The fruit of my life was that there was none.
I finished the mango; climbed up on the tin roof, which was still warm from the day’s heat; and lay down, staring at the stars and counting the satellites that screamed overhead.
An hour later, I climbed down, having never felt so full and so small at the same time.
Chapter Eighteen
Monday morning daylight brought with it the glorious smell of coffee. I followed my nose and found Paulina and Paulo sitting on the back porch. The back porch was a compacted area of dirt next to the house where the tin roof had been extended like a stiff tent over two posts. It was both a shelter from the rain and half a hot box. While Isabella slept, they were talking about the day. She told me Paulo’s idea was that while Isabella was in school, we’d break up into two “teams.” Divide and conquer. He’d take the truck and go one way; she and I would hop on the bike and go another. He felt we could cover more ground that way. We’d start at the northern end of the coast and move south, and he’d return to León, across to the coast, and then north. That way we could cover the entire coastline, and by the end of the week, we should meet somewhere in the middle. Granted, Zaul could move around and to places we’d already covered, but at least we could get some info from the locals who might have seen him.
Sounded good to me. I asked, “You don’t mind sitting on the back of a bike?”
She smiled. “I’m used to it. Or”—a shrug—“I used to be.”
Paulo asked, “We meet back here after noon. Then you help me?”
I wasn’t quite sure what he was asking. Paulina offered, “He wants to ask a favor of you.” She paused. “He’s hesitant because it’s different than working in the sugarcane.”
I turned to Paulo. “Sure. Anything.”
Paulo nodded and left while Paulina readied Isabella for school, which left me savoring my coffee. I’d had some good coffee in my life, and I’d often considered myself a connoisseur in much the same way people prefer wines, but as I sat there, the flavor of those beans and that resulting coffee struck me as possibly the best I’d ever had.
She smiled. “Good, isn’t it?”
I spoke staring at my mug. “Not sure I’ve ever had better.”
“You must mean it. That’s the second time you’ve said that.” We walked Isabella to school and then stood in the backyard staring up at the mountain several miles in the distance. She pointed. “You see that dark spot below the crater. Where it’s real lush?”
I nodded.
She shaded her eyes. “My father was walking up there forty years ago and discovered that the lake atop the crater spilled into that area. Natural irrigation that deposited all those minerals into the soil. He also found wild coffee. The land wasn’t very valuable; no one wanted it because no one believed you could do anything with it, but he felt differently, so he bought that plateau with his life savings and then cultivated the coffee. He felt there was something special in the combination of that volcanic water, the shade from those ancient trees, and that soil. I was born a few years later, and by then we had coffee plants popping up out of every thing or container that wasn’t nailed down.” She shook her head. “I have walked up that mountain a thousand times and planted ten thousand coffee plants myself. By hand.” A pause. “What you are drinking comes from some of those original plants.” A smile. “Provided you know where to look and do so when others are not.”
“You stole these beans?”
She considered this. “How could I steal what was given to me?” She pulled on my helmet and began buckling the strap. Then pulled on a backpack filled with a few snacks and water. “My father was very successful. Bought more land. Planted more coffee. And employed hundreds of people in this valley, but the economy he created affected thousands. If the head of household makes money, the community grows, and the men walk with their heads high because their family eats at night. At one time, he was the largest grower and supplier of coffee in the northern half of Nicaragua. We shipped all around the world. Europe. Africa. North America. There were larger farms who produced more, but they weren’t family owned.” She smiled. Her eyes glistened. “My father paid good wages, gave hand over fist, created good working conditions, shared profits, started a school and taught the kids for free, brought in doctors and provided health care.” She laughed. “He even helped birth a few babies, and there are more boys and men in this valley named Alejandro than anywhere. My father was unlike anything these people had ever seen. His goodness shocked them because for so long they’d been beat down so far that they’d lost everything. What’s worse, they’d lost the most important thing and he gave it back to them. He loved this country, he loved these people, and he loved my mom and he loved me, but that didn’t earn him his legacy. He is still talked about today because he gave these people something no one had ever offered before. No government. No military. No warlord. No rebellion.” A nod. “He gave them hope—the currency of love—and they loved him for it.” She shook her head, laughing. “He had this crazy idea that mangoes and coffee, if planted together, shared their taste with one another. So he planted hundreds of mango trees across this mountainside and then, as they grew, thousands of coffee plants beneath them. Oddly, he was right. Add to that the rich volcanic soil, natural irrigation from the crater lake, and our coffee has a hint of mango in it and our mangoes have a hint of coffee in them. Only place in the world. And my uneducated father, who quit school the third day of second grade, figured that out.”
My voice stuttered when I asked, “What happened?”
“Two things: First, an American company wanted to buy my father’s business for pennies on the dollar, and when he wouldn’t sell, our guess—and we don’t know this for sure—is that they bought the competition and unloaded the coffee at ridiculous prices, bloating the market with cheap coffee with which we could not compete. They couldn’t have us, so they destroyed us, giving it away in order to bankrupt my father. It worked. Feeling indebted to his workers, he borrowed to the hilt and mortgaged his mountain to pay and feed his people. Then, when every ounce had been squeezed out of him and he’d lost forty pounds working his fingers to the bone, trying to resurrect something from nothing, Carlos happened.”
Her voice fell quiet and soft. A long pause. “We were all gathered in the house together, and Papi said he needed to take food to the people down the mountain. To the few that remained. He knew they were wet and hungry and afraid. Mami went with him. I remember staring down after them, watching them walk away. And I knew that the food in his backpack meant that he would not eat for a week. He reached for her, grabbed her hand as they walked in the rain. Happy.” A nod. “I remember that despite hardship untold, they were happy.” She shook her head once. “They walked down the mountain in the rain on the road that passed the well, and I never saw them again. Next thing I knew, we heard a noise like helicopters and then…all the world changed. Mudslide. In the months that followed, my husband, Paulo, and I tried to resurrect what we could, but so many people died. Ninety percent of our workforce had been killed. My husband was a doctor, so he and I spent weeks tending to the sick and wounded. Paulo began building coffins and he quit counting at two hundred. Coffee production came to a standstill. We had no thought of producing coffee when we were trying so hard just to survive and help others do the same. There was”—she wiped her hands in a large swath across the entire valley between us and the mountain—“death everywhere. The smell of it lasted for weeks. At one point, it was so bad we just had to stack and burn the bodies of both people and livestock to kill and stop the spread of disease. These people who worked for us weren’t just paid workers. They were family. We paid for more than two hundred funerals and paid to help rebuild Valle Cruces. So the remaining families had a roof and a place to live. Because my father would have wanted it this way, we gave what amounted to life insurance policies to the families who lost anyone.” She shook her head. “How do you value a human life?”