If I could find a way to mix this with chocolate, I’d have a winner.
After devouring the dessert, Aquilino guided me toward the parlor, pointed at a stiff velvet couch, and sat across from me. He picked up the cigar box and offered me one. I hesitated. I’d always been curious about this mysterious male habit, but I wasn’t sure I could deliver a proper exhalation. Cristóbal sometimes produced immaculate, blue circles, a source of ultimate pride for him.
At my hesitation, Aquilino’s bushy eyebrows arched. Smoking was a sign of a true man, and I must pass the test. I glanced at the Great Dane by the entrance—even he seemed to be waiting for my reaction. I took a thick cigar between my fingers, mimicking Aquilino’s resolve as he tightened his lips around it, and lit it.
The first inhalation hit my chest like a flame. Aquilino gave me the sort of look one might reserve for a curious insect as I coughed incessantly and hit my chest with my hand a few times, attempting to free the inferno from my body.
“You don’t smoke, Mr. Balboa?”
“Only pipe,” I gasped. “In my country, the tobacco is more pure.” Whatever that meant. I’d heard men speak about the quality of tobacco and its purity, but to me, all of them stank in the same way.
Aquilino lit his own cigar. He had no problems inhaling or exhaling.
“I must ask you, sir,” he said, his voice carrying the same solemn tone of a priest. “What are your plans now that your wife, que en paz descanse, is no longer with us?”
I had to tread carefully. I couldn’t come across as a threat to anyone.
“I will probably return to Spain. I have no interest in either the country or the cacao business. To be quite honest, this was my wife’s dream—not mine.” The burn in my throat had given my voice a natural coarseness that I decided to use to my advantage. “I must ask you, Se?or Aquilino, are there any other heirs?”
“Just two. Don Armand had two daughters in Vinces: Angélica and Catalina de Lafont.”
Two sisters.
The news hit like a slap in the face. It was one thing to suspect something, to consider a possibility. It was something else to receive confirmation that there were, indeed, real blood relatives. My father had betrayed me and my mother. He’d raised two daughters, whom he probably loved more than me, while I’d waited for him to return to Spain for over two decades. But he was never planning to come back, I now realized. He’d made a new life without us, discarding us like an old newspaper. What an idiot I’d been—religiously writing all those letters to him, sitting for hours by the window, drawing his portrait. In my childhood innocence, I’d always expected him to walk through the front door, his arms filled with presents, and then take me on one of his adventures.
“Angélica is the eldest,” he said. “Well, in reality, there is a brother, too. But he renounced his inheritance.”
A brother as well. And he renounced the fortune?
“He’s a priest.” Aquilino stared at his cigar with appreciation. “He took the vow of poverty.”
A priest, of all things. My father hadn’t been a religious man, not according to my mother’s recollections. Then how did he produce a priest? I, myself, was filled with doubts. Although I would never voice them out loud. But if it was true that this brother had renounced my father’s money, had it been a voluntary vow or a forced one?
“What about their mother? Is she also an heir?”
“No, Do?a Gloria Alvarez passed away a few years ago. But we’ll get into all the details tomorrow.”
My father had hidden so many things from us. It stung worse than his death. Good thing my mother hadn’t lived to see so much deceit. Another woman, another family. Did he think he could make amends by leaving me a portion of his estate? What good would that do when I never had him? I would never know what his voice sounded like, what cologne he used, or feel the warmth of his hugs.
A thump against the window startled us both. We moved toward the pane in time to see a speckled bird wrecked on the pebbles outside the house.
“A sparrow-hawk,” Aquilino said.
I remained silent, unable to keep my eyes from the dying bird.
“The poor creature must not have seen the glass,” he went on. “It didn’t know what it was getting itself into when it came here.”
CHAPTER 2
Two weeks earlier
It took us a week aboard the Valbanera to arrive in La Habana, my first taste of the American continent with its colonial buildings, narrow streets, and tantalizing beaches. But we didn’t have time for sightseeing as almost immediately we had to board our next ship, the Andes, a British vessel that was three times the size of the Valbanera. Not that Cristóbal would’ve agreed to any sightseeing with me anyway. He’d spent the entire week aboard locked in our cabin, typing.
The clerk at the reception desk had a perfectly bald head filled with moles, like a spotty mango.
“Your name, sir?” he asked.
“Cristóbal de Balboa, and this is my wife, María Purificación de Lafont y Toledo.”
Cristóbal tapped his fingers on the desk—repeatedly—while the clerk wrote our names as if there weren’t dozens of passengers standing behind us. Cristóbal had little patience for incompetence, a trait I never quite understood since he had a temperate disposition and always avoided conflict. His way of expressing his frustration was to burst into a variety of tics: tapping his foot, scratching the back of his head, loosening his tie, chewing his nails to the quick. It was as if his body expressed what his voice couldn’t.
“Purificación,” the clerk said slowly. “With a c or an s?”