those odalisques on Ottoman tapestries.
    A day came when we all felt the gnawing of hunger. That was when I remembered my empanadas, and convinced the cook, a black man from the north of Africa whose face was embroidered with scars, to provide me with flour, lard, and a little dried meat, which I set to soak in saltwater before cooking it. From my own reserves, I took olives, raisins, cooked eggs—minced so that they would go farther—and cumin, an inexpensive spice that adds a particular flavor to a dish. I would have given anything for some onions, the kind that are so plentiful in Plasencia, but there were none left in the ship’s stores. I cooked the filling, kneaded the dough, and since there was no oven, prepared fried empanadas. They were a great success, and after that day everyone contributed some part of their provisions for the filling. I made empanadas with lentils, garbanzos, fish, chicken, sausage, cheese, octopus, and shark, and with them earned the gratitude of the crew and the passengers. I earned their respect when, after a storm, I cauterized wounds and set the broken bones of two of the sailors, as I had learned to do in the nuns’ hospital in Plasencia.
    That was the only event worthy of mention, aside from having escaped from French corsairs lying in wait for Spanish ships. Had they caught up with us, Maestro Manuel Martín explained, we would have met a terrible end, for they were very well armed. When we learned that danger was closing in on us, my niece and I knelt before the image of Nuestra Señora del Socorro and fervently pled for our salvation, and she sent us the miracle of a fog so thick that the French lost sight of us. Daniel Belalcázar said that the fog was already there before we began to pray; the helmsman had only to set a course toward it.
    This Belalcázar was a man of little faith, but very entertaining. In the evenings he would delight us with tales of his voyages, and of the things we would see in the New World. “No cyclops, no giants, no men with four arms and the head of a dog, but you most certainly will meet evil-spirited primitives—especially among the Spaniards,” he joked. He assured us that the inhabitants of the New World were not all savages: Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were more refined than we, he said; at least they bathed and did not go around crawling with lice.
    â€œGreed,” he said. “Pure and simple greed. The day we stepped onto the soil of the New World, it meant the end of those cultures. At first they welcomed us. Their curiosity was stronger than their caution, and when they saw that those strange bearded creatures from the sea liked gold, the soft, impractical metal they had such quantities of, they handed it out with both hands. However, our insatiable appetite and brutal pride soon became offensive to them. And why not! Our soldiers abuse their women, they go into their homes and take whatever they want without asking permission, and if anyone dares get in their way, they dispatch him with one thrust of the sword. They proclaim that the land they’ve so recently come to belongs to a sovereign who lives on the other side of the sea, and they insist that the natives worship a couple of crossed pieces of wood.”
    â€œYou must not let anyone hear you talking like this, Señor Belalcázar!” I warned him. “They will accuse you of being a heretic and betraying the emperor.”
    â€œI am simply saying what’s true. You will find, señora, that these