by Luz Gabás
Kilian spoke without taking his eyes from the sky, that day being especially bright and clear. Where was the rain that had always framed the saddest moments in his life?
“Daniela, Daughter, I would like you to answer a question for me. I can say I’m at peace and happy …” He paused. “But I want to know if I’ve been a good father.”
Clarence felt a sharp pain in her chest. It was impossible, since Jacobo had lost all his cognitive and physical faculties, but if her own father could ask her the same question in similar circumstances, she would be struck dumb. What would she say?
“The best, Dad,” answered Daniela while covering his face in kisses. “The best.”
Kilian closed his eyes, pleased with the answer. At least part of his waning life, after having separated from Bisila, had had meaning.
Heavy tears rolled down Clarence’s cheeks. She would now never have the chance to answer that question for her own father, and she then deeply regretted not having let Jacobo know, when he was still able to understand her, that if those who had suffered directly from his actions had partially forgiven him—as it was impossible to forget what he had done—and had managed to cast from their hearts their initial feelings of outrage, resentment, and shame, she had no reason not to do so. Too late, she thought, she realized she had inflicted the worst punishment possible on Jacobo; she had made him suffer the rejection of his own daughter.
Kilian opened his eyes and turned his head.
“Your mother,” he began, “told me that she would like us to be buried beside each other, and I’m not going to go against her.” Daniela gave a barely noticeable nod. She pressed her lips together hard to hold back her emotion. “But I’d like you to do something … I’d like you and Laha to do something for me. When you go back to Fernando Po, take a bag with two handfuls of soil from my garden and spread one on Sampaka’s royal palm tree avenue and the other on Grandfather Antón’s grave in the Santa Isabel cemetery.”
Laha noticed that Daniela was finding it very difficult to keep her composure. He went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. Kilian gave him a weak smile. It had been inevitable that Bisila’s and his paths would cross again. It had only been a question of time for the spirits to allow them some peace. He was completely sure that Bisila, like him, was happy to have lived long enough to see their children together.
Kilian rubbed his fingers over the small shells on the well-worn leather collar. “Help me, Daniela. Undo the knot.”
Daniela did so. Kilian held the collar in the palm of his hand for a good while, closed his fist, and stretched out his arm to his daughter.
“Take this to Bisila and tell her that where I’m going, I won’t need it. Also tell her that I hope it protects her as it has protected me.” He shrugged and looked again at the blue sky. “That’s all. Now I’d like to sleep …”
That’s what he wanted: to finally rest in a small island carpeted by cocoa trees with bright leaves and pods, where the days and the nights were the same length and no shade of green was missing, and where he had helped cultivate the food of the gods; to cross the ribbon of coves and bays before climbing the slope of the fevers and note the smell of the small, delicate white flowers of the egombegombes; to hear the laughs, the jokes, and the songs from the throats of the Nigerians and vibrate to the rhythm of their drums; to brighten his view with the color of the clotes on the streets of a charming city laid out at the feet of the misty mountains of Santa Isabel; to bathe himself in the sweet odor and sticky warmth; to walk under the paradise’s green nave of palm trees, cedars, ceibas, and ferns where the small birds, monkeys, and colored lizards played; to feel the force of the wind and the rain of a tropical storm on his skin and then let himself be caressed by a warm breeze infused with the scent of roasted cocoa.
Oh, how he wished to be on that island and feel Bisila’s clear gaze!
Kilian lost consciousness that same night. He was delirious for two days and, in his terrible agony, spoke words that Daniela and Clarence could not understand; Laha would not translate them. From time to time, the dying man spoke Bisila’s name, and all signs of suffering left him; he even seemed to brighten before shrinking back. This went on until he gave his last breath and peace returned to his body.
A week after the funeral, Laha had to leave for work, and Daniela stayed with the children to tidy up and sort out Kilian’s clothes and effects. The cousins did not allow tears to flow so as not to further upset Samuel and Enoá, who did not understand why their grandfather was not in the House of Rabaltué, where he had always been. As an explanation, they told him that their granddad had transformed into a butterfly and flown up to heaven.
One afternoon, when they had finished putting Kilian’s things in boxes, Clarence saw Daniela putting away the collar with the cowrie and Achatina shells and thought it strange. Her cousin answered, “I owe my mother a little justice. If I take it to Bisila, I’m accepting that my father was unfaithful to my mother in his heart. And I don’t want to look at the past anymore. Laha and I have a present and a future to enjoy. There is so much to do! Enough with the nostalgia that has impregnated the walls of this house. I mean this for you as well, Clarence …”
She sat on the bed with the collar in her hands and cried. Clarence said nothing. She let her get it all out, freeing herself of the loneliness that comes when the older generation dies.
After a while, Daniela dried away the tears and gave her the collar. “Here,” she said in a mixture of resignation and decisiveness. “Do whatever you want. I neither want nor wish to understand it.”
Then Clarence remembered how Iniko put the collar, which she still had, around her neck to keep away the evil spirits that surrounded them. She did not find it in the least strange how different the stories of the people in that house had been, as if some higher force had decided to pair them up in the most suitable manner as events unfolded.
Kilian and Bisila had loved each other beyond distance and time, and even though they had not heard from each other in decades, they had maintained an intimate and secret conversation. In contrast, Iniko and she had loved each other at one specific moment in their lives and had separated by mutual agreement, conscious that neither of them was going to give up their life for the other.
However, Daniela and Laha were the ones who had suffered most from a past that had marked their relationship from the beginning and from which they had to unshackle themselves to find their true place, to be free.
Clarence sighed. Daniela was right to say that she was too nostalgic. She lived more in the memories, her own and others’, than in her own present. She took so seriously the task of perpetuating the traditions that she was becoming another stone in that sturdy house. But what was she to do? In a couple of days, there would be no one left there. After centuries, the task would fall on her of closing the doors on a House of Rabaltué that would become, like so many others, just a summer home. There she would leave the voices of dozens of lives whose owners were listed on the genealogical tree in the hall, a silent witness of those who had left and would never return. That was it. Life.
She looked into her hands at Bisila and Kilian’s collar and knew exactly what she would do with it. She would prepare a package with two handfuls of earth from the garden and send it to Iniko, along with the collar, so he would give it to Bisila together with Kilian’s final words. Since she had given up her idea of moving her grandfather’s remains to Pasolobino, at least she would make sure the soil of his home valley would be with him. She was certain that Iniko would know how to tell Bisila what had happened with the same thoughtfulness and love as she would. To other people, all that respect for one’s forebearers might seem stupid, but she knew that Iniko would understand. And she had no doubt that there was nobody better than Bisila to fulfill the last wishes of her uncle just as he had expressed.
A small girl with braided hair appeared in the room, hugging her teddy bear. Daniela picked Enoá up in her arms and took her back to bed.
Daniela could not have chosen two more appropriate names. Enoá meant “sea,” and Samuel referred to that Sam Parker whose name in Pichi had given Sampaka its name. The day would arrive when everything that had happened there would be forgotten, but the names of her nephew and niece would sum up the past and the future. The sea and the tunnel of royal palms. The symbols of the resurrection and victory over time itself.
Clarence’s heart became glad when she thought about the children, but she also felt a stab of jealousy. They would be lucky enough not to think it strange to be black and white, islanders and from the mountains. She would tell them their story of the Bubis and the genealogical ancestors of Pasolobino; she would relate the love story of their grandparents, and they would listen to it with no anguish. They already belonged to another generation, a generation that would see it as normal, even anecdotal, that a small part of the Pyrenees was forever joined to an African island.
Yet for her, it would always be the story of a few people whose great feat had been to change the immovable pages of the book of a centuries-old stone house that now faced the future with the same quivering determination as that of a fragile butterfly.
I told you, Kilian, I did, right at the beginning. You were afraid the snow on the palms would melt, evaporate, and disappear forever. You were afraid the palms would not root in the snow.
Rise up now! Use your wings and gaze upon your house from the heights of the mountain! Look how life clings on! The river of existence that runs across the garden in the House of Rabaltué is now finally fed by small streams of various origins.
I told you, Kilian, I did.
You knew you would never again see each other, but now …
Use the impetus of the north wind and fly toward the valley! Cross the plains and stop at the cliffs! Get on the back of the harmattan and glide toward the island!
You are no longer lost at sea. You are no longer a ship aground. No bell toll can make you lose your bearings.
You see?
Bisila smiles.
She will soon come to you. You will be together again in a place with no time, no haste, no limits, far from fury and close to peace, where you will only drink rainwater.
And now that you have been reborn in the arms of the baribò, you will finally be able to understand what Bisila always wanted you to know:
That the footprints of the people who walked together never, never fade away.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The romantic plot that brings together and divides the characters of this novel, both the inhabitants of Bioko and those of Pasolobino, is pure fiction. However, the story of those men and women from the Pyrenees who spent years of their lives on the island is inspired by real events. Some of them were my father, Francisco Gabás Pallás, and my grandfather Francisco Gabás Farré from Casa Mata in Cerler; my grandmother Rosario Pallás Ventura from Casa Llorgodo in Cerler; and my father’s first cousin Ismael Lamora Pallás from Casa Caseta in Ramastué. Thanks to their memories, both spoken and written, I knew from a very young age of the existence of the island of Fernando Po and so many other things about that part of Africa that is the same size as the county of my roots.
The story of dozens of people from the Benasque Valley, in the county of Ribagorza, part of the province of Huesca, who, from the end of the nineteenth century, decided to go and work in Equatorial Guinea was compiled by José Manuel Brunet, José Luis Cosculluela, and José María Mur in an essential and interesting book entitled Guinea en patués: De los bueyes del valle de Benasque al cacao de la isla de Fernando Poo, published in 2007, soon after my father passed away. I would especially like to thank José María Mur, who rescued from oblivion experiences only known to a few of us, for allowing me to be present when recording those people whose memories and anecdotes permeate my novel, and who—without realizing it—gave me the final push to finish giving shape to an idea I had had in mind for years, an idea where other things became predominant: the curiosity to know the things they had not told us and to discover the other version, that is to say, the version of the natives from there who, in my opinion, were not or have not always been represented either in stories or in travel novels with the respect and dignity they deserve.
The place where my father was born, Cerler, is a small, beautiful, cold, and sunny village located 1,540 meters above sea level. It is part of the Benasque municipality, which can boast of being surrounded by high and beautiful mountains. Our valley has a long history, even if it is now known for being a ski resort. I decided to baptize the birthplace of some of the Spanish characters in the novel with the name Pasolobino for two reasons: to be objective, I needed to distance myself from the place where I have lived much of my life; and Pasolobino could well be a setting like so many others from which hundreds of Spaniards left to spend decades in Guinea. (In the 1940s, there were around a thousand Spaniards on Fernando Po. When the country gained its independence, it was estimated that there were around eight thousand in the whole colony.) In the same way, the village of Bissappoo is fictional, although its description would match many others of the place at the time the novel is set in. It is true that in 1975, Macías ordered a village to be burned because he believed its inhabitants were involved in subversive activities.
All historical events, along with the novel’s setting, have been rigorously checked. Nevertheless, I know that the most erudite readers on the topic of Guinea will be able to forgive some slight changes (such as the Nigerians leaving, which I brought forward in time in the novel) or subtleties (such as Anita Guau’s refurbishment) for literary reasons.
I am also conscious that the action is confined to the island of Fernando Po and not all of Guinea. The cultural differences between the insular and continental part, much bigger in size, made it impossible to give a deeper analysis of other points of view that have been dealt with only tangentially. My original idea, which I have kept to at all times, was to establish the comparison between the two small paradises my father always alluded to: the island and his home valley.
To familiarize myself on the contextual political and social history of Equatorial Guinea, I spent an extended period reading the maximum possible amount of material published on the region. Detailed below are those books, articles, and authors that have had an influence on the writing of this novel.
1. For the geography, history, economy, and politics of Equatorial Guinea, I generally used the following texts: Aproximación a la historia de Guinea Ecuatorial by Justo Bolekia Boleká (2003); El laberinto Guineano by Emiliano Buale Borikó (1989); Macías, víctima o verdugo by Agustín Nze Nfumu (2004), a revealing tale on the atrocities of the Macías dictatorship; Fernando el africano by Fernando García Gimeno (2004), an essential, moving, and detailed account of his twenty years in Guinea until shortly before independence; Fernando Poo: Una aventura colonial Española en el África Occidental 1 (1778—1900) by Dolores García Cantús (2004); De la trata de negros al cultivo de cacao: Evolución del modelo colonial español in Guinea Ecuatorial de 1778 a 1914 by Juan José Díaz Matarranz (2005); Apuntes sobre el estado de la costa occidental de África y principalmente de las posesiones españolas en el Golfo de Guinea by Joaquin J. Navarro, naval lieutenant, secretary of the government of Fernando Po and its dependencies (this document was written in 1859 at the request of Queen Isabel II in order to get trustworthy information on the possessions in the Gulf); and Cronología de Guinea Ecuatorial: De la preindependencia (1948) al jucio contra Macías (1979) by Xavier Lacosta, a clear, interesting, and complete work that allowed me to order the dates correctly of the events narrated in the book.
Articles from the magazine La Guinea Española, edited by the Claretian Fund, from 1904 until 1969, whose issues can be read at www.raimonland.net. In fact, the magazine that Kilian was reading on his first trip by sea in 1953 is real, and the article he mentions on the Bubi linguistics was written by Father Amador del Molino of the Claret
ian mission, who researched the history of Guinea for years. I also found very useful the illustrations of the African botanist and chair of natural sciences Emilio Guinea, author of the books En el país de los pámues (1947) and En el país de los bubis (1949), and the documentary Memoria Negra by Xavier Montanyà (2007).
Of all the articles read in the last ten years, I would like to mention “La dictadura de las tinieblas” by Juan Jesús Aznárez (2008); “Guinea Ecuatorial: De colonia a estado con derecho” and “Guinea Ecuatorial: Vídeos y bibliografía” by Miguel Ángel Morales Solís (2009); the essay “Guinea Ecuatorial” by Max Liniger-Goumaz and Gerhard Seiber for the New Enciclopedia de África (2008); “Guinea Ecuatorial Española en el contexto de la Segunda Guerra Mundial” by José U. Martínez Carreras (1985); “Guinea Ecuatorial: La ocasión perdida” by Juan M. Calvo (1989); articles published in La Gaceta de Guinea Ecuatorial that can be seen at www.lagacetadeguinea.com; and articles in Historia 16 and the online newspaper libraries such as those of ABC and Diario del AltoAragón (formerly Nueva España), not only in searching for news about Guinea from the beginning of the twentieth century, but also for news about Spain.
Of all the encyclopedias, websites, magazines, forums, blogs, and travel reviews to be found on numerous webpages, I found the following invaluable: www.raimonland.net, a marvelous meeting point, a place for news, and a historical review by and for all those who lived in Guinea or those who want to know more about the country; www.asodegue.org, the webpage of the Asociación para la Solidaridad Democrática con Guinea Ecuatorial, where political and economic news along with various articles on Equatorial Guinea can be found; www.revistapueblos.org, website of the Pueblos magazine, with numerous articles on African subjects; www.guinea-ecuatorial.org, official webpage of the government in exile of Equatorial Guinea; www.guinea-ecuatorial.net, where a wide collection of information on Guinea can be found; the Fundación España-Guinea Ecuatorial; the magazine of the association of Equatorial Guinean women living in Barcelona, E’Waiso Ipola; and the Malabo.SA. magazine.
