María

VII

When my father made his last trip to the Antilles, Salomón, a cousin of his whom he had loved since childhood, had just lost his wife. At a very young age, they had come together to South America, and on one of their voyages my father fell in love with the daughter of a Spaniard, an intrepid ship captain who, having left the service for a few years, found himself obliged in 1819 to take up arms once more in defense of Spain’s king and queen. He was executed in Majagual on May 20, 1820, shot to death.

As a condition for allowing the girl to marry him, her mother insisted that he renounce the Judaic faith. My father became a Christian at the age of twenty. During that time his cousin was becoming interested in the Catholic religion without, however, giving in to requests that he be baptized, for he knew that what had gained the wife he wanted for my father would keep him from being accepted by the woman he loved in Jamaica.

The two friends, then, after several years of separation, saw each other once again. Salomón was now a widower. Sara, his wife, had left him with a three-year-old daughter. My father, who found his cousin ravaged by grief, both physically and mentally, found in his new religion the consoling words their relatives had sought in vain. He urged Salomón to give him his daughter so she could be brought up with his own children, and he dared to propose that he would have her become a Christian. Salomón agreed, saying, “It’s true that only my daughter has kept me from making a journey to India that would raise my spirits and ease my poverty. She also has been my only comfort after Sara’s death. But you wish it, let her be yours. Christian women are sweet and kind, and your wife must be a saintly mother. If Christianity, in times of greatest misfortune, can lighten one’s burden as you have mine, perhaps I would have done a disservice to my daughter if I had let her remain Jewish. Don’t tell our relatives, but when you reach the first shore with a Catholic priest, have her baptized and have them change her name from Ester to María.” He shed many tears as he spoke these words.

The schooner that was to take my father to the shores of New Granada set sail a few days later from Montego Bay. The swift boat was testing its white wings, as a heron in our woods will do before undertaking a long flight. When Salomón entered the cabin with his daughter held in one arm and a trunk with her things hanging from the other, my father had just finished adjusting his shipboard suit. The girl stretched out her little arms toward her uncle, and Salomón, placing her in his friend’s arms, broke down sobbing over the small trunk. The little one, whose precious head had been bathed in a flood of tears by the baptism of grief rather than that of Jesus’ religion, was a sacred treasure; my father well knew it, and never did he forget it. As Salomón jumped to the launch that was about to separate them, his friend reminded him of a promise, and Salomón responded in a choked voice, “The prayers of my daughter for me, and those of my own for her and her mother, shall rise together to the feet of the crucified one.”

I was seven when my father returned, and I spurned the precious gifts he had brought me from his trip, preferring to admire that child, so beautiful, so sweet and smiling. My mother covered her with caresses, and my sisters lavished her with tenderness from the moment my father placed her on his wife’s lap and said, “This is Salomón’s daughter, he has sent her to you.”

During our games, her lips began to form the sounds of Spanish, so harmonious and seductive when coming from a woman’s pretty mouth or that of a happy child.

Some six years must have passed. One afternoon when I walked into my father’s room, I heard him sobbing. His arms were crossed upon the table, supporting his forehead. My mother was next to him, crying, with María’s head resting on her knees. María was unable to understand such grief and was almost indifferent to her uncle’s lamentations. That day there had been a letter from Kingston bearing news of Salomón’s death. I just remember something my father said: “If everyone is leaving me with no final good-byes, why should I return to my country?” Alas! His ashes were destined to rest in a foreign land where the winds of the ocean, on whose beaches he had played as a boy, whose vastness he had crossed as a passionate young man, could not sweep away from his tombstone the dried acacia blossoms and the dust of years!

Few among our family’s acquaintances could have suspected that María was not my parents’ child. She spoke our language well, she was well-mannered, lively, and intelligent. When my mother would caress her head at the same time she was caressing my sisters’ and mine, no one could have guessed which of us was the orphan.

She was nine years old. Her flowing locks, still a light chestnut color, hanging loosely and playfully about her svelte, sinuous waist; her expressive eyes; that melancholy way of speaking—such was the image I carried with me when I left my parents’ home. And this is how she looked on the morning of that sad day, under the vines of my mother’s windows.