“You don’t know how sick of her I am,” I declared.
“Ignore her.” He had been avoiding her, cutting her off when she started conversations with him, but she persisted in her predatory inclinations.
“Is it so hard to understand that I hate having her here—flirting with you and trying to steal you away from me?”
He let out a deep, long breath and eyed me for a few seconds as if not knowing what to say.
“Ask me, Valentina,” he finally mumbled.
“Ask you what?”
“You’ve been meaning to ask me something for a while now, haven’t you?”
I stared at him in shock. How did he know?
“You’re eyes aren’t hard to read,” he stated, having read my mind.
My mouth dried out into chalky dust. “I . . . did you . . .”
“Ask me. Get it all out.”
Shaking, I suddenly realized how scared I was to know the truth. “Did you have an . . .”
“Finish,” he demanded.
“Did you and Gregoria . . .” It was as far as I could get with my tongue tying itself into a knot.
“No,” he stated simply.
“No?”
“No,” he repeated again.
“But, Leonardo, I never finished my question,” I blurted, suddenly being able to speak in full sentences. “You don’t know what I was asking.”
He folded his arms in front of him. “You were asking if Gregoria and I had had an affair before you got here.”
“How did you know—“
“I already told you. I can read your eyes.”
“You know me that well?” I asked, perplexed.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t sleep with Gregoria?”
“No.”
“But weren’t you lonely? Wasn’t the temptation of her throwing herself at you strong?”
He looked intently at me before speaking. “Valentina, when I was a child and my parents died, I was left with nothing except what they had taught me. That’s all I had, and I was taught to keep my word. I promised on our wedding day that I would be faithful to you, and my word is stronger than anything.”
“I know the kind of integrity you have,” I said quietly.
“Besides,” he continued, “I’ve never told anyone about this but . . .”
“What is it?”
“When I was a kid, I went with my uncle to this house in town. He left me outside while he went inside. After a while, he came out with this woman. He ordered me never to say anything about us being there.”
“The woman was his mistress?”
“Her name was Jovita, and he would always visit her. Everything about my uncle was so ugly. He cheated on his family—the people he was supposed to take care of. I promised I’d never be like him. Never!”
I let out a heavy breath from deep inside my throat. “If you knew I was agonizing over whether you had been together with Gregoria, why didn’t you put me out of my misery?”
He took his time before speaking. “I guess I wanted to hurt you like you had hurt me with Lucio.”
“What?” I blurted in surprise. I had never known him to be vengeful.
“I’m sorry,” he expressed, his dark eyes at their most sincere.
“I’m sorry that we keep hurting one another,” I mumbled.
His hand started caressing my hair. “I’ve never wanted to hurt you. I’ve always wanted you to be happy. That’s why I’d leave you the flowers and moved out of the way for Lucio because I thought he could make you happy.”
I took his hand from my hair and kissed it. “I love you, Leonardo.”
These first-time words had come out of my mouth smoother than stones in a river. It seemed they had been stuck inside of me desperately wanting to be set free. I had said similar words before to Lucio but never with such passionate force and overwhelming intensity.
His eyebrows knit together. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
“I do mean it.”
“You do?” he asked, surprised.
“I love you, Leonardo. You are my life.”
His strong arms wrapped around me, squeezing until I was out of breath.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear those words,” he murmured.
Chapter 50: Valentina
When Gregoria realized that my husband and I no longer had arguments over her and that he would forever ignore her, she walked around deflated. Her light-brown eyes lacked shine and her once beautiful caramel hair hung limply over her shoulders, greasy and tangled. The food she cooked and sold to lonely soldiers also suffered, and they complained that her meals lacked flavor.
One of them announced, “I might as well eat dirt. It would taste better.”
I finally got the chance to talk to her one day when we were left alone at the camp.
“We need to finish that conversation we started at the river,” I snapped.
“Why don’t you go back home?” she cried. “Why are you even here?”
“You’re the one who should leave,” I responded furiously. “What a low woman you are trying to take away my husband right from under my nose! Don’t you have any shame?”
“You don’t love him,” Gregoria blurted, her voice breaking. “I love him, but you love someone else.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You love Lucio Sevilla! That’s the man you love!”
“What?” She almost knocked me over with her announcement.
“You thought I didn’t know, right?” she continued. “But I know everything. I know that you had a secret love, I know that he gave you a heart-shaped necklace that you always wore, and I know that he asked you to marry him, but you changed your mind at the last minute.”
“How . . . how do you know all that?” I mumbled.
“Lucio told me.”
“Lucio?”
Then she told me the story—the one I had told my husband I never wanted to hear. It was a tale marked with tragedy, sadness, and tears. Unfortunately, I was at the center of this whirlwind and when Gregoria started explaining what had happened, I was not able to tear myself away.
When Lucio had married into the Montenegro family, he hadn’t actually known what he had gotten himself into. Gregoria had been a servant in the Montenegro household since she had been fourteen years old, so she knew all their dark secrets. As it turned out, Delfina’s family had lost all their wealth through a bad management of money a long time ago. They had to move back to the hacienda next to the Sevilla one because they had lost their home in Europe. Keeping their financial status a secret, Don Timoteo had set about finding rich husbands for his daughters. Fortunately, Delfina had fallen in love with a good prospect.
Don Timoteo took his family to the United States, hoping his fortune would change and knowing the Sevilla family would soon join them. His good friend, Don Clemencio, was as anxious as he was for Lucio to marry Delfina.
Lucio arrived in the United States looking lost and weary—very unlike his jovial self. Delfina’s kindness and his family’s insistence that he form a union with her wore him down. He married her in a barely put together ceremony and started drinking soon after. No one could snatch the bottle away from his hands. It was during one of his drunken bouts that he told Gregoria the story of his great love. Eventually, Lucio got word about what had happened to his father. Leonardo had known Lucio’s address through a letter from Doña Clotilde in Don Clemencio’s pocket. He had sent a friend to El Paso to tell him about Don Clemencio’s death.
“Leonardo did that?” I asked, surprised.
“He's such a considerate person,” answered Gregoria.
Lucio quickly headed for Juarez with Gregoria and a male servant for the body of his father. After the shock of seeing Don Clemencio dead and giving him a Christian burial, he refused to return to El Paso until he spoke to Leonardo. When receiving the message, Leonardo did
n’t hesitate to meet with Lucio. He soon arrived at the empty courtyard behind the hotel where Lucio was staying.
“I’m sorry about your father,” said Leonardo.
“Thank you for sending me word,” Lucio solemnly expressed, his voice shaky and already infused with the injection of alcohol. Out of respect for his father, though, he had drunk far less than usual. “We wouldn’t have known what had happened if it wasn’t for you.”
“I’ve got to get back,” Leonardo asserted, turning away, “and you should get back across the border.”
“Wait,” Lucio blurted and Leonardo turned back to face him.
“Yes?”
Lucio swallowed hard. “I’ve got to ask you something.”
“What?”
“About Valentina.”
“What about her?” Leonardo asked defensively.
“Do you know how she is?”
“She’s fine,” asserted Leonardo, his voice taking on a rigid tone.
“Is she?” he questioned anxiously.
“Yes, fine.”
“She’s with her parents?” he asked hopefully.
“Yes.”
The relief was visible on his face. “So she hasn’t gotten married,” he blurted, more to himself than to anybody in particular.
“You don’t know?” asked Leonardo, surprised.
“Know what?”
“Valentina is married,” stated Leonardo, harshness in his voice.
Lucio’s face crumbled as if he had been gut punched. “She is?”
“Yes.”
“She couldn’t be, she just couldn’t be,” he repeated over and over again. “How can she be married?”
“Why not?” asked Leonardo. “You got married, didn’t you?”
“I married a woman I didn’t love. Who did she marry?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Who?” Lucio demanded.
Leonardo stepped closer to him. “Me.”
“You?” A complete disbelief was visible in Lucio’s words.
“Yes, me,” Leonardo retorted.
Lucio took a step closer to him, putting himself face to face with an unflinching Leonardo. “How could she have married you?”
“She did,” he affirmed, not retreating.
“But she loves me!” Lucio blurted. “She’ll never love you! Never!”
A furious Leonardo swung the first punch, cracking Lucio’s jaw. Lucio was thrown back with the force of a hurricane but quickly recovered and started swinging back, his fists in knurled balls. But his strength and fighter’s instincts couldn’t compare to Leonardo’s who soon had him on the ground.
“Stop,” Gregoria pleaded with Leonardo. “You’re going to kill him.”
Leonardo woke up from his frenzied fury and got off of Lucio. Both fighters tried to catch their ragged breaths and wipe off the blood and sweat from their faces. They didn’t say a word, just glared at each other. After a few moments of ugly silence, Leonardo, already being on his feet, turned around to leave.
“You should’ve killed me!” yelled Lucio, his voice caught in valley of pain. “My life is already over anyway.”
After that, Gregoria and the other servant took Lucio back to El Paso where he doubled up on his drinking. The secret the Montenegro family had been harboring so carefully finally came out, and there was nothing but misery in the house. The last of the money was almost gone, Lucio’s sisters went around in a fog over their lost fortune and status, and Delfina sobbed continuously that her husband threw in her face that he didn’t love her. All the servants were eventually dismissed because of the lack of funds to pay them. Gregoria ended up in Mexico again and selling food to the soldiers to be able to sustain herself.
“That’s when I got to know Leonardo and what a great man he is,” Gregoria sighed. “I always liked him from the hacienda days, but he never talked to me back then.”
“I never knew that he and Lucio had confronted each other,” I muttered, still shocked over the story she had told me.
“That’s why I’m telling you now—so that you know.”
“Know what?” asked Leonardo, having just arrived with a slew of others to the campsite. His eyes went from her to me with concern as he stepped over to where I was standing.
“I told her about what happened with Lucio when his father died.”
He frowned deeply. “Why did you do that, Gregoria?”
“Valentina has a right to know,” she insisted strongly. “I’m going to tell her everything, even about how close we were getting when she arrived to ruin it.”
“You and I were never close,” he snapped. “You know damn well we never lay together.”
“There are other types of intimacy.”
“You can never have what Leonardo and I have,” I declared furiously.
“What do you have?” Gregoria asked, her mouth in disgust. “He has to live his life wondering about you and Lucio.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Leonardo affirmed strongly. “We’ve already made our peace with everything.”
“I don’t see how!” she retorted, her composure becoming at its most erratic. “How can you have so little pride to be with someone who loves someone else?”
“I do love Leonardo,” I announced.
She vehemently shook her head. “How can you believe her, Leonardo?”
“I do believe her,” he asserted, his voice as steady and firm as I had ever heard it. “This conversation is over.”
“But—“
“Gregoria, you need to leave us alone. Let’s go Valentina.”
“But she’s making a buffoon out of you, Leonardo. Don’t be a fool!”
“Stop it, Gregoria,” Leonardo demanded. “Stop setting my wife against me and me against her. It’s not going to work. Stay away from us—you and the trouble you’re trying to cause.”
“But Leonardo—“
“Stay away!”
“Don’t do this to me,” Gregoria begged with desperation. “Don’t treat me this way.”
“I have to put an end to all of this,” he explained. “You’ve got to respect my wife, Gregoria. You can’t be trying to get in between us.”
“But I love you Leonardo—much more than she claims to love you.”
“How would you know what I feel for my husband?” I questioned furiously.
“Let’s just leave, Valentina,” Leonardo insisted.
I nodded. “You’re right. It’s no use being here.”
Gregoria grabbed Leonardo’s arm. “But—“
“Gregoria,” he said sternly as he jerked his arm away, “I don’t want to keep telling you to leave us alone.”
“You can’t humiliate me like this,” she sobbed, her eyes darting to the crowd that had gathered around us. “You can’t.”
Leonardo looked exasperated. “Gregoria—“
She scampered to Leonardo until she was standing directly in front of him. “How can you treat me this way? All I’ve ever done is love you! All I’ve ever done is try to show you that you’re the only man in my life. You would never have to share my love with anybody!”
“Gregoria—“
“I thought you were special, but I was wrong, very wrong!”
Gregoria’s out-of-control emotions started to concern me. Instinctively, I stepped closer to her because something inside of me told me to do it. She ignored me as she continued to rant at my husband.
“You’re a beast, an animal—“
“Calm down, Gregoria,’ Leonardo entreated.
“You don’t deserve to live!” she declared, and before anyone realized what she was doing, she grabbed the gun in Leonardo’s holster and pointed it at him.
“Gregoria, give me the gun,” Leonardo murmured softly.
“I’m going to kill you!”
Swiftly knocking the gun out of her hands, I pushed Gregoria back. The weapon went off, but the bullet exploded on the ground. Leonardo
grabbed the gun while she fell to her knees sobbing and gasping for air.
“Why did you do this to me, Papa? Why?” she kept repeating over and over again.
Her comadres got her off the ground and took her away, soothing her. The rest of the people at the campsite stared at her with odd expressions.
Leonardo put his hands on my shoulders. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I stated, my throat in a knot and a tremble still with me.
He kissed my forehead. “You did a very stupid thing, Valentina.”
“I couldn’t let her shoot you.”
“She could’ve easily turned the gun on you.”
“But she didn’t.”
“But she could’ve.”
“Just thank me,” I said, smiling.
“Thank you,” he murmured as he planted a warm kiss on my lips.
A few hours later when we were much calmer, we ate burritos with a small amount of beef I had managed to procure. I smothered them with my specialty chipotle salsa. One of Gregoria's comadres interrupted our dinner to tell us that Gregoria had left and that we shouldn’t worry.
“What if she comes during the night and tries to kill you?” I asked Leonard after the comadre had left, my voice shaky.
“The guards won’t let her in the campsite anymore,” he stated.
“I just don’t understand why she got so crazy. And what was she saying about her father?”
“Her father raped her,” Leonardo said gravely.
“What?”
“When she was a child, he’d take her to the corn fields. She ran away from home when she was fourteen to work for the Montenegros.”
“How horrible!” I exclaimed, completely shocked. “How do you know this?”
“She told me.”
“She did?”
“One day I caught her sobbing next to a river like you used to, and I couldn’t help but ask her what was wrong. She said she had been living with a secret that was eating her up alive. She told me her story, and I felt sorry for her, so I’d let her stay around me. I guess she misinterpreted my feelings.”
The overwhelming anger I felt for Gregoria dissipated. There’s a saying that goes, No one knows what’s in the sack except for the one who carries it.
“Poor Gregoria,” I murmured.
A month later, we heard that Gregoria had gone home, killed her father with a sharp pair of scissors and fled. No one knew anything about her again.
Chapter 51: Valentina
Life after Gregoria left became as calm as it could be with a war exploding all around us. Leonardo was less tense, and I didn’t walk around with a constant clenched fist, ready to pounce. But calm in the middle of a tempestuous storm didn’t last long because once again someone from the past reared his ugly head.