Juanita la Larga: a Novel

Chapter 25

Chapter 25 F ortunately Doña Inés did not hurry to bring into effect the plan for Juanita’s nunhood, thus giving her seamstress companion time to prepare for the rebellion with sufficient strength to throw off the yoke while not undermining her interests and schemes. Although Doña Inés felt and admitted that she was going to make an immense sacrifice on giving up Juanita, the only woman in the world who understood her and could be her companion, in no wise did she wish to dispense with this sacrifice that would bring her honor among mortals, and that God would take into account to reward her in heaven. So she persisted steadfastly in her plan, but retarded it, and while she retarded it she went about completing it in its particulars, consulting Father Anselmo about each and every one of them. Doña Inés decided that she would pay Juanita’s dowry. What she still vacillated over was the convent in which she should place her. After having rejected many, she thought about one in Écija, with whose abbess she corresponded, because it was there that nuns made the famous sponge cakes duplicated by Juana la Larga. But Doña Inés maintained that everyone with a good sense of taste recognized Juana’s imitation at once because it lacked the quid divinum that lent such an unforgettable flavor to the authentic ones, confections so good that if, with a crude and material supposition, we could imagine cherubim coming down to Earth with a message from on high and feeling the urge to eat something, they would undoubtedly eat only the sponge cakes made by the above-mentioned nuns. Notwithstanding such important considerations, we don’t know 131 why Doña Inés determined that Juanita would not go to the convent in Écija and in the end settled on the nuns of the Order of Santiago in Granada, where, if those extraordinary and inimitable sponge cakes are not made, the best syrups in all of Andalusia are. While Doña Inés drew up and readied her plan for Juanita, whose protector and director she had declared herself to be, her affection for the protégée and disciple was growing more and more, manifesting itself in odd displays and joining the sacred and profane in it. One day Doña Inés was so emotional that she undid Juanita’s hairdo, admired her abundant, wavy, soft mop of hair, and kissed her several times. She then said it would be gross disrespect were the rough, dirty hands of a peasant to touch her and run its fingers through that hair, and she already imagined it having been cut at the foot of the altar the day that Juanita professed her vows, and thus begged her to bequeath it to her, Doña Inés, because she would preserve it like a relic of inestimable value. Juanita was deeply appreciative of this flattering request of Doña Inés’s, and, almost with tears of gratitude in her eyes, promised Doña Inés that the mop of hair would be hers the day she cut it. Thanks to all the meetings and conferences between the two friends, Juanita was at Doña Inés’s house nearly every afternoon, not leaving her side or her house until after the hour when the gentlemen of the tertulia usually came. Some of the latter would see Juanita in the anteroom, and since she was there with her head uncovered and her face not hidden or shielded by a pulled-down shawl as required by modesty and sanctimony , Juanita, without being able to prevent it, did not strike them as all skin and bones and they often looked at her in a sinful manner . The most forward of these men was the master of the house himself , Señor Don Álvaro Roldán, who was very prone to laughter. But on several occasions when he found Juanita alone, he flirted with her 132 Juanita la Larga Juanita la Larga 133 with more ardor than jokes and savoir-faire, and Juanita, who saw in him someone on whom to unload her bad humor, always replied with pronounced surliness or sarcastic mockery. And since not even that discouraged Don Álvaro, one day he made bold to give the girl a pat on the cheek, and she...