The boy ran out of the shack and down the path through the ferns in the mango grove. The muddy slope took him, under the sky hidden by red flowers and yellow fruit, to the riverbank where Lunero was clearing a work site with his machete at the spot where the river, still turbulent, began to widen. The mulatto came over to him, buttoning up his denim bell-bottom trousers, a memory of some forgotten sailor fashion. The boy picked up his blue shorts, which had spent the night drying on the circle of rusty iron that Lunero was now approaching. Mangrove bark was lying about, open and smooth, its mouth in the water. Lunero stopped for a moment, his feet sunk in the mud. As it neared the sea, the river breathed more easily and caressed the growing masses of fern and banana. The brush looked higher than the sky because the sky was flat, shimmering low. They both knew what to do. Lunero took the sandpaper and went on smoothing the bark with a strength that danced in the thick sinews of his forearms. The boy brought over a broken, rotten stool and placed it inside the iron circle, which was hanging from a central wooden pole. Out of the ten openings punched through the circle hung ten wicks made of string. The boy spun the circle and then bent over to light the fire under the pot. The melted wax bubbled thickly; the circle spun; the boy poured the wax into the holes.
"Purification Day is coming," said Lunero, through the three nails he held in his teeth.
"When?"
The small fire under the sun brightened the boy's green eyes.
"On the second, Cruz, my boy, on the second. Then we'll sell my candles, not only to the neighbors but to people from farther away. They know our candles are the best."
"I remember last year."
Sometimes the hot wax would spit; the boy's thighs were covered with tiny round scars.
"That's the day the groundhog looks for his shadow."
"How do you know?"
"It's a story that comes from somewhere else."
Lunero stopped and reached for a hammer. He furrowed his dark brow. "Cruz, my boy, could you make canoes all by yourself?"
A big white smile flashed on the boy's face. The green reflections off the river and the moist ferns accentuated his sharp, pale, bony features. Combed by the river, his hair was plastered on his wide forehead and dark nape. The sun gave it copper highlights, but its roots were black. The tones of green fruit ran through his thin arms and strong chest, made for swimming against the current, his teeth shining in the laugh of his body refreshed by the river with its grassy bed and slimy banks. "Yes, I know how. I've watched how you do it."
The mulatto lowered his eyes, which were naturally low, eyes that were serene but searching. "If Lunero goes away, can you take charge of everything?"
The boy stopped turning the iron wheel. "If Lunero goes away?"
"If he has to go."
I shouldn't have said anything, thought the mulatto. He wouldn't say anything, he would just go, the way his kind always went, without saying anything, because he knows and accepts destiny and feels an abyss of reasons and memories between that knowledge and that acceptance and the rejection or acceptance of other men, because he knows nostalgia and wandering. And even though he knew he shouldn't say anything, he knew that the boy-his constant companion-had been very curious, his little head turned to one side, about the man wearing the frock coat who came looking for Lunero yesterday.
"You know, selling candles in town and making more when Purification Day comes; carrying the empty bottles back every month and leaving Master Pedrito his liquor at the door…Making canoes and bringing them downriver every three months…and handing the gold over to Baracoa, you know, keeping some for yourself, and fishing right here…"
The little clearing by the river no longer pulsed with the hiss off the rusty circle or the mulatto's somnambular hammering. Boxed in by the green, the murmur of the swift water grew, water carrying bagasse, trees struck by lightning in nocturnal storms, and grass from the fields upstream. The black-and-yellow butterflies fluttered around as they, too, headed for the sea. The boy dropped his arms and asked the mulatto's fallen face: "You're going away?"
"You don't know everything about this place. In another time, all the land from here to the mountain belonged to these people. Then they lost it. The grandfather master died. Master Atanasio was ambushed and killed, and little by little they stopped planting. Or someone else took their land. I was the last one, and they left me in peace for fourteen years. But my time had to come."
Lunero stopped, because he didn't know how to go on. The silver ripples of water distracted him, and his muscles asked him to get on with his work. Thirteen years before, when they gave him the boy, he thought of sending him down the river, cared for by the butterflies, the way they did with that old king in the white folks' story, and then waiting for him to come back, big and powerful. But the death of Master Atanasio let him keep the boy without even having to fight about it with Master Pedrito, who was incapable of thinking of anything or arguing; without fighting with the grandmother, who lived already locked away in that blue room with lace and chandeliers that tinkled when it stormed, and who would never find out about the growing boy a few yards from her sealed-up madness. Yes, Master Atanasio died at just the right time; he would have had the boy killed; Lunero saved him. The last few tobacco fields passed into the hands of the new master, and all they had left was this little bit of river edge and thickets and what was left of the old house, which was like an empty, cracked pot. He saw how all the workers went over to the lands of the new master and how new men began to come, brought from upstream, to work the new fields, and how men were brought from other towns and hamlets, and he, Lunero, had to invent this work of candles and canoes to earn enough to keep them alive. He began to think that no one would ever take him from that unproductive patch of land, just a tiny plot between the ruined house and the river, because no one would ever notice him, lost among these vegetal ruins with the boy. It took the master fourteen years to notice, but at some time or other his fine-toothed search of the region was bound to turn up this needle in a haystack. And so, yesterday afternoon, the master's agent had ridden up, suffocating in his frock coat, the sweat dripping down his face, to tell Lunero that tomorrow-meaning today-he was to go to the hacienda of the gentleman to the south of the estate, because good tobacco workers were scarce and Lunero had spent fourteen years living off the fat of the land, taking care of a crazy old lady and a drunk. And Lunero did not know how to tell this to young Cruz, he thought the boy would never understand. The boy had known only work on the bank of the river, the coolness of the water before lunch, trips to the coast, where they gave him fresh crayfish and crabs, and the town nearby, inhabited by Indians who never spoke to him. But in truth the mulatto knew that if he started pulling on one thread in the story, it would all come unraveled and he'd have to start from the beginning and lose the boy. And he loved him-the long-armed mulatto kneeling by the sanded-down bark said to himself. He'd loved him ever since they ran his sister Isabel Cruz off the property and gave him the baby and Lunero fed him in the shack, fed him milk from the old nanny goat, all that remained of the Menchacas' stock, and he drew those letters in the mud that he'd learned when he was a boy, when he served the French in Veracruz, and he taught him to swim, to judge and taste fruit, to handle a machete, to make candles, to sing the songs Lunero's father had brought from Santiago de Cuba when the war broke out and the families moved to Veracruz with their servants. That was all Lunero wanted to know about the boy. And perhaps it was unnecessary to know more, except that the boy also loved Lunero and didn't want to live without him. Those lost shadows of the world-Master Pedrito, the Indian Baracoa, the grandmother-were coming forth like the blade of a knife to part him from Lunero. They were what was alien to the life he shared with his friend, what would part them. That was all the boy thought and all he understood.