One day at the end of summer in 1883, news of the death of Juan Defaus Moragas arrived at the farm. When Mariano read the telegram announcing his brother's death, he fell into a state of sadness and despair that made Ángel and Nieves very concerned.
“Juan was only 23 years old. Why did that have to happen? I can't accept it. And my poor parents are devastated. I have to go and console them . . . but on the other hand, I can't leave you alone, with everything that remains to be done on the farm,” Mariano told them.
“Don't worry about us, do what you think is most appropriate,” replied Ángel.
“I am at a crossroads, I don't know what to do.”
“Let a few days pass and you will see that you will make the wisest decision,” Ángel answered. “Keep in mind that the trip is very long, so even if you embarked tomorrow, as long as a ship left for the Canary Islands, you would not arrive in Barcelona until after an eight week journey. Two or three days is not going to make a difference.”
Mariano was silent for a moment and a shadow of sadness crossed his face. “Ángel is right, take your time to decide,” Nieves told him, tenderly.
While he was racking his brain thinking about the best thing he could do, another telegram arrived from his mother in which she told him that his brother Francisco had left his studies and had taken charge of the family businesses. Mariano felt relief when reading that news. After a few weeks, he received a letter in which his mother told him that they were thinking of proposing to Francisco that he marry Teresita, but that things were going to be complicated since, being in-law’s, they had to ask permission from the bishop before celebrating the wedding.
She asked his opinion and Mariano replied that, if Teresita and Francisco agreed, it seemed like a very good solution.
Teresa did not tell Mariano that his father José had already spoken with Teresita and that, following the priest's advice, he had proposed that she marry Francisco, but on the condition that she prove that she was fertile. Teresa did not like that pact because, putting herself in the widow's place, she felt embarrassed and ashamed.
“How could a priest propose that thing to the poor girl?” Teresa repeated to her husband.
“The priest says that a widow cannot live under the same roof as Francisco. They have to get married, José replied.
“I understand that. But why are conditions put on it?”
“Because she didn't get pregnant the year she was married to Juan and now we can't risk the same thing happening with Francisco and consequently our lineage disappearing,” José exclaimed, a little upset.
“Don't you take into account the other children, Isidro and Mariano? And Mariona and the little ones?” Teresa asked him seriously.
“Our two oldest children are far away, so don't count on them. The only one who can give us descendants is Francisco. The earth, as you well know, passes from man to man,” Joseph answered.
“In the end, men always decide the fate of women. I don't want to be present when you and the priest propose that horrible thing to Teresita," she added bitterly.
“So, what do you want, kick her out of our house and return her to her father?”
“No, I would like her to stay with us.”
“Let me take care of it,” José told Teresa, ending the conversation.
Mariano calmed down after reading his mother's letter. That night he spoke with Ángel and Nieves and told them that he was going to postpone the trip to Spain for the following year, when they had finished planting wheat, rye, and corn on all the land on the farm. But things turned out differently, and a year later, when Ángel fell ill, Mariano stopped thinking about going to see his parents.
Ángel was buried, following his wishes, on the edge of the esplanade that bordered the mansion. It was the place where he used to tame the foals. He flatly refused to be buried with his parents and brother in the Llopí Cemetery in Pinar del Rio. They surrounded the plot with a wooden fence and there they buried those who died from the smallpox epidemic as well. Ángel Hernández's tomb consisted of a white stone with his name engraved and his date of birth and death.
The mourning on the Esperanza farm lasted two weeks, after which ordinary activities began again. However, the farm lost its splendor. It was as if, in addition to the people, the plants and animals were depressed due to the death of the master. In the eyes of Mariano and Nieves, everything had lost color: the flowers had turned pale, the leaves of the trees were a faded green, the feathers of the turkeys faded, the manes of the horses were dull, and the sky was no longer bright blue.
Nieves kept the anguish she felt to herself, and only when no one saw her did she cry. However, she tried to keep herself busy with a thousand tasks to alleviate the heaviness and intense pain in her chest that she felt every morning when she got out of bed, with very little sleep. The thing that gave her the most relief was turning on the oven to work. From the patio you could smell the scent of freshly baked bread and the smell of sourdough, so Mariano left his work aside and entered the oven shed, which everyone called bakery and he would remain enthralled watching Nieves while she skillfully placed the loaves on the shelves and with a cloth removed the crumbs and flour dust from the table.
One day he told her, “I love watching you while you take the loaves out of the oven. It reminds me of the smell of the bakery from my childhood. Often the baker would give me a roll and I would return home happy with my bag full of bread.”
“Ángel was right when he said that wheat was going to brighten our lives,” Nieves replied, with a sad look on her face. At that moment, Mariano would have wanted to say something more, but he was left speechless.
Ángelito was almost three years old when he lost his father, and the first few months he didn't stop calling Ángel and looking for him.
“Dad, Dad, where are you?” he screamed, running around the yard.
In those weeks of mourning, Mariano left some tasks in the hands of the foremen and dedicated himself, body and soul, to little Ángelito. It was then that he had the idea of organizing a country school to teach all the children on the farm to read and write. Nieves helped Mariano whitewash and arrange a large room on the ground floor to convert it into a classroom, build desks, and prepare teaching materials. This new task calmed her.
Mariano took more care of Ángelito every day as if he were his own son and noticed that Nieves appreciated him and looked at him gratefully.
One day Nieves told him, “I am very relieved to know that you will always be by our side.”
“I will never leave you,” Mariano replied.
In the fall of 1884, two of the children of Teresa Moragas and José Defaus were married: on November 26, Mariano to Nieves in Pinar del Río and on December 19, and Francisco to Teresita in Malgrat. As destiny had been cruel to the Defaus Moragas family, the two brides were widows after the premature death of their young husband. However, everyone hoped that the misfortunes had ended and that a time of prosperity would begin.
On that occasion, Teresa wrote a long letter to her son, describing the details of Francisco and Teresita’s wedding. Mariano read it several times, because he had the feeling that there was something hidden beneath the written words.
“It might just be me, but there is something strange about the wedding that my mother doesn't want to tell me. Perhaps the bishop has put obstacles in their way,” Mariano told Nieves.
“What do you care about the wedding? The main thing is that they love each other. The bishop can say what he wants.”
“But you already know that in the villages, there would be a lot of gossip if they lived together without being married.”
“Don't give it any more thought. Your mother told you that they were married and that she is pregnant. Well, that's it. Let it go.”
Mariano would have liked to send a photograph of Nieves to his mother; but on the day of the wedding, the photographer he had hired did not show up. It was later learned that he had had an accident falling from a tree while picking plums and that he had been taken to the hospital. The poor photographer was paralyzed in a wheelchair. His was the only photography studio in Pinar del Rio. Since its closure, you had to travel to Havana to take a portrait. Nieves flatly refused to undertake such a long trip to have her photograph taken. Teresa and José had to imagine Nieves' beauty through their son's descriptions.
Mariano rarely left the farm; but once a week he went to Las Ovas or Pinar del Río and every two months, as he had promised the three brothers, he went to Havana to review the store's accounts. Until one day he told the shopkeepers, “It is time for me to leave our business association as you no longer need me.”
The three brothers accepted his proposal, but promised that they would visit him every year in the summer, to spend a few days with him and to help him on the farm if necessary. And they did so throughout their lives.
Teresa Moragas' letters continued to arrive regularly at the Esperanza farm and Mariano never stopped writing to his mother either. The letters that Teresa wrote to her son were longer in winter than in summer. In the last one of that winter she mentioned her son Isidro many times, confessing to Mariano that she was distressed because she had little news of him. Nor did she fail to mention with joy Teresita's pregnancy, which was following its natural course and that everyone was impatient to know if a boy or a girl was going to be born. She also told him that the harvest had been quite bad, but that the sale of seeds had been better and she ended up complaining about the torrential rains and the strong sea.
Rereading that last letter, Mariano recalled the phrase that his grandfather, Mariano Defaus Segarra, pronounced emphatically when in winter the strong waves of the sea frightened the population: “If salt water reached our land, we would be lost forever.” More than one night, young Mariano dreamed of giant waves that reached the town and woke up sweaty and scared by that nightmare.
In the letters that Mariano wrote to his mother during those long months, he told her anecdotes about daily life on the farm, how happy he was to have married Nieves, and how lucky he was with Ángel, his godson, whom he loved as if he were his real son. However, he never spoke to her about his return to Spain, nor did she mention it.
At the end of the summer of 1885, Mariano received a telegram from his mother with news - both good and bad news:
Teresita has given birth to a girl. Scarlet fever has taken Luisa and Rosa. Agustí died in Cuba, in an ambush.
A few days before the girl's birth, Mariona's husband, Agustí, died in a military camp near Santiago de Cuba; and the girls, Rosa and Luisa, fell ill in Malgrat. The doctor told them that it was scarlet fever, to give them poultices and not to let the fever rise. But the fever rose to forty degrees and there was no way to get it to go down. Luisa and Rosa, aged seventeen and fifteen respectively, died a few hours away from one another.
Mariano decided to return to Spain again, but a few hours later he gave up upon thinking about Nieves and his godson. After a few weeks, he received an envelope containing the obituary of the burial of his two sisters and a photograph of Francisco and Teresita with the newborn in their arms, who was named Teresa, like his mother and grandmother. In this letter Teresa once again told Mariano not to worry, that everyone was fine, that Teresita, Francisco and Mariona took care of everything, and that the baby girl was very lively and that she gave them joy after the many misfortunes.
Nieves consoled Mariano as best she could. Every night she prepared him a lime infusion so that he could rest well. Mariano and Nieves slept in separate rooms; they did not want to consummate the marriage out of respect for the deceased. At that time when it seemed that the misfortunes had no end, Mariano and Nieves realized that there was something more than a friendship between them; however, neither dared to confess their own feelings to the other.
The days on the Esperanza farm returned to normal again. The routine and daily tasks gave the couple a feeling of prosperity and well-being. In the morning, Mariano left his work and taught Ángelito and the other children of the farm to read and write. Mariano enjoyed being with the children. He liked to go by the children’s desks to see how they had carried out the exercises. He remembered the primary school in Malgrat and carefully applied the good teaching techniques of his former teacher.
The day he went to Havana to close business with the three shopkeepers, he bought a pedagogy book that he read on the train with great fervor. When he arrived at the farm, he said to Nieves, “I feel satisfied helping children solve a problem or write an essay.”
“It's amazing what you're doing. I'm sure you were a model student.”
“When I was little, I was very happy going to school, but when I was twelve I had to put down the books to start working. Luckily, the teacher gave me private classes in the afternoons. I learned a lot with him in those years. In the mornings, I helped my father in the field, but I didn't like tilling the land. I would have liked to travel and leave the town. In the evening, I had fun hanging out with a gang of boys who always got into trouble that ended in fights.”
“I'm sure there were affairs with women. I want to hear about your antics from when you were fourteen or fifteen. I know almost nothing about you, you only told me that you fled Spain because of the war.”
“One day I'm going to tell you,” Mariano told her, because talking about that topic embarrassed him.
“Mom, where are you?” The little one shouted, running towards them.
The arrival of the little one had saved Mariano that night. He always felt very uneasy recalling the memories of those early years of his youth, but he knew that sooner or later he would have to tell Nieves his secret.
During this time, Nieves was busy baking loaves of bread and firing pieces of clay. One day, she started painting plates with bright colors: orange with a blue edge, violet and yellow, and green and red.
“Why don't you sell those pieces? They are beautiful,” Mariano told her.
“You're right. We have plenty of dishes and jugs at home.”
“The bazaar shopkeeper at The Century in Pinar del Río could be your first buyer.”
Nieves followed Mariano's advice and her vessels began to sell well. The Esperanza farm was progressing; however, neither Mariano nor Nieves wanted to expand it. They did not make a lot of profit, but it was enough for them and the workers. They already knew that cereals and flour were not enough to make them rich, but that was not the goal they were pursuing.
“Smelling the freshly baked bread and giving shape and color to my dishes makes me feel happy," Nieves told Mariano one day.
“I am happy by your side,” Mariano answered, looking at her intensely.
Neither Mariano nor Nieves brought up the topic of the trip to Spain again, and the old brown cardboard suitcase that had crossed the Atlantic in 1873 was left laughing in the closet.
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