next day Martín brought Sarah some little brown melons. “Don Jorge said I must not carry you on my back any more, señorita; but I brought you some fruits from the forest.” The wild melons had no names in dictionaries nor even in the market because they were too sparse and perishable to sell, with tough hard dark skins and soft deep pink insides that made her blush to look at them for reasons she couldn’t explain. They were very, very sweet, so that she needed almost as much lime juice as pink flesh to cut the nectarous honey. Although Don Martín would know the Indian names for them, she’d ceased asking what they were called long ago, because she quickly forgot; and the next time he would bring a different variety with yet another name but just as sweet.
Quinta Louisa was a rather ordinary adobe house with a red tiled roof and beautiful polished tile floors. It was furnished with one or two nice chairs and the English Sheridan settee. The appliances had come from the United States, especially the refrigerator and kitchen range. The rest of the furniture had been handmade from beautiful Nicaraguan wood, like the wooden furniture in humbler Nicaraguan homes. There were two extraordinarily primitive bathrooms with beautiful tiled walls and another toilet and shower with rough concrete walls in the servants’ room next to the kitchen.
Martín and Flora lived in a little house in the village with their three sons, Julio, Guillermo, and Pablo; but sometimes Martín or Flora would spend the night in the room next to the kitchen. They never used the bathrooms in the other part of the house, although Mary Rutledge had told Flora that she was welcome to use them when she was working there, but Flora had looked at her with the gaping incredulity that she often expressed at things Sarah’s mother said.
When Sarah refused to eat anything after being sick, Mary Rutledge’s pleas were unheeded and ignored. “Won’t you take a few sips of soup, dearest? Just a few spoonfuls?”
“I’ll try to eat a little bit if Don Martín will come inside and eat with me.”
Mary called Martín in from the garden and related Sarah’s request.
“No, señora. I am sorry very much, but I cannot do such a thing. It is very improper.”
“You know that you and Flora are welcome to join us for lunch at our table. I do not understand. You are always welcome.”
“No. Never, señora. We will eat at our own table in the kitchen. You do not understand these things. It would be very wrong. A sacrilege.”
Mary Rutledge didn’t know the meaning of Martín’s final word and went to the study to look it up in her Spanish-English dictionary. “Sacrílego. What nonsense!” She spoke so loudly that she thought he could have heard her from the dining room, but he’d already returned to the garden.
Julio and Guillermo were six and two years older than Sarah respectively, but she rarely saw Julio and hardly knew him. He didn’t work on the finca (farm) except during the coffee harvest when he helped to pick the beans. Guillermo often helped his father in the garden, but he was shy and rarely spoke and never played with Sarah. George Rutledge had arranged for the two older sons of Martín and Flora to attend a school in Managua after they graduated from the village school, and he paid for their tuition and school uniforms and books. Pablo was almost seven years younger than Sarah and often followed Martín around the garden. When Sarah turned twelve, she thought of Pablo as a baby always needing attention, even though he was really a little boy of six who came and went as he pleased.
Avocados were George Rutledge’s favorite fruit, and it annoyed him that the trees at Quinta Louisa had done so poorly that only three or four pears a year were harvested from his garden. He told Martín they ought to be able to do something about it.
“I am going to take care of the problem, Don Jorge. You will have plenty of avocados when the rainy season comes again.”
“As if that ignorant peon has the competence and training of a horticulturalist and can improve the yield of temperamental fruit trees,” Sarah heard her father mutter as he entered the house.
Several days later George saw Martín cutting a ring of bark around the trunk of the avocado tree. “What are you up to, my good man?”
Martín uttered some long word that Sarah didn’t recognize. “What was that word you used?”
(“Who else in Nicaragua has an Indian peasant working for him that spouts out ten syllable words like some Cambridge don . . . in Spanish, of course,” George had said as he related the story to his wife that evening.)
George went into the study to look up the definition in the Spanish-English dictionary to be sure he understood it. Circumcidante (Circumcising).
Sarah read the entry on the page where her father had left the dictionary open on his desk, but the words didn’t refer to fruit trees and confused Sarah and made her blush. “Circumcising: cutting circularly a portion of the skin around the male virile organ.”
She heard the patio slam once again as her father went back to the garden.
“Martín, tell me one more time what you are doing to that tree?
“I am circumcising it, señor.”
Martín was cutting a strip of bark around the trunk of the tree. “What are you doing that for?”
(“It really did look like some primitive circumcision ritual,” George told his wife that evening.)
“To change the sex. It is a male. That is why it will not bear any fruit. I am making it into a woman.”
“My good man, circumcision is not the way we go about changing the gender of things.”
“It is for avocado trees, señor.”
George told Mary at dinner that the tree would be dead within the month but he might as well let Martín have his way. “You can’t tell these bull-headed campesinos (peasants) anything. They’ll just walk off and start sulking and do no work at all. You might as well let them have their way in little things and save your arguments for urgent matters. The tree is perfectly useless anyway if it bears less than a half-dozen pears every year.”
To George’s surprise the avocado tree didn’t die. It produced more buds that season than it had borne in all the previous seasons added together, and there were even more pears the following season; but the next season after that, the year that Sarah turned thirteen, the tree put out almost no buds again.
“Martín has some crank theory about virgins. Perfectly ridiculous. These fool peasants are obsessed with superstitions about virgins. I don’t believe a word of it. He told me an avocado tree won’t bear fruit if a virgin climbs on its limbs after she begins to menstruate.”
“Father! Really!” Sarah got up and threw her napkin on the table without inserting it into its ring, as she’d been trained to do, and ran to her room and slammed the door.
“You really shouldn’t talk so freely around Sarah now that she’s becoming a young woman, George. She’s easily embarrassed.” Mary’s eyes twinkled, and she wrinkled up her lips. “But you might pay more attention to Martín’s folk remedies. Remember how the tree began to bear fruit after it was circumcised a couple of years ago.”
George forbade Sarah from ever climbing in the avocado tree again. He told her that she was too old for such behavior, just as he’d told her when she was ten that she was too old to ride on Don Martín’s back.
The
