Palm Trees in the Snow

by Luz Gabás

  Tomás parked the car in the porch under the balcony and beeped the horn, which could hardly be heard in the storm. However, when they got out of the car, it did not take long for a man around fifty, serious looking, with strong features and bronzed skin, to appear and greet Clarence pleasantly. He was wearing shorts and a blue shirt and had close-cropped gray hair—with a rebellious fringe—a wide face, and slightly sunken eyes.

  “Welcome to Sampaka … Clarence, is that right? My name is Fernando Garuz.”

  Clarence froze when she heard his name. Well, yes. F for Fernando! Was Julia referring to this Fernando? Was it that simple? Impossible!

  “You’re younger than I’d thought you’d be.” She smiled without stopping to look around at everything she could in amazement.

  “So, did you imagine it like this?”

  “More or less. What surprises me most is the color. The four photos I saw were in black-and-white. And it’s very empty …”

  “In this weather, nothing can be done. I’m afraid I won’t be able to show you around the plantation or the new nurseries. The most I can do is show you the buildings around the yard. You are going to be here for a few days, aren’t you? We can choose a more suitable time to tour the outside areas. Today, if you’d like, we can have coffee and chat.”

  “I’ll wait for you here,” said Tomás.

  “That won’t be necessary.” Fernando gave him some money. “I have to go to the city at midday. I’ll bring her.” He turned to the woman. “If that’s all right?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind …” She took out a notepad and pen from her bag and asked Tomás to write his telephone number. “I’ll call you from the hotel if I need you again.”

  The young man left, and Clarence followed Fernando to a small room with colonial furniture, where he made her the best coffee she had tasted in her whole life. They sat down in some rattan armchairs near a window, and he asked her more about her relationship to Sampaka. She answered quickly while analyzing his features and gestures, trying to find some trace that could link him to the men in her family. But nothing. They were not alike at all. Unless … maybe Julia had meant to say that this Fernando could help her in her search.

  Clarence decided to start at the beginning.

  “Are you possibly a relation of Lorenzo Garuz? At home, his name was sometimes mentioned.”

  “Actually, I am.” Fernando smiled. She noticed that the gap in his upper incisors gave him a youthful air. “He was my father. He died last year.”

  “Oh, I am sorry.”

  “Thank you. He was very old …”

  “And how is it you’re still here? Have you always lived in Guinea?”

  “No, no. I was born in Santa Isabel.” Clarence pursed her lips. Julia had said to look for a Fernando born in Sampaka. “I spent my childhood between Guinea and Spain. Later, I was away for many years, until I finally settled here at the end of the ’80s.”

  “In Sampaka?”

  “At first, in another company in the city.”

  “And how did you end up on the plantation? Was it not bought by the government after independence?”

  “The plantation was left in the hands of someone who could be trusted. He did his best for the few years that the plantations continued, even if it was nothing like your father’s time. But they did something. You have to take into account it was the only means of getting foreign exchange for the country’s survival. After the liberty coup of ’79 did away with Macías Nguema, the old owners, among them my father, who had the majority of the shares, lost the property, and the government granted it to a high-ranking military officer.”

  “And then, how did you manage to get it back?”

  “When the officer died, at the beginning of the ’90s, I was already working on an agricultural development project, financed by the European Union and Spanish cooperation programs, to rejuvenate the cocoa plantations and to try and bring in new crops like pepper and nutmeg. The heirs of the officer agreed to sell the plantation.” He proudly added, “I managed to get back what belonged to my family from the beginning of the last century and return to the place of my childhood.”

  Fernando offered Clarence another coffee, and she accepted.

  “I suppose they named you Fernando after the island.”

  “I think that in all Spanish families who had some connection to Guinea, there is a Fernando.”

  Clarence cringed. That made things even more complicated.

  “In yours too?” he asked, misinterpreting her expression.

  “Eh? Ah, no, no. Only women at home,” she said, smiling. “And no Fernanda …” She stopped and decided to be careful. “Out of curiosity, did any of the archives from the 1950s survive?”

  “There are some things. Before leaving, my father stored the workers’ files in a bookcase. When I came back, the office was a mess, but they had not burned anything, which was unusual. They must have realized that there was nothing dangerous.”

  “And your father, did he ever come back?”

  Fernando shrugged. “Yes, of course. He couldn’t go for very long without stepping foot on his island. He missed it constantly. I kept my promise of burying his remains under a ceiba. Do you know, until he died, my father dreamed of returning the plantation to its old glory?” He looked out the window, with a nostalgic gaze. “In this land, there is something infectious. I still believe the cocoa from Sampaka could return to mass production.”

  Clarence sighed. “Fernando, now that I’m here … would it be too much to ask if I could have a look at the archives? It’s something stupid, but I’d like to see if there is anything on my grandfather or my father.”

  “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 t
he 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.”

  She passed beside the man and crossed the yard very quickly. The torrential rain had eased, but it was still coming down. There was nobody on the ground floor of the house. She went toward the porch where Tomás had parked. Apart from a 4x4 that she had not seen before, it was empty. Where were the hundreds of workers? This was a ghost plantation. The best thing to do was go back to the office. But … if the big man was still there? She let out a snort. She was acting ridiculous. Was she really so skittish?

  She turned with the intention of going back to her papers and saw that a not-very-tall man with completely white hair was coming toward her, waving his hands and speaking in a language she did not understand. The man scrutinized her, went back a few centimeters, and came closer again, murmuring strange words and shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what you are saying,” said Clarence nervously, her heart beating rapidly.

  She began to walk toward the red earth of the yard. The man followed, lifting his arthritis-deformed hands to the heavens and then directing them toward her as if he wanted to grab her. She got the feeling that he was scolding her.

  “Leave me alone, please, I’m going now. Fernando Garuz is waiting for me in the office, do you see?” She pointed to the small building. “Yes, over there.”

  She quickened her step and entered the room, looking behind to make sure that the strange man was not following her.

  Then she ran into a granite wall wearing jeans and a white shirt.

  “Are you blind?” A strong pair of hands gripped her arms and moved her away. She felt something damp dripping on her face. “Your nose is bleeding.”

  Clarence brought her hand to her face and realized it was true. She went over to her bag to look for some tissues. So the giant was still there.

  “I thought you would have gone by now,” she said as she tore off a piece of the tissue to plug her nose and stop the trickle of blood.

  “I’m not in a hurry.”

  “Well, I am. I have to gather all this up before Fernando gets here.”

  The man sat down quietly in front of the desk. The chair creaked under his weight. Clarence began to move the mountains of ordered papers to the bookcase under his attentive supervision. His intense gaze made her nervous. And to top it all, he had not even offered to help her.

  “Sorry for the delay, Clarence.” She gave a start. Fernando strode through the door and then greeted the other man. “I thought with this weather, you’d come another day. Have you been here long?”

  Clarence came over to pick up the last pile of papers.

  “Gosh, what happened to you?” Fernando asked.

  “Nothing, I ran into a door.”

  Fernando went with her over to the cabinet and had a look inside.

  “What a difference! I see you have used the time well … Did you find anything interesting?”

  “Very little I did not know already. I’m surprised there’s nothing about the children born on the plantation. Only the names of the mothers who gave birth in the hospital are listed. I had an idea that there were a lot of children in Sampaka, weren’t there?”

  “Yes, there were.” Fernando pointed to the man in the corner. “You were one of them, no?”

  Clarence’s interest piqued. She reckoned he was about forty, which would put him in the period she was interested in …

  Fernando went on, “But I couldn’t tell you if there were records or not. Maybe in the school, though there is nothing left of it. What do you think, Iniko?”

  Iniko, she repeated to herself. What a strange name.

  “There were a lot of us,” he answered, without much enthusiasm. “Though I spent more time in the village with my mother’s family than on the plantation. As regards records, the Bubis were normally born in their villages and the Nigerians in the family barracks. Only when there were problems were the mothers brought to the plantation hospital. The whites went to the hos
pital in the city.”

  “Why are you interested, Clarence?” Fernando asked.

  “Well …” She looked for a plausible lie. “In my research, there is a section on the names of the children born in the colonial period …”

  “What children?” Iniko interrupted her scathingly. “Our parents gave us a name, and in school they made us change it for another.”

  Which complicates things further, thought Clarence.

  “Ah.” Fernando clicked his tongue. “This one is a … thorny subject.”

  “Yes.” Clarence nodded so as not to raise suspicions. “Well, as I said, I haven’t seen anything here that I didn’t know already.” Well, only that my father was very sick.

  “I wasn’t able to finish tidying everything. If you’d allow me to come back another day, I promise to do it.”

  “You have to come back. You haven’t seen anything!” Fernando turned to the other man. “Are you going to Malabo now?”

  The man nodded.

  “You could take Clarence back to the city.” He said it as a statement rather than a question. “This … I’m sorry, Clarence, but a small problem has come up. The generator room has flooded, and I can’t leave for the moment.” He took a key out of his pocket. “If you would excuse us, I’ll only keep Iniko for a minute.”

  Clarence got her bag while Fernando opened a cabinet. She noticed that Iniko had his eyes, cold as icebergs, still fixed on her. He was probably as pleased as she was at having to spend time alone together. She pursed her lips and left, not looking forward to the ride all the way back to Malabo with him. She assumed that the 4x4 she had seen was Iniko’s, but she did not even think of crossing the yard to it for fear of meeting up with the other crazed man. Instead, she waited close to the door.

  She heard them talking about accounts. There was a moment when they seemed to be arguing, because Iniko’s voice rose, but Fernando quieted him. Soon, they both came out. Fernando insisted that Clarence return to Sampaka as many times as she wished during her stay on the island, handed her a piece of paper with his telephone number, and made her promise to call him for anything she might need.