He laughed. “Not just me. Us. My father. Puerto Rico. Europe buys most of it.”
“France buys your coffee?” Valentina imagined a fleet of ships filled with coffee beans, its course set for Paris.
“Claro,” he said.
“Do you have a big coffee plantation? I think Dalia and her family have often spent the summer at your hacienda,” Valentina said.
“We don’t have a coffee plantation or hacienda,” he said. “Nothing so grand.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” Maybe his kisses weren’t as sweet as she’d first thought.
“The farmer’s life isn’t an easy one—coffee prices go up and coffee prices go down but my father says that right now coffee’s up,” Vicente said. “My father taught my brother and me everything we know about coffee. He learned from my grandfather.”
“But why aren’t you rich, then?” For the first time in her life, Valentina was interested in coffee and not just drinking it.
“Maybe I will be one day when I have my own farm,” Vicente said. “But tonight I’m just one of Dalia’s poor cousins.”
“Your people are poor?” Valentina thought of the mendigos and los hambrientos who begged for food in the street and around Ponce’s Plaza Las Delicias.
“Somos gente regular,” Vicente said. “People doing the best we can, like everyone else.”
“Dalia’s family has a lot of money,” Valentina said.
“If I had my own coffee farm and a beautiful wife like you, I’d be satisfied,” Vicente said. “I wouldn’t need to be rich.”
“You wouldn’t?” She smiled because he thought her beautiful.
“¡Valentina! ¡Valentina!”
“That’s my mother!”
Vicente offered her his arm.
“I’d better go alone,” Valentina said.
He bowed, then disappeared into the coconut palms.
Later, when Elena asked Valentina why she would go into the garden with a strange man and risk her reputation and that of her family, Valentina told her how much she enjoyed the farmer’s kisses. Of course, she’d pitied the good-looking farmer who would never be rich. Maybe she’d think about him toiling en la finca when she sipped coffee in a Parisian café.
CHAPTER THREE
BOYHOOD CIRCA 1880
Sometimes in whispers, Vicente and his brother Luisito called their father Raúl Vega “el General.” His father’s temper was infamous throughout the countryside; he often overheard people say that Raúl Vega tenía mal genio o un carácter fuerte. So whenever el General inflicted scorn that scarred their skin like the slash of the whip, his older brother’s eyes bore into his: Say nothing!
Raúl Vega had taught his sons that the way to know coffee was with your hands and your feet. When Vicente and Luisito were children, their father had set them under a bush to pick coffee berries. Vicente hadn’t dared to complain about the mosquitoes and other insects that flew into his eyes and stuffed themselves up his nose. Evil branches scratched his face and tried to thwart his picking.
He dreamt of trees. When a tree asked if he were a bird, Vicente observed the ghostliness of the moon, free to come and go as it pleased. Vicente whispered: I am the Moon Bird. The tree whispered cuentos that the birds had brought back from other lands, tales of riches and pirates and oceans longer than days. A tree complained about the owl that kept it awake each night. Why didn’t it fly down the mountain and bother those trees? The coffee trees wished that their taller cousins, the banana and plantain and guava trees, wouldn’t hog all the sunlight, because they too wanted to bask in the sun. There was the eagle that perched on the crown of a tree with such delicacy; the swish of its massive wings as it flew away woke Vicente from his dream.
Even Raúl Vega admitted that Vicente had the gift. Vicente’s fingers need only touch the coffee berry for it to drop into his palm. He didn’t mind that the berries didn’t ripen all at once, and that the trees must be picked over again and again throughout the harvest. He told the trees: Your berries will be washed and dried and roasted to make coffee so delicious that it is a drink for the gods. Mere mortals will pay for it in gold and silver. Your berries will become coffee beans that will be transported in ships to faraway places I could never hope to see in this life or the next. Your berries will be transformed into coffee that will be served in the palaces of the most important people in the world—the kings and queens and popes. Your coffee will kiss the lips of the most beautiful señoritas and be served in cafés to idle people who will linger over tiny cups, bewitched. There are people in the world who could never live a day without you.
Vicente never shared with others his conversations with the coffee trees, but it wasn’t because he thought his brother Luisito would laugh at him, or that his father might question his sanity; it was because it was between him and the trees. The trees liked the murmur of his voice, his words wrapped around their leaves as gentle as the nightly fog. When he ate dinner, his thoughts were of the red coffee cherry nestled in the green leaves, not the rice and beans and malanga, and not even when they had pollo fricasé, his favorite. He was back en la finca, his gaze on the banana and plantain and guava shade trees, blessing their huge green fronds. When he examined the coffee cherries, he held his breath, exhaling only when he saw that they were healthy, that the lack of rain hadn’t dried the berries, or that too much rain hadn’t stripped the branches bare. When the green berries ripened, they would glisten on his palm like rubies.
When he was a young boy, an eagle swooped down and tried to carry him off. Vicente was perched in a coffee tree, the basket full of berries strapped to his waist. The bird clutched his shirt in its yellow claws, and its great wings flapped like the sound of wind. The shirt tore. The strap snapped. Berries fell to the ground like hard rain. He tumbled down.
“Wake up!” His father stood over Vicente, who had fallen out of bed. “We have to go see about a pig.”
Dawn had yet to arrive when Vicente and his brother Luisito followed their father to la sala, where he took down the machete from the wall. The boys’ mother, Angelina, hated to see el machete hang beside the thick coil of rope as in any jíbaro home, but her husband insisted that it was the custom of the country to have tools near at hand. Vicente and Luisito stumbled behind their father in the fog. Cerro Morales, the mountain on which they lived, was colossal and forbidding; the boys, less sure-footed than their father, grasped at branches and vines along the way; they feared their father’s wrath more than the edge of the cliff.
The rooster announced them as they entered the batey of Sevilla’s house. A door opened and light came from a kerosene lamp.
“Sevilla, I warned you.”
Vicente shivered at his father’s words.
“Raúl Vega? Is that you?” Sevilla held up the lantern. “What do you mean coming to a man’s house like a thief?”
“I told you to repair your pigpen,” Vicente’s father said. “I grow vegetables to feed my family, not your pigs.”
“You can’t blame the pigs because your vegetables are so tasty,” Sevilla said.