‘I have heard of exotic places, but this truly is a wonder. Green, very green, and not a single lamppost.’
Everyone was staring at the white man stepping cautiously out of the carriage.
‘Hello, José. Do you remember me?’
‘How could I not remember you? You’d do well not to come any closer; it is your fault that the leg of my mare was hacked off.’
‘You don’t say! When was this?’
‘While you were telling me that my son Melecio was gifted and that you wanted to help him. That was the very moment the bandido chose to strike.’
‘I beg your forgiveness. It’s true I did detain you for some time. Here you are, José.’ Don Emilio had Aureliano unhitch one of the thoroughbred horses and handed over the reins. ‘Once again, my sincere apologies.’
José looked Emilio Bacardí up and down incredulously and eventually pointed to Evaristo the kite-maker, explaining that the mare had been his.
Evaristo hesitantly stepped towards the white man. ‘I . . . I . . . I . . . don’t know . . .’
‘Allow me . . . Is the gentleman a stutterer?’ asked Don Emilio. ‘Because I have the perfect cure. It is called Indian honey and is a syrup confected from a variety of psychotropic plants which restores the balance of the central nervous system. The problem is centred in the brain. I shall send you a bottle.’
Evaristo was incapable of responding, his stutter growing ever worse. No one present had ever seen him in such a state, his eyes welled with tears and he trembled with excitement. The villagers had not yet decided whether to trust the stranger. Again and again they weighed him up, inspecting his coachman and his carriage and finally looking back at José waiting for some signal that would tell them how to behave towards the outsider.
El Jabao was first to break the ice. He walked up to Don Emilio and said cordially, ‘No, señor, Evaristo is not a stutterer, he is just nervous. Don’t worry about what happened just now, he will be fine in a moment. It has been a long time since an outsider has visited our village, so you can imagine how curious we are. The truth is that you could not have arrived at a better moment. What is your name?’
‘Emilio! His name is Emilio Bacardí,’ Evaristo said finally, without stuttering.
Emilio Bacardí looked at him, smiling. El Jabao went on, ‘Well, Señor Emilio. Before you arrived, we were discussing which of the villagers here should go to El Cobre to study and become the future schoolteacher for our village. The options are these . . .’
Juan Carlos, Anastasia Aquelarre, Ana Cabrera, Silvia Santacruz and Melecio took a step forward. One by one Emilio Bacardí studied them, with the exception of Melecio whom he treated as though he did not exist. José realised that the stranger’s attitude had changed; he glanced at Betina, but his wife gestured for him to remain calm and let matters play out.
‘Now,’ said El Jabao, ‘I think the best way to decide the future teacher for our village is to have a sack race, but no one will agree. Nor are they prepared to simply put the matter to a vote, meaning a show of hands with the candidate who receives the most votes being declared the winner. And another thing, Juanita, the wise-woman, the woman at the back there, has threatened that if we do not choose her she will bring down a terrible curse on us. Perhaps you could help. What do you think would be best?’
‘What I think is that now would be the moment to give you the gifts I’ve brought,’ said Don Emilio and the coachman quickly began to unload from the carriage dozens of baskets of bread, roast suckling pig, legs of ham and earthenware bottles filled with rum.
The inhabitants of Pata de Puerco had never seen so much food. But they remained wary and nobody moved. The coachman told them to go ahead, the food was for them: that if they did not eat it, it would go to waste. José nodded. In the blink of an eye, the villagers fell upon this banquet. Everyone grabbed a leg of ham to take home while stuffing themselves from the other baskets and swigging rum. There was mango juice and guava juice for the children and toys the like of which they had never seen. José watched as Betina, Geru, Melecio and Benicio ate frantically, sampling every delicacy.
In the midst of this ravening ferocity, José walked over to the coachman and said, ‘I was told your master’s son fought with Maceo. Is it true?’
‘Yes, señor. Emilito his name is. I told you, José, Don Emilio Bacardí is an extraordinary man. Not long ago he went to a far-off country called Egypt in mother Africa and brought back a dried-up body more than a thousand years old to put in the museum he plans to build. “If the world will not come to us, then I will bring it here so that my people can know it,” he said to me once. And that’s what he’s doing.’
José listened carefully to Aureliano’s words. He spat on the ground and then looked at Emilio Bacardí who was delightedly listening to the tales and stories of the candidates for the post of village teacher. Still he resolutely ignored Melecio.
An hour later, when everyone was sated and drunk, the stranger addressed the assembled crowd.
‘How do you feel now?’
‘Excellent! Fenomenal! This is the best food we’ve ever had in our lives,’ they chorused.
‘I am very glad. It has been a genuine pleasure to share it with you and I am grateful to you for sharing your concerns for the village. To turn now to the problem raised by Señor Pablo, I believe that the person best suited to assuming the role of teacher is Melecio. I say this because I had the good fortune to witness the boy’s talent and I can assure you it is truly exceptional. Believe me when I tell you this, señores. Moreover, I promised to teach this extraordinary boy everything I know.’
Bacardí hugged Melecio to him.
‘Unless of course someone has a better idea. Is there anyone here who disagrees with the idea of sending Melecio?’
‘No, sir, you are completely right. From the very beginning I thought as much, but no one would let me speak,’ said Pablo el Jabao, staggering around clutching a bottle of rum.
‘I agree,’ said Juanita, unable to get up from her chair. ‘Melecio is our man and if anyone doesn’t like it, I swear I’ll cast a spell that leaves him bald for the rest of his life. I completely agree with Señor Bacardón.’
Everyone began chanting ‘Me-le-cio, Me-le-cio, Me-le-cio . . .’, then the chorus changed to ‘Bacardón, Bacardón, Bacardón . . .’ José smiled to himself, he could not but admire the stranger’s cunning. Don Emilio first winked at him and then walked over to where he stood, eyes twinkling, and whispered, ‘Well then, José, you decide.’
José Mandinga looked at Betina and could tell by her eyes that she agreed. He looked at Geru, at Benicio and lastly at Melecio who stood, hands in his pockets, nervously awaiting the verdict. Then he turned back to Don Emilio.
‘I have never trusted a white man, but I suppose there is a first time for everything. And as someone from El Cobre once told me . . .’ José turned to look at Melecio who was smiling excitedly ‘. . . opportunities are bald and you’ve got to grab them by the hair.’ Bacardí gave a satisfied smile.
‘But listen to me, Señor Bacardí. I want my Melecio to come back with all four limbs because if he doesn’t, I promise I will come for you with a machete and for anyone who comes between us. I want him back in perfect condition, is that understood?’
‘You have my word as a Cuban,’ said Don Emilio simply, then held out his hand which José took and shook warmly.
‘Bacardón! Bacardón! Melecio! Melecio! José! José!’ everyone bellowed, tossing chicken bones, hunks of bread and pieces of ham into the air – these are the bits of the story I really like, all the stuff about ham and chicken . . . but anyway, I’m getting sidetracked.
The shimmering June sun was already beginning to set. All the villagers bid farewell to Melecio, hugging and kissing him. Betina shed a few tears as she reminded him to brush his teeth every day and make his bed every morning. José read him the riot act and told him to behave himself. The last to say goodbye were Gertrudis and Benicio.
�
�Promise me you’ll take care.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Melecio, of course we’ll take care. Besides, Papá is strong as a ceiba tree.’
‘Not Papá, I’m talking about your secret, the one you both carry inside you, it is something truly special.’
Geru and Benicio looked at each other bewildered, then kissed Melecio on both cheeks and with tears in their eyes, they watched him set off, thinking that a great part of their lives was leaving with that carriage. José watched in silence as the carriage moved along the Callejón de la Rosa. He always had something to say, some opinion to offer, but at that moment he was speechless, as though his thoughts had been carried off by the gentle breeze that followed behind the carriage of Don Emilio Bacardí.
‘Cheer up, hombre. It had to happen some day. We bring children into this world, but they are not ours,’ said Evaristo, putting an arm around José’s shoulder. Then the Mandinga family headed home, not realising that with those inconsequential words the kite-maker was saying goodbye. Had he been aware, Evaristo would doubtless have found something memorable to say, but he could not have known that the following morning he would wake up dead. He had no time to enjoy his new horse, nor to say farewell to everyone.
‘Apparently his heart just stopped,’ said El Santacruz. Juanita had a different version. She spent five minutes examining him, sucked in a deep lungful of smoke and, rubbing her hands, she said, ‘This man has been poisoned.’
José suggested a whole day be spent keeping vigil over Evaristo, without speaking or eating.
‘No one can live without eating, José. We’d all die like Evaristo.’
In the end, it was decided there would be eight hours of silence and fasting. Only two people fainted. Evaristo was buried in the same spot as Oscar and Malena. It occurred to several people that since the deaths of Oscar and Malena, no one had died in Pata de Puerco.
And this, according to my grandfather, was the end of Evaristo the kite-maker, one of the most generous men he had ever known.
Three Years Pass
With Evaristo’s death, the weekly Festival of Birth became a tedious ritual. Eustaquio the machetero attempted to take on Evaristo’s role, but he was an oafish man who had spent all his life wielding a machete. Few were surprised when he suggested ‘a scything competition’, which consisted of cutting back the brushwood in the area and stuffing it into sacks. Whoever filled the most sacks in the shortest time was to be the winner. Eustaquio was of the opinion that not only would this be a good exercise to build up the arms of both men and womenfolk, it would also improve the appearance of the village.
‘Thanks, Eustaquio, but we don’t want to cut back the undergrowth,’ everyone told him. ‘The village is fine just as it is.’ The plants and the trees were a part of the lives of everyone. They had grown accustomed to dragging around the weight of years in the verdant world that was Pata de Puerco and thus, somewhat relieved of their pain, could stride on towards death. This wilderness was their universe and nothing existed beyond the borders of the Accursed Forest but an infinite emptiness. The modern world they so often heard of was a mirage, a dream, a tale oft told but never believed.
Shortly afterwards rains came that quickly turned into a tornado, winds gusting at more than a hundred miles an hour, ripping trees up by the roots. It was a curious thing, since no tornado had ever passed near Santiago before. Many people were of the opinion that Melecio should not have left, that his departure had brought the cyclone.
The Jabaos’ house was swept away by the storm. Every neighbour contributed three or four boards ripped from their own walls or the roofs of their shacks, they made use of pine trees that had been felled by the storm to rebuild the frame, recycled all the dried palm fronds they could find from the old shack, and in less than two weeks the Jabao family had a new house that was sturdier and more comfortable than the old one.
The village was tidied up. Branches and tree trunks were cleared from the paths. The betel palm that had become lodged in the well was removed. They cut back the weeds, the sicklebush and brambles that had grown up during the rains and gradually taken over the area, threatening to create a thorny jungle. The village returned to normal. At Chinaman Li’s store, the corrugated-iron roof had been ripped off, but his family – some twenty strong – soon returned the store to its original state.
The days became long and heavy. People ceased to dream about the possibility of progress. By the time they looked up and took notice, it was 1914.
During this time, Grandpa Benicio grew so much that José could not explain the change in him. One morning he simply woke up and he was not the same. José began to watch him closely, to follow him constantly; he even went into the bathroom when he was bathing, something he had not done since Benicio was a little boy. Sometimes Grandfather thought José had gone mad because at night when he was asleep he would creep into Benicio’s room, slip a hand into his shorts and measure his pinga with a length of string. My grandfather woke with a start, as did Gertrudis, and they frightened him off. It was an obsession.
‘I don’t understand, Betina. Malena was small, Oscar was scarcely four feet tall and you’ve told me that your parents were not very tall either, so where the hell does the boy get it from?’
Betina answered that it was simply in the nature of things, but she could not convince him. The truth was that every day José was growing older. He walked more slowly and constantly had to look down, careful not to trip. Overnight, he appeared with a walking stick which he had whittled from the branch of a ceiba. His hair had turned white, his shoulders had begun to droop and something like a hump began to grow on his back.
Yet still he went on working in the vegetable garden every day to feed his family. Benicio helped out as much as he could while Betina and Geru made a little money washing clothes down at the river, or sometimes they would go to El Cobre and sell the skirts and trousers the Santacruzes made. This way they managed to get by.
José began to talk constantly about the past, almost always with a sense of guilt about the death of Oscar. No one could persuade him that he was not to blame for the death of his friend. Over and over Betina had to remind him that Malena had died in childbirth and that Oscar had simply decided to follow his wife into the next world. José would never listen. And so he got into the habit of walking to the cemetery every morning to talk to his friend. He would go very early, when the half-light still veiled the colours of day and the dew heightened the forest smells of the village.
José Miguel Gómez, who had been a general in the war of 1895, was the new president of the country. Everyone in Cuba knows that Negroes were not allowed to join the police force, could not take part in official ceremonies or hold public office; they were not allowed into hotels or anything of that kind. But very soon a wave of protests erupted across the island by unions, veterans of the war of independence, progressive movements campaigning against exploitation. And so the Partido Independiente de Color – the Independent Party of Colour – was founded with the aim of abolishing the exploitation of coloured people and the death penalty, while supporting a policy of free education and other civil liberties. The movement grew to become a political party which participated in elections; however the Morúa Law – introduced by Martin Morúa, one of the few black men in the Cuban senate – outlawed political parties based on race. At this point, the sectors of the oligarchy who had always lived in fear of a race war began to sow the seeds of hatred among the traditional parties and the wealthy classes, accusing the PIC of seeking to impose black power in the island and spreading rumours of black men supposedly raping white women.
Matters became heated. The PIC mounted demonstrations in the streets and rose up in arms in Oriente, particularly in Santiago, Pinar del Rio, Havana and Las Villas. These rebel groups did not initiate violent confrontations; they were mobilised simply to put pressure on the government to recognise the demands of their party. The government of José Miguel Gómez responded by sending in the Rural Guard, the vo
lunteers and all the heavy artillery, urged on by retired general Mario García Menocal, who years later would become president of the republic. In less than three months, the ‘rebels’ and their leaders were all butchered. Three thousand black people died in the massacre.
‘I told you, Aureliano, but you wouldn’t listen. It’s just like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes,’ José told the coachman one day. Betina, Benicio and Geru looked at him, puzzled. ‘You know the story – the emperor who always wanted to wear the latest fashions and one day, having tried on a dozen outfits and finding none of them suited him, was persuaded to leave the palace wearing a suit of invisible clothes. Everyone clapped and cheered until one little boy shouted, “But the king is stark naked.” This is exactly the same. I told you that the white men were a double-edged sword and you went on clapping and cheering just like the people praising the bare-arsed emperor. It took this race war and the mass slaughter of everyone for you to finally understand.’
‘I still think as I always thought, amigo José,’ said the coachman, shaking his head. ‘Our mistake was to think like sheep. This is why the Independent Party of Colour failed, because it tried to put all white men in the same basket when there are tramps on the street who are white, there are white people who are oppressed and exploited. But let’s not argue, these things are not over yet.’
From the pocket of his red jacket, Aureliano took a sealed letter that smelled of ink and glue. Everyone stared at the yellow envelope.
‘But that’s a letter,’ said Betina, looking into the coachman’s eyes. ‘What are we supposed to do with a letter since none of us can read?’
The coachman asked Betina to warm a little coffee and said that he would take charge of reading the documents. José suddenly announced that he was going to the cemetery.
‘To the cemetery?’ said the coachman, surprised.
‘Yes. Betina, you can tell me what’s happening with Melecio when I get back. And you, Aureliano, could you please tell my son that he has been gone a long time. Just tell him that. And give him a hug from us.’
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