Part I
Wedding Day

When young Josefina dreamed of her wedding day, she never imagined it would come this soon in her life, neither with the richest man in town. From the day she met Don Ramon de Altamira her life turned into a fairytale. In front of the tall oval shaped mirror, she contemplated herself, wishing some of the servants assisting her was brave enough to pinch her arm to prove what she was living was real.

Standing behind Josefina, her mother, Doña Magdalena stared at her smiling, eyes glowing filled with pride. "If your father could see you now."

"No please Mom, you're gonna make me cry" the bride replied, eyes watering while fanning her face with her hand.

"No darling, don't. Look at yourself, dressed like a princess on your wedding day, the happiest day of your life", Doña Magdalena cupped her daughter's face in her hands.

A gentle knocking at the door interrupted the lovely mother-daughter moment before it opened and Josefina's uncle peeped his face and smiled. "Are we ready?" It was more a fatherly call than a question. "They're waiting for us."

Both ladies held hands and Doña Magdalena kissed the bride's forehead giving her blessing.

While the stunning brunette paraded, holding arms with her uncle over a rug of white roses' petals and green grass in the hacienda's back yard, her mind filled with memories altogether with the man she would marry to that day. A fortuitous encounter, she remembered, the morning she was riding with her mother the cart hauled by horses to town. Doña Magdalena, a widow five years since, pushed forwards her work as a seamstress to sustain themselves and to maintain the minor fruits crops and small business, her husband, Don Lucio Benvenutti, a Corsican immigrant, began when he first settled in Yauco after the Royal Graces Decree granted him with a no more than ten acres land.

Magdalena and Josefina, ten and six years then, rode by themselves to buy some fabrics and laces when one of the rustic iron and wood wheels broke, leaving them grounded by the dirt road. After nearly twenty minutes stuck, Don Ramon de Altamira the proud landlord of Central Vista Hermosa, the most productive sugar plantation in the Island, arrived like the hero in a fairy tale to rescue the ladies in distress.

The handsome man, sun-toasted skin and light hazel eyes, dressed in his elegant hacendado's fashion, dismounted his cart with diligence and helped them. Rolling up his sleeves, Don Ramon and his servants fixed the wheel, attaching it back to the car under a blazing tropical sun. Staring back at him, Josefina waved goodbyes and curved up timidly her lips up, more in fascination than thankfulness while departing, riding back to town.

Since that very first met, de Altamira fell in love with the teenager girl and it was soon after the man, a widower in his mid-thirties, asked permission to court beautiful Josefina.

On that day, a year later, the stunning and lively lady couldn't believe herself as she sashayed, her heart pounding with joy, towards the altar to the compass of a nuptial waltz as happiest as she ever imagined to be. Under the shade of a gorgeous iron carved and cedar thatched gazebo, the priest pronounced them husband and wife on a magnificent autumnal afternoon in the island's southern coastal plains.