Palm Trees in the Snow

by Luz Gabás

  “Get off my island.”

  18

  Bëköttò

  Days of Sorrow

  1965–1971

  Lorenzo Garuz personally sped up the paperwork so that Jacobo could terminate his contract with the Sampaka plantation and return to Spain. The latest happenings needed to be forgotten about as quickly as possible. Jacobo shot someone who had already killed two Europeans. Case closed. For his own safety, it was best that he left immediately, without a farewell party or dinner: only a few pats on the back from his upset friends and two light pecks from Julia, who showed him support and understanding—something he missed from Kilian and Manuel—by clasping his hands for a few wordless seconds.

  Kilian did not go to the airport with his brother. He did not go to Mosi’s funeral. José had convinced him it was better like that. None of the fellow workers or neighbors of Bisila’s husband would understand. Now Kilian was just another white.

  Since Mosi’s death, it had not stopped raining. The wind blew in their corner of the island stronger than Kilian ever remembered. He had not seen Bisila for twenty days. He had asked José, but he had refused to reveal her whereabouts, and to approach the barracks would have been unwise. The workdays felt unbearably long on the plantation as the men prepared for the coming harvest. The tornadoes brought to mind his father’s words: “Life is like a tornado. Peace, fury, and peace again.”

  As time passed, he started to better understand many of the things Antón had told him. At thirty-six, Kilian had enjoyed little peace and much fury. Only Bisila had been able to offer him moments of calm. And he needed more. When would they see each other again?

  At last, one night, someone opened the door of his room after he had gone to bed. He sat up, frightened, but an unmistakable voice hastened to calm him, “You still leave the door unlocked.”

  “Bisila.” Kilian sprang up and ran to her.

  Bisila’s head was covered in a scarf. Her eyes shone in the darkness. Kilian wanted to hold her in his arms and breathe her in, whisper in her ear the torrent of emotions that were overwhelming him, kiss her face and body, make her understand that nothing had changed …

  Instead, he stood still, waiting for a sign to let him know that she wanted the same.

  “I have to talk to you,” she said gently.

  She raised her hands to her head and took off her scarf. Kilian gasped in shock when he saw that her head was shaved.

  “Your hair, Bisila! What happened?”

  She took his hand in hers, took him over to the edge of the bed, and sat down beside him. She began to stroke it, and then she brought it to her lips and kissed it. At that moment, he felt hope course through him.

  The moonlight filtered through the room. Even with no hair, Bisila was more beautiful than ever. The hardness in her eyes had disappeared, and her lips had lost the bitter grimace of their latest meetings and formed a timid smile.

  “I’m so sorry,” he began to say. The words came streaming out, tripping over each other. “I shouldn’t have gone. All I want is for everything to be as it used to … Mosi is dead … Now you are free to be with me—”

  Bisila put her hand on his lips and said, “I said that that was possible only if the woman carried out the mourning ritual fully. I’ve never given up my beliefs. What I feel for you has temporarily taken me from what I once was, but something inside me is asking me to go away and think about what has happened, what I want, and who I really am.”

  Kilian frowned. “Do you need time to admit that in your heart, I’m your real husband?”

  Bisila gave a sad smile. “Before the eyes of the divine and the human, Mosi was my husband. As far as my people are concerned, the mourning period is necessary. But there’s something else.” Her eyes filled with tears, and her voice trembled. “The memories of that night are always there, in my mind. I can’t get rid of them. And their words, Kilian … They not only seized my body, but also my soul. They made me feel as insignificant as a worm. I have to recover. Otherwise, I won’t be free to love you. I don’t want to compare you to them, Kilian, with the whites who have abused us for so long. That’s why I have to distance myself from you.”

  Kilian got to his feet and paced the room. The attack suffered by Bisila hurt him deeply, but the dread he felt now was worse.

  “Tomorrow I’ll go to Bissappoo. I’ll be alone for another twenty days in a cabin on the outskirts … ,” she added.

  “Almost another month!” exclaimed Kilian.

  Bisila bit her bottom lip. “Then I will lodge in a house beside my mother’s, where Iniko will stay. Mosi didn’t have any family, so nobody will come looking for my son, which is a relief. I will paint my body in a clay paste, and I will decorate my knees, arms, wrists, and waist with esparto bands. No one will be able to see me dressed in widow’s weeds for a couple of days. Then I’ll be able to go out and walk wherever I wish, but neither will I come down to Sampaka nor will you come up to see me during the mourning period.” She finished. “That’s everything.”

  “And how long will you be like that? How long will we be like that?”

  Bisila murmured something.

  “A year,” she whispered as she got to her feet.

  Kilian froze. “Don’t ask so much of me,” he whispered in desperation. “What am I going to do here?” He looked for her eyes. “Aren’t you afraid our time is running out?”

  She met his gaze with firm determination.

  “You can’t stop me from coming to see you in Bissappoo …”

  “If you come … ,” Bisila warned him, “I’ll never return! You have to promise me!”

  “I can’t promise you that, Bisila,” answered Kilian obstinately. His hands caressed the skin on her head, her neck, and her shoulders and descended down her back to the curve of her hips. His voice became soft again, almost pitiful. “Having you so close and not being able to be with you …”

  “I’ve told you once, and I’ll say it again. I’ll always be by your side”—Bisila raised a hand to stroke his cheek and kissed him so tenderly that Kilian shivered—“even if you can’t see me.”

  At that moment, Kilian could not know that the period between May 1965 and April 1966 would not be the most unbearable time in his life, although it seemed so to him. Once more he sought refuge in the routine of work and was pleased that the year’s harvest was the most abundant seen in Sampaka in decades. Sleep and work: those were his tasks. Fortunately, the newlyweds, Mateo and Marcial, were occupied with their new lives in the city and left the plantation as soon as their day’s work was done, and Julia was looking after her two sons, Ismael and Francisco, full-time. Kilian no longer had to look for excuses to abandon his social life completely. He could count the minutes until Bisila’s mourning period—and his own—came to an end, totally removed from the events changing history around him.

  Harvesttime came on top of the pruning tasks. José and Kilian walked along the wide cocoa-tree rows, supervising the laborers’ work. In each row, the trees were planted the same distance from each other. They rose identically, like fertile goblets, with well-balanced crowns and new shoots, stumps, and intertwined branches. Not far from them, they heard the voice of Simón, who laughed and joined in songs with the Nigerians in his brigade.

  Kilian walked on, deep in thought.

  The world-renowned Sampaka cocoa came from the daily work of hundreds of workers who spent their days cutting weeds, regulating the shade of the nurse trees, replacing the diseased trees, curing accidental cuts, grafting different varieties of cocoa, and harvesting every fortnight when the trees bore fruit.

  And they could always be heard singing.

  Some men had spent years without seeing their wives, their children, their relations. They worked from dawn till dusk. They got up, went to the fields, ate, continued their work, had dinner, sang, and talked until they went to their barracks—all the same, in ordered rows like the cocoa trees—certain that a new day would swallow them up in its routine. The only thing
they hoped for out of life was to get paid well so they could send money to their home country and give their families a better life.

  And they still continued singing.

  Day after day. Month after month. Season after season.

  It had been eleven months and one week since he had seen Bisila.

  Not once had he felt the urge to sing.

  “You’re very quiet,” said José. “What are you thinking about?”

  Kilian tapped the ground a few times with his machete. “You know, Ösé? I’ve been here for many years, and I’ve never felt like a stranger. I’ve done the same as the rest of you. Work, eat, have fun, love, suffer …” He thought of his father’s death and Bisila’s absence. “Ösé, I think the biggest difference between a Bubi like you and a white man like me is that a Bubi allows the cocoa tree to grow freely, but the white man prunes the tree to get the most out of it.”

  José nodded. As it grew, the cocoa tree produced a large quantity of shoots that had to be cut so as not to suck the sap. As the years passed, the trees began to deform. For that reason, pruning started when the tree was young. If too many branches were cut, the tree exhausted itself. If not enough dead, diseased, or badly formed branches were cut and enough suckers and the remains of last year’s crop removed, the sun would not be able to get to the trunk, and the tree could rot until it died.

  After a while, José said, “There are now blacks who prune like whites and blacks who want the cocoa tree to grow at its own pace. There are also whites who continue pruning and whites who abandon their plantations. Tell me, Kilian, which one are you?”

  Kilian considered the question. “I’m a man from the mountains, Ösé”—he shrugged, looking him straight in the eye—“who has spent thirteen years among tropical tornadoes.” He shook his head in resignation. “For that reason, I know only one thing is certain. You cannot leash nature. Cocoa trees are pruned, but the trees continue to generate new shoots and disorderly branches in such quantity that there aren’t enough machetes to deal with them. The same as the waters of the rivers and gullies, Ösé. The storms increase their flow, and they burst their banks.”

  “There is a Spanish saying that the waters always return to their original course,” responded José.

  Kilian smiled briefly. “Tell me, mi frend, do you know a saying that could explain how those waters felt while they were free?”

  Ösé remained thoughtful. Then he answered, “Wasn’t it a big white chief who said, ‘Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth’?”

  The workday was coming to an end when the nightmares made a sleeping Waldo, lying on a pile of empty sacks, moan.

  Nobody mistreats Öwassa. The forest is forbidden to those who are not from here. It’s only ours. The great spirit of Öbassa thanks you, mysterious man of the forest, who …

  “Wake up, Waldo!” The lad shot up, startled by Kilian’s shout. “I don’t know what has happened to you and Simón lately, but during the day, you seem sorrowful.” Someone cleared their throat behind him, and he turned. “Ah, I was just talking about you. Don’t tell me that you were also taking a nap …”

  Simón gave him an enigmatic smile.

  “Well, you’ll have to tell your girlfriends to let you rest a bit,” Kilian continued, “if you want to get paid. Work comes first.”

  Simón sighed. “She’s back,” he said flatly. “She’s returned to work in the hospital.”

  He added slyly, “I hope you don’t fall ill again …”

  Kilian bolted in the direction of the main yard. Will she want to see me? he asked himself. Will she have thought about me as I have thought about her? Why didn’t she tell me herself that she was back?

  Bisila was not in the hospital. Impatience consumed him. He began to circle the main entrance, wondering where he could find her.

  He decided to ask in the upper part, near the Obsay yard limits. If Bisila had taken up her job again as plantation nurse, Garuz would probably have given her a house there. He took off with a determined step, holding back the impulse to run. The sweat began to bead on his forehead. He felt anxious and happy to see her again. A year!

  When he got to the first barracks, some music drifted over to him. It was impossible not to be affected by the rhythm of the drums. They were dancing a balele. He was soon able to make out a large group of children dressed up in green and red dancing to the beat of the drums, in groups, individually, or with their mothers. They looked happy in their celebration. Kilian had managed to understand and share with the Africans their idea that any reason was good enough to dance.

  He stopped just a few meters away from the party and allowed himself to become infused with the children’s happiness. One of them, about five or six, stared at him with a smile on his face, and Kilian recognized Iniko under the green hat. For a second, he saw Mosi in his features, and he returned the smile with sadness. Iniko looked at him attentively while moving a pendant that hung from his neck with his hand. The boy turned and ran in the direction of a woman carrying a load in her arms and began to obstinately pull at her skirt until she looked in the direction he was pointing to.

  Bisila’s eyes met Kilian’s, and the hearts of both somersaulted in their chests.

  The drums repeated the same rhythm over and over again. Bisila’s eyes filled with tears as soon as she saw Kilian, tall and muscular, with his shirt rolled up above his elbows, with his well-cut, dark, copper-highlighted hair, his skin bronzed by the sun and some small wrinkles framing the green of his eyes.

  Kilian stood still.

  There was Bisila, wrapped in a turquoise-blue tunic that could not hide the new fullness of her features. A matching scarf covered her head and showed off the deep expressiveness of her enormous eyes.

  He could not stop staring at her eyes.

  He began to walk toward her slowly and then saw that she was carrying a baby, only a few months old, in her arms. When he was beside her, Bisila spoke to him softly, “I want you to meet my son.”

  She removed the white cloth covering the child, and Kilian could see that he was a lighter color than the other children, like coffee with a dash of milk.

  “His name is Fernando Laha.” Kilian felt a knot in his stomach. “He was born in January, but you can see he has the features and eyes”—her voice broke—“of the men of the House of Rabaltué.”

  Kilian gazed at the baby in shock. “He could have been mine, Bisila,” he murmured.

  “He could have been yours, Kilian,” she repeated sadly.

  Kilian asked her to let him hold the child in his arms. It was the first time he had held a baby, and he was clumsy. He remembered the snakeskin hanging in the square in Bissappoo so that all the newborn children could touch it with their hands.

  “Have you taken him to touch the boukaroko’s tail?” he asked.

  The little Fernando Laha woke up and looked at the man oddly, but he gurgled and made a face that Kilian interpreted as a smile.

  “I won’t tell Jacobo,” he said, amazed. “It will be our secret.”

  The baby raised its eyes to Bisila.

  “His future brothers and sisters won’t notice the difference.”

  Bisila hung her head.

  “He won’t have any more brothers and sisters,” she whispered.

  Kilian looked at her, perplexed.

  “I was very ill, Kilian,” she explained. “I can’t have more children.”

  Kilian did not want to know any more, not at that moment. He was with her, and in his arms, he held a descendant of his father, Antón, and all the other names that appeared on the house’s genealogical tree since the first Kilian centuries before.

  Nothing else mattered.

  “Fernando will be our child, Bisila,” he said. “And I like the name you chose for him. It’s from there and here, yours and mine. Tell me, what does Laha stand for?”

  “It means ‘someone with a good heart.’ Like you.”

  The baby grabbed hold of Kilian’s fin
ger with his small hand, and Kilian smiled, filled with joy.

  Bisila felt greatly relieved. At that moment, she knew she would never love a man like she loved Kilian.

  She had honored tradition and was now a widow free to do what she wished with her life. But above all, she had come back from the depths strengthened both in her beliefs and in her love for him.

  Iniko timidly came over to them, continuing to move his feet to the rhythm of the music. His hand still clasped the pendant round his neck.

  “What are you hiding in your hand, son?” asked Kilian.

  Bisila touched the head covered in the green hat. “It’s a sign of punishment. Father Rafael put it on him for talking in Bubi instead of in Spanish. I’ll take him up to my mother again. He’s happy in Bissappoo.”

  Iniko began to pull naggingly at his mother’s dress while rubbing an eyebrow.

  “Yes, I’m coming,” she said. “Today is the beginning of ëmëtöla …”

  They celebrated the transition from ömögera to ëmëtöla, the subtle change from spring’s beginning to its fullness. For the Bubis, ömögera meant the beginning, the start, the morning, vitality, and movement, and ëmëtöla represented permanence, strength, perseverance, stability, and preservation. The red and the green. The fire and the earth.

  “It’s time to begin preparing the next harvest,” said Kilian. “The crops are growing nonstop. It will be a good one.” He returned the baby to his mother’s arms. “Meanwhile,” he added with uncertainty, “we’ll have a little more time … for ourselves.” Just then, Kilian felt some pats on his thigh. He looked down and found Ismael trying to get his attention. The child asked him if he had also come there to dance and explained to him, with a hurried chatter, that he had come up with his mother, with his brother, and with Oba and that since he was now grown up, they had let him play a drum. Kilian looked up and saw a red-faced Julia looking for the little one.

  Julia stopped to say hello to Bisila, without taking her eyes off the baby in her arms. Kilian saw her frown. Bisila and Iniko continued on, followed by Ismael.