But none of this mattered.
My father had no time for me. Some days, when he was speaking to Martin, I would wonder if I’d turned invisible. I would start coughing, just to get his attention, but it was often Martin who patted my back without missing a beat in the conversation.
I couldn’t help but glance at Martin as Aquilino continued to read my father’s last wishes with that monotonous drone of his. We were all gathered in the dining room, surrounding my father’s lawyer, elbows resting on the surface of the table, mouths tightly shut. Martin pressed his hands together, his knuckles turning white. The will seemed to be having a similar effect on him as it did on me.
My father never tried to hide the fact that Martin was like the son he always wished Alberto had been. Martin was decisive, stern with the workers, and above all, he shared my father’s passion for the business. Alberto, on the other hand, had been barely audible before joining the seminary. He’d spoken in monosyllables and his days and nights were spent locked in his room with his architecture, theology, and philosophy books. On the rare occasions that we did see him （during meals） he seemed to be transported to another world, and if he spoke, it would be to question things we’d never thought about or had nothing to do with our current conversation. （“Do you think goodness is innate or learned?”）
Not my father. Not Martin. Their days and nights were scheduled around tree cycles. Those finicky trees were our fortune and our doom. If production was good in a given year, my father’s boisterous laughter would echo in every corner of the house, and he would lavish my mother, Catalina, and me with gifts.
God help us if production was bad.
In a bad year, my father would lock himself in his study for hours on end, in a perpetual state of fasting, and the only person allowed inside was Martin （with a bottle of red wine or jerez as an entry ticket）。 My father would write infinite letters that never got mailed and ended up collecting dust in his drawers, “La Marseillaise” blasting on his gramophone again and again until we were close to tearing our ears out. Every time the door opened （mostly to let Martin in and out）， I would hear cursing （“Ce pays de merde!”）。
But apparently, he hadn’t left Martin anything—an odd thing, considering how close they were and how patient Martin had been when my father was in one of his moods. Not even my mother—the saintliest of women—could stand his rotten temperament. She would invite the ladies from the Cofradía for an afternoon of prayer. （“Only the Virgin can help your father now,” she would explain.） But my father loathed them and the sights and sounds of these devout ladies never seemed to improve his temper. Quite the opposite.
Alberto covered his mouth and coughed, but his serene expression returned almost immediately. Either he didn’t fully grasp what Aquilino was saying or he didn’t care.
When Aquilino finished reading the document, he raised his head and stared at each one of us.
Under the table, my legs trembled. I could barely digest that the respectable Armand Lafont had left the majority of his assets to his estranged daughter, someone who to me was nothing more than a name carved on a wooden sign that dangled at the plantation’s entrance, a name that had tormented me all my life but somehow didn’t seem real. Now that name was about to turn into flesh and blood and come to my hacienda to claim everything I’d managed to accrue and keep in pristine order. But where was this beloved daughter when I’d played nurse to my father during the last six months of his life? This had been the matador’s final thrust.
“Oh, well,” Catalina said, standing up. “What good are material possessions anyway? You can’t really take them to the grave, can you?”
Of course she would say something like that. From an early age, Catalina had little use for our father’s presents. It was not uncommon to see the peasants’ daughters wearing my sister’s gowns or playing with her toys.
“Oh, save it, Catalina,” I said. “I don’t want to hear a word about it!”
I managed to stand. Laurent rushed to assist me. He’d turned pale. Surely, this was not what he’d envisioned when he agreed to marry the daughter of a French landowner. Though he’d managed to fool everyone in town to think that he had his own personal fortune, he hadn’t fooled me. I knew early on that Laurent’s family had nothing but a prestigious last name and a lot of arrogance.
Martin avoided my eyes, like he always did, and removed a hand-rolled cigarette from his front pocket. His large hands shook slightly as he lit it, but once he took the first drag, the tremor subsided. The frown between his eyebrows remained.