Chapter 3 #2
Perla Hildegarda Inclán Arnao’s birth is a long, torturous affair.
Her mother labors for a whole day, and when the child is delivered, she screams a triumphant cry that reverberates through the walls of the house as loud as a bell, threatening to shatter the crystal shuttered inside the custom-made cabinets.
Her sister, María de la Encarnación, is born exactly eleven months later. Hers is an easy birth, swift, almost painless, and years later Perla thinks that Encarnación has an easy life because she had an easy beginning.
The girls are dressed in matching pinafores and told to hold hands when they pose for photographs.
Their brother wears a sailor suit complete with a tiny hat.
He is the eldest, born on Christmas Eve 1898, and his full name is Osorio Natalicio, in honor of Christ Our Savior, but they call him Natito.
The three children grow like orchids in the warm, humid climate of Puerco Ahogado, reared by a governess who speaks French fluently and carefully peruses their penmanship and their sums.
When it comes to arithmetic, Perla towers over her siblings.
She has a head for numbers that is unmatched by either her brother, who would prefer to read books all day long rather than go over his multiplication tables, or her sister, who is most content with a needle and thread between her fingers.
Their mother, Genoveva, oversees the girls’ education in matters of etiquette and polite society, showing them how to embroider handkerchiefs, curtsy, and greet their elders.
She also shows the children how to pin butterflies against squares of black velvet, although Natito is terrible at this task, sniffling and wincing at the sight of the insects inside the killing jars.
He’s also terrible at skipping rope, and Encarnación can outrun him when they race up and down the stately staircase.
But his spelling is superb, and he memorizes lines of poems with ease and exactitude.
Their father, Don Osorio, doesn’t think much of poetry, although he says a gentleman must know a little of everything.
“What must a lady know, Father?” Perla asks.
“A lady must know how to manage her household, and she must be at all times a jewel that enhances the honor of her family,” he says. “A woman who disgraces her family’s name is like a decomposed piece of meat, sprouting maggots, infecting everything she touches.”
Perla pictures maggots crawling under her skin and shudders at the thought, and she washes her hands fastidiously, afraid decay conceals itself inside her veins.
She says her prayers every night and always maintains her composure.
Her movements are soft, placid, and her face is tranquil.
She is the perfect child. Encarnación, less so.
Sometimes she runs around in open revolt, storming down the stairs and playing at pirates with her brother, her hair in knots.
Natito is prone to flights of fancy, staring away into space as their governess tries to drill into his brain verbs in Latin.
Neither of them has Perla’s poise, and she fancies that for this reason she is their father’s favorite.
Those early years are scented with the aroma of coffee. Sugarcane and tobacco have given way to this crop. In Córdoba, Xalapa, Coatepec, Orizaba, Huatusco, and smaller towns like Puerco Ahogado, everyone plants coffee trees and the savvy businessman makes a tidy profit.
Twenty years before her birth, Perla’s father entered a lucrative relationship with two brothers from New York, who advanced him loans that allowed him to buy new machinery and tap into fresh trade networks.
Now her father’s coffee is shipped to New Orleans and Paris; he owns two storage buildings, the house, and the processing plant in Puerco Ahogado, and the family would never think of growing anything else.
Her father takes Natito to the processing plant, to the beneficio.
Perla and Encarnación go there less often, for they are women, and their roles are different from those of men.
When he grows up, Natito will run the business.
When Perla grows up, she will make a good match.
Because Encarnación is the youngest girl, she will remain at home, taking care of her parents, and will not wed. This is the way things are done.
Thus, Perla glimpses her father’s business in brief, disconnected bursts.
She sees the hulling machines and the depulping machines, watches the loaders carry the coffee beans in sacks to a large room lined with windows where women standing at long tables sort them, but her father does not tell her much about this world.
Coffee is their livelihood, but she need not worry about its details.
“When you grow up, you’ll be an emperor,” her father tells Natito, and then he turns to Perla. “You’ll be a queen.”
Natito laughs, but Perla knows her father speaks the truth. Coffee is creating kings and kingdoms, turning sleepy towns into bustling trade centers, increasing the fortunes of the Incláns with each year.
She does not realize at that age that kingdoms rise and fall, and kings and queens may face the executioner’s axe one day.
She does not know that coffee prices worldwide are slipping, that by the time she is eight years old her father’s luck is failing, though he remains undeterred, borrowing large amounts of money from his American associates to stay afloat.
He takes a loan against his machinery, then on the two buildings he owns.
She does not know and does not understand until much later.
The Revolution arrives in 1910. It does not buffet the state as violently as it does other regions, but rebel railway attacks and random incursions take their toll on coffee growers.
The Americans swoop down on the port in 1914, taking it over for seven months, unwilling to recognize the government of Huerta, and how her father frets, worried about shipments and disruptions.
The outbreak of the First World War causes further commotion and prices fluctuate wildly.
And the peso, it tumbles, and her father’s debt grows monstrous.
It is then that she begins to glimpse the cracks in her father’s magnificent facade and the disintegration of their pleasurable life.
The governess is dismissed, as are several other members of their staff.
There are no new dresses or shoes or suits, and the foods they eat grow blander and less varied.
Her mother suffers from headaches, which she treats by moistening her handkerchief with chloroform and ether.
To allay nervous excitement and sleep better, she drinks a tonic of laudanum.
Her father is angry. He stomps through the house like a bull with a lance stuck in its flank, muttering under his breath. Doors are slammed shut. Voices rise.
She hears their father arguing with Natito, his tone harsh and unyielding.
Natito is a slim reed of a boy who cannot ride a horse well even though he’s been atop one since he was five years old.
He coughs every time he walks into the beneficio; the coffee dust that carpets the floor at the end of each workday seems to needle his lungs.
When he walks behind his father, by the furnaces where the flames glow white, sweat drips down his forehead.
He absolutely despises the coffee business.
“You foolish woman, you’ve made him soft, all he does is think of books and dream of poetry,” their father complains to their mother while the girls pretend they’re not listening, monogramming yet another handkerchief.
Later Natito plops down on a couch next to them with a sigh. “He’s an awful bully,” he says. “And all this racket because I said I might want to go to university after the fighting is over.”
“You might as well have told him you wanted to grow a beak and wings and become a parrot,” Perla says.
“Why is it so impossible that I should want something other than coffee beans?”
“What else would you want?”
“I don’t know. Books and papers and learning. I could study literature, or if Father insists that the arts are not to be touched, I’ll settle for law.”