Palm Trees in the Snow

by Luz Gabás

  A short time later, in the guest bedroom, Daniela studied Laha’s bare chest. There was a huge difference between the boys in her past and this fully fledged man. She had known she wanted to spend her life with him, even before sleeping together. Laha moved closer till his body joined hers. No more words were necessary. There were no nerves, nor awkward laughs, nor superfluous pauses, nor confused thoughts. Their hands knew what they wanted to feel. Their lips and their tongues knew well how to sate their desire. It only took one glance into each other’s eyes to be sure that one felt the same intimate hunger as the other.

  Laha had made a tremendous effort in delaying the moment when he would take her. He wanted to enjoy every second of exploration. It was the supreme celebration of all the senses. He had traveled half the world, had slept with many women, but he had never experienced pleasure like this, with a young woman whom he had just met in a forgotten corner of the coldest mountains he had ever known. If at any stage he had worried that age difference would be an obstacle, he was now certain he had been completely wrong. His body no longer belonged to him. It would no longer be able to feel anything away from her. He was sure of it.

  Daniela moved under him, more than ready to welcome him. If he did not enter her soon, she would scream, even if it woke half the village. Laha positioned himself tenderly between her legs and began moving, stroking her hair with his hands. Daniela moaned and arched her back. She needed to feel him in the deepest part of her being, to rock with him, to melt into the complete union, to explode in unison.

  Laha, completely out of breath, collapsed on his back, with his heart beating at a dizzying speed. Daniela placed her arm on his chest. Laha wrapped his arms around her.

  “This has never happened to me before,” he said in a low voice. “It was as if …”

  She finished his sentence before submerging into a deep sleep, “… as if someone were manipulating us at will, wasn’t it?”

  Clarence returned two days later. The holidays were coming to an end, and her mother’s convalescence would coincide with the start of classes, so it would be a while before she returned to Pasolobino. There had been no progress made on the subject of Laha. For one reason or another, it was never the right moment. It was difficult enough for her father to look after his wife in the flat in Barmón without having to hear such an accusation from his daughter. With regard to Daniela, she was not going to wait one minute more: the moment Laha got on the bus, she would tell her everything.

  Clarence watched the quiet and affectionate farewell between Laha and Daniela at the stop in Cerbeán, which was nothing like her complicated good-bye from Iniko on Bioko. Did this mean that Daniela and Laha meant to see each other again?

  When her turn came, Laha hugged her tightly.

  “Dearest Clarence. Thanks for everything! I’ve had a marvelous holiday!”

  Clarence was overcome by a sudden burst of sincerity. “Ah, Laha! A few months ago, you and Bisila and Iniko were strangers. Now, it’s like we have known each other all our lives! As if our lives had been intertwined!”

  “Do you mean,” he whispered jokingly, “that you have the strange feeling that you can’t fight the spirits?”

  Clarence loosened her hug with a sudden jerk and moved away. Laha planted a quick kiss on Daniela’s cheek and got on the bus. Daniela did not stop waving her hand in the air until the vehicle disappeared from sight.

  “And now you and I are going for a beer,” said Clarence. It came out more as an order than a suggestion. “How long has it been since we’ve had time alone?”

  When Clarence finished recounting her version of the facts—leaving out her special relationship with Iniko—she lowered her eyes and sighed deeply. At a few points during the story, Daniela’s eyes had filled with tears, but she never let them roll down her cheeks. She pursed her lips, arched her eyebrows, rested her chin in her hands, peeled off the label from the beer bottle, and shredded it into a thousand pieces, but she did not say a word.

  “Even the note I found has more meaning than ever,” finished Clarence. “It said that one was working and the other studying hard. It’s obvious. The two brothers, Iniko and Laha.” She lit a cigarette. Her hands were trembling. “The only thing I don’t understand is the relationship between Dimas of Ureca and Manuel in all of this … And you? Have you anything to say?”

  “And what could I say?” answered Daniela, still in shock. “You yourself have said you don’t have conclusive proof, apart from the coincidence in names and other details.”

  They went over all the dates and information once again, but always came to the same point. It was very probable that Laha and Clarence were brother and sister, but only Jacobo could confirm that.

  And even if it is true, thought Daniela, that wouldn’t change how I feel about him in any way.

  A long silence followed.

  And I had thought that my cousin was jealous … Daniela shook her head.

  “And now what?” Clarence asked, finally free of the secret that had tormented her for months.

  “I can’t believe it.” Daniela let out a small, nervous laugh. “Laha could be my … cousin!”

  Just then, she felt a tightness in her chest.

  “What’s the matter?” Clarence asked. “You’ve gone very pale.”

  “Oh, Clarence … What if … Are you sure there isn’t the slightest possibility that Laha’s father could be …” She ran out of breath before finishing the question. “My dad?”

  Clarence shook her head in certainty.

  “Julia practically confirmed Jacobo’s paternity to me. Also, could you imagine your father hiding something so serious?”

  “He’d have had to really fool me.” Daniela took another sip of beer. The tightness in her chest disappeared as quickly as it had come. “Dad is quieter than usual, sure, even gloomy, but he’s relaxed. If it were his son, he’d be on edge.”

  “And the person who seems nervous is my father, yes? Then … when will we announce what we know?”

  Daniela thought about her answer. “For the moment, we won’t say anything at home. Before that, I’d like to talk to Laha.”

  During the first few months of 2004, as Jacobo helped Carmen recover and Clarence buried her head in work, Daniela made several trips to Madrid, traveling there every three or four weeks. Because she lived in an isolated area, it was easier to use a job refresher course as an excuse. Clarence could not understand how everyone else—especially her uncle Kilian—had not picked up on the change in her cousin. How did they do it with the distances involved? The only thing she could think of was that Laha was making a stopover in Madrid every time he went from California to Bioko and vice versa.

  After each weekend away, Daniela arrived home exhausted but radiant. Clarence thought, with envy, that if Laha was half as good a lover as Iniko, Daniela had reason to be happy. Still, she was concerned. So many trips could mean only one thing: that Daniela and Laha had successfully gone beyond the honeymoon phase of the relationship and showed no signs of wearing out. They wanted to learn every detail of each other’s pasts, and think about living together for the rest of their lives.

  Far from Pasolobino, what Daniela and Laha still did not know was how, where, and when.

  The situation was not easy; Bioko, California, and Pasolobino formed a huge geographical triangle. One of the two would have to consider following the other around the world. Either Laha moved to Spain or Daniela would be between California and Bioko. Laha argued that the big advantage of being a nurse was that she could work anywhere. And in Guinea, she would have the opportunity of really making a difference, even if she earned less. Bisila would be a great help in placing her. What a coincidence that the two most important women in his life were nurses!

  But Daniela was less worried about her work situation. For one, she had yet to confess to Laha her suspicions about his identity. She was being very selfish, but she was afraid that the news would threaten their closeness. And she had not dared talk to her f
ather.

  She had always been so close to Kilian that she was finding it very difficult not to tell him how happy she felt with Laha. She and her father had never lived apart from each other; even in college, she stayed with him on weekends. Jacobo, Carmen, and Clarence were close family, but the relationship between Kilian and Daniela was special, as if they really only had each other. How was she going to tell him that she wanted to fly far away, just when he most needed her?

  At the speed her relationship with Laha was going, she would have to choose sooner rather than later. But she found herself fighting with her practical side. A love story with such a different man, a man a few years older than she, and with whom she could share genes, frankly, had never been part of her plans.

  And Laha’s touch and delightful obsession with nibbling at her breasts was not helping her find the right path.

  “You’re very quiet, Daniela,” said Laha. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I was thinking about my father,” she answered, sitting up against the bed’s headboard. “I will have to tell him!”

  Laha lay on his side beside her as she wrapped her arms around her knees, deep in thought.

  “Do you think he’ll care about the color of my skin?”

  Daniela turned toward him, shocked. “Not for one moment have I ever thought anything like that!”

  Laha stroked her foot. “This is something completely new in the House of Rabaltué.”

  Daniela’s eyes blazed in fury. “Well, it’s about time someone disrupted the historic peace of my house!” She sighed before continuing. “It’s possible that it will give Uncle Jacobo a fit … a black in the family!” She winced. A black who could also be his son. “But my father is different. He will respect my decision above all.”

  “Then what’s worrying you?”

  Daniela sighed deeply. “Any decision we make to live together means leaving him alone in Pasolobino.” She picked up Laha’s shirt, put it over her shoulders, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Maybe it’s too soon to tell him. We’ve known each other for only three months.”

  “It’s enough time for me.” Laha knelt behind her and hugged her. “There is a popular African proverb that says no matter how early you rise, your destiny will have risen before you.”

  She leaned back against his chest and closed her eyes.

  That night, in the Madrid hotel, she found it nearly impossible to sleep. In her mind, she ran through her childhood, her father, and a mother she recognized only from photos. She also saw Clarence, Carmen, and Jacobo. She thought of her friends, neighbors, colleagues, and of people she greeted every day on her way to work or when out shopping. She thought of how lucky she had been growing up.

  Like Clarence, she was a part of the fields scored by streams, tarns, and glacial lakes; of the woods of black pine, ash, walnut, oak, and rowan; and of the meadows dotted with wildflowers in spring, with the smell of freshly cut hay in summer, with the fire colors of autumn, and with the solitude of the snow.

  This had been her world.

  Clarence would not understand.

  She remembered another African proverb that Laha had shared in one of their many conversations about his home.

  “The family is like the forest,” he had told her. “If you are outside it, you only see its density. If you are inside, you can see that each tree has its own place.”

  Her family would not understand that she was ready to move on. “Daniela,” they would say, “you can’t transplant a grown tree, nor a flower in bloom. It will die.”

  “Unless you dig out a huge hole,” she would answer, “and allow the roots to take as much soil as possible and water it continuously. Also,” she would add, “a person’s roots are kept inside. They’re the tentacles that extend the length of our nervous system and keep us whole. They go wherever you go, live wherever you live …”

  When sleep finally came, Daniela continued to dream.

  The meltwaters from the glaciers in her valley formed a large pool that flowed along a plain before falling as a waterfall into an enormous chasm. There, it disappeared completely. As if by magic.

  In one of nature’s whims, at the foot of Pasolobino’s highest peaks, an exceptional karstic phenomenon occurred.

  The river was gobbled up and flowed along a subterranean path robbed from the rock. The acidic meltwater was capable of dissolving rock. The subterranean water made new galleries and bends along which the river flowed away from any sunlight. After several kilometers, the river reappeared in other lands, in another valley. It resurfaced in the form of a huge fountain that contributed to the flow of water in another river, which, once joined, fed into the French coast, far from its source.

  In her dream, Kilian and Daniela leaned over the huge chasm.

  Daniela was happy for the mysterious journey the waters would take before a happy ending.

  And oddly enough, in Daniela’s dream, Kilian was not sad. On the contrary, he gave her a triumphant smile.

  He knew that the same water that entered the dark caves and remained hidden from the outside world, after eroding and dissolving the rock, would find a way to the surface.

  In the end, it found a way out.

  14

  Temps de Espináulos

  Time of Thorns

  April 2004

  As soon as the family left for Madrid to attend the gathering of old friends of Fernando Po, Daniela gave in to her excitement.

  She went through every room in the house to make sure everything was perfect. This time, Laha would sleep with her in her beautiful blue room, decorated in antique furniture, all belonging to her great-grandparents, her grandfather Antón’s parents. An enormous bed, its size a rarity from that time, took over the room. Daniela could hardly wait to have Laha with her under the feather-filled eiderdown.

  She crossed to her father’s bedroom, smaller than hers and simply decorated with honey-stained pine furniture. The only decorations in the room were two etchings, one of St. Kilian and the other a sad-faced black image of Our Lady, hanging on the wall opposite the head of the bed. These were the first two things her father saw when he woke up and the last things before he went to sleep.

  Her eyes wandered over the room.

  On top of the bedside table was Kilian’s old wallet.

  For his trip to Madrid, Daniela had managed to get her father to try out the wallet that she had given him on Christmas Eve. She herself had hurriedly changed over the documents and the numerous pieces of paper filled with telephone numbers and notes after a lot of insisting, just before he got into the car with Jacobo. Her father was reluctant to hand it over, and she had had to promise that she would take only the money, credit cards, and his ID and that she would keep it in the drawer of his bedside table with the others.

  She went over to the table to put it away. As she bent down to open the drawer, which always got stuck, her eyes noticed a piece of paper sticking out from under the bed, half hidden by the rug.

  She picked it up and saw that it was a black-and-white photo of a beautiful smiling black woman with a small boy in her arms.

  Daniela did not know who they were. She had not seen the photo before. What she did know was that the author of Guinea in Pasolobinese had asked the people of the valley who had traveled to Guinea decades ago for material. Maybe this was one of the few photos Kilian found when rooting around in the sitting room cabinet. In fact, several images of the Rabaltué brothers appeared in the book.

  Yes, that would be it.

  She put it in the drawer and went down to the kitchen to get dinner ready. It would not be long before Laha got there.

  In a hotel in the center of Madrid, Jacobo and Kilian did not stop chatting. As well as meeting Marcial and Mercedes, Clarence had also met a wizened old man in a wheelchair named Gregorio, whom her uncle had given a cold greeting to.

  The celebration was marred by the recent terrorist attack on four suburban trains in Madrid, which had seen almost two hundred people lose their l
ives. Even so, most conversations revolved around Guinea. Many commented on the brief headline that had appeared in the press about the setting up in Madrid of a government of Equatorial Guinea in exile, aimed at giving a democratic option to the country by returning to Malabo and preparing open and democratic general elections. Clarence had quite quickly divided the guests into two groups: the outdated colonists, like her father, who defended the theory that Guineans lived better under the colony, and the paternalistic conservatives, like her uncle, who claimed that Spain had a historic debt to the old colony and that something should be done to compensate for the abuses of the past.

  She wondered if anyone was there like herself or Fernando Garuz, who thought that the mother country and the ex-colony did not owe each other anything. The best thing would be simply to respect the decisions of the small country. Why not treat it as an equal, as a partner, as an independent and sovereign republic to do business with?

  Clarence took a glass and sat down in an armchair until the meal began. She missed Daniela, even if their last conversation had been unsettling. There were very few of their generation there. Daniela had accused her of being jealous that she was spending more time with Laha than Clarence. She remembered choking on her whiskey. If anything, Clarence was simply bitter that distance had not undermined Daniela’s and Laha’s feelings toward each other. No matter how frustrating it was to admit that she missed Iniko a lot, she was aware that in her case, once the initial passion had passed, her relationship would not have worked.