Antón smiled and raised his hand. “We’d better wait until we meet up with your brother,” he said. “That way I won’t have to answer everything twice!”
When they got to the end of the pier, Antón glanced up at the steep path and puffed.
“Do you know, Kilian, why they call this the slope of the fevers?”
“Yes, Dad. Don’t you remember? Manuel told me on my first day.”
Antón nodded. “And what did he tell you exactly?”
“Well, that no one escapes from . . .” He offered him his arm. “Dad, it’s normal to be tired after such a long journey.”
Antón accepted his arm, and they went up the path slowly. Kilian did not stop talking the whole way back to Sampaka, bringing his father up to date on happenings on the plantation, the other employees, the new laborers and the older ones, their friends in Santa Isabel, the days working in the cocoa trees . . . Antón listened and nodded, smiling from time to time, but he did not interrupt once.
He had lived long enough to know that his son’s monologue was fueled by the fear of having to give, for the first time, his arm to his father, who felt tired and old.
“Massa Kilian!” an out-of-breath Simón shouted from the window of the truck. “Massa Kilian! Come quickly!”
The vehicle had raised a cloud of dust along the cocoa-tree track. Kilian was checking that the squirrel traps had been set properly. Squirrels in his country were cute. On Fernando Po, they were bigger than rabbits and ate the cocoa-tree pods. Some even had wings to glide from one tree to another. The truck approached, its horn beeping incessantly. Simón got out in a flash.
“Massa!” he shouted again. “Did you not hear me? Get into the truck.”
“What’s wrong?” Kilian asked.
“It’s Massa Antón!” Simón panted. “He was found unconscious in the office. He’s in the hospital with Massa Manuel and Massa Jacobo. José sent me to look for you. Come on!”
Even though Simón drove at a breakneck speed, to Kilian the journey felt like an eternity.
Since March, Antón’s health had been getting steadily worse, though he remained composed in front of his sons. On occasion, he even joked, saying that paperwork was much harder than working among the cocoa trees. Kilian and Jacobo had finally forgone their six months of holidays and asked that they be postponed until their father was feeling better.
The only thing that had changed about Antón was that he now felt the constant need to tell his sons, in minute detail, about the finances of the House of Rabaltué. He repeated the number of livestock they should herd, the correct price at which to sell a mare, the price of lambs, a shepherd’s salary, and the number of reapers they would need that summer to cut the hay and store it for the next winter. He also instructed them on maintaining the house. It needed reroofing, the shed needed a beam changed, the henhouse wall needed support, and everything had to be whitewashed. With the salaries of the two brothers, along with what was earned from the sale of livestock, he calculated, they would have enough to undertake all these tasks. If one salary failed, they would have to do things bit by bit and fix something each year. And in case they had not properly understood him, he wrote down all the calculations on dozens of sheets in duplicate using carbon paper: one copy for the brothers and another to be sent to Spain by post.
Antón had also used some of his moments alone with Kilian to tell him in greater detail about what it took to be a good master, like the relations between houses in Pasolobino and Cerbeán and the debts and favors given and owed between the family and neighbors from time immemorial. Kilian listened to him without interrupting. He did not know what to say. It made him very sad to know that his father was dictating his will to him, even if he used the pretext of letters from home, which arrived with ever more frequency. It was evident that his father felt a pressing need to leave everything in order before . . .
The truck braked abruptly at the door to the hospital. Kilian went up the steps three at a time and burst into the main hall. A nurse directed him to a room beside the doctor’s office. There he saw his father lying in bed, his eyes closed. Jacobo was in a chair in the corner and rose as he saw Kilian. José stood beside the bed. A nurse gathered instruments onto a small metal tray. When she turned to leave the room, she almost bumped into Kilian.
“Excuse me!” she apologized.
That voice . . .
The young woman looked up, and their eyes met.
It was her! The bride of his dreams! Mosi’s wife!
He did not even know her name.
José began to ask his daughter something, but at that very moment, Manuel entered.
“He is sedated now,” he said. “We gave him a higher dose of morphine.”
“What do you mean by a higher dose?” Kilian asked, confused.
The doctor looked at José, who shook his head.
“Can we talk in my office?”
They all went into another room. Manuel got straight to the point.
“Antón has been getting morphine for months to withstand the pain. He did not want anyone to know. He has an incurable illness, untreatable and inoperable. It’s just a question of days, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”
Kilian turned to Jacobo.
“Did you know?”
“As much as you,” Jacobo answered in a sad voice. “I had no idea that it was this serious.”
“And you, ?sé?”
José hesitated before answering. “Antón made me promise not to say anything.”
Kilian dropped his head in grief. Jacobo put an arm on his brother’s shoulder. They knew that their father was sick, but not this sick. How could he have hidden the seriousness of the situation from them? Why had they not thought more of his constant tiredness, his lack of appetite? Everything was due to the heat, he had told them a thousand times . . . to the blasted heat! Did their mother know? The brothers looked at each other, their eyes filled with angst. How were they going to tell her? How do you tell a woman that her husband is going to die thousands of kilometers from home and that she will never see him again?
“Will we be able to speak to him?” Kilian managed to ask in a faint voice.
“Yes. He will be conscious for short periods. But I hope that the morphine works to ease the final agony.” Manuel patted him a few times on the arm. “Kilian . . . Jacobo . . . I am so very sorry. Everyone’s time comes sometime.” He took off his glasses and began to clean a lens with the corner of his coat. “Medicine can’t do any more. Now it’s all in God’s hands.”
“God doesn’t send sickness,” José commented when they were back beside Antón, his eyes still shut. “The creator of beautiful things, the sun, the earth, the rain, the wind, and the clouds cannot be the cause of anything bad. Sickness is caused by the spirits.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” responded Jacobo while Kilian took his father’s hand. “Things are as they are.”
José’s daughter watched them from the door.