Read Online Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende - Free Book Online Page B

in the firmament. He assured me that I could rest easy, for he had made the voyage many times and the route was well known to Spaniards and Portuguese, who had been following it for decades. Navigation charts were no longer as closely guarded as they once had been; even the damned English had them now. He made it clear that it was a different matter when it came to charts of the Strait of Magellan, or the Pacific coast. Pilots guarded those with their lives; they were more valuable than any New World treasure.
    I never grew used to the motion of the waves, the creaking wood, the grating iron, the incessant flapping of wind-whipped sails. By day I was tormented by the crowded conditions and, especially, the way the men stared at me with the eyes of dogs in heat. I had to fight for my turn to place our olla on the cookstove, as well as for privacy to use the latrine, a large box outfitted with a hole and suspended over the ocean. Constanza, in contrast, never complained, and even seemed content. After a month at sea, supplies began to grow scarce, and water, by now fouled, was rationed. Because the men stole the eggs, I moved the cage with my hens to our cabin, and took them outside twice a day with a string around their legs, like lapdogs being taken for a stroll.
    On one occasion I had to use my frying pan to defend myself from a sailor more brash than the others, a certain Sebastián Romero, whose name I have never forgotten because I know we will meet again in purgatory. In the close quarters of the ship, this man seized the slightest excuse to fall against me, blaming it on the waves. I warned him again and again to leave me alone, but that merely excited him further. One night he found me alone in the small area beneath the bridge that served as a kitchen. Before he could get his hands on me, I felt his fetid breath on the nape of my neck and, without thinking twice, I half-turned and thumped him on the head with the frying pan, exactly as I had years ago to poor Juan de Málaga when he threatened to strike me. Sebastián Romero had a softer skull than Juan, and fell sprawling to the deck, where he lay for several minutes as if asleep, while I searched for rags to bandage his head. He did not lose as much blood as one might have expected, though later his face did swell and turn the color of an eggplant. I helped him to his feet, and since neither of us was eager to spread the truth about his injury, we agreed to say that he had banged his head against a beam.
    Among the passengers on the ship was a chronicler and sketch artist, one Daniel Belalcázar, who had been sent by the Crown with the assignment of drawing maps and recording his observations. Belalcázar was a man of about thirty-five, slim and strong, with the angular face and dark skin of an Andalucian. He would trot from bow to stern and back again for hours, exercising. He combed his hair back into a short braid and wore a gold earring in his left ear. The one time that a member of the crew made some remark about him, he punched the man in the nose and no one bothered him again.
    Belalcázar, who had begun his voyaging as a young man, and who knew the remote coasts of Africa and Asia, told us how on one occasion he was taken prisoner by Barbarrosa, the feared Turkish pirate, and sold as a slave in Algiers, from which he had escaped after two years of great suffering. He always carried a thick notebook wrapped in waxed cloth, in which he wrote his thoughts in little letters that tracked across the page like ants. He entertained himself in sketching the sailors performing their duties, and devoted a great deal of time to drawing my niece. In preparation for life in the convent, Constanza dressed like a novice, wearing a heavy cloth habit she had sewn herself. A triangle of the same cloth, tied beneath the chin, covered half her forehead and all her hair. This horrendous garb, however, was not able to hide her proud carriage or her splendid eyes, black