Kilian was pleased to finally hear the sound of her voice, but said nothing.
“You know that we have two types of marriage,” she continued. “One is called rè?t?, or marriage to buy a woman’s virginity. It is the real marriage in law and is what joins me to Mosi. The other is called ribalá ré ríhólè, or marriage for love. It is not recognized in law, but it is between ourselves.” She raised her eyes toward Kilian and continued with a trembling voice, “We don’t have anyone to act as priest, but I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
Kilian raised her hands and squeezed them hard.
“I must talk first,” she went on. “And I must tell you, and you’re not to laugh, that I won’t forget my duty to cultivate my husband’s fields and make the palm oil and promise to be faithful to you, at least in my heart.”
Bisila closed her eyes to repeat the promises to herself.
“Now it’s my turn,” said Kilian in a hoarse voice. “What do I have to say?”
“You have to promise not to abandon this wife”—Bisila opened her eyes—“in spite of the many more you may have.”
Kilian smiled. “I promise that I will not abandon this wife, at least in my heart, come what may.”
They sealed their vows with a long, warm kiss.
“And now, what happens before going to the marriage bed?” Kilian asked with a special glint in his eyes.
Bisila tilted her head back and laughed aloud. “Well, we would say ‘amen,’ and someone would ring the el?bó and sing . . .”
“I’m already carrying the el?bó with me,” said Kilian, raising his hand to his left armpit and placing it gently on his tattoo. “Forever. We’ll always be together, Bisila. This is my true promise to you, my muarána muèmuè.”
17
? Ripúríi Ré ?bbé
The Seed of Evil
1965
Time went by very slowly for Bisila. The days and weeks passed, and Kilian did not return. Neither of them could get news of the other. Exchanging letters would have been too risky.
Thousands of kilometers away, Kilian did write, but the letters were never sent. He read them back to himself as if she could read his thoughts. His body wandered the rooms of the house, but his heart and mind were far away. Without her, life in Pasolobino was familiar but empty.
Almost every day, Bisila approached the main building of the plantation where the foreigners lived. She got as far as the outside stairs, placed her hand on the banister, put her foot on the first step of the stairs, and fought back the impulse to run up to Kilian’s room to see if he had already returned. Her heart beat quickly, and her knees went weak. She listened closely to the voices of the Europeans, trying to make out Kilian’s deep voice.
That is how another year started and another cocoa harvest ended.
On the island, the weather was excessively hot; only a weak breeze managed to alleviate the stifling air. In the Pyrenees, the weather was excessively cold; the north wind dragged the snow from one place to another as if it were grains of sand on a frozen desert.
On the Sampaka plantation on Fernando Po, the workers began preparing the ground for planting, gathering firewood for the dryers, mending the roads and tracks, and beginning pruning.
In Pasolobino, the walls of the house were closing in on Kilian. It snowed and snowed, and when it stopped snowing, the wind began to howl. It was impossible to go out to the fields. It was impossible to do anything. The hours beside the fire listening to his mother’s sighs seemed endless as he endured Catalina’s last days, comforting a brother-in-law he hardly knew, and repeating over and over again the same conversations with the neighbors about the riches that the future ski resort would bring to the valley.
He needed to move, to get out. But he could not even spend time mending the house, not when his sister was agonizing; it was not right. She herself had expressed her wish to die in the house she had been born in, so he had to show her respect through his silence.
With his eyes fixed on the flames of the fire, Kilian fought against the slow ticking of the clock by thinking of Bisila. She would die if she had to put up with week after week of cold and snow. Her body was made for heat.
How could he think of a life without her flame?
Catalina was buried in the middle of the terrible frost at the end of February. The cold sped up the first mass in Pasolobino that Kilian had not heard in Latin and the later burial.
The speed at which everything happened—from when they closed the coffin until the shovels gave the last taps on the dampened soil—reawakened a sense of urgency in Kilian. He wanted to go back to Fernando Po, but he had to stay with his mother in her grieving.
How much longer would he have to wait?
At the end of April, the rains arrived on the island.
Bisila was tired. She had spent many hours in the hospital. At that time of year, the number of accidents and machete cuts went up. Work on the plantation was more dangerous than in the dryers, and the rain helped increase the number of pulmonary illnesses. She needed to clear her mind and decided to take a walk.
There was no use fooling herself: her steps always led her in the same direction. She approached the whitewashed main building once again. It was very late on Saturday night, and the yard was empty. She did not want to get her hopes up, but she lost nothing in trying. It had been five months since she had seen him, since she had heard his voice, since she had felt his hands on her skin. She had asked her father nonchalantly if he had any news of Kilian through Jacobo, and that was how she found out about the death of his sister and his intention of staying longer in Pasolobino. How much longer would she have to wait? She was afraid the longer it took him to come back, the greater the chance of him learning to live without the island and without her.
Sometimes she had the horrible feeling that it had all been just a dream. She knew she was not the first nor the last native to fall in love with a foreigner.
Yet Kilian had promised. He had told her they would always be together. She could only trust what he had said. He was now her true husband. Not Mosi, with whom it was getting harder every time to fulfill her role as wife. Mosi was a body she lay with every night; Kilian was the owner of her heart and her soul.
She leaned on the wall and closed her eyes, imagining the instant when the door of his modest room would open and Kilian would come out, with his wide beige linen trousers and his white shirt. He would take a deep breath, light a cigarette, lean on the railing, and meet her eyes below. She would smile, as if to say there she was, waiting as she had promised, his black wife, his Bubi wife; the woman he had chosen above all, in spite of the color of her skin and her customs, traditions, and beliefs. They would always be Kilian of Pasolobino and Bisila of Bissappoo.