Kilian exhaled.
“Shall I make it easier? Do you want me to start?” Gregorio pushed the younger man with both arms. Kilian took a step backward. “Come on!” He pushed him again. “Show me how brave the men from the mountain are!”
Kilian grabbed Gregorio’s wrists with all his strength, with his muscles tensed, until he perceived in the other’s dark eyes a weak flash of surprise and let go in disgust. He walked to the truck, climbed into the cabin, and started the engine.
He waited until Gregorio got in and then drove at top speed, as if he had not done anything else in his whole life.
A couple of weeks later, March arrived. It was the hottest month of the year, the precursor to the rainy season. On the plantations, the cocoa trees, with their smooth trunks and large egg-shaped leaves, began to sprout small yellow, rosy, and reddish flowers. Kilian marveled that the blooms grew directly from the trunk and the older branches. The heat and the humidity of the following months would allow the cocoa berries or pods to emerge from these flowers. On the fruit trees of Pasolobino, if there was not an unexpected or late frost, the hundreds of buds would become dozens of fruit. Jacobo had told him that the thousands of flowers springing from each cocoa tree would produce only around twenty pods.
The days passed without much happening. Work was routine and monotonous. Everyone knew what they had to do: repair houses, prepare the crops, and get the dryers and stores ready for the next harvest in August.
Kilian also seemed more relaxed in his routine. Gregorio had been more cautious since the argument in the store, which Kilian had not shared with anyone, least of all his brother. Gregorio still was not doing much instructing, but he was not picking on him either. Even so, Kilian kept alert.
Although he had gone back to Anita Guau a couple of times more, he had not required Sade’s attentions, something that did not seem to faze her as she satisfied her many other admirers. Manuel and Kilian had discovered that both preferred the films in the Marfil Cinema or a good chat in any of the seafront terraces as the huge bats flapped away from the palm trees at dusk.
One morning, while Antón and José were showing Kilian the workings of the different parts of the dryers in the main yard, Manuel came over and showed them a card.
“Look, Kilian. My old friends from the hospital in Santa Isabel have sent me some invitations to a formal dance in the casino this Saturday. I hope you’ll come with me. I’ll tell the others as well.”
“A party in the casino!” said Antón. “You can’t miss it. The elite of the island will be there, Son. Plantation employees normally don’t get the chance.”
“I’d be delighted.” Kilian’s eyes lit up. “But what do you wear to a place like that? I don’t know if I have the right clothes.”
“A jacket and tie will be enough,” Manuel explained. “The invitation says that formal wear is not required, so we don’t need to rent a dinner suit.”
“I’ll lend you a tie if you haven’t brought one,” offered Antón.
Manuel said he would see them at lunchtime, and the others continued their tour around the dryers, raised roofs over enormous slate sheets where the cocoa beans would be roasted. José approached some workers as Kilian turned to Antón.
“Dad, I’d like to talk to you about something . . . ,” he started in a serious voice.
Antón had a fair idea what Kilian wanted to talk to him about. “Yes?”
“Jacobo and I think you should go back to Spain. Even though you deny it, we know that you are exhausted. It’s not like you. Why don’t you go and visit the doctor in Zaragoza?” Antón did not protest, so he continued. “If it’s the money, you know that what Jacobo and I earn is more than enough to cover all the expenses and more . . . And how long has it been since you last saw Mom?”
Antón gave him a faint smile. He turned his head and called José. “Do you hear what Kilian is saying? The same as you and Jacobo! Maybe you’re all in this together?”
José widened his eyes with a feigned look of innocence. “Antón”—his friend had not allowed José to use the term massa for some time when talking in private—“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You know perfectly well, you rogue. It seems that you all want to be rid of me.”
“It’s for your own good,” Kilian insisted.
“Your sons are right,” José interjected. “I don’t know how you will manage another harvest. I’m sure that the doctors in Spain will prescribe you something to make you better.”
“Doctors, José—the farther away, the better. They cure one thing and mess up another.” Kilian opened his mouth to protest, but Antón raised his hand. “Wait, Son. I spoke to Garuz yesterday. After the harvest, I will spend Christmas at home. I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure. Afterward, I’ll come back here, and depending on my condition, I’ll work in the office.”
Kilian would have preferred it if his father would say farewell to the colony for good, but he did not push it. Maybe once he got to Spain he would change his mind. As a man accustomed to physical work, he might find it strange to take a post as massa clak, which was what the workers called office clerks, though they often gave all the literate whites on the plantation that title. Anyway, his father was a stubborn and private man. He would do whatever he wanted no matter what anyone else said.
“I’m relieved,” Kilian admitted. “But it is still a long time until autumn.”
“Once the dryers are going at full blast, time will pass so quickly that before we know it, we will be singing Christmas carols, right, José?”
“Agreed!”
“The tons we have shipped over the years, you and me!”
His friend’s eyes brightened. Kilian loved to listen to Antón and José reminisce over old times that went back to the beginning of the century. It was difficult to imagine a small Santa Isabel with bamboo and calabo wood houses similar to village huts or the streets of firm red earth instead of tarmacadam or the native aristocrats having afternoon tea and remembering their English education or going to Catholic mass in the morning and Protestant service in the afternoon to practice tolerance. José laughed as he recalled his childhood, when men his father’s age sweated inside their frock coats and raised their top hats slightly to greet the elegantly dressed women in their Parisian hats.
“Did you know, Massa Kilian, when I was born, there was not even one white woman in Santa Isabel?”
“How is that possible?”
“There were some in Basilé with their colonist husbands. They had a very hard life. But in the city, not one.”