Don Lucio Delcano resembled an overstuffed mummy as he sat surrounded by his fawning, adulating brood. Delcano’s skin had been milk-white in his early years, but decades of tropical and mountain sun had darkened it, so that his face now looked as bronzed as that of his native servants. His ponderous nose was supported by a long, drooping white moustache and his hair was no longer blonde as it had been in his youth, but white. His jowls were bloated, and no matter how much he tried to stick out his chin in an attempt to tighten his jaw, the rolling flab layered around his neck. Once tall and muscular, Don Lucio’s shoulders now stooped. Whenever he shuffled from his chair, he dragged his feet wearily, and his arms hung over his distended belly.
“May God bless you, Father. You’re still strong as an ox, and as handsome as a young man of twenty.”
“Birthday greetings, Grandfather!”
“Joy and happiness! That’s my wish for you this day, Padre.”
The long line of Lucio Delcano’s progeny filed past, congratulating him. Their faces smiled, but the old man knew that behind the masks was rancor and hatred. He knew his children and grandchildren wished death on him, and he realized he hated them with the same intensity that they felt toward him.
“Abuelo, you’re looking splendid on your day. What a prince of a man you are. You must have the secret of the fountain of youth.”
Don Lucio felt a repugnance for his family that matched his own self-loathing. As he glared at their faces he felt that each one, from the oldest of his sons to the youngest of his grandchildren, looked like animals.
“Excrement! Lies! Stinking flattery! A collection of miserable creatures. I’ve fathered the makings of a circus.”
The old man muttered as his faded eyes scanned the large room, then rested on his oldest son Damián. Damián looked like a camel, he thought.
“A stupid one at that. Bubble eyes, draping upper lip, split at the middle, a fat nose. “
Don Lucio’s gaze darted to the other side of the room and focused on a heavy-set woman.
“Hortensia. A mare, all flab.”
Lucio stared at his daughter as she walked across the room, swinging her body from one side to the other.
“She would crack the plaster on the walls with that ass of hers if the room were any smaller.”
Delcano shifted his body in the oversized chair. He looked to the side and saw his youngest son standing by Hortensia at the table.
“Anastasio. The sun fried his brain a long time ago. He’s a tapir…hoofs…muzzle…”.
Next to Anastasio, Don Lucio spotted Fulgencio..
“Ah! The snout of a weasel, the priest of the family…ha!”
Delcano knew why his son had chosen to be a priest. Fulgencio preferred the freedom that a skirt around his legs gave him. The old man grunted inwardly. He felt that his belly was on fire.
“Animals! All of them.”
His eyes flitted from Ricarda, to Eliseo, to César. Their faces began to blur as Don Lucio suddenly realized that if they were brutish and dull it was he who was the distortion. He let out a loud snort, and the brood laughed along with him. He saw their purplish tongues, and his head swam with disgust. None of them had the intelligence nor the courage to earn a single colón. None deserved the lands and the silver that he had accumulated with years of hard work.
“¡Mierda! Shit, ordinary pigshit!”
Wearing the wide brimmed Panama hat that had become his personal emblem, Don Lucio lowered his face against his chest. No one could tell that he had escaped to the pleasures of his memories.
“Luz, you have been mine. Only mine. Why do you look at me with such frightened eyes?”
“Something to eat or drink, Lalo?” Don Lucio’s wife’s shrill voice brought him back to the moment.
He resented the name she had for him because she used it to impress others with her wifely devotion; yet, he knew that she had never loved him. The name cut into his nerves like a sharp knife, and he mumbled to himself, “I married a cow!”
Don Lucio looked into his wife’s eyes. She was offering him a plateful of green lumps that someone had concocted in his honor. His stomach turning, he escaped his discomfort by returning to the girl.
“When I’m with you, I feel only my love for you. I hear nothing. I see nothing. You fill my soul. You make me forget who I am.”
Don Lucio’s memories shifted to an even more distant past.
He had been one of several brothers and sisters born in a small village near Santander on the northeastern coast of Spain. His father had been a sailor, a drunkard, who beat his children and their mother. Lucio had grown to adolescence dressed in rags, his belly always aching with the pains of hunger.
By the time he was fifteen, his father’s abuse and the stench of rotting fish had become intolerable. From the taverns, voices spilled out into the streets with news about the opportunities that awaited a quick-witted man in America. And so one day Lucio went to the port where a merchant ship was being prepared for its ocean crossing.
“¡Amigos! ¡Vámonos a America! ¡Vámonos!”
Without knowing the vessel’s destination, the boy jumped aboard and secured passage in exchange for work in the galley. The trip was long and difficult, and he suffered constant bouts of nausea. The meagerness of the rations doled out on the voyage emaciated him, and he walked off the ship in El Salvador at the Bay of Fonseca, his body bony and his face gaunt. He had also grown taller, and at sixteen, Lucio knew he had to act like a man.
He found in El Salvador a world filled with people of many colors, mostly impoverished peasants. He never again thought of his mother or of his brothers and sisters. Instead he gave himself to his new land, never questioning his actions or his motives, all the time knowing that someday he would be immensely wealthy.
“¿Abuelo, un café?”
The old man’s baggy eyes looked at the eager face of one of his grandchildren. Irritably he waved the boy away, refusing to take food or drink from anyone. Once again, he recalled his youth. Slowly, he had amassed plantations, mines, cattle, and servants.
Don Lucio clamped shut his burning eyes, and in the darkness he saw the girl’s body, the nipples of her small breasts. “They tell me that you’ll soon be a woman. Come! Let me kiss your breast. Do not be frightened. Please!”
“Padre Manuel is here to wish you a happy birthday.”
A servant informed Don Lucio that the priest from the city had arrived. The old man resented being interrupted by the presence of the priest. As he looked up at his family, Don Lucio noticed that they had stopped their chatting. All eyes were intently riveted upon him. Hortensia, Damián, and Josefina were inclining their ears toward him trying to snatch at least one word of the whispering. Shutting his eyes, Don Lucio sagged deeper into his chair, knowing that his silence would stir their curiosity even more.
Hunched on his throne, his eyes shut tightly, his elbows folded over his swollen belly, Don Lucio Delcano began to experience a new feeling. Dim, soft at first, it soon gathered momentum. In an instant Don Lucio realized that he was going to die and that he had not yet received forgiveness for the sins and offenses he had willfully committed.
“To be forgiven I have to repent. I have to feel sorry for what I’ve done.”
Don Lucio’s breath caught in his throat. His mouth gaped open. No, he realized he repented of nothing. He was even amused by the knowledge that he was going to die as if he were nothing more than an animal. He chuckled, then laughed loudly, and as his belly quivered and heaved, his family responded by laughing along with him. The harder Don Lucio laughed, the louder were their guffaws.
Suddenly, he began to feel loss of breath. He sensed that the collar of his shirt was tightening around his craggy neck. The buttons on his shirt and vest were constricting like snakes around his heart. Sharp fingers were squeezing his lungs. He was no longer laughing, and his eyes were filled with panic, as he attempted to cry out. But the merriment continued around him. The brood misunderstood, or pretended to misunderstand while their laughter intensified.
The noise began to recede from Don Lucio’s consciousness. In its place he heard a distant tinkling of tiny bells, followed by the heightening sound of a rusty accordion and a squeaky violin. He recognized the tavern music from the town of his birth. Facing death, Lucio Delcano was once again a youth of fifteen, surrounded by toothless, long-nosed men with bald heads and dirty berets.
He blinked trying to focus on those faces of long ago. But he could no longer see. Air began to siphon out of his body as his eyelids clamped shut. He gasped and gurgled. His hands frantically fingered his chest as he began to lose consciousness.