The Taste of Sugar

by The Taste of Sugar (retail) (epub)

  “That dirty thing?” Valentina had run away, her giggles rising over the crowns of the trees.

  The scalloped edges of the mantilla’s delicate lace framed Valentina’s face, a bit of it coming to a point between her brows and drawing attention to her dark eyes. She tried to hypnotize Rudolfo with her wide-eyed gaze. Maybe he would rescue her from her fate with Juan Moscoso.

  “Let’s walk in the garden,” Rudolfo said.

  “I’d rather go to Spain with you,” she said.

  “It’s all been planned by the family, the people I am to meet, the places I must see,” Rudolfo said. “Spain, Italy, France.”

  “I could go with you if we were married,” Valentina said. “To Spain, Italy, France.”

  “If only you could,” Rudolfo said. “But don’t worry, we’ll get married the moment I return.”

  “Why not marry me now? We needn’t wait.” Mamá would say that she would be a tonta to wait for Rudolfo, who already had a reputation among the ladies as a picaflor. And why not? He was young, from buena familia, and could charm a coquí from forgetting its nightly chant.

  He laughed; Mamá clacked her fan in warning.

  “You’re still so impulsive,” Rudolfo said. “Four years will go by fast.”

  “For you.” How dare he laugh at her!

  Rudolfo whispered in her ear, “Will you wait for me?”

  But Valentina knew how their story would end. After their parting, proof of his honorable intentions would arrive on every Spanish ship that came to port. He would write in detail about what he had seen and the people he had met and how he could not wait for them to become husband and wife. Soon Rudolfo’s infrequent letters would prove that his affection had faded, until there were no more letters and she would have to accept that his destiny was in Europe, while hers was not.

  “Let’s go into the garden,” Rudolfo said. “Let’s make a memory to last four years.”

  He was so confident that she would agree to such madness.

  Annoyed, Valentina glanced around the room; her gaze fell on Vicente for the first time.

  “Who is that with Dalia?”

  “Nadie,” Rudolfo said. “Some third or fourth cousin. His father is a coffee farmer.”

  “A coffee farmer.” Valentina repeated it with a slight sneer in the way of townspeople when they talked about country folk. Still, the stranger was nice looking. In one French romance she had particularly liked, the handsome farmer murmured chérie, chérie as he made love to the French mademoiselle in a field of lavender. Valentina had spent many a satisfying hour lying with a handsome farmer on a bed of purple flowers.

  “We’ll go over the first bridge, past the marble fountain with the bathing Greek goddesses, by the giant coconut palms,” Rudolfo said. “No one will find us there.”

  How dare he continue to make such inappropriate propositions! Valentina noticed the farmer cousin looking at her. The waltz ended and Rudolfo reached for her hand to lead her into the garden. Every Spanish lady had a fan tied by a ribbon to her wrist, and Valentina flicked hers open with a loud clack.

  “I must decline your kind invitation, caballero, pero merci.” Valentina peered at Rudolfo over the silver-painted parchment paper. “Bon voyage, Rudolfo, and when you’re in Paris, please say bonjour for me.”

  Dalia’s third or fourth cousin wasn’t as tall as Rudolfo, but he was tall enough. Rudolfo was the better dancer, renowned for his skill at the popular European dances, el vals y la polca. When Valentina and the farmer waltzed past las damas, the mothers and grandmothers and maiden aunts, the furious flick of her mother’s fan warned her to take care.

  Her partner didn’t speak for several minutes and Valentina bemoaned her bad luck—first the humiliating dances with the old man Juan Moscoso, then the disappointing ones with Rudolfo, and now this mute farmer!

  “Strawberries,” the farmer said.

  “What?” If only he wouldn’t mumble, if only he would speak up!

  The farmer said, “Did anyone ever tell you that your eyes shine like roasted coffee beans?”

  They meant only to look up at the stars from the veranda, but the scent of orchids lured them into the garden and soon they were enveloped by coconut palms. Las damas de noches opened their white petals for the moon, and the moon mistook the silver embroidery on Valentina’s dress for stars. The owl called out to its mate over the chanting of the coquís. Their hands met as they walked deeper into the garden. The rustle of Valentina’s skirt was the sound of the breeze when it skips over leaves.

  Valentina held onto the lapels of his jacket when they kissed under a coconut palm. She learned that she liked kissing.

  “Vicente Vega, a la orden,” he said.

  “My name is Valentina, I’m almost eighteen,” she said. “How old are you?

  “Twenty-one,” he said.

  “Do you have a mujer?” Maybe he’d left a woman in the countryside.

  “No,” he said. “Do you have a husband?”

  “Un viejito wants to marry me,” Valentina said.

  “An old man? That would be a crime,” he said.

  “You’re not from Ponce.”

  “I live in Utuado. We’re coffee farmers,” Vicente said. “We grow the best coffee in the world.”

  “You do?”

  He laughed. “Not just me. Us. My father. Puerto Rico. Europe buys most of it.”

  “France buys your coffee?” Valentina imagined a fleet of ships filled with coffee beans, its course set for Paris.

  “Claro,” he said.

  “Do you have a big coffee plantation? I think Dalia and her family have often spent the summer at your hacienda,” Valentina said.

  “We don’t have a coffee plantation or hacienda,” he said. “Nothing so grand.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.” Maybe his kisses weren’t as sweet as she’d first thought.

  “The farmer’s life isn’t an easy one—coffee prices go up and coffee prices go down but my father says that right now coffee’s up,” Vicente said. “My father taught my brother and me everything we know about coffee. He learned from my grandfather.”

  “But why aren’t you rich, then?” For the first time in her life, Valentina was interested in coffee and not just drinking it.

  “Maybe I will be one day when I have my own farm,” Vicente said. “But tonight I’m just one of Dalia’s poor cousins.”

  “Your people are poor?” Valentina thought of the mendigos and los hambrientos who begged for food in the street and around Ponce’s Plaza Las Delicias.

  “Somos gente regular,” Vicente said. “People doing the best we can, like everyone else.”

  “Dalia’s family has a lot of money,” Valentina said.

  “If I had my own coffee farm and a beautiful wife like you, I’d be satisfied,” Vicente said. “I wouldn’t need to be rich.”

  “You wouldn’t?” She smiled because he thought her beautiful.

  “¡Valentina! ¡Valentina!”

  “That’s my mother!”

  Vicente offered her his arm.

  “I’d better go alone,” Valentina said.

  He bowed, then disappeared into the coconut palms.

  Later, when Elena asked Valentina why she would go into the garden with a strange man and risk her reputation and that of her family, Valentina told her how much she enjoyed the farmer’s kisses. Of course, she’d pitied the good-looking farmer who would never be rich. Maybe she’d think about him toiling en la finca when she sipped coffee in a Parisian café.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BOYHOOD CIRCA 1880

  Sometimes in whispers, Vicente and his brother Luisito called their father Raúl Vega “el General.” His father’s temper was infamous throughout the countryside; he often overheard people say that Raúl Vega tenía mal genio o un carácter fuerte. So whenever el General inflicted scorn that scarred their skin like the slash of the whip, his older brother’s eyes bore into his: Say nothing!

  Raúl Vega had taught his sons that
the way to know coffee was with your hands and your feet. When Vicente and Luisito were children, their father had set them under a bush to pick coffee berries. Vicente hadn’t dared to complain about the mosquitoes and other insects that flew into his eyes and stuffed themselves up his nose. Evil branches scratched his face and tried to thwart his picking.

  He dreamt of trees. When a tree asked if he were a bird, Vicente observed the ghostliness of the moon, free to come and go as it pleased. Vicente whispered: I am the Moon Bird. The tree whispered cuentos that the birds had brought back from other lands, tales of riches and pirates and oceans longer than days. A tree complained about the owl that kept it awake each night. Why didn’t it fly down the mountain and bother those trees? The coffee trees wished that their taller cousins, the banana and plantain and guava trees, wouldn’t hog all the sunlight, because they too wanted to bask in the sun. There was the eagle that perched on the crown of a tree with such delicacy; the swish of its massive wings as it flew away woke Vicente from his dream.

  Even Raúl Vega admitted that Vicente had the gift. Vicente’s fingers need only touch the coffee berry for it to drop into his palm. He didn’t mind that the berries didn’t ripen all at once, and that the trees must be picked over again and again throughout the harvest. He told the trees: Your berries will be washed and dried and roasted to make coffee so delicious that it is a drink for the gods. Mere mortals will pay for it in gold and silver. Your berries will become coffee beans that will be transported in ships to faraway places I could never hope to see in this life or the next. Your berries will be transformed into coffee that will be served in the palaces of the most important people in the world—the kings and queens and popes. Your coffee will kiss the lips of the most beautiful señoritas and be served in cafés to idle people who will linger over tiny cups, bewitched. There are people in the world who could never live a day without you.

  Vicente never shared with others his conversations with the coffee trees, but it wasn’t because he thought his brother Luisito would laugh at him, or that his father might question his sanity; it was because it was between him and the trees. The trees liked the murmur of his voice, his words wrapped around their leaves as gentle as the nightly fog. When he ate dinner, his thoughts were of the red coffee cherry nestled in the green leaves, not the rice and beans and malanga, and not even when they had pollo fricasé, his favorite. He was back en la finca, his gaze on the banana and plantain and guava shade trees, blessing their huge green fronds. When he examined the coffee cherries, he held his breath, exhaling only when he saw that they were healthy, that the lack of rain hadn’t dried the berries, or that too much rain hadn’t stripped the branches bare. When the green berries ripened, they would glisten on his palm like rubies.

  When he was a young boy, an eagle swooped down and tried to carry him off. Vicente was perched in a coffee tree, the basket full of berries strapped to his waist. The bird clutched his shirt in its yellow claws, and its great wings flapped like the sound of wind. The shirt tore. The strap snapped. Berries fell to the ground like hard rain. He tumbled down.

  “Wake up!” His father stood over Vicente, who had fallen out of bed. “We have to go see about a pig.”

  Dawn had yet to arrive when Vicente and his brother Luisito followed their father to la sala, where he took down the machete from the wall. The boys’ mother, Angelina, hated to see el machete hang beside the thick coil of rope as in any jíbaro home, but her husband insisted that it was the custom of the country to have tools near at hand. Vicente and Luisito stumbled behind their father in the fog. Cerro Morales, the mountain on which they lived, was colossal and forbidding; the boys, less sure-footed than their father, grasped at branches and vines along the way; they feared their father’s wrath more than the edge of the cliff.

  The rooster announced them as they entered the batey of Sevilla’s house. A door opened and light came from a kerosene lamp.

  “Sevilla, I warned you.”

  Vicente shivered at his father’s words.

  “Raúl Vega? Is that you?” Sevilla held up the lantern. “What do you mean coming to a man’s house like a thief?”

  “I told you to repair your pigpen,” Vicente’s father said. “I grow vegetables to feed my family, not your pigs.”

  “You can’t blame the pigs because your vegetables are so tasty,” Sevilla said.

  Vicente wished that Sevilla wouldn’t laugh.

  The boys ran after their father; they heard the grunts of Sevilla’s pigs over the clamor of the tree frogs. Glimmers of morning sun streaked through the mist toward the vegetable patch where Raúl Vega had planted two different varieties of beans along with yuca and calabasa, tomatoes, and corn. The boys chased the pigs away, but Raúl Vega caught one and pinned it between his knees. His machete flashed silver as he slit the pig’s throat. Vicente saw the animal’s startled expression.

  What did I do that was so wrong? I’m a pig!

  Raúl Vega and Luisito carried the hog back to Sevilla’s finca. Vicente hurried after them, and when his shirt caught on a branch, he stifled a scream. He’d thought a spirit had grabbed him; people said that spirits wandered the countryside in the dark; Luisito would tease him for being such a miedoso. Vicente stepped over the pig’s blood that dripped on the ground; he couldn’t see the blood, but he knew it was there. He hoped that Sevilla wouldn’t shoot them. Pigs were for market or for special occasions like Christmas. Vicente loved the smell of pig cooking on a spit, a fragrance so delicious that it tantalized everyone who smelled it roasting from dawn until night, its skin toasting until it deepened to the dulce de leche color of caramelos. Only then would it be ready, only then would the skin crunch in one’s mouth and the succulent meat glide down one’s throat. His mother would share the lechón with the poor jíbaros who never had enough to eat, even at Christmastime, peones lured by the scent of roasting pig. The pig’s tail and nose, prized delicacies, were always saved for the old or the pregnant.

  When they arrived at Sevilla’s house, Vicente’s father and brother dropped the pig on the ground with a thud that woke the whole mountain. The rooster and the chickens tiptoed on dainty feet to peck at the carcass. The boys followed their father back through the mountain; their footsteps vanished behind them in the fog. Vicente feared a bullet in his back; not until they arrived home did he breathe a sigh of relief.

  Vicente’s mother stood at the window; she turned to look at her husband’s blood-splattered clothes. As long as Vicente could remember, his mother had stared at the horizon for hours. Often he had to call her name several times before she came back from wherever she’d been. Oh, it’s you, Vicente, she’d say.

  A few nights after the pig tragedy, Raúl Vega was walking in the fog that shrouded Cerro Morales on his way to visit a woman. He had grown up on the mountain and knew well the slopes and ravines, as did Sevilla and his brothers. Sevilla left his knife inside the stomach of that maricón Raúl Vega. Before he lost consciousness, Vicente’s father thought: I’m going to die because of a fucking pig! A jíbaro, his horse loaded with plantains for market, found Raúl Vega before he bled to death. The man held the knife steady in Raúl Vega’s stomach all the way to the town of Utuado, where there was a doctor at the mental asylum. The knife saved Raúl Vega’s life and sent Sevilla to jail.

  The months when Raúl Vega was forced to convalesce at home were the longest of Vicente’s life. Once Vicente thought he heard laughter when his mother was in the bedroom, but how could that be? Each night when the boys were called to report on their labor, Vicente folded his hands behind his back to hide their trembling.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HOW ANGELINA WAS SAVED

  One day when Vicente was still a boy, Angelina woke to the rooster’s crow and went to the river to drown herself. She stopped to disengage the hem of her nightgown when it caught on a branch. Only when she stepped on a twig did she realize that she was awake. Her bare feet were cold and wet with dew, but what of it? She reached the river where the laund
ress Destina washed the laundry and bedding. Her husband bathed here every night, but Angelina was of the class of woman for whom it was not proper. Angelina stepped forward and gasped at the water’s coldness. She had never learned to swim, but she felt a sense of peace. When next she opened her eyes, she was on the riverbank.

  “What’s wrong with you? Are you crazy?” Raúl Vega shook her.

  “Don’t save me next time,” Angelina said.

  “I won’t,” Raúl Vega said.

  Angelina spent her days in loneliness and drudgery. They didn’t have money to spare for her to visit her family, who lived only a few towns away; the roads were poor and would require a special carriage.

  When los hambrientos—so underfed that they resembled stick people—came to their door to beg for food, she bit back her complaints. She gave what could be spared and granted permission for the hungry people to pluck grapefruit and oranges from their citrus trees. Some days she gave away her own meal and pretended that she had already eaten when she sat down with her husband and sons. There were evenings when she was alone at the table after dinner and smoked a cigar, filling her lungs with smoke as if it were her last breath.

  There was a time when Angelina blamed her discontent on her husband because he had never loved her, but then she hadn’t loved him, either. It had been a simple matter of need: he for a wife and she for a husband. Angelina’s family gave some money for her marriage and it had saved the farm. But there were taxes and expenditures and always creditors. Every coffee farmer with a little education knew that the coffee harvest was at the mercy of the gods and the coffee market. Luckily, los peones who helped during the harvest could be paid in plátanos and bananas.

  Angelina employed a single servant, Gloria, whose hands had not been created for handiwork, but rather to pound the giant pestle in the mortar carved from the trunk of an old tree, pound pound pound until the coffee beans were crushed into brown sand. Pound pound pound until Angelina wanted to scream and bang her head against the kitchen table. She restrained herself because she doubted that it would bring any relief, only a cracked head. Also she didn’t want to scare Gloria, who worked for room and board instead of wages, because, like most small coffee farmers, they had little hard cash.