The Lastoc of the Annumpi: Maria's Choice

Chapter 4: Maria’s Choice

Maria closed the curtains and sat down at her dressing table. She needed to change, wash up, and then go back down to check on her father. She couldn’t ever remember seeing her father so upset. Maria was so very tired and it felt good to just sit in the silence of her room. She slid the pile of heavy books aside and propped her elbows on the table. She rested her chin in her hands and winced. That blister on her index finger still hadn’t healed completely. 

Maria looked in the mirror at her tired eyes, no sparkle there, and her blunt cut hair, no flowing locks, and sadness filled he thoughts. Why did things have to be so difficult? Why does my poor father have to suffer so much? Dangerous thoughts gathered speed as the tumbled past her weakened defenses. I could make it all better so easily. In two months my hair would long and shiny. Oh, and this damn painful bruise on my thigh would be gone. A cosmetic touch here and there and my eyes would sparkle. The cheek bones are fine, quite superior actually. Good high forehead, quite desirable I’m told. My hands, well, two months of daily manicures might remove the callouses and soften them, but gloves for a while would be safest. I know how to carry myself in those little silly shoes. In two months, I could go to a ball and capture one of those sad young foreign officers whose delicate wives died of fever in some tropical posting. I’ve captured more dangerous specimens. In four months, six at the least, I’d be married, Poppa would be happy, and a year later I’d be a mother and he’d be a ridiculously ecstatic grandfather. 

Just get married. It would be so easy. But not to Cupido. Not him. Never. The idiot was outside again staring at my window. Does he think that one night I’ll decide to undress in front of the open widow? Perhaps staring out into the darkness and stretching an arm to lift a breast provocatively. He’d probably swallow his tongue and then race off to one of his whores, running hunched over with small, mincing steps. The man’s pathetic. I must do something about his hanging around and bothering us. But not now, not tonight.

“Just get married.” The words kept sliding back into Maria’s brain. “Marriage is the easy way,” she thought. “All I have to do relax and let the current take me. Stop swimming against the tide and float. The current will pull me along.” Maria ran a comb through her hair, dislodging a few seeds and several strange, stiff hairs. But Maria was tough-minded and suspicious of easy answers by temperament and long training. “No, it is not a simple as abandoning your fight against the current. In you’re case, Donna Maria,” she said to the face in mirror speaking in the voice she used when lecturing the willfully ignorant,  “some time back you left the river of convention, crossed the gentle plains of eccentricity, climbed the foot hills of non-conformity, and took up quarters in the mountains of obstinacy. And you like it there.” 

Rubbing her sore thigh, Maria headed to the bathroom to clean up. As she dropped her soiled work clothes into a basket lined with canvas, she thought wistfully, “And the men you meet on the mountain aren’t too keen on you being there.”

*****

Maria tightened her robe around her waist and shot a quick, angry glance at the closed curtain as she walked downstairs to check on her father. She found him awake in the library finishing a sherry. He looked worn out and the image of his beaming face when she’d announce her marriage flashed past her eyes. She shook her head briskly to dismiss the idea.

“Poppa?,” she asked. “Would you like something to eat?”

“No, my dear. My stomach is so queasy.”

“Some crackers then, and some milk.”

“Alright,” he said. “That would be fine.”

Maria hurried down the narrow hall to the kitchen and returned with the crackers and milk and a small slice of cold chicken. “Mrs. O’Brien said you’re not eating enough. She wants you to eat the chicken, as well.”

Don Hernando nodded and reached for the chicken. It was more than he was worth to get on the wrong side of Mrs. O’Brien.  Maria drew a cracker out of the pocket of her robe and nibbled it. She’d eat dinner in the kitchen with Mrs. O’Brien and Rosa after she’d tidied things up. Her father took a bite of the chicken and laid the slice down on the plate.

They sat in silence for while, until Don Hernando abruptly said, “I miss your mother.”

Maria stiffened. Her father almost never spoke of her mother. 

“You are older now than she was when she died. She was so young.”

Maria did remember her in a way, but now she wasn’t sure if her memories were real or creations from bits and pieces she’d heard and paintings of her mother seen. She was not quite three when influenza swept through the countryside and took her mother along with so many others. It almost took her, but she stubbornly clung on to life.

Maria was drawn back to the present by her father’s soft voice. He sat heavily in his chair, crumpled against the back, so unlike his usual graceful self. His unfocused eyes stared blankly into a dark corner of the library. She wondered if he was talking to her or to others that she could not see. 

“I’ve tried to raise you properly. I though many times when you were younger that I should remarry so you would have a mother. A girl needs a mother. That’s the right way of things. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

Maria sat very still. She heard the pain in her father’s voice and felt the current pulling on her strengthen. It would be so easy.

“Darling, you know I never push you. You know I’ve always encouraged you in your interests. But have you considered what your choices will cost you?”

Maria was pulled up short. She had not expected this. Not so directly. She counted on her father to be on her side. She didn’t need someone else who demanded an explanation for her life.

Maria waited a bit to gather herself and then answered in a calm, firm voice. “Yes, sir, I have. I’ve weighed the costs of how I live and how people think I should live. I’ll pay the cost to live my way.”

“But you will be so lonely, my dear daughter. Look at me. And I am blessed with you.”

She reached over and grasped her father’s hand. He turned and looked at her. “Poppa, I never said I wouldn’t marry. But I’ve never met anyone who wants to marry me. To marry me as I am. Cupido doesn’t want me. He wants to humiliate you and complete his family’s long conquest of us. We are the last holdout against their plans and he hates us for that. He wants to defeat you and take the few remaining sections of land we possess. Besides no one in society will even approach me because of mother’s blood.”

Don Hernando recoiled as if slapped. 

“Oh, poppa, forgive me. I’m upset and tired or I never would have brought up such a painful matter. I don’t care that Mother was an Annumpi, but you know that society people do. No respectable family would accept me into their family. I don’t mean to hurt you or insult mother, but that’s the way things are and there’s no point wishing they were otherwise.”

She let the silence settle around them. “Damn,” she thought. “Why did I say that? That idiot Cupido marches in here and everything gets stirred up. Maybe if Chacha’s delivery had been simpler and she hadn’t knocked me around so much,” her hand rubbed her stiffening thigh, “I wouldn’t have been so tired. I don’t know. Why is all so hard? And why am I whining so much?”

Her father patted her hand and smiled at her. “You went away for a while, little one. You have much on your mind, I know.”

She smiled and said, “Just feeling sorry for myself, but I’m fine now.”

Don Hernando yawned and felt the weariness well up in him. Perhaps a short nap, the thought. He looked at his daughter. She looked so much like her mother. When he spoke the spaces between the words were oddly measured as the words struggled out against the tide of exhaustion that swept over the old man. “I loved your mother. I still do. I wish she were here to tell me what to do with our headstrong daughter that I love so much.”

Maria squeezed his hand. She held his hand until his even breathing registered he was asleep.  She stood up, kissed his brow, and swept his gray hair back from the eyes. She quietly lit a candle for herself and then snuffed the others. Instead of returning upstairs, she slipped through the hidden door on the opposite wall of the library and lit the oil lamps. She settled down at the large cluttered desk and drew a large notebook to her. She had some records to update. It had been a long, hard day all around.