The island of eternal love by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cubans
Publisher: New York : Riverhead Books
Published: 2008-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

A piercing stab forced her to lean against a small table where she often placed flowers. She heard shrieking behind her and turned around. Now there were four imps. The third one was balancing on top of a painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And the fourth was leaping from one rocking chair to another.

Ill I. LSI. A N I) ,/ III H N A I- LOV I. • 159

At that moment Jose opened the door and stopped in his tracks, perplexed. The flowerpots on the balcony were spinning like tops. The painting and the lamp vied with the clock's pendulum in a swinging competition. Four chairs rocked all by themselves, suggesting a convention of ghosts. Then the cause of that carnival-like commotion hit him.

Mercedes' moan roused him from his daze. He ran to pick her up while the apartment trembled with the thud of the painting falling to the floor. Oblivious to everything else, he lifted her in his arms and ran downstairs to the car, forgetting to close the door.

Mercedes was moaning with her eyes shut, and long before they arrived at the clinic, a warm liquid soaked her legs. The pain was agonizing, as if an internal force threatened to split her in two. At that moment she didn't think of the child she had so ardently desired. She wanted to die. At the hospital she ignored the doctor's recommendations and the nurses' exhortations. She just screamed as though they were killing her.

After many long, confusing hours—hands touching her, squeezing her, or comforting her—she heard the cry of a new voice. Only when they brought her a little girl who was bawling like the dickens did she notice the nurses with their enormous nuns' wimples coming and going along the corridors. It took her a few moments to understand that her child had been born in the Catolicas Cubanas Clinic, formerly the country estate of Jose Melgares and Maria Teresa Herrera, where her mother had worked as a slave until she met Florencio, the coachman who would become her father. Florencio had left that same mansion one night, after delivering his shipment of candles and wine, just before he was murdered. . . . Mercedes closed her eyes to stave off the forbidden memory.

"Jose," she whispered to her husband, who was leaning over the newborn, entranced, "hand me my purse."

The man obeyed without questioning why she might need a purse just then. She rooted around in the lining and pulled out a tiny package.

"I bought it a long time ago," she said, before revealing what the package concealed.

It was a shiny, little black stone, mounted in a hand-shaped hoop. With a safety pin, Mercedes affixed it to the blanket that swaddled her daughter.

"When she's older, I'll hang it around her neck on a gold chain," she announced. "It's to protect her from the Evil Eye."

Pepe didn't comment. How could he refuse such a strange request

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