“It’s no trouble at all.” He stood up. “But know that the papers were returned to the cabinet in no particular order.” He picked up an umbrella from the corner and walked toward the door. “Come on, the old office is just across the way.”
He opened the umbrella and, like a gentleman, held it over Clarence as they crossed the yard to the one-story white building with the single sloped roof and a small porch.
They entered a large room with a big table in front of a window that looked like a picture of a lush, wet landscape. On her right, a cabinet with lattice doors filled half the wall. Fernando began opening the doors, and Clarence sighed. The shelves were overflowing with bundles of papers dumped everywhere. It might take hours to sift through.
“See? Here is the chaotic history of Sampaka. What years did you say your father was here?”
“My grandfather came in the 1920s. My father, at the end of the ’40s. And my uncle, in the early ’50s.”
Clarence picked a random sheet. It was a handwritten chart with a list of names on the left and fingerprints on the right, dated 1946. She put it back in its place and picked up another one that was the same, but from three years later.
“Let me see.” Fernando came over. “Yes, these are the weekly food-ration lists. Well, just with a simple glance, a lot of the papers can be disregarded.” He looked at his watch. “I don’t have to go back to Malabo until three. If you want, you can stay here till then. I hope you don’t mind if I leave you to it.”
“Of course.” Clarence was delighted to be left alone, so she could calmly look for something about the children born a few years before herself, just as Julia had told her. “And in exchange I’ll leave it a little tidier. I’m good at paperwork.”
“Very good then. If you need anything, look for me in this yard or”—he went to the doorstep and pointed to the wall outside—“ring this bell, okay?”
Clarence nodded. At last she was alone and prepared to make good use of her time. She began by taking out armfuls of papers from the bookcase and putting them on the table. She took her notebook from her bag and wrote on several sheets the titles of her listing criteria: workers’ lists and contracts, allocation of houses to families, food-ration lists, accounts, bills, material orders, employee files, medical certificates, and unimportant items. Next, she started to divide the papers into different piles.
An hour later, she opened a folder full of files, with faded and unclear photos of young men stapled to work contracts, wage dockets, and medical certificates. She went through them one by one until she identified first her grandfather and, just after that, her father and her uncle. She gasped in excitement. The mere fact of imagining any one of the three signing their name on the dates stated brought out that same strange nostalgia, but topped with a touch of pride. She spent a few minutes running her fingers over the photos. Had they been that young and handsome? And that brave! How, if not, would they have dared go off to Africa from the mountains of the Pyrenees?
The folder held almost fifty files of other men like them. In her notebook, she wrote down the names of those who worked on the plantation in the 1950s and 1960s. She would ask Kilian and Jacobo if they remembered Gregorio, Marcial, Mateo, Santiago . . .
Before continuing, Clarence spent a good while carefully reading the information about the men in her family. What surprised her most was part of her father’s medical file. She learned that he had been very sick with malaria.
She frowned.
Jacobo and Kilian told them how careful they always were to regularly take their quinine tablets and Resochín to avoid coming down with malaria. If you ever forgot to take them, it was easy to get a high temperature and the shivers, but from what they said, it felt like a bad dose of the flu. From that to being hospitalized various weeks. She decided to ask her father about it when she returned to Pasolobino.
She looked at her watch. One o’clock! At this rate, she would never finish. She reckoned she had sorted about sixty percent of the material. She stretched her limbs, rubbed her eyes, and yawned. She suspected that she would not find anything about the other matter, the birth of Fernando. In the laborers’ contracts, the head of the family and his family were put down, without specifying anything else, neither names nor number of children. On some of the medical files, the birth of a child was listed and whether it had been a male or a female child, but the name of the newborn did not appear. She assumed they were native births. As far as she knew, at that time the only white couple on Sampaka was Julia and Manuel. She was beginning to get discouraged. Nevertheless, she decided to continue with the task a while longer. If someone like her, some descendant of her father’s companions, decided to visit the plantation, at least the papers would be tidy.
Engrossed as she was, murmuring the headings beside which she was placing the corresponding documents, Clarence did not realize that someone had entered until she heard a few steps just behind her. She jumped and turned around with her heart racing.
She stayed fixed to the spot, her mouth open.
Before her was a giant with skin as black as night, observing her with a mixture of curiosity, surprise, and disdain. She was tall, but she had to look up to see that the well-muscled body ended in a completely shaved head with drops of water trickling down it.
“You frightened me,” she said, diverting her gaze to the door. She bit her lip, a little nervous.
“I’m looking for Fernando,” he said in a deep voice.
Oh. So am I, she thought. She let out a little laugh.
“As you can see, he’s not here. Maybe in the building opposite.”
The man nodded and looked thoughtful. “Have you been hired as a secretary?” He nodded toward the table.
“No, no. I came to visit and . . . well . . .” She looked at her watch again. Fernando would not be long in coming. “I was looking for documents from when my father worked here.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “You are the daughter of a colonist.”
His tone was neutral, but she took the sentence as an insult.
“Plantation employee,” she corrected. “It’s not the same.”
“Yeah.”
An awkward silence followed. The man would not stop looking at her, and she did not know whether to continue her work or go look for Fernando. She chose the latter option.
“If you would excuse me, I have to go to the other building.”