She had classified the letters by author and date, starting with those from 1953, when Kilian had written every fortnight. The contents matched her uncle’s personality to perfection; the letters were extremely detailed in their descriptions of his day-to-day life. He told his mother and sister about everything. There were fewer letters from her father, often just three or four lines added to his brother’s missives. Lastly, her grandfather Antón’s notes were short and sparse and full of the formal phrases typical of the 1930s and 1940s. He mostly reported that thanks be to God, he was well and wished that all there were well also. Sometimes he thanked those—relations or neighbors—who were helping maintain the House of Rabaltué for their generosity.
Clarence was happy that nobody was at home. Her cousin Daniela and her uncle Kilian had gone down to the city for his checkup, and her parents would not be coming up for another fortnight. She could not help but feel a little guilty about reading the intimate confessions of those still living. It was very strange to see what her father and uncle had written decades ago. This was normally done while putting a deceased person’s papers in order. It felt much more appropriate to read her grandfather’s letters, someone she hadn’t even known. She already knew many of these anecdotes. But narrated in the first person, with the slanted and trembling hand of someone not used to writing and laced with bottled-up nostalgia, the letters brought out a mixture of strong feelings in her. Her eyes had filled with tears on more than one occasion.
She remembered opening the dark wardrobe at the bottom of the sitting room when she was younger and brushing the letters with her hands as she formed an image of what the House of Rabaltué had been like a century ago: press cuttings yellowed with age; travel brochures and work contracts; old livestock bills of sale and land leases; lists of shorn sheep and live and dead lambs; christening and memorial cards; Christmas greetings in uncertain strokes and faded ink; wedding invitations and menus; photos of great-grandparents, grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, cousins and parents; land deeds from the seventeenth century; and the land exchanges between the ski resort and the heirs of the house.
It had not occurred to her to give any attention to the personal letters. Back then, the stories of Kilian and Jacobo were more than enough. But after attending a conference of African speakers, some foreign and upsetting sensations had begun to nest in her heart. She was, after all, the daughter, granddaughter, and niece of colonists. From that moment on, a curiosity had risen inside her for everything to do with the lives of the men of her house. She remembered the sudden urgency she felt to go up to the village and open the wardrobe, the impatience that gripped her when her commitments at the university delayed her. Fortunately, she had been able to free herself of everything in record time to take advantage of the empty house—a rarity. She was able to read all the correspondence in complete and utter peace.
She wondered if anyone else had opened the wardrobe in the last few years; if her mother, Carmen, or her cousin Daniela had rummaged through the past; or if her father or uncle had ever felt the need to see themselves once more as the youth who had penned these lines.
She quickly dismissed the idea. While Daniela liked the old stone-and-slate house with its dark furniture, she never took her interest further. Carmen was not born in the house or the area and had never felt that it was hers. Her only mission, especially since the death of Daniela’s mother, was to make sure the house was kept clean and tidy and the larder was kept full and to find any excuse to throw a party. She loved spending long breaks there, but was grateful to have her own home that was completely hers.
Jacobo and Kilian were like all the other men from the mountains; they were reserved to an unnerving degree and very strict about their privacy. It was surprising that neither of the two had decided to destroy the letters, as she had done with her teenage diaries, thinking that the act of destruction would erase everything that had happened. Clarence weighed various possibilities. Perhaps they were aware that there was nothing in the letters that would put them in the line of fire. Or perhaps they had simply forgotten about their existence.
Whatever the reasons, she would have to find out if something had really happened—precisely because of what was not written, and the questions raised by this piece of paper lying in her hands. It was a fragment that could change the peaceful life of that house in Pasolobino.
Without getting out of the chair, Clarence stretched her arm toward a small chest on the coffee table, opening one of its little drawers and taking out a magnifying glass to look more closely at the edges of the paper. In the bottom right-hand corner, a small outline could be seen where a number appeared: a straight line crossed by a hyphen.
Then . . . the number could very well be a seven.
A seven.
She drummed her fingers on the table.
A page number was unlikely. A date perhaps: 1947, 1957, 1967. From what she had gathered, none of the three fit the description of colonial life for a few Spaniards on a cocoa plantation.
In fact, nothing had caught her attention except those lines where the anonymous writer said that he or she would not be going back as often, that someone sent money from the House of Rabaltué, that three people whom the recipient of the letter—Jacobo?—knew were well, and that a loved one had died.
Whom would her father be sending money to? Why would he have to worry that this person was fine and, more specifically, that they were doing well at work or studies? Who was this person whose death was felt so deeply? Ureca friends, the note said . . . She had never heard of this place before, if it was a place . . . A person maybe? And the most important of all: Who was she?
Clarence had listened to hundreds of stories about the lives of the men from the House of Rabaltué in distant lands. She knew them by heart because Jacobo and Kilian needed no excuse to talk about their lost paradise. What she had thought was the official story always took the form of a tale that began decades before in a small Pyrenean village, continued on a small African island, and ended once again in the mountains. Until now, it had never crossed Clarence’s mind that it could be another way: the story starting on a small African island, continuing in a small village in the Pyrenees, and ending again on the sea.
But they had seemingly forgotten to tell her some important pieces. Clarence let her novelist’s mind wander and frowned while she mentally sorted through the people Jacobo and Kilian talked about in their stories. Nearly all of them belonged to her own inner circle. Not strange, considering that the instigator of this exotic adventure was an adventurous young man from the valley of Pasolobino who weighed anchor in an unknown land at the end of the nineteenth century, around the time her grandparents, Antón and Mariana, had been born. The man had awakened on an island in the Atlantic Ocean located in what was then called the Bight of Biafra. In a few years, he had amassed a small fortune and became owner of a fertile plantation. Far from there, in the Pyrenees, single men and young couples decided to go and work either on the plantation of their old neighbor or in the city close to it.