This happened in the sixties, in a town on the Costa Grande called Técpan de Galeana. Dad was 17 and my uncle Julián 14. They worked weekends in Grandma's copra orchard.
A copra orchard is a coconut plantation with an embankment. You lower and peel the coconut with machetes, break it in two and drain the water or drink it and put both bowls in the sun. When the copra is made, white meat flattened and parched, grate and boil it to remove oil that you sell from door to door. Or you send her to Acapulco to make soap in a factory. It depends on how good the harvest has come.
Grandmother's garden was modest, if not how two brats were going to take care of her on Saturdays. The hard days are to smash and peel and break coconut, the soft days are to walk around just seeing that the birds do not peck the copra. There are wild birds and also poultry, because what else can you do in a plantation, which grows almost all the time on its own, but raise a few chickens. What else can you do but that and lie in a hammock. And eat mangoes. Raising chickens and lying in a hammock and eating mangoes are things that you cannot talk to a coastal man.
This happened in the mid-sixties, on a soft day Saturday, in my grandmother's copra orchard. Dad and my uncle Julián arrived early. They installed their gear under the handles to protect themselves from the sun, although not from the muggy. They pulled hammocks out of their bags. They spread them between a branch and a pile with a wrist hook. And they went to work. They worked like this until three o'clock in the afternoon, when the hunger began to lift them off. They took out of their bags two cakes of Tecpaneco filling that the mother threw for them. A Yoli water. A chilate thermos. A pair of tecoyotas.
"With this life, who's deserting," my dad must have said. It was his favorite digestive phrase. Or so my mother had. The truth is that I saw her very rarely. This story was told to me by her, who heard it from him when they were dating.
After the food had dropped a little, my uncle Julián and my father returned to the day.
"Look out, then, that the birds don't eat the copra, Julián," said my father, without stopping from the hammock.
"I can't, parna," replied my uncle without stopping from the hammock.
"How can you not, then?" —The older brother insisted from the hammock, calm but brave: those from the coast (I don't really know if it is my family or it will be the ones from the coast, or it will be more like growing up without a dad) we value the rank of Brother Greater as you have no idea.
"I'm hunting a mango," said Julian.
"What mango are you going to hunt." They are all green.
"There will be one."
Dad looked at the top of the tree just in case his myopic eyes noticed a ripe fruit among the branches. What was going to happen: there was still half a month to go. You could harvest a green one with the basket (a two-and-a-half meter stick with a dry cane stick at one end: you pick it up, you catch it in the fruit, you pull it from the ground and it falls without damage to the stick) eat it chopped with chili and lemon. But no more.
"What's going to happen." Look out then, I already listen to the chickens.
"I'm busy, parna."
Dad began to rage calmly.
—Look, then, if you don't look, I'll hang up on you, little brother.
"Hang me up, parna." I while I hunt the mango.
I don't know where he got the idea from. Maybe from the red note.
He reached over to his bag and drew from it a long rope that I did not know why: if he was part of the gear or if the idea of killing his younger brother was already lurking. The first thing is that he started making a slipknot. Slowly, without stopping from the hammock. He stayed that way until five in the afternoon. The second is that he started throwing manganas around my uncle's neck. He could not throw it, but in part it must have been that Julián —without ceasing to hunt his mango, and this would have required a certain concentration of mystical vein— nodded, mocking the stocks every now and then.
Dad finally got tired of doing things lying down. He stood up slowly from the hammock and walked to Julián and passed the knot of the rope down his throat. Julián did not flinch.
"This is the last time I tell you." Go see the copra and the chickens.
"I can't, parna."
Dad looked up for the right branch to hang his younger brother. Once again his nearsighted eyes betrayed him: he was not sure which pitchfork would withstand the weight of a 14-year-old boy. It was the kind of thing Julian always solved, the one with the shrewd eyesight.
"You didn't think that, did you, motherfucker?" Said my uncle, laughing and reading his brother's mind.
Dad ran the rope through a low pitchfork that seemed well aligned with the main trunk. Now it was a matter of knowing if his weight alone would be enough to act as a pulley against Julián, who was already stout despite his years. And it was also a matter of putting on the work gloves to protect yourself from the cuts of the rope when pulling. And it was also a matter of finding a long slope of land to carry Julián's body on his back and start running while pulling the rope with all his might. And it was also a matter of throwing a protective burlap over his shoulder and wrapping the rope around his torso to be able to pull better with all the weight of his own body without the mentioned rope burning him. And hope in God that the mentioned rope was strong enough not to trip in the first friction against the fork. He discovered that it required an unprecedented amount of work and energy, that of punishing insubordination. It gave him a dizzy as soon as he calculated it.
"You didn't think that either, did you, motherfucker?" My uncle said again, laughing and reading Dad's mind.
Dad pulled on his work gloves and toyed with the burlap and twisted the end of the rope around his fists and was ready to run down the slope when my uncle pointed to a spot on the mango tree:
"There it is, parna." I hunted it. Pass me the basket, blown up.
Dad suspected that this was a last minute trick on the part of my uncle to save his life, but what does he do, he weighed, with saving me also from this monserga of wages, so much work for a fucking mother, nothing to give a futile warning of this disobedient bastard in the future, how lazy Cain must have felt at the right moment to kill Abel.
He released the rope and handed the basket to his brother, who was two or three steps from the hammock. Without getting up from the hammock, Julián raised the stick and hunted the handle. He lowered it. He carefully reviewed it. It was a yellow petaconcito without wrinkles, without a single black stain.
"It's going to be in vain," said Dad, still.
"Lend me your knife," answered Julian.
They split it in two. My uncle gave his older brother a half. Dad said (Mom didn't tell me this: I heard it from my father's voice many years later, shortly before his death, when we finally met in person) that this was the sweetest, softest and juiciest mango that ever never try. Out of season. An aberration.
Dad returned to the hammock to better enjoy the fruit.
This is how my grandmother found them when she came to collect them, made two strains by the muina and the fright: lying in hammocks, sucking mango while the birds pecked at the copra. They were so comfortable that it hadn't even occurred to them to take Uncle Julián's neck off the rope with which my dad tried to kill him. —Eps
Julián Herbert is the author, among other works, of the novel Canción de tumba.