When Kilian came back to the square, everyone except his niece had gone home.
“Everything all right, Uncle?” Clarence asked. “I thought you were arguing.”
“With Julia? That’s impossible. You must have misinterpreted.”
Something I’ve become an expert at, she thought.
Kilian held on to the young woman’s arm to begin the walk back to the house while the colored flags fluttered above their heads.
Except for the burden of the memory of Iniko, which weighed on her heart, the hunch that Julia’s doubt had opened a new line in her investigation, Kilian’s downcast demeanor, and Jacobo’s continuous foul mood, to Clarence the summer festival of 2003 felt the same as always.
She did not know then that the following year, one member of the family would be missing.
The insistent autumn wind from the north stripped the trees of their leaves with unusual aggression.
Carmen and Jacobo migrated down to Barmón and, unlike other years, spaced out their visits to the village more and more. Daniela had more work than normal in the health center and also enrolled in an online children’s medicine course that kept her busy every afternoon. And Clarence, who, like the leaves on the trees, did not exactly find herself at the calmest moment in her life, immersed herself in preparations for a couple of research articles, her classes, and her doctoral courses, which would all be happening after Christmas.
On a gray November day, she received an e-mail from Laha letting her know he would be visiting his company’s facilities in Madrid in the middle of December. Clarence let out a shout of joy and quickly answered, inviting him to spend the Christmas holidays in Pasolobino with her family. To her pleasure, Laha accepted delightedly.
Until the last minute, she dithered over revealing Laha’s identity, but finally opted to tell her family that she had invited a special friend—she put a lot of emphasis on the word—an engineer she had met in Guinea, to spend the holidays in Pasolobino. If this was the sign she had been waiting for, she did not want to miss Jacobo’s and Kilian’s reactions.
Her mother was delighted with the idea—finally—of having a special friend of Clarence’s enjoying her stews. Her father complained from the other end of the phone that he would have to put up with a stranger during the family Christmas holidays and suggested spending the holiday period in the flat in Barmón for the first time. Daniela became very curious to know exact details about the man who was probably the cause of her cousin’s love problems. And Kilian came out of his daydreams to look at her with an indescribable expression in his eyes and said nothing, absolutely nothing. But after years of not smoking, he stretched out his hand to Clarence’s packet of cigarettes, took one, leaned over one of the four Advent candles that Carmen had placed in the center of the table with a green pine wreath, and lit it.
And Clarence, she felt enormously happy—although nervous—with the possibility of having the brother of her unforgettable Iniko near her.
Or should she start thinking of Laha as her brother?
12
Báixo la Néu
In the Snow
The journey by train and coach from Madrid to Pasolobino was not comfortable, but at least it allowed him to get a sweeping view of the country that had so influenced his own.
Laha was really looking forward to seeing Clarence and her beautiful village, but he was especially anxious to spend a few days with a Spanish family. Without knowing it, his new friend had awoken surprising feelings of curiosity in him, which could even be described as slightly morbid. He would now have the chance to imagine how his life would have been if his white father had taken care of him. Why would it be so outlandish to assume that his father was Spanish and that somewhere, there lived people he shared blood with?
The fact that Laha was one of the many did not mean that he had taken the absence of a father figure well. Iniko, at least, could name his. Laha could not. When he was a boy, any lie would have consoled him. How many times had he dreamed that his father was an explorer devoured by a lion after a terrible fight or a man who had to leave on a secret mission? As he grew up and began to understand the reality, his questions became direct and incisive. He had tried to get his grandfather to tell him where he came from, but he only told him to ask his mother, who was inflexible and repeated to him hundreds of times that he was just Bisila’s son.
He remembered having searched his mother’s house, looking for some memory or clue. His fragile reward had been the fragment of a blurred photo of a white man leaning on a truck, along with the sparse images of Bisila’s childhood. She never found out that he had removed this photo from the rest just long enough to make a copy that, since then, he always kept in his wallet. It was foolish, but for a long time, he had treated this faceless man as his father.
With the passing of time, Laha had managed to accept that his mother’s story was no different from those of Mamá Sade and so many others and that his father had abandoned them without a guilty conscience. He was not the first nor the last, which was no consolation, but this made his interest in finding out who he was disappear. What was the point in looking for someone who did not care about his own child? Laha had forgotten about him and had happily gone on with his life.
. . . until Clarence appeared.
He looked at his watch. He had been on the bus for two hours, and it had just then taken a turn away from the lowlands toward the mountains. From fields covered in furrows, where the vines shrank in the cold, he passed almost without warning to a halfway zone of rolling hills, a reservoir, and towns and villages each time smaller in size. Little by little, the architecture changed. Instead of apartment blocks, he saw brick houses of no more than three or four stories, some old, some newer, and others with the crane ready to intervene. He got the impression that all those places had been transforming for years: they showed the cheerful aspect of all the small places that for centuries have been yearning for the arrival of civilization, with all its consequences.
However, when the bus began to travel along the last part of the route, Laha’s heart shrank. The road became so narrow that he had the sensation that there was not enough space between the precipice over the river and the mountain to his right. For forty minutes, the bus fought against the sharp bends gouged from the rock of the narrow canyon before breaking into a new landscape.
What the hell had sent men from here to a place as different as Equatorial Guinea? Had it just been out of necessity or also because of a faint sensation of claustrophobia?