Only José and his daughter were with Kilian in the room.
Just after entering, the Bubi doctor and priest thanked the white man for the generous presents he had sent through Simón. He then prepared his intervention. He first put on a showy hat of feathers and a long straw skirt and lit a pipe. Then he began to tie various amulets on Antón’s arms, waist, legs, and neck. José posed respectfully, standing with his head bowed and his hands crossed, and his daughter moved around the room, following the requests of the doctor with exquisite diligence. The amulets were of snail shells, bird feathers, locks of sheep’s hair, and leaves from the sacred Iko tree.
Kilian observed the scene in silence. He assumed that these objects, like those at the entrance to Bissappoo, acted to ward away evil spirits. When he saw his father decorated in this manner, part of him began to regret not listening to his brother. But in some part of his heart beat a small flame of longing, fed by the stories of miracles that he remembered from his youth. He thought of the image of the Faith of Zaragoza, who held in her firm arms a broken man, and fixed his eyes on Antón, waiting for something, an open smile, that would show that it had all been a false alarm, a cold, or a deceptive bout of malaria.
The witch doctor untied a gourd filled with small shells from his waist, and the ritual began. He invoked the spirits and asked them to reveal the illness, its cause, and the most effective medicine with which to cure it. He took out two round and smooth stones from a leather bag and placed one on top of the other. The stones, José explained, were the essential tool to find out if the patient would live or die. There was no other alternative.
The witch doctor spoke, whistled, murmured, whispered. Kilian could not understand either the questions or the answers. When José translated the final diagnosis—the patient had not fulfilled his obligations with the dead and would probably die—the weak flame was extinguished in Kilian’s heart. He bowed his head as José made the customary promise to the witch doctor to fulfill his own obligations with his deceased ancestors. The Bubi doctor nodded, pleased, and gathered up his things and left.
“You have done the right thing, Kilian.” José, grateful for the respect the young man had shown to the Bubi traditions, put a hand on his shoulder.
Kilian did not feel comforted by José’s words. He dragged over a chair and sat down beside his father. José’s daughter gave him a timid smile, turned down the sheets, and left, followed by her father. For a good while, Kilian held Antón’s hand tightly gripped in his own, soaking in his father’s spent heat. The blades of the ceiling fan whirred in monotonous beats.
Much later, Jacobo entered the room, accompanied by Father Rafael. The two brothers respectfully observed Antón receive the holy sacraments and the apostolic benediction from the hands of the priest.
Suddenly, as if he could feel the presence of his two sons, Antón began to show a restlessness that could not be calmed, even with a fresh dose of morphine from Manuel. He held the hands of the brothers with unusual strength and moved his head from side to side, as if fighting a colossal force.
For a moment, Antón opened his eyes and said in a loud and clear voice, “The tornadoes. Life is like a tornado. Peace, fury, and peace again.”
He closed his eyes, and breathed his last.
It was hoarse, and quick.
Kilian, completely devastated, saw the feared loss of expression, the rigidity of the face, and the stiffness of the flesh. Death.
When the worst tornado that the old men could remember struck the plantation, Kilian studied it in order to understand his father’s final words. Till then, a tornado had simply been a combination of wind, rain, and furious electrical discharges. A suffocating heat preceded the phenomenon; during the tornado, the temperature dropped between twelve and twenty degrees; and after the rain, the intense heat returned.
But this time he could not be a mere spectator; his spirit mixed with the storm. He himself rumbled and got destroyed.
It all started with a small cloud in the zenith, a small cloud that got bigger and darker as it neared the horizon. All living things ceased activity.
Not a sound was to be heard.
Kilian remembered the intense calm just before the first snowflake, the sensation of unreality.
An absolute, deep, and solemn silence reigned. Distant echoes of thunder were heard, and the lightning grew so intense that for some minutes, it looked as if the atmosphere were on fire. And suddenly, the wind, gusts of such fury that the trees were horizontal to the ground.
The tornado lasted longer than normal and ended in a furious downpour. The wind and the rain threatened to end the world, but when they stopped, the atmosphere was filled by a delightful purity. The living beings began beating again, as if born of a regenerating fire.
They decided that Antón was to be buried in the cemetery in Santa Isabel.
The nurses swiftly cleaned and dressed his body before them. José’s daughter painted little marks on his chest close to his heart.
“These signs made with ntola purify your body,” she murmured. “Now you will be received with full honors by both your white ancestors and ours. You will be able to pass from one realm to the other without difficulty.”
The coffin left the hospital and crossed the main yard of the plantation on a truck that would take it to the city. The plantation employees followed in two vans and the manager’s Mercedes, driven by a sad Yeremías, who had asked Massa Garuz to be allowed to drive the two brothers in remembrance of the deceased. As the funeral cortege passed, most of the workers closed the doors and windows in their houses, and some tolled wooden bells.