Palm Trees in the Snow

by Luz Gabás

  She wondered if anyone else had opened the wardrobe in the last few years; if her mother, Carmen, or her cousin Daniela had rummaged through the past; or if her father or uncle had ever felt the need to see themselves once more as the youth who had penned these lines.

  She quickly dismissed the idea. While Daniela liked the old stone-and-slate house with its dark furniture, she never took her interest further. Carmen was not born in the house or the area and had never felt that it was hers. Her only mission, especially since the death of Daniela’s mother, was to make sure the house was kept clean and tidy and the larder was kept full and to find any excuse to throw a party. She loved spending long breaks there, but was grateful to have her own home that was completely hers.

  Jacobo and Kilian were like all the other men from the mountains; they were reserved to an unnerving degree and very strict about their privacy. It was surprising that neither of the two had decided to destroy the letters, as she had done with her teenage diaries, thinking that the act of destruction would erase everything that had happened. Clarence weighed various possibilities. Perhaps they were aware that there was nothing in the letters that would put them in the line of fire. Or perhaps they had simply forgotten about their existence.

  Whatever the reasons, she would have to find out if something had really happened—precisely because of what was not written, and the questions raised by this piece of paper lying in her hands. It was a fragment that could change the peaceful life of that house in Pasolobino.

  Without getting out of the chair, Clarence stretched her arm toward a small chest on the coffee table, opening one of its little drawers and taking out a magnifying glass to look more closely at the edges of the paper. In the bottom right-hand corner, a small outline could be seen where a number appeared: a straight line crossed by a hyphen.

  Then … the number could very well be a seven.

  A seven.

  She drummed her fingers on the table.

  A page number was unlikely. A date perhaps: 1947, 1957, 1967. From what she had gathered, none of the three fit the description of colonial life for a few Spaniards on a cocoa plantation.

  In fact, nothing had caught her attention except those lines where the anonymous writer said that he or she would not be going back as often, that someone sent money from the House of Rabaltué, that three people whom the recipient of the letter—Jacobo?—knew were well, and that a loved one had died.

  Whom would her father be sending money to? Why would he have to worry that this person was fine and, more specifically, that they were doing well at work or studies? Who was this person whose death was felt so deeply? Ureca friends, the note said … She had never heard of this place before, if it was a place … A person maybe? And the most important of all: Who was she?

  Clarence had listened to hundreds of stories about the lives of the men from the House of Rabaltué in distant lands. She knew them by heart because Jacobo and Kilian needed no excuse to talk about their lost paradise. What she had thought was the official story always took the form of a tale that began decades before in a small Pyrenean village, continued on a small African island, and ended once again in the mountains. Until now, it had never crossed Clarence’s mind that it could be another way: the story starting on a small African island, continuing in a small village in the Pyrenees, and ending again on the sea.

  But they had seemingly forgotten to tell her some important pieces. Clarence let her novelist’s mind wander and frowned while she mentally sorted through the people Jacobo and Kilian talked about in their stories. Nearly all of them belonged to her own inner circle. Not strange, considering that the instigator of this exotic adventure was an adventurous young man from the valley of Pasolobino who weighed anchor in an unknown land at the end of the nineteenth century, around the time her grandparents, Antón and Mariana, had been born. The man had awakened on an island in the Atlantic Ocean located in what was then called the Bight of Biafra. In a few years, he had amassed a small fortune and became owner of a fertile plantation. Far from there, in the Pyrenees, single men and young couples decided to go and work either on the plantation of their old neighbor or in the city close to it.

  They swapped green pastures for palm trees.

  Clarence smiled as she imagined those brusque and reserved men from the mountains, tight-lipped and serious, accustomed to the white of the snow, the green of the fields, and the gray of the stones, discovering the bright colors of the tropics, the dark skin of half-naked bodies, the flimsy buildings, and the caress of the sea breeze. It still surprised her to imagine Jacobo and Kilian as the main characters in one of the many books or films in which the colonies are seen from a European viewpoint. Theirs was the only version she knew.

  Clear and unquestionable.

  The daily life on the cocoa plantations; the relations with the natives; the food; the flying squirrels; the snakes; the monkeys; the great multicolored lizards; the Guinea sand fly, the jején; the Sunday parties; the tom-tom of the tumba and droma drums …

  This was what they had told them. The same as what appeared in Uncle Kilian’s first letters.

  How hard they worked! How difficult life was there!

  Indisputable.

  … her children are also fine …

  The date had to be 1977, or 1987, or 1997 …

  Who could explain the meaning of those lines? She thought of asking Kilian and Jacobo, but quickly admitted that she would be very embarrassed to confess to having read all the letters. Occasionally curiosity had led her to ask daring questions during family dinners when the subject of the colonial past had come up, but both men had developed an uncanny ability to divert the conversation toward more innocent topics. Coming out with a question directly related to those lines and expecting a clear and honest answer was a lot to hope for.

  Clarence lit a cigarette, got up, and went toward the window. She opened it a little so the smoke could escape and breathed in the fresh air of the rainy day that had slightly dampened the dark slate roofs of the stone houses that squeezed together below her. The elongated old quarter of Pasolobino still retained an appearance similar to that in the black-and-white photos from the beginning of the twentieth century, even though the majority of the houses had been refurbished and the streets were now paved instead of cobbled. Beyond the village, whose origins could be traced back to the eleventh century, extended the estates of tourist apartment blocks and hotels that had come with the ski resort.

  She directed her gaze toward the snowy peaks, where the spruces ended and the rocks began, still hidden under a white blanket. The dancing mist on the summits was an astonishing sight. How did the men of her family withstand being so far from these mountains for so long, so far from the morning smell of the damp earth and the peaceful silence of the night? There must be some attraction in the splendor unfolded in front of her eyes when nearly all those who had traveled to the island had ended up returning home sooner or later.

  Just then, the person she should ask came to mind. Why had she not thought of it before?

  Julia!

  No one better than Julia to answer her questions! She had lived on the island through the family’s history and shared her longing for the exotic stories of Jacobo and Kilian, and she was always willing to have long conversations with Clarence, whom she had treated with warmth since she was small, possibly because Julia only had boys of her own.

  Clarence quickly put out her cigarette in an ashtray and went from the sitting room into her office to call Julia. As she crossed through the large foyer, she could not help but stop in front of the huge painting that hung over an exquisite wooden arch handcrafted by seventeenth-century artisans. It was one of the few treasures that had survived to attest to the lost nobility of the house.

  The painting showed her father’s family tree. The first name she could read in the lower corner, which dated from 1395, Kilian of Rabaltué, continued to intrigue Clarence. No one could explain how an Irish saint who had traveled through France and
ended up in Germany shared a name with the founder of her house. This Kilian probably crossed from France to Pasolobino through the Pyrenees, and his traveling gene, plus his hair’s copper streaks, set up house there. From his name, a large trunk rose straight up with reaching branches, on whose leaves the names of brothers and sisters were written along with their husbands and wives and the following generations’ descendants.

  Clarence stopped at her grandfather’s generation, the pioneers of far-off lands, and went over the dates with her eyes. In 1898, Antón of Rabaltué, her grandfather, was born. He married Mariana of Malta, born in 1899, in 1926. In 1927, her father was born. In 1929, her uncle Kilian arrived, and in 1933, her aunt Catalina.

  Family trees were very reliable in the area. Everyone knew where everyone else came from. In the appropriate box, she saw her own date of birth, name and surname, and the house where she was born. Sometimes the surnames were replaced by the name of the house and the village of origin, as many of the newcomers came from neighboring villages. The trunk drew one’s eyes from the first Kilian to the last heirs in direct line. It was normal for names to repeat themselves generation after generation, evoking past ages of counts and ladies—the old names on old papers had the strange ability to fuel her imagination: Mariana, Mariano, Jacoba, Jacobo, a Kilian or two, Juan, Juana, José, Josefa, more than one Catalina, Antón, Antonia … Through reading family trees, one of her great passions, Clarence was able to imagine how life flowed without major changes: being born, growing up, having offspring, and dying. The same earth and the same sky.

  The last names that appeared on the tree, though, showed a clear break with a petrified past. The names of Daniela and Clarence broke the monotony. It was as if at the time of their birth, something was already changing, as if their parents were marking them in some way with new meaning. As adults, they learned that Kilian had chosen the name Daniela without his wife, Pilar, being able to stop him. It was a name that he had always liked, and that was it. But Clarence was named by her mother, a great reader of romance novels, who had foraged through her husband’s traveling past until she came up with a name grand enough to satisfy her: Clarence of Rabaltué. Jacobo had not offered any objections, perhaps because the name, coming from an old African city, reminded him every day of that idyllic past so often recalled by both him and Kilian.

  Standing before the tree for a moment, Clarence let her mind open new boxes on the lines immediately above those of herself and her cousin. What names would future generations have, if there would be any? She smiled. At the speed she was going, years would pass before another line was filled, which was a shame, as she understood life as a long chain where all the links with names and surnames formed a solid and extensive whole. She could not understand how anyone could not know of the generations before that of their grandparents. But of course, not everyone had the good fortune of growing up in the same familiar environment. In her case, her understandable, if slightly oversized, attachment to her birthplace, her valley and her mountains, went above and beyond mere genetics. It was something deeper and more spiritual that calmed her existential fear of nothingness. Perhaps because of this wish to be part of an intimate link between the past and the future, Clarence had succeeded in focusing her linguistics research on the study of Pasolobinese. The recent defense of her doctoral thesis, which had left her exhausted and saturated with the academic world, had made her not only the world’s foremost theoretical expert on the nearly extinct language, but also the guardian of her cultural inheritance. It brought her great pride.

  Nevertheless, she had to admit that on occasion, she regretted the amount of time this study had taken away from her life. Especially with relationships. Her love life was a disaster. For one reason or another, her boyfriends never managed to stick around longer than twelve months. She had this in common with Daniela, only it did not seem to affect her cousin as much, maybe because she was six years younger or simply because she was more patient. Clarence smiled again, thinking about how lucky both of them, as only children, had been to grow up together. What would she have done without the girl who replaced all her childhood dolls? Despite being so different, they felt like sisters, sharing thousands of experiences and adventures. She remembered the honor code that they agreed on when Daniela was old enough to go to parties with her: If they felt the same way about a boy, the one who met him first got a clear run. Luckily, because of their personalities—Daniela was shyer, more practical, and perhaps less passionate—and because of their tastes—Clarence was attracted to solitary, mysterious men with muscular bodies and her cousin to average ones—their loyalty had never been put to the test.

  Clarence sighed and let her imagination fly for a few seconds, envisioning the names of her invisible descendants on the chart.

  Suddenly, a shiver went up her body, as if someone had blown on the back of her neck or tickled her with a small feather. She made a face and turned quickly, frightened, before immediately feeling ridiculous. She knew that no one would be back for a few days and all the doors were well shut—she was not overly skittish, though perhaps more than she would like to be.

  She shook her head and focused on what she had to do: call Julia. She passed through one of the diamond-paneled doors into the room underneath the large wooden staircase. Her office was dominated by a wide American-oak table where her cell phone was sitting.

  She looked at the clock and calculated that Julia, a fairly methodical woman, would have gotten home from church by now. When she was in Pasolobino, she and a friend went to five o’clock mass, took a walk around the village, and had a hot chocolate before driving home.

  Strangely, Julia did not answer at the house. Clarence called her cell phone and learned that she was now playing a card game with another friend. She was so focused that they hardly talked. Just enough to agree to meet the following day. She felt a little disappointed. There was nothing else to do but wait.

  For one day.

  She decided to go back to the sitting room and tidy up the papers that she had spread out. She returned the letters to their place and slipped the note into her purse.

  After the excitement of the last few hours, she suddenly did not know what to do with the rest of the day. She sat on the sofa in front of the fire, lit another cigarette, and thought of how much had changed since Antón, Kilian, and Jacobo went to the island, especially time. Clarence had computer, e-mail, and telephone to instantly connect with her loved ones. These developments made her generation impatient; they could not handle uncertainty, and any slight delay became a slow torture.

  Now, the only thing concerning Clarence was that Julia could explain the meaning of those few lines. In her mind, they could only mean one thing: her father might have regularly sent money to a strange woman.

  The rest of her life had suddenly taken second stage.

  The next day, at exactly half past five, Clarence was at the church entrance, waiting for Julia. She had been admiring the majestic silhouette of the Romanesque tower for only a few minutes when the door opened and the trickle of people attending daily mass emerged, greeting her gently. She quickly spotted Julia, small, sensibly dressed, with a short chestnut bob recently trimmed and a pretty scarf around her neck. Julia gave her a beaming smile.

  “Clarence! Haven’t seen you for a while!” She gave her two loud and friendly kisses and linked their arms to walk out of the church grounds and past the stone wall topped by high ironwork railings. “I’m sorry I didn’t pay you much attention yesterday, but you called me in the middle of a good hand. What brought you here? Work?”

  “I don’t have many classes this term,” answered Clarence, “so I have free time to do research. And you? Are you going to stay long this time?”

  Julia’s mother’s family was native to the valley of Pasolobino. She still owned one of the many houses dotted around the fields a few kilometers from the village. Her mother had married a man from a neighboring valley. They traveled to Africa when she was very small, leaving
her to be minded by her grandparents until her parents’ hardware store began to do well and they could bring her with them. There, Julia married and gave birth to two children. After finally settling down in Madrid, she and the children enjoyed short holidays in Pasolobino, occasionally joined by her husband. After her husband’s death two years ago, Julia’s visits to her birthplace got longer and longer.

  “Until October at least. That’s the good thing about having grown-up children. They don’t need me.” She gave a wry smile before adding, “And this way they can’t leave me with the grandchildren at all hours.”

  Clarence laughed. She liked Julia. Although you would not think so upon first glance, she was a strong-minded woman. She was also cultured, observant, prudent, and sensible, very open and easygoing, with a certain air of sophistication that made her stand out. Clarence was convinced this was due to her well-traveled past and her years in the capital. Yet when Julia was in Pasolobino, it was like she had never left. Her down-to-earth ways won her many friends. Though she joked about her children and grandchildren, she could not help but offer her assistance whenever needed.

  “Would you like a hot chocolate?” suggested Clarence.

  “The day I don’t want one will be the day you should worry!”

  They walked slowly through the narrow cobblestone streets, leaving the old quarter behind. They took the wide avenue that divided up the new part of the village, with high lampposts and four-and five-story buildings, to the only shop in Pasolobino, where—according to the expert, Julia—the chocolate passed her test. You could turn the cup upside down without spilling a drop. “When you grow up with pure cocoa,” she always said, “it’s impossible to abide substitutes.”