There was a quick patter of footsteps on the wooden boards and a shirtless, barefoot boy of about eight suddenly appeared.
“Go and tell your papá that Don J. has arrived! Go on, quick now!”
The boy vanished without a word. Ten minutes later, his father arrived, accompanied by three other black men. He was short and heavy-set, with greying hair that lent him a serious, dignified air.
“We weren’t expecting you so soon,” he said, “Gilberto Rendón, at your service.”
J. shook his hand. He said, “Hello,” to the others and they replied.
“I’ve got a letter in my backpack for you, Gilberto,” said J. “Our luggage is on the beach.”
The men headed down to collect the luggage while J. sat on the veranda. Some ten metres from the house was a rocky beach where the breaking waves rattled like maracas against the rocks in a clatter of broken seashells and detritus from the coral reefs. “There must be sea urchins round here,” J. thought.
In a small field to the left of the house facing were several mango trees, one of which was particularly tall and well proportioned. It was crowned with thick foliage and the lower branches had been pruned so cattle could graze in the shade. “It’s exactly how I pictured the tree in the Garden of Eden,” J. thought. A cow and her calf stood under the tree, sheltering from the sun. “Probably brought her in to milk her… maybe it would be better to plough up that field and plant orange trees or something. Obviously you couldn’t till the ground directly beneath the mango trees or people would trample the saplings when they came to pick mangoes. Anyway… I need to make an inventory of what’s in the house, tools and so forth.”
He got to his feet and went back into the house.
The whole place smelt of dust. Just below the ceiling a colony of bats fluttered. J. tried and failed to pry one of the planks from the boarded window. “I need a hammer or a crowbar,” he thought. He made a tour of the house and found a pile of wooden cot beds propped against a wall in one of the rooms. He unfolded one of them and noticed that the canvas was soiled with mouse droppings — or bat droppings. Only three of the cot beds still had their canvas attached, the others were skeletal frames.
The floor was strewn with yellowing magazines, copies of Vanidades and Reader’s Digest that had been gnawed by mice. There were oil burners on the window sills and the floors. In a windowless back room, he found a set of rusty spanners, three battered copper insecticide cans and various shards of plastic and lengths of wire.
Taking one of the spanners, he headed back to the room with the cot beds.
When he managed to pry the boards from one of the windows, the noonday sun burst into the room like an explosion. A small, iridescent lizard scuttled across the sill. The view of the sea from inside the window hit him like a punch in the gut and he felt happiness welling up inside him.
“This will be the bedroom,” he decided and started kicking magazines and newspapers towards the door. “Though we’ll have to fumigate the whole place.”
Meanwhile, the men arrived back with the luggage.
“Bring the cases in here,” J. shouted from the room.
The trunk, the sewing machine and the two suitcases were unloaded.
“Share it between you,” J. said holding out a banknote to Gilberto.
Without even looking at the bill, Gilberto folded it and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He was wearing red trousers, leather sandals and a faded blue shirt with the sleeves ripped off.
“You said you had a letter from Don Carlos for me?” he enquired. J. opened one of the suitcases, took out the envelope and handed it to him. Without opening it, Gilberto folded the envelope and slipped it into the same pocket.
Elena had not come into the house; she was sitting on the wooden steps of the veranda, staring at the sea, still fuming about the presumptuous behaviour of the two boatmen. She felt hot. Her skin was sticky and her feet swollen. She peeled off the shoes and socks she had put on in order to walk across the beach to the house. “I need to get a pair of sandals out of my suitcase,” she thought. “I’ll have a bath, put on a clean dress… This whole place needs a good scrubbing.”
“Don Carlos said that you might be prepared to work for us,” said J.
“Of course,” said Gilberto, “Known Don Carlos years, I have; a fine man.”
They agreed on a salary and also agreed that J. would pay for all the necessary provisions so that Gilberto’s wife would cook for them and for her own family. This had been their arrangement with Don Carlos.
After dark, the woman brought them dinner of black coffee, fried plantains and sea bass. J. and Elena had to sleep in separate cot beds.
“We need to build a decent bed,” murmured J. before he fell asleep.
He was woken at 3 a.m. by the clattering of loose tiles rattled by the wind. Half an hour later, he was sound asleep once more.
5
ELENA SPENT her first days at the house in a frenetic whirl of activity. As the daughter of generations of women obsessed with cleanliness, and buoyed up by the pride associated with a spotless home, the filthy, cluttered state in which Elena found the house had been oddly comforting. The day after she arrived, having swept out the room where they planned to sleep and hung the clothes in a wardrobe she had scrubbed with a scouring pad and bleach, she set to work on the bathroom and the toilet. Leaning in the doorframe, cradling the baby — who seemed permanently attached to her breasts — Gilberto’s wife watched as Elena cleared out rotted window screens, the rusted cans and lengths of pipe. The bathroom looked as though it had been used as a junk room in which to store bits and pieces — useful or otherwise — found on the two hundred hectares of the finca.
The various objects Elena tossed out piled up at the feet of Gilberto’s wife who, still leaning in the doorway, shifted the objects with her foot so she could examine them. Then she looked at the other woman with vague curiosity.
“What is all this shit?!” Elena muttered furiously.
Eventually, the bathroom was clean. In the toilet stall a roll of toilet paper now hung from a length of wire, the ceilings were free of cobwebs, the floor had been swept, there was a bar of soap in the shower, two towels hung on the back of the door, and the washbasin in the corridor had been equipped with soap and a hand towel.
At first, any progress was more apparent than actual. It was a sign of ownership rather than a real improvement, because the huge concrete cistern mounted on bricks behind the outhouses was cracked and the pipe carrying water from the stream three hundred metres away had long since rotted away.
There was no running water. Every morning, wearing their swimsuits, Elena and J. would have to carry soap and towels down to the stream where they bathed using a gourd to scoop up water.
“The most important thing is to get the shower working,” Elena said that first morning as she dried her feet before putting on her sandals.
There was a constant clamour of birds down by the river and several times they spotted troops of monkeys swinging through the trees. The water was clear and soft. On the walk back, J. got into the habit of pausing for a while beneath the tall mango tree, picking a few ripe fruits and eating them as he stood in the shade watching Elena, her wet hair glistening in the sunlight, a towel in one hand and soap and shampoo in the other, walking back to the house. Even later, after they had replaced the water tank and the pipe and there was running water in the bathroom, J. went on bathing in the crystalline stream until the end.
When Elena set about organizing the kitchen, she discovered that it was the only clean room in the house. Despite the fact the cooking was done on an open fire, the ancient pots and saucepans were gleaming and immaculate. The meagre stock of groceries was carefully arranged on shelves that were spotless, though blackened by the smoke. There was no sign of ants or cockroaches.