16 Amarga, Barrio Ávila, 1957
Teresa arrived home from Cartago still high from having seen Alice after so long. She looked out to the empty lot where the guesthouse once moped like an afterthought from which grew a small forest of Queens of the Night, Amarga’s favorite flowering tree. Perfume curled into the air like smoke from the hanging trumpets, the unmistakable aroma of roses dipped in honey. An expensive, sensual, rapturous cloud Amarga had always wished she could bottle. She’d tried many times to extract its essence: boiling the flowers, reducing them until the petals disintegrated, and all that was left was burnt sap (a failure); skinning the plant’s tender bark to dry in the sun, then pickling the bark in alcohol (another failure); and finally, her last attempt, crushing the fruit into a paste to splotch onto the sides of her neck (the biggest failure of all, because the psychedelic properties of the Queen of the Night seeped into her skin, spread throughout her bloodstream, and she was later found on a nearby roof, crowing at dawn like a rooster). The plants were heavy drinkers, and this hurricane would make them flourish. A pageant of parched beauty queens right in her backyard.
Amarga’s portrait, next to the vanity mirror, stirred and brayed like an attention-starved child.
“Look at me. ¿Will you listen to me?”
Except for this portrait, Teresa had entirely erased Amarga’s material existence from the house. The religious paraphernalia she hoarded over the years lost in the demolition, the gold watch set fifteen minutes ahead pawned to pay the gardener, Amarga’s favorite coffee mug, her father’s cigar cutter, hairpins, coin purse, and Tácito’s letter: all bulldozed, pulverized, and hauled off. Teresa had destroyed José María’s existence too. That was easier. He had never owned much—just shirts and other ratty articles of clothing, a comb, and a jar of hair product. Erasing the existence of a poor man was unsettlingly easy. His smell she bleached out, his touch she exfoliated with soap and her fingernails. His voice was the most difficult to forget—those years in DC. Teresa had cupped the ears of her heart, until it was only every once in a while that she heard José María’s echo as she cleaned or shopped at the supermarket. By the time Teresa returned to Barrio Ávila and razed the guesthouse and burned José María’s things, she’d almost forgotten him entirely. Almost.
TERESA REMEMBERED THE day José María first arrived on her doorstep in Barrio Ávila. He stank of pig flesh and sweat. He hadn’t the smoky cologne from the beach wedding or the glossy pomade of a young bachelor. Mud, cuts, and green paste splotched his olive-toned skin. Teresa hadn’t known until much later that he’d run the whole way from Puntarenas without stopping for breath or water, though he’d never tell her what he had been running from. Teresa couldn’t help but guess an ex-girlfriend. Amarga swept where he’d walked throughout the house, proclaiming that low-level workers only ran that fast from debts.
“He’s a devil,” Amarga said to Teresa while he slept those first few days. “I can tell from here.”
When he was half awake, Teresa bathed José María herself and slicked his skin with orange blossom water and petroleum jelly. The louder Amarga repeated her theory, the more insistent her grandmother’s voice became in Teresa’s head. The machete in your heart, cut off his tail. But it was a ritual Teresa hadn’t any idea how to perform. She wondered if there existed a special candle with a special color or special scent, or perhaps an herb her grandmother had planted in the garden before she died. Nothing came to mind, and Teresa pleaded with her mother for a clue, any clue at all, because Teresa believed that Amarga must have picked up at least some techniques or secrets from her mother-in-law after so many years.
“It’s love, silly,” Amarga said one night as she cradled a sturdy bottle of sweet aguardiente. Alcohol sweetened her. “Love removes the tail, locks it away, as your grandmother used to say. Sure, she taught me. ¿How do you think your father got so lovely? ¿Why do you think he would look at me the way that he did?” Amarga wept, for perhaps the first time Teresa had ever seen. Teresa tried to comfort her, but Amarga shooed her away. “They’re all born devils, she was right about that. Oh, Dolores, how right you were.”
The mention of her grandmother reminded Teresa how much she truly missed her. The morning she died, Teresa was sprinting to her room, wanting to recount to her a fabulous dream of flying. She’d crept in and found her lying on the bed, her face relaxed except for her mouth, which was agape, as if she had been singing in her sleep. An odd scent hung in the air. Jasmine, rain, dirt.
When Teresa ran to Amarga for consolation, and Amarga saw the despair on Teresa’s face, she knew that Dolores was dead, and she and Teresa would now face the torturous fate of being stuck with only each other. But Amarga did not blame Dolores or even Teresa for this fate; she blamed her husband, for whom she’d waited all those years with candles. When a man leaves, everyone else dies.
As Teresa hovered over José María’s sleeping body, strategizing about what sort of love it might take to separate a man from his tail, she took solace in the memory of her grandmother’s funeral. Teresa had never seen so many people at one time. Mourners of all races and classes, washerwomen, fishmongers, cobblers, thieves, bishops, spinsters, widowers, a president or two, all crowded into the church to touch the forehead of the woman who’d blessed their lives, and others who’d been cursed by her but wanted to pay their respects anyway. Nothing was more beautiful than realizing the person she loved was also loved by others. That the person she would always remember would be remembered by them too. Teresa spoke to José María’s sleeping body, retelling stories of her grandmother until he woke, rested and as handsome as when she’d met him.
THE FIRST TIME Amarga saw Teresa kiss José María, she bundled her things and whisked herself away into the guesthouse and never returned. Her daughter’s future would be easier to tolerate if she didn’t have to witness it up close every day. Amarga had spent her whole life perfecting this tolerance. Not acceptance, because acceptance brought peace to the soul, balance to the mind. No, Amarga preferred to tolerate undesirable things because it allowed her the necessary room to resent. She’d tolerated her childhood, for example.
Amarga was the daughter of a wealthy coffee baron and an Indigenous woman whom he cornered one night in the washroom. To many coffee barons in Costa Rica, siring a child out of wedlock didn’t present any real moral dilemma. They felt it was their birthright—if their great-great-grandfathers could do so, why couldn’t they? In fact, the church encouraged this phenomenon—more children, more patrons—so it became a pastime for Costa Rica’s white oligarchy, blessed by the clergy. But marrying the mother, toting her around at galas? Dressing her in gowns and drowning her in diamonds? Absolutely not. Marriage was a sacred thing to them, not to be performed outside their race.
Amarga was born as crows cawed into the dawn light, and the coffee baron arrived to ship her and her mother away. But he was a capricious man, and changed his mind when he saw the bright, giggling newborn. She wasn’t as dark as she would become, and he had no heir to speak of, and his first wife had died of malaria the year before. He adopted Amarga that day—not out of benevolence, or any semblance or prospect of love—but did so because he was bored and alone there on his vast coffee plantation.
“You’re a good Christian to raise the bastard,” the priest replied to the baron’s confession the following Sunday. “To right the sin, sir. You are doing God’s work.” But the baron had no use for Amarga’s mother anymore; he never repeated what he described as his conquests. So he shipped Amarga’s mother off like a sack of beans. She would never meet her. Her name was Teresa.
Amarga’s father was cartoonish—he wore a panama hat to hide his baldness, balanced cigars from his lips at a forty-five-degree angle, displayed silver-capped teeth like artifacts in a museum—and like all caricatures of men, he was a monster. He would often comment on Amarga’s complexion at random. We should lock you inside until I can pawn you off on someone else, or, Look how your mother’s pussy burned you on the way out. Cruel, unimaginable insults at all hours of the day. But Amarga tolerated it, because when the coffee baron drank, he became warmhearted, showered her with compliments, gifts, and promises to leave her as sole inheritor. She even stomached the baron’s relatives who turned up their noses at her and the governesses who tried to scrub off her skin with a scouring pad. And eventually she would tolerate her husband’s long work hours, and the extravagant parties they attended with vicious mestiza socialites, and her mother-in-law the witch, who saw right through her. But what Amarga never truly tolerated, had not yet mastered, and would not until the moment right before her death, was her daughter. She looked upon Teresa with such contempt that sometimes it would drive her mad, trembling her limbs, giving meaning to her name. Amarga looked upon Teresa, and her father’s ghost would creep into her mouth like a gun, take aim, and fire.
JOSÉ MARÍA HADN’T known the extent of Amarga’s bitterness until he began living in the house in Barrio Ávila, and she exiled herself to the guesthouse without a second thought. José María would bite his tongue whenever Amarga shot snide comments at him or Teresa. But as Teresa readied herself for bed, José María would say his piece, wring his hands in frustration and anxiety, and implore Teresa to stand up for herself. But, Teresa admitted, when she wasn’t affected by her mother’s treatment, she found Amarga comical. No, sad. An absurd pathos, Teresa decided.
Teresa told José María of her experiences on American Fruit Company’s plantation with her mother. How, when they parked her father’s Chrysler outside the White Zone before entering, the white laborers hauling bushels would dulcetly call Amarga Negra, while the Black laborers hacking sang out, ¡Mamá!—both terms humiliated her, and Teresa would watch Amarga sulk as Tácito drove them home along La Guaria Railroad, weighing which term offended her more. Often Amarga yelled back to these workers that she’d have them fired—because how dare they talk like that to the wife of the Company’s head corporate lawyer. But the workers ignored her, and so did Tácito, who thought that she was overreacting.
Teresa’s skin was tougher, she said, though sometimes her mother’s words lodged in her mind like a virus. Teresa had found it funny being around the banana laborers as a girl, as they tried to guess her race. Each worker wanting to claim her and even Amarga. Brunka, the Brunka workers said. (Or at the very least Bribri.) The Jamaican men smiled, certain that Teresa’s family was from their island’s northern coast—Ocho Rios or Port Antonio, they bet. The white workers also put in bids, though they would begrudgingly acknowledge that she was mixed; mestiza or mulatta, but with powerful Spanish blood present in her veins nonetheless.
Teresa, for her part, couldn’t deny that Amarga’s incessant remarks affected José María, each mumbled insult a spore that began covering the walls around his heart. Teresa could do nothing about it, because one can never do anything about one’s own mother. Amarga had fallen from grace, Teresa tried to explain to José María. She had grown up rich (hated by her own father, but wealthy nonetheless), and the AFC had paid Tácito well enough that they could afford a house in Barrio Ávila and attend galas and benefits as nobility did. Teresa remembered that when her mother entered any store in San José, the workers would attend to her as if her skin were white.
That’s what had inoculated Amarga for so many years, had provided her the energy to tolerate her circumstances: money. But when Tácito disappeared, that changed, or rather, in Amarga’s mind, it reverted her. She watched as her friends’ noses steadily turned upward, and more than once, strangers asked her to wipe up spills at fundraisers.
When their savings had eventually all but dried up, Amarga was dethroned as the heir to an opulent white baron and rechristened as the offspring of that nameless washerwoman, shipped off like a sack of beans. Disposable, Amarga knew, because of her color. When José María arrived to marry Teresa, a boy with white skin but no money to unlock its potential, it only added insult to Amarga’s injury. The irony of her life to eat from the salary of a laborer on the plantation her husband once ran.
A fall from grace that hard, Teresa said to José María, makes one bitter.
When Lyra was born, then Carmen, Teresa tried her best to shield them from Amarga’s venom. Teresa used herself as a lightning rod, sparing her daughters. During the rainy season, the girls’ skin would lighten to their father’s complexion, while the dry season provided enough sun to bronze the girls to a gorgeous shade of cocobolo. Amarga’s treatment of the girls became seasonal. But Teresa could see that her mother fought with herself, tried her best to control the poison she produced unconsciously. Amarga doted on her granddaughters, pawned her jewelry to buy them Christmas gifts, strolled them through town in their baby carriages, told them legends before bed. Some scary, some marvelous. And if Amarga meandered enough in her stories, they would all lead to her husband, their missing grandfather, Tácito. His dark, angular face; full, vulture-black hair; delicate digits and fingernails. He could have played piano, Amarga said many times. If only he had learned, because music has a way of staying with you.
Despite the many who might have objected, or contradicted, or scoffed, Amarga considered herself a saint. Brushing her granddaughters’ thick hair or rubbing their dark skin with oil, Amarga fended off her father’s possessing ghost and its glossary of bane, and that in itself was undeniably saintly. Worthy of canonization, if she were given the chance to plead her case to the Vatican.
And in that argument, Amarga would emphasize how she suffered. Alone. Abandoned by the man she worshipped. How Tácito vanished one night. How those idiot gringos had sent him to his fate and left her with no condolences. How her life reeked of wax. And longing. And a hope so desperate, the pope wouldn’t have a choice but to sanctify Amarga for withstanding it.
AMERICAN FRUIT COMPANY
GENERAL OFFICES, 588 20TH STREET NW, WASHINGTON, D.C.
CABLE ADDRESS
AMERIFRUITCO { D.C. SAN JOSÉ
JOHN AUGUSTUS SMITH SR.
CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD
CIRCULAR NO. B-34
August 18, 1948.
TO COSTA RICA BANANA DIVISION MANAGERS
It has been decided, by unanimous vote, that Tácito Cepeda Mora, Chief Legal Officer of the Costa Rica Division, is to be dealt with in a swift and efficient manner. After reading, this memo is to be destroyed. It must be done seamlessly, with no connection to the Company.
Based on witness testimony of Cepeda Mora’s personal conduct, compounded with his past history, it has been determined his Communist sympathies have resurfaced, and with his intimate knowledge of the Company, he must be dealt with.
The Banana Division Managers are to carry on business as usual after Cepeda Mora’s absence. You need not concern yourselves with the details.
His replacement will be sent after confirmation. Cepeda Mora’s office is to be emptied out, documents compiled for inspection, and prepared for the new CLO’s arrival.
Roberto Espinoza Gallo is to assume Cepeda Mora’s surveillance of agitators in the meantime. Any business or complaints are now to be sent through him. He is a loyal man, with no Bolshevist ties or Red leanings. He will visit all the plantations next month to interview you. Please organize information on potential subversives to hand over to him.
Very respectfully,
