Free Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende Page A

conquistadors have no shame. They arrive as beggars, they act like thieves, and then they behave as if they were lords of the world.”
    Those three months at sea were as long as three years, but they allowed me to develop a taste for freedom. There was no family—except for the timid Constanza—neighbors, or priests to observe me, I did not have to give an accounting to anyone, and so I shed my widow’s black clothing and the undergarments imprisoning my flesh. In his turn, Daniel Belalcázar convinced Constanza to put away her nun’s habit and wear my dresses.
    The days seemed interminable and the nights even longer. The filth, the confinement, the limited, dreadful food, the men’s bad humor, all contributed to the purgatory of the crossing, but at least we had escaped sea serpents capable of swallowing up the ship, monsters, tritons, the sirens that drive sailors mad, the ghosts of the drowned, phantom ships, and St. Elmo’s fire. The crew had warned us of these and other dangers found at sea, but Belalcázar assured us that he had never seen any of them.
    One Saturday in August we sighted land. The water that had been deep and black became clear and blue as the sky. The ship’s dory took us to a beach of rippled sand licked by gentle waves. Sailors offered to carry us, but Constanza and I lifted our skirts and waded to shore. We preferred exposing our calves to being slung like sacks of wheat over the men’s shoulders. I had never imagined that the water would be so warm; from the ship it looked very cold.
    The village where we came ashore consisted of a few cane huts with palm-leaf thatch. The single street was a mud pit, and there was no church—nothing but a wooden cross on a promontory. The few inhabitants of that godforsaken spot were an assortment of sailors between ships, black- and brown-skinned persons, and the Indians. It was the first time I had ever seen the natives of these new lands—poor, nearly naked, miserable people they were. All around us was dense greenery and sweltering heat. The humidity soaked even into one’s thoughts, and the implacable sun bore down mercilessly. We could not endure the touch of our clothing, and took off as much as we could: collars, cuffs, shoes, and stockings.
    It did not take long to find that Juan de Malága was not there. The only person who remembered him was Padre Gregorio, an unfortunate Dominican priest who had been stricken with malaria and was now a man aged before his time; he was barely forty years old, but he looked seventy. For two decades he had wandered through the jungle with the mission of spreading the Christian faith, and in his wanderings had twice come across my husband. He confirmed that, like many hallucinatory Spaniards, Juan was looking for the mythic city of gold.
    â€œTall, handsome, a good card player, likable,” he said.
    It had to be Juan.
    â€œEl Dorado is something the Indians dreamed up to get rid of the foreigners,” the priest added. “Once they go looking for the gold, they end up dead.”
    Padre Gregorio offered his hut to Constanza and me. There we were able to rest while the sailors got drunk on a strong palm liquor and dragged the Indian girls, against their will, into the thicket that encircled the little settlement. Despite the sharks, which had followed the ship for days, Daniel Belalcázar steeped in that limpid water for hours. When he took off his shirt, we saw that his back was crisscrossed with the scars of lashings, but he offered no explanation and no one dared ask for one. On the voyage we had noticed that Belalcázar had a mania for washing, something he had learned in other lands. He wanted Constanza to go into the water with him, clothes and all, but I would not permit it. I had promised her parents that I would return her in one piece, not half eaten by sharks.
    At sunset the Indians lighted fires of green wood to combat the mosquitoes that