CHAPTER
1
April 12, 1932
My fourteenth birthday was the most important day of my life. Not because of the party. We didn't have enough money for one. And not because it meant I was no longer a child. On that special day my father announced to my family that he'd sold our beautiful house on the Malecon Simon Bolivar in Guayaquil, the city in Ecuador where we lived, and we were moving to an island called Paita.
He gathered us in the parlor, me and my mother and three younger brothers. Papa wasn't a man who knew how to smile, and the grin that cracked his face was evidence that what he was telling us was making him completely miserable.
"Do we have to go?" I asked Papa.
Mama answered for him. "Your father has lost his business, Benita, and we have no money left and no choice."
"But what will we do on an island? I mean, how will we live?" I asked.
"Well, that's the good news," my father said, and he looked at each one of us. "I have a plan to make us rich. With the money we'll make on the sale of this house, I'm going to start a coconut plantation."
"So . . . you're going to sell coconuts for a living?" I asked.
"No, no. Just the oil. That's what the big American corporations want. They put it in all their products--soaps, detergents, creams."
Next he told us that Paita was a three-hour boat ride from Guayaquil. The middle of nowhere.
"I can see farms from the window of my classroom," I said. "Why should we go so far away?"
"Because I've been generously given a parcel of land there to tend. Ten acres plus a house."
"Who would give this to you?"
"My mother," said Mama.
"Grandmother Tita?" She hated my father, and I couldn't imagine that she'd give him anything good.
Jose, who was twelve, and the oldest of my three brothers asked, "Who lives on Paita?"
Papa told him, "Fishermen."
"Are there other children there?" asked Alfonse, who was only eight.
"Probably," Papa said.
Manuel, who would soon turn eleven, asked, "Will I like living on the island?"
"That's up to you." And that was the last thing Papa would say about it.
Before bad luck hit us like a tidal wave, my father had owned a business exporting handmade French lace all over the world--even all the way to America. The women there loved it so much they used it to decorate the backs and arms of their chairs and sofas. In Ecuador, women used my father's lace sparingly--to accent the wrists and necks of their best clothing. But every woman who saw my father's lace wanted it, and that made us very wealthy. Papa bought the grand house we were now leaving. I had clothes and hats and shoes and gold jewelry, my brothers had toys and bicycles and Mama had as many servants as she needed, as well as paintings, rugs and silver to match any of the finest homes in the city.
According to all the newspapers and the radio, the Great Depression of 1929 was what had brought on our bad luck. As my father explained it, everyone became poor at once, not just where we lived, but in America too, and there was no one left to buy his lace--not when they were struggling to put food on the table.
I learned a new word then. Bankrupt. This became the subject of every dinnertime conversation in our house, but never once did I hear my parents say it had happened to us. But less than a year later, we began losing things. The chambermaid who washed our laundry and made our beds was the first to go, then the two who cleaned the floors and polished all the silver. A few weeks later Papa said, "Silver always gets a fair price," when he took a piece from the breakfront to market. Not too long after that, most of the silver was gone and we didn't need anyone to care for it anyway.
In a few short months many of my school friends' families lost everything too. And even some of our neighbors on the wealthy Malecon had let out their rooms to help with expenses, turning their mansions into tenements. Overnight, torn sheets and stained underwear were flying out their windows to dry. Strange people shouted at each other in the street as if they were performing in an opera, and they didn't seem to care what time of the day or night it was.
"That won't be our fate," my father declared during supper one night. "We will not be a part of this unstoppable degradation of our society."
But I never thought that meant we'd move away. I couldn't tell him so, but I thought we were making a huge mistake. Even though we had no money anymore, we still had one of the nicest houses in the city. I was going to miss it. Everything in the house was touched by a special beauty that was just like a magic trick, always taking me by surprise. I knew every flowering mildew stain in the plaster. I loved where the tile floor was worn smooth, like river rock. In our courtyard, the palm trees reached to the sky, and in the morning we woke to the sweet songs of brightly colored birds that perched upon those wide green leaves. My favorite room was the library, with its tall windows and heavy wooden cabinets that held my father's rare book collections. And most of all, I loved spending time there with him. He would read to me, or I to him, and we would completely lose track of time.
The day after Papa's Paita announcement, we started packing, right in the middle of a terrible heat wave. Even though it was only late April, already the cobblestone streets outside our windows cooked up a bad smell--a mix of rotten vegetables left unsold after market day, dirty cooking oil tossed out into the gutter, cat pee. Mama kept the front door closed so that the stink wouldn't enter our courtyard, but it didn't help. I said, "Mama, why don't we take out a bucket of water and wash down our sidewalk?"
"And let the neighbors know we've become scullery maids? I'd rather die." To keep the smell at bay, she shuttered up the entire house. The hot air turned still and thick--it hung around like an unwanted guest, impossible to ignore.
From the Hardcover edition.Continues...
Excerpted from Red Palms by Cara Haycak Copyright © 2006 by Cara Haycak. Excerpted by permission.
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