Woodsmoke wafted through the interior. Dogs watched from a distance as Isabella led us through the living quarters. Finally, we turned toward the kitchen, a large building centered around an enormous wood fire. Large pots of rice and beans and corn sat simmering on iron grates suspended over the fires. Large, sweaty women worked the pots and poked the fires with long sticks. In the corner, two teenage girls worked feverishly making tortillas. A second fire glowed beneath a sheet of steel. The girls would dip their hands into a bucket of what looked like cornmeal and water, pound out a flat cake-like thing, and then drop it onto the hot sheet. They’d let it sit sixty to ninety seconds on one side and then flip it.
Paulina hugged the women and the girls and spoke quietly with each, listening and nodding. When they offered food, she refused, but when the young girls pointed toward the tortillas, she looked at me and must have seen my mouth salivating. She nodded; the girl quickly picked one off the hot sheet using only her fingers and handed it to me. Paulina nodded. “It’s okay.”
One of the women dipped a large spoon into the boiling beans and offered. I held the tortilla under while she dribbled goodness on top. Then I folded it and sank my teeth into it. I guess my smile betrayed me because the women laughed loudly, and evidently the delight on my face and absolute approval of their cooking made me an instant friend. They offered more, but Paulina quickly shooed them and ushered me out, laughing.
We continued walking out of the living area into what looked like the working part of the plantation. Large warehouses, tractors, and various pieces of oiled and rusty heavy equipment lay scattered about. Above us, huge trees shaded our walk. Flowers bloomed like peacock wings in the branches, and as I stood mesmerized, I noticed the birds shooting like F-16s between the branches. I shaded my eyes. “What are they?”
Isabella answered me. “Parrots.”
Farther off to my right, maybe several hundred yards, I heard a strange sound that was loud and can only be described as a howl. “What was that?”
Paulina spoke as she walked. “Howler monkeys. There’s one directly above you.” I stopped and stared upward, where I was met by two eyes staring back at me. Paulina snapped her fingers and made some whistling, clicking noise with her mouth that I’d never heard. The monkey jumped as if shot out of a cannon. It danced from tree limb to tree limb until it landed on the ground, where it ran across and, to Paulina’s great delight, climbed her like a tree and perched on her shoulder.
I adjusted the pack on my shoulders and shook my head. “This place should sell tours.”
Behind me, the little boy who’d had the thorn in his foot appeared from around a tree. He was dragging his mother—a skinny young woman carrying an infant. He pointed at me and proclaimed loudly, “El doctor!” He tugged on his mother’s shirt. “El doctor!”
I waved and she eyed me from a distance.
Paulina nuzzled and spoke quietly to the animated monkey, who drifted from shoulder to shoulder to arm and then to the top of her head. He was constant motion.
With another click of her lips, she set him down and he disappeared into the trees, swinging from limb to limb as we walked.
“I guess you and he have done that before?”
“No.” A knowing smile with a single shake of her head. “Just met.”
We walked into what looked like a garage where they repaired the tractors and heavy equipment. A man working on a large tire, with an enormous wrench in his hand, smiled widely when he saw Leena. He limped around the tire, and she extended her hands in the same way Isabella had with me. He bowed slightly and then she hugged him. His eyes lit.
She spoke, he nodded, and after a second, he sat in a chair while she knelt and began rolling up his pant leg, exposing a nasty wound. She rinsed it with bottled water, then cleaned the wound. Finally, she gave him an injection above the wound, covered it in a greasy antibiotic ointment, and wrapped it in gauze. She finished by giving instructions, which included politely, and with a smile, pointing at him to do exactly what she said. He nodded and pulled a small bag from next to the chair and gave it to her. She rolled it up and stuffed it into my pack, then kissed his hand and walked me through the back of the warehouse.
Beyond us, a large concrete world—half the size of a football field—opened up to us. Huge sheets of black plastic had been spread across the concrete, and men with brooms and rakes were spreading coffee beans in single rows across the sheeting. Leena spoke. “The first harvest of beans is coming in. They’ll spread and sort across these sheets, where they will dry. Then”—she led me by the hand—“they are bought in here.” We walked into a separate building where a huge belt-fed machine shook large sifters filled with beans. The noise was deafening, and the air was filled with dust and pieces of hull. The earth vibrated with the movement of the machines. “Where the husk is broken, leaving only the bean.” She continued walking, leading me by the hand out the back where a row of a dozen or so people sat sorting beans into bags between their legs. “They are then sorted into grades of bean. The best are sorted and sold as single source, organic, and fair trade, although I find little that is fair about the trade that occurs here.” When she said this, her tone turned acerbic. She continued. “The lesser or imperfect beans are sold to larger companies for ground coffees throughout the Americas.”
Leena spoke to several of the workers sorting beans, who waved or smiled at her. We exited out the side and down a hill that took us through a chicken coop holding several thousand chickens.
The sun was falling as Leena led me to a pot of water sitting off to the side of a fire where the embers glowed red and white. She touched the water with her finger, then pulled a bar of soap from her pack, and we washed at the water. She made me scrub my arms nearly to the pits, my face and neck. Isabella, too. When finished, we shook dry, shouldered our packs, and began descending the hill through the coffee plants. With the smell of the plantation still wafting around us, Paulina stopped and listened. The sound of an engine. A diesel. Grew closer. Paulina pulled us behind a large tree, and we squatted as a newer white Toyota 4-wheel drive HiLux with roof racks and aggressive tread mud tires climbed up the mountain. Leena leaned around the tree to get a good look at the driver. She whispered, “That’s the foreman.” Her face grew tight, and she spat, “Can’t afford clean water for his workers, but he can drive a new $20,000 truck.” She paused, shaking her head. “He doesn’t allow us here. Says we’re bad for business. For morale.”
“You’re doing all this, and they don’t want you here?”
She shook her head. “Nope.” She listened again. “He fancies himself a cardplayer, so he plays a game every Tuesday night in León. Sleeps off his hangover until Wednesday about noon. Pays his whores. Returns here about dinnertime.” She weighed her head back and forth. “He’s early today. That means he won, and he’s back in time to show off.”
I spoke while watching the truck ramble over the rocks. “Did you say he likes to play cards?”
She looked irritated, and the veins in her arms had popped out like rose vines. “Yeah.”
“And you say that truck is new?”
She watched with disapproval as it rolled and bumped over the rocks and roots. “He wasn’t driving it last week. Why?”
“Just curious.”
I’d only seen pictures of Colin’s truck, but I doubted there were two just like that. And if the foreman was driving it, that meant Zaul had lost it in a card game, which made me wonder what else he’d lost. León was not a big town, and I’d be surprised if there was more than one high-stakes poker game on Tuesday night.