The night before José María killed Amarga and disappeared into the dark, he sat between his two girls on Lyra’s bed and sang a few songs and told a few stories. Teresa lay on the floorboards, cooling her back, as the humidity steadily rose. José María could sing, surprisingly, and Teresa closed her eyes and followed his notes. The girls, on either side of him, pulled at his arm hair and at his mustache. His fingers stroked their scalps and unpinned the barrettes clipped into their hair like bubble gum.
“¿Should I tell it? ¿Or do you want to?”
“¿Tell what, José?”
“The story of how we met.”
“¿Is that the only story you know?” Lyra asked sarcastically.
“You only know half of it,” José María replied mysteriously. There was nothing mysterious about it, but mystery is the only way to get a child’s attention.
JOSÉ MARÍA AND Teresa met at some snobby cousin’s wedding in 1956. A twenty-two-year-old twice-removed cousin, whom Amarga had never met. But the prospect of men in expensive suits was enough to accept the invitation, with Teresa as her plus-one. The reception was out in the northern part of Puntarenas, in a small beach town so far from San José that Teresa and her mother had to take a bus, a mule, and a ferry to arrive after two days of travel.
Amarga could have booked them a small plane, but their savings had almost dried up. Tácito’s small fortune from years at the American Fruit Company was practically gone. Amarga had just pennies from her father’s inheritance—it had slipped through his hands like water—which is why, though Teresa didn’t know it, Amarga had an ulterior motive: finding Teresa a suitable husband.
At the wedding, Teresa and her mother wore matching purple velvet dresses. Amarga refused to dance at the reception. It is too hot, and besides, women my age don’t dance. Period. ¿You know what I would look like dancing? Like a cow with broken legs.
Amarga waded close to the walls, skulking and gossiping with her elderly aunts and vapid cousins. Their fortunes hadn’t slipped through their own fathers’ hands. They’d been passed down as inheritances often are: to undeserving snobs who threw tacky weddings. While Amarga’s eyes dilated at the prospect of family gossip, Teresa expressed no interest in her clan’s politics, even when her mother whispered in her ear, as insistent as a conscience with a moral compass pointing south.
“Look at that boy,” Amarga said. “He is handsome, ¿no? Look at his shoes. They are European, and so are his cuff links.” Teresa calmly brought to her mother’s attention that they were, in fact, talking about and ogling her cousin. “¡But your third cousin!” Amarga qualified emphatically. “You can’t be so picky. We are not in a position where you can be picky.”
It went on like that the entire night: Teresa kept to herself and ignored the men who danced clumsily about her, while her mother periodically floated over to her like a hummingbird matchmaker.
Toward the end of the reception, Amarga lost sight of Teresa. She shook off any thought of panic but couldn’t help hovering around the remaining guests, eavesdropping to see if anyone had seen her daughter. Gossip from four fat sisters slapped her hard in the face. Teresa had run out with a waiter, one cackled. They turned around just in time to see a shadow disappear toward the beach, a trickle of starlight spotlighting Amarga’s anger as she stormed across the sand.
Teresa and José María would often say the moment they met was something right out of a movie—Teresa avoiding her overbearing mother, dancing on her own, with a buzzing cloud of gallant men begging to join; José María, serving finger food, couldn’t and didn’t take his eyes off her. Maracas crackled, as did fireworks overhead. Teresa flicked boleros from her fingers, even knew how to clack her heels to flamenco. She emitted a natural, electric sensuality. José María tripped over himself and dropped a champagne flute. It splashed like a wave on the open-air dance floor, stopping Teresa, opening her eyes for the first time since the music had begun.
Her smile disarmed José María and sent him into an effusive apology for interrupting something so beautiful. Teresa stayed quiet as he mopped the dance floor with an expensive cloth napkin, and smirked because José María was the clumsiest, handsomest boy she’d ever seen. His innocence attracted her immediately, a clichéd crack of lightning in every nerve.
“Dance with me,” Teresa said.
“I can’t,” José María stuttered. “I’m working. I can’t get fired.”
“Suit yourself,” Teresa said. She turned around and knew she had won. José María threw down the napkin, the tray, unbuttoned his shirt and tossed his bow tie into a bowl of dip. He matched her rhythm, caressed the small of her back with one hand, and cradled her hand with the other. The bolero finished, and Teresa bowed. José María stood frozen with a stupid grin on his face.
Teresa smiled. “Let’s get out of here.”
TERESA AND JOSÉ María lay together on the sand, the sound of the party tinny behind them, the tide creeping closer. She felt his hands fidget behind her back, and he pulled a shark’s tooth from the sand.
“This is good luck,” José María said, smiling. “With this luck, ¿will I be able to find you again?”
“I live with my mother outside San José,” she said. “It’s a cream house in Barrio Ávila.”
“I’m not a rich man,” José María said, slipping the shark’s tooth into his pocket like a treasure. He’d heard of Barrio Ávila’s wealth.
“I didn’t say you had to be,” Teresa said.
José María kissed her again. He asked if her house had a garden. He promised to grow flowers to put in her hair. He asked her to marry him.
“My mother will kill me,” she said.
“She will have to kill us both,” he said.
“She’s terrifying when she wants to be.”
“My family was full of monsters. ¿What kind of man would I be if I were still afraid of them?”
Teresa considered José María’s impulsive proposal. She had never before felt this weightlessness in her bones. She felt as if she would float away if he weren’t holding on to her. Teresa kissed him on his forehead, his nose, on each eye.
“¿What’s your last name?” Teresa asked.
“Sánchez. I know it’s common, but—”
“I don’t care about those things. The problem with coming from a family like mine is you realize how unhappy they are. When you’re obsessed with pedigrees and inheritances, there’s only stress and anxiety. I want to be done with the whole thing.”
The last name Sánchez felt strong and brave to Teresa. Names influenced a person’s nature, and a last name brought about a patrimony of expectations—she saw that Sánchez spread throughout the sinews of his shoulders, the lean muscles that supported his arms that in turn supported her.
“I propose a toast,” Teresa said.
“I don’t like to drink guaro straight. It burns my throat.”
“We’ll chase it with the salt in the air, Mr. Sánchez.”
“You’re something of a poet, ¿no?”
AMARGA HID BEHIND a palm tree that also craned its head to listen to the lovers. If she’d had any more champagne, she would have retched right then and there. A bitterness spread through her and tickled the ends of her limbs, itching her face and torso with hives. Back in Barrio Ávila, she would forbid Teresa from ever seeing him again. She would take a serrated knife to her own throat before entertaining the thought of that waiter on the beach with her daughter. What kind of mongrels would they raise? How could I ever show my face in society again?
Amarga considered confronting them both, grabbing Teresa by the ear and slapping the boy across his face. But she couldn’t run the risk of further ruining her last pair of good heels in the sand. Vanity won. Amarga stomped back to the inn.
The more swigs of guaro that Teresa and José María took, the higher the tide rose. It caressed the soles of their naked feet and nudged Teresa into José María’s embrace. He asked her many questions—who her father was, her favorite color and if it had changed since she was a girl, if she had ever ridden a horse. She answered honestly, but by the time the moon lowered into the horizon, she realized she knew nothing about him.
“¿What about your father? ¿What was he like?” Teresa asked.
“He’s gone.”
“¿And your mother?”
José María winced. “I don’t know,” he said. “I assume she’s gone too.”
Never before had Teresa met someone so secretive, so mysterious about his past and emotions. She took the hint. Teresa wouldn’t insist any further on unearthing his truth. At least not yet.
The moon dropped below the horizon. A gold coin into a pocket.
“Teresa, we’ll have two daughters,” José María said triumphantly.
“¿Is that so?”
“Yes. Two. Beautiful girls with your eyes. And they will dance just as I saw you dance tonight. Gracefully … and all the boys will follow them like fools. Like how I followed you.”
“But I don’t want them to be as dark as me,” Teresa said, her insecurities lubricated by guaro. “I hate my skin. At least in that way they’ll be beautiful.”
José María pinched Teresa’s shoulder before drinking from the bottle again. “That’s a stupid thing to say,” he said. “You have the most beautiful skin I have ever seen. They will be as brown and as beautiful as their mother.”
Teresa stayed silent awhile. She imagined two daughters with her skin. She feared what her mother would say. How Amarga would nag her to keep them out of the sun. To never let them wear pastel dresses for fear of darkening their faces with contrast. Teresa began to weep.
“I’m sorry,” José María said. “I’m a drunken idiot sometimes. Forgive my tone.”
“It wasn’t your tone,” Teresa said, smiling.
José María lifted her body from the sand and carried her into the water. The waking sun’s rays sneaked through the treetops. Giggling, ecstatic, Teresa and José María tossed themselves into the surf, their lips locked, breathing in each other’s breaths until their bodies and the sea became one.