“I presume it’s the original name of the village.”
Iniko smiled with a look of superiority. “Sampaka is the contraction of the name of one of the first freed slaves who disembarked in Port Clarence when the island was occupied by the English. The name of this freed slave, Samuel Parker, became Sam Parker, then Sampaka.”
Clarence turned toward him. “And how do you know this?”
Iniko shrugged. “They must have told me in school when I was young. Or I must have heard it when I was working as a laborer. I can’t remember. Well, shall we go in?”
“One more question. I’m curious to know if you ever feel nostalgic about the years you spent on the plantation.”
Iniko thought for a few seconds. “I was happy here as a child, but when I was forced to come back, the work was hard and boring. Maybe I feel a mixture of indifference and familiarity.”
She directed her gaze toward the majestic palm trees whose feet were painted white up to a height of about two meters. Each palm was barely a meter apart from the next. They formed two parallel rows, which were separated by a dirt avenue and seemed to meet at a point in the distance. The entrance closed in on itself, swallowing up the traveler.
She said, “Fate wanted my family to come and work in Sampaka instead of other plantations like Timbabé, Bombe, Bahó, Tuplapla, or Sipopo. These were beautiful sounds that evoked images of distant lands in my mind when I was growing up. Today, since it’s not raining and I can see it properly, I feel as if I can finally enter into the enchanted castle of my childhood stories.”
“I don’t know what you hope to find, Clarence, but in this case, the reality is at best . . . poor . . . to say the least.”
“See those palm trees?” Clarence pointed ahead of her. “The men of my family replanted some of them. That makes me proud and comforts me. My father and my uncle grow old and bent, but the palm trees are still here, strong and straight up to the sky.” She shook her head. “To you it seems insignificant, but to me, it means a lot. One day they will all disappear, and there will be nobody to tell the generations to come about palm trees in the snow.”
She pictured the family tree in her house and felt the same deep tingling that she felt the day she discovered the mysterious note between the letters and decided to call Julia.
“I will. One day I will tell them all I know.” And will you also tell them what you suspect, but have yet to find out? she thought fleetingly.
Iniko started the car, and they entered the plantation, which was full of life: men dressed in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts, pushing wheelbarrows; small vans raising dust; a tractor transporting firewood; a woman with a basket on her head; one or another abandoned container. Then, the yard. On the right, two white storehouses or sheds with red roofs. On the left, a unit built with a white-columned veranda. The main building. The small archives building. Piles of cut firewood here and there. Bare-chested men slowly moving from one place to another. Clarence felt deeply emotional once again.
They parked under the veranda beside several jeeps, and Iniko led her over to the nearest cocoa trees. Clarence saw some men picking cocoa with a long pole that had a sharp flat metal hook at its end, which allowed the men to separate the ripe pods from the green ones and to make them fall without touching the others.
“Look, Iniko! My uncle brought two things back from Fernando Po: a hook and a machete that he still uses to prune and cut the thin firewood.”
The cocoa trees seemed lower than she had imagined. Some men were walking with baskets on their backs; they collected the orange-colored pods from the ground using machetes and put them into the basket. They were wearing high Wellington boots. There were a lot of weeds all around. Other men carried the pods in wheelbarrows and moved them to a pile around which six or seven men were splitting them. They held pods in one hand and opened them with two or three gentle strikes of a machete, which was also used to extract the beans from inside. Almost all of them were young men. Their clothes were dirty. It was certain they spent many hours like that, opening pods and chatting.
There was a sparkle in Clarence’s eyes. Jacobo and Kilian talked to her from afar: “When the cocoa had to be dried in the dryers, even if it was four or five in the morning, I didn’t miss it once in all the years that I was there.”
She would tell her father and her uncle that cocoa was still being produced, and in the same way that they remembered. The cocoa dryers, although old and neglected, were intact. Time seemed to have stood still in that place: the same machinery, the same structure supporting the roofs, the same wood-burning furnaces. Everything worked in the same way and used the same techniques as in the middle of the twentieth century. There were not five hundred workers, nor the order or cleanliness that Kilian and Jacobo used to boast about, but it worked. It had been real and still wanted to be so.
Neither they nor others like them were there now, but the cocoa was.
Iniko was surprised by her interest in something that for him was nothing more than heavy work. They went around each and every corner of the main yard and the surrounding land, with Iniko giving her a detailed explanation of all the activities. After several hours, they crossed a small bridge with no rail and took the path back toward the vehicle. They arrived at the white-columned veranda, took the bags out of the car, and sat on the steps of the old employees’ house. Clarence was exhausted and sweaty, but happy.
A man in his sixties came over. Iniko recognized him, and they talked for a while. The man, who looked familiar to Clarence, would not stop staring at her. Then she realized it was the crazy man who had followed her, making windmills with his arms, on her first visit to Sampaka. She found it strange to see him so calm.
Suddenly, her curiosity increased as she thought she heard the words Clarence, Pasolobino . . . and Kilian!
“Clarence!” Iniko exclaimed, motioning her over. “You’re not going to believe this!”
Her heart began to beat quickly.
“I’d like you to meet Simón. He is the oldest man on the plantation. He has been here for over fifty years. He can’t work anymore, but they allow him to come and go on the plantation as he pleases, gather firewood, and give orders to the young tenderfoots.”
Simón looked at her with incredulity. He had fine incisions scarring his forehead and cheeks. He must be one of the few scarified ones left; he was the first one she had seen, and its effect was a bit frightening. But beside Iniko, she was not afraid.
The man decided to talk to her directly, but he spoke in Bubi. Iniko whispered something in her ear.
“He’s known Spanish since he was a child, but one day decided not to speak it anymore. He has never broken his promise. Don’t worry, I’ll translate for you.”