Many men who worked for the American Fruit Company lived dual lives, especially those with larger salaries. No one made more than the Americans who arrived in Costa Rica to oversee operations, or trim fat, or doctor medical documents, but Tácito Cepeda Mora came very close. He’d been hired by the AFC not only as their head corporate lawyer but as a surreptitious queller of revolts. As weeds reproduce and threaten crops, so, too, did agitators and socialists put the AFC’s banana operations in peril. Having once been a Communist syndicate head against the AFC himself, Tácito was quickly recruited to their side. With the almighty dollar, and a new family to care for, he was easily lured to the AFC’s payroll.
In his younger days, Tácito positioned himself as a dangerous rabble-rouser on the AFC’s Golfito plantation. He had returned to Costa Rica from Washington, DC, with a fresh law degree in 1925, and made labor rights his prerogative. He homed in on the AFC, disgusted by tales of its plantations’ horrid living conditions, slave labor, and its ubiquitous government meddling. Not often did tales of a single man make it into AFC board meetings, but the members decided Tácito’s education made him dangerous; his ability to speak both English to the Jamaican laborers and Spanish to the mestizo ones would unquestionably overwhelm the Banana Division Managers. While the AFC had tried for decades to turn the races against one another by means of preferential treatment and the exploitation of deep-rooted anti-immigrant sentiments, Tácito was able to bring them together to reject the AFC and its ungovernable influence. He led consecutive revolts in the early 1930s, attacking machinery with water, La Guaria Railroad with sticks and sharp stones. He traveled to the other plantations, fomenting laborers to turn their machetes from the fruit to the Americans and their soft white flesh. But when Tácito met Amarga at a party on her father’s coffee latifundio and courted her for a few months, he wanted to give her the world. And when Teresa was born, he wanted to give her the world too. He realized his calling as a Communist agitator would provide his new family no peace and no comfort.
Shortly after Teresa’s birth, he was approached by his predecessor at the AFC. A man who brought a loaded revolver to Tácito’s kitchen table, and instead of unloading its cylinders into his wife, newborn, and his mother, who eyed the exit, the man offered Tácito a generous contract. With stipulations, of course, but with enough security to live the life all activists secretly dream of.
The AFC proceeded to use Tácito for his knowledge and experience—Know thine enemy might as well have been printed on the dollar bills that lined Tácito’s pockets. And during his career at the AFC, he’d been successful in extinguishing half a dozen uprisings. Tácito organized assassinations, disappeared organizers, obliterated organizations before they could spread Bolshevist propaganda like blood. The night he disappeared from Teresa’s world, he’d been sent on a mission to eliminate a Jamaican syndicate head by the name of Jack Pemberton, who the Company determined proved most troublesome. But the memo he’d received from the Company about his adversary was laced with contradictions and inaccuracies. Tácito didn’t know they had tipped off Pemberton and provided him with the same memo Tácito had received.
Tácito left Amarga a letter that night instead of saying goodbye. Scribbled it quickly at his desk, unable to properly convey his sentiments. How important she had been in his life. He promised he would return to her. He touched Teresa on her cheek, caressed her cheekbone with his thumb. She was sleeping so peacefully, he couldn’t bring himself to wake her. Before he left Barrio Ávila, he balanced on the steel of La Guaria Railroad like a tightrope, inhaling the cool midnight air. He felt something odd in his bones, an instinct he later realized had been fear. Men must eventually pay for their sins, and Tácito knew life was ready to balance its books. A man who kills knows when he’s going to be killed. And a man like Tácito, who’d done unspeakable things, knew that fact well enough to flee from his wife and teenage daughter, whom he was sure either the Company or the Communists would hunt down.
A WEEK AFTER Tácito’s disappearance, Amarga watched her daughter and her mother-in-law flutter about the garden, picking flowers, and seeds from their pods. The letter Tácito left lay over her breast. Wait for me, it said. Amarga lit a seventh candle and waited. The green wax pooled and dripped onto the floor.
Belligerent insects congregated in thick clouds, toads of all species performed in a guttural choir, and even the trees rustled their own discordant rhythm. White bats with blond noses, unable to navigate through the cacophony, crashed into windows like fleshy pebbles, tearing their wings on the glass. Teresa watched as one took refuge within a Queen of the Night’s trumpet flower. It ignored the buffet of nocturnal bugs and slipped swiftly into a dream. Teresa could hear its whistling snores as she picked seeds from mustard flowers with her grandmother.
“Tita, ¿why are we doing this? It’s so late,” she said.
“It’s to keep our minds clear.”
Her grandmother’s stocky frame moved nimbly from plant to plant, collecting the tiny seeds like coins. In an hour, Teresa had gathered just a handful, while her grandmother had filled the pockets of her apron. As the lantern light flickered, her grandmother’s body seemed to flicker, too, teleporting from the royal-yellow mustard flowers to the rosebushes, from which she clipped unopened snow-white blooms.
“Flores para los muertos,” she mumbled. She grabbed the flowers by their thorny stems, but her hands didn’t bleed.
“¿Are you picking those for my father?” Teresa asked. Her grandmother froze. The firelight shifted the angles of her face, revealing all her anger, anxiety, and heartbreak in a matter of seconds.
“No,” she answered solemnly. “As far as I know, I can still feel his heartbeat. You must have faith.”
“I miss him,” Teresa said after a long pause exacerbated by the night’s chaotic sounds.
“I miss him too. We are lucky because we can miss him together.”
“I don’t want to be left alone with my mother, Tita,” Teresa confided. “I wish it were her who had left instead.”
“You cannot say such awful things. You are but thirteen years old. You cannot possibly understand the inner workings of your mother’s mind. She does everything for a reason. We mothers, we do everything for reasons that go far beyond anyone else’s understanding. You will learn that lesson well, child. Just wait.”
“But I—”
“¡But nothing!” Teresa’s grandmother sat cross-legged in the grass. She turned and motioned for Teresa to sit in front of her. Teresa did. “¿Do you want to end up like La Cegua?” she asked, staring directly into Teresa’s glassy eyes. “¿Well?
“Heed this story,” her grandmother said, grabbing a handful of mustard seeds from her pocket to pass between her hands like sand in an hourglass.
La Cegua was once a gorgeous young girl, not too much older than Teresa was now, her grandmother explained. All of Cartago knew of her beauty, and the men who had heard the rumors came from every corner of the country, searching the city for her face. They strutted through the streets like colorful roosters, bouquets in hand, their finest clothes on their backs. Once they reached her house, the girl’s mother (somewhat jealous) and the girl’s father (somewhat protective) turned them away politely. If the horny men insisted, however, the father would brandish a machete as long as his arm and swing indiscriminately. Suitors lost ears, nipples, thumbs, and the city’s homelier ladies rushed to pick up their pieces scattered in the dirt, promising to sew them back in exchange for marriage.
This isolation filled the girl with an acidic, unmitigated anger that washed over her in a daily bath. She began to insult her father and curse her mother. It was said her screams could be heard from kilometers away. As the months passed, her anger metamorphosed into pride, and her insults became honed scalpels, slicing to the marrow of their bones. She bragged to herself in the mirror and picked apart her parents’ insecurities the way a child dismembers an insect.
One night, the girl was invited by a handsome young man to a ball. He was the descendant of a famous conquistador and the most eligible bachelor in all of Cartago. Along with the handwritten invitation, he sent the girl a stunning, tight white dress. Her mother, finally able to repay her daughter’s cruelty, forbade it. And in a fit of rage, the girl raised her hand to strike her mother across the face. But before she could, a disembodied hand, as black as an evening shadow, materialized and clutched her wrist. The black hand with sharp nails twisted her arm violently behind her back.
“Evil girl,” a voice beyond the hand said. “I curse you for being so ungrateful as to raise your hand against she who gave you life. Now and until the end of days, those men who search for your beauty will instead be repulsed by your hideousness. Your face will be replaced by the malevolence that rules your heart.”
“And that,” Teresa’s grandmother said, “is the ultimate lesson. You may not love your mother, but you must always respect her. She is, after all, the one who brought you into this world, just as I brought your father into it.”
Frozen in awe, Teresa didn’t notice the fruit bat plop dead from the trumpet flower, suffocated by the delicious fog of the refuge, its translucent, veiny wings still twitching in ecstasy.
THAT NIGHT, OVER the lonely mountain ridges of Guanacaste, a baleful moon twirled on her heels. Quivering with excitement, ready for a show, illuminating the path of a man on horseback who was following the constellation Orion north. A revolver tucked in the man’s belt, a sword in Orion’s. The celestial warrior guided Tácito Cepeda Mora to the Nicaraguan border, where he’d decided to flee. He’d left his Chrysler at the San José AFC plantation as a feint, thinking those who wished to betray him would scour the surrounding areas and nowhere farther. No one knew he’d taken a horse from a nearby ranch to amble about slowly. Tácito was a careful man. A tortoise in races, the winner of contests.
But snaking behind him, about a kilometer or so on foot, Jack Pemberton had been stalking Tácito for two days. His two syndicate lieutenants marched alongside him, anxiously shining their pistols in the moonlight. Even if it was three on one, Tácito was a terrifying opponent. All four men would rendezvous at the horizon, promising the moon a truly unforgettable performance.
Tácito, bored and starving, struggled to stay awake atop his horse. Howler monkeys called back to his stomach’s grumbling, thinking it was one of their own. His father’s Ladysmith revolver pressed farther into his ribs with the horse’s every clop. The pain, he promised himself, would keep him awake.
In his bones, Tácito could feel he was being stalked. By a jaguar or a murderer. Or maybe his new replacement. To the rhythm of a slow clop, Tácito looked like Death atop its horse, skeletal from hunger, cold and weary. His patience convinced him he would stumble upon a village with food and water, somehow survive this, and eventually go back to his wife, his mother, and Teresa with her darling smile. To pass the time, Tácito filed through his memories carefully, isolating the moments in which he had felt proudest.
The first was from when he was fourteen, and he’d shot a viper at fifty meters, saving his sister from its bite. His elated father lifted him into the air and declared, “¡This is my son! ¡The best shot in all of Costa Rica!” The lustrous Ladysmith revolver was his reward. Its eight chambers filled with seven bullets. “For good luck,” his father had said. “Not that you will ever need it.”
The second memory was from when Tácito was the head of a labor union in Golfito. In 1927, he had rallied workers from three separate banana plantations owned by the different fruit companies and staged a five-hundred-man protest. After returning to Costa Rica with his law degree, Tácito witnessed men blister their hands with blunt machetes to meet overseers’ impossible demands. He watched as peons wasted their measly salaries on watered-down guaro sold by the Company’s liquor store—essentially feeding the beast that fed upon them. He fomented the workers, led them in protest, destroying equipment and halting operations for a month. While he’d wallowed in shame these past thirteen years, those episodes of his bravery, his long-lost instinct to stand up for what was right, became seeds of joy and pride in his heart, even if they’d never germinate again.
This led Tácito to his third memory—the day Teresa was born.
To Amarga’s dismay, Tácito’s mother had been her midwife. “Do not be so uptight, Amarga,” his mother said. “When you have delivered as many babies as I have, women’s private parts all end up looking the same.”
Amarga fainted not from the pain but from sheer embarrassment. Tácito’s mother coaxed his child out of his unconscious wife effortlessly, and when the cord was severed and the child bundled tightly in a blanket, Dolores handed the wide-eyed baby to Tácito. He paced the morning bedroom and watched her pupils dilate with each new thing she saw. He wanted to show the newborn her mother and her grandmother, the sun, the moon, the stars, the trees he had climbed as a child, her own ten perfect fingers. He wanted to give her the universe all at once. His mother, sensing Amarga stirring, led Tácito to his wife’s side. The three crowded around the tranquil baby girl and wept.
Delirium rode alongside Tácito like a chevalier. Fifty meters ahead, there was a rustle of leaves. Tácito drew the Ladysmith from his belt, closed his right eye, and aimed. But it was a girl who emerged from a thicket of ferns—she had to be just a few years older than Teresa—dressed in a tight, sheer corn silk dress that followed her in an undulating train. Not until she reached the horse did Tácito see how beautiful she was. In all his life, he had never seen a girl with skin so brown and vibrant. With his luck, he had just discovered a princess in the middle of the jungle. He wondered briefly if he could slip off his wedding ring.
“Señor,” the girl cooed. “¿Where are you going? Please, I need your help.”
Tácito’s eyes followed the beads of sweat that ran from her collarbones down into the space between her breasts.
“Señorita,” he said. “I myself need help. I am searching for the nearest town.”
“¡My village is not too far down this same road! Oh please, señor, ¿will you take me with you?”
“¿How will I take you? I have no other horse to offer.”
The girl placed her hand lightly on Tácito’s thigh. “There seems to be enough space for both of us,” she said. “Please, señor, I must arrive there before dawn.”
Tácito jumped down from his horse and tucked the Ladysmith back into his belt. A perfume radiated from the girl, filling the night with gardenias. She mounted the horse expertly. “Well,” she said, “¿are you not going to get on?”
As they rode, the girl hummed a familiar song. A breeze disheveled her black mane.
“¿Why must you get to the town, señorita?” Tácito asked.
“I must get to my mother. She is very sick.”
“I see … ¿and your father? ¿Where is he?”
“I have not seen him in many years. ¿And you, señor? ¿What of your family?”
“They are back in the capital. I have left them for a short while.”
“Yes, I am sure your daughter misses you very much.”
“¿How did you know I have a daughter?”
“It is in your eyes. There is a peculiar kindness in the eyes of men who have daughters. Sometimes it is as if they can see a woman for who she truly is, not for what they can take from her.”
Tácito questioned the girl’s logic. With this beautiful creature sitting so close to his erection, Tácito would argue that men are driven by selfish desire.
Tácito thought of his mother’s theory: men and their devilish tails. He wondered if on her wedding day, Teresa might find his hand acceptable to guide her down the aisle. He imagined the face of the potential groom, who could cause her as much pain as Tácito had caused those around him. If Tácito could escape this Hell alive, he would drop to his knees and beg their forgiveness—his mother’s, for having abandoned her when his father died; Amarga’s, for having remembered the faces of all the men he had killed as they made love; Teresa’s, for missing out on the years she had left.
Tácito felt the night air chill. He tapped the girl on her shoulder to offer her the blanket strapped to the saddle. The stench of rotten eggs filled the air. The sleek wings of a vulture eclipsed the moon as it circled overhead.
“Señorita,” he said. “¿Is there a volcano close by? ¿Can you not smell the sulfur?”
The girl didn’t answer. Her body straightened. Her spine like rope pulled taut. Again, the vulture eclipsed the moon.
“¿Señorita? We have been riding for as long as you said we would, and I have seen no signs of any town,” Tácito said as he reached for the revolver. “Señorita, turn around and tell me what is going on.”
The girl began to sob. Her shoulders hunched in grief. “Very well,” she said.
What Tácito saw next made his heart stutter. When the girl turned to him, a horse’s skull materialized where her face had been. From the skull’s empty eye sockets, flickering tongues of fire were ignited. Tácito saw his terrified reflection in its every sharp yellow tooth. He fell sideways to the hard earth and heard his ribs snap. His horse galloped away, and Tácito crawled backward in the mud to a boulder. The thing with a horse’s skull crept closer, so close its dress caressed his boots. Tácito drew his father’s Ladysmith and aimed.
Across the road, Jack Pemberton and his lieutenants watched as Tácito dropped suddenly from his horse. They saw him crawl backward like a worm until he reached a giant boulder. They had no idea what was happening, but unable to stand, he made an easy target. As they emerged from the brambles to attack, Jack Pemberton heard seven shots, but felt only two: one that erupted in his kneecap and the other in his left hand. A bullet missed his head by a centimeter and pierced the bark of a tree behind him. The bodies of his two lieutenants collapsed to the earth, perfect bullet holes adorning their foreheads and their hearts. Rivulets of blood trickled from the wounds. Jack Pemberton limped over to Tácito Cepeda Mora, who had stopped moving completely. Sulfur emanated from his corpse; it looked like he was frozen midscream, cheeks almost torn open. The moon’s hushed applause fell on the still-standing man. Jack Pemberton, claiming the revolver from Tácito’s stiff fingers, hobbled north in search of the nearest town.
THE NIGHT’S NOISE quieted down—the clouds of insects dispersed, the choir of toads exhausted. The fruit bats collected their dead. Hanging upside down from kapok tree branches, they recited dour rosaries and crossed their chests with their wings. Teresa lay awake in her bed, staring through a window at the moon dancing playful pirouettes on the horizon’s stage.
Amarga unlatched the guesthouse’s door to find her mother-in-law holding a blossomed white rose. She invited Dolores in to rest on the fainting sofa. Waning candlelight joined their shadows together in a thin, wavering bridge.
“Dolores, ¿what can you feel?” Amarga said.
“¿What do you mean? ¿In my heart?”
“Yes. Wherever you feel these things, or wherever those visions of yours come from.”
Amarga focused on the lines around her mother-in-law’s mouth, wanting in that moment to manipulate the next answer. “I want to know what you see,” Amarga said.
“You already know the answer, Amarga. You have already felt it too.”
“¿But how could I possibly know? I am not like you. I am not a witch.”
“You do not need to be a witch. Tácito has been inside us both, child. From where he left me, he entered you—that connection is absolute. We can feel his heartbeat in our own, and you felt it, too, I know you did. You felt it stop.”
With a dry, muffled scream, Amarga fell to her knees and grabbed her mother-in-law’s apron, ripping the pockets. Hundreds of tiny mustard seeds spilled onto the floor, surrounding Amarga in a spiraling halo.
“Come, child,” Dolores whispered. “Help me pick these up.”