Passage I

LiTERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the novel Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez (©1997 by Sandra Benitez).

Alvaro Tobar gripped the wheel of his convertible and leaned into the approaching curve. He loved the sense of power he experienced when he was in the driver’s seat. He’d owned the car since before the war, and may be now that the war had ended he would buy a newer model. This convertible he would not sell, however. He patted the wheel as if reassuring the vehicle of his loyalty.

It was a late afternoon in early November. The air was heavy with coming rain, surely one of the last downpours before the dry season. Alvaro would wait for the first drops to fall before he stopped to raise the car’s top. He was only a few kilometers, from San Salvador and, once inside the city limits, only minutes from home.

Alvaro’s thoughts turned to his cotton harvest. For the past week, he'd been on the eastern coast, at his plantation outside Usulután. On this trip, he had helped ready the hacienda for the harvest, which would start at month’s end. Much was riding on his cotton. He always referred to it as “mi algodon.” My cotton, a venture that he, and not his mother, controlled. He pictured his mother’s strong, handsome face. Eugenia Herrera de Tobar. At seventy-three, doňa Eugenia was still the undisputed ruler of the Tobar family. As the doyenne, she controlled her business and private affairs with as much vigor as she had since her husband’s death. Because she had Alvaro and his four older sisters to raise, she took over the reins of her usband’s cattleranching operation and his vast property holdings and never relinquished them. Under her control, her husband’s enterprises prospered. Oh, there were moments when she cried out against the fate that had sent her down a path strewn with so much responsibility, “It’s a heavy burden life has handed me,” she liked to say. “A burden I long to have lifted from my shoulders.” Even as a youngster, however, when Alvaro heard his mother’s lamentations, he had glimpsed into her heart as if her chest were made of glass. In her heart, he had seen the pleasure the burden gave her.

It was power that obsessed her. And could he blame her? He, had had a whiff of the heady scent of power himself. He smelled it in his cotton. He’d been in the business for four years. The first three years were hopeful ones. There was a world war, and unlike coffee, cotton prices rose steadily, thanks to the growth of the local textile industry.

From the start, his mother had not encouraged him to strike out on his own. “Only fools go into cotton when there’s cattle to be raised or coffee to be grown,” she said, compelling him to work all the harder to prove her wrong. He had spent months scouting for the right land among the family’s properties on the flat coastal plain. When he found it, he had lovingly sown the best seed himself. And he had kept a vigil on the growing plants. Lying in a hut next to the field, he was present at the moment the buds broke into flower.

Once Alvaro reached Avenida Cuscatlan, he accelerated, weaving in and out of traffic. Cotton. A man took a risk growing it, for cotton might never make the money coffee would, but Alvaro did not allow this thought to perturb him. He had various means of making a living: There was real estate to be bought and sold, a seat on the bank board, the shrimping business on the coast. He had disbanded his law practice years ago, although, at times, he took a case or two on a consulting basis. But it was in the cotton business that he’d placed his heart and money. Last year, so sure was he of a better-than-ever yield, that he'd invested his wife’s money in it as well. It was the inheritance from her grandfather, bequeathed to her twelve years before. Magda had entrusted it to Alvaro, and he had carefully managed the money, seeing to its growth. When the time was right, she would use her inheritance for her own business scheme: a gift shop named Tesoros.

The disaster of last year’s harvest flooded his mind. He sank back against the seat, remembering his cotton, the bolls swollen and soon to burst into a cloud of white, infested malevolently with weevils.

But this year would be different. He had taken measures. He had spent the better part of the week stockpiling insecticides that would insure this crop against failure. He had not told Magda any of this, of course. Why cause her concern? It was all a matter of cash flow, of money transferred from one account to the other, of bank loans and promissory notes. This year, because of insecticides, would bring his first bumper crop.