Just then that room, where their older brothers had died, seemed the saddest place on earth. Nevertheless, Teresita, always a sweet-natured soul, managed to sit up and ask: “Why’s everyone looking so sad?”

And that made them laugh, even if her sudden illness was yet another of those tragedies they’d have to accustom themselves to. With pure affection, María wiped away her little sister’s tears; and with tenderness kissed her pretty face a dozen times over, telling her, as they later sat out watching the stars, “You see, Teresa, everything’s going to be all right, because I love you, and Papi and Mami love you, and nothing bad is going to happen to you while we’re around.” That’s what they all wanted to believe. Local healers, examining her the next day, provided Teresita with some natural calmantes by means of a specially brewed tea containing equal parts of jute, ginger, and cannabis, among other local herbs, and suggested they sacrifice an animal to San Lázaro, but this advice was ignored. Papito told her to drink a cup of rum, whose taste she found burning and metallic, but, even after she had been administered a santera’s cleansing, by means of burning roots and tobacco, as an added precaution, when she began trembling again a few days later, there remained no doubt that Manolo would have to fetch a doctor from San Jacinto or, failing that, from the sugar mill, a day’s ride away.

He’d do anything for his daughters, of course, and though it made him sad to pay the fee-what was it, a dollar?-he truly believed that the doctor, a certain Bruno Ponce, so sanguine of manner, and slightly jaundiced with sunken eyes behind wire glasses, would find a cure. Her papito’s hopefulness, however, didn’t quite work out. Apprised of her symptoms and examining her, the doctor determined that Teresita had suffered from a grand mal seizure (a tonic-clonic episode or status epilepticus, as her namesake, Doctor Teresita, would identify it, from her mother’s descriptions, decades later), a condition related either to epilepsy or to a tumor within her skull. As treatment, he prescribed a twice daily dose of phenobarbital, a sedative they could find at the farmacia in town. Its proprietor, whom María would never forget for his homely but kind face, Pepito el alto, as he was known to everyone, never even charged them for their monthly amber bottles of the stuff, so sorry did he feel for those guajiros with the lovely daughters. (In fact, that wonderful man, a widower, formed an attachment to María and actually took Manolo aside one afternoon to discuss the possibility of a marriage between them, even if he was in his fifties. While such arranged marriages weren’t unheard of, and it would have made their lives easier, her papito just couldn’t bring himself to subject his thirteen-year-old daughter to life with an old man. To the pharmacist’s credit, he never held anything against them; though, whenever María entered his shop to get Teresa’s pills, he became solemn in his demeanor, and, more often than not, while stepping back into the shadows, he’d let out with a sigh. Years later, with a wistfulness about la Cuba que fue, she’d wonder whatever happened to him.)

For a while several of those bitter pills daily seemed to do the trick. Still, with their foul taste, Teresita dreaded the very idea of having to take any medicine, and whether she took those pills or not as instructed, she seemed just fine.

A few months later, several days before the Christmas of 1943, they were out at the bodega by the crossroads, where trucks from distant cities sometimes stopped, dancing for a crowd of rum-soaked guajiros, who were whooping it up on one of those nights when the poorest of the poor pretended to be rich, the tables covered with all kinds of victuals-succulent lechón and pit-roasted chickens and doves, rivers of aguardiente and beer flowing like the Nile, their roosters and hounds meandering about, droppings left everywhere, as if anyone, some dancing barefooted on those sagging pine floors-covered in sawdust in the corners-gave a damn. On that night with their papito in good voice and on a little makeshift stage with a few of his musician friends from around-what were their names?-oh yes, Alvaro and Domingo, and a third fellow, the one-eared Tomaso, who played a gaita that he’d made from a pig’s belly, his terrible wailings on that primitive bagpipe appreciated just the same, those guajiros were having so much fun.

Among the females were those charming jamoncitas in their best flower-patterned dresses: María and Teresita, displaying their youthful rumbas, white blossoms tucked into their hair, and laughing as they turned, spinning in circles like flowers fallen from a tree. In the midst of all that, with the musicians playing, their papito proudly beaming at them, and with the oldest of the old clapping along, and the other beautiful young women of their valle, usually pregnant or on their way to becoming so, nodding at las muchachitas-with all that going on, Teresita, in the midst of a dance, had the second of her serious attacks, falling stiffly into her older sister’s arms and then, after appearing as if she were dead, trembling so violently on the floor that her limbs were soon black and blue. But, la pobre, even that wasn’t the worst of it-the pretty thing lost control of her bowels, coño, a shame of all shames. That fiesta still went on, though with more restraint in respect to Manolo and his daughter, the pretty one, with the wistful spoon-shaped face, who had nearly died and then come back before their very eyes.

After that, it was María who kept after Teresa to take her medicine, whether she wanted to or not, but even so, those fits returned, her body contorting in frightening ways, her eyes becoming blank as stone. Looking after her, María preferred to think those seizures, lasting only a few minutes, would soon vanish altogether because of the medicines (and their mamá’s constant prayers). But they didn’t. Out in the yard one morning, jumping rope with some of the local girls, Teresita, gleefully yelping as she took her turn, their hounds Blanco and Negro barking at her, died again, her eyes rolling up in her head. On another day, they were feeding the pigs and crying out with delight (and disgust) at the way the sows sniffed their feet and prodded their ankles with their moist and bristled snouts, when Teresita, in the midst of a laugh, suddenly turned to stone and fell right down into the swill, but this time, instead of violently shaking, she simply seemed to stop breathing, her lips and face becoming slightly blue. María, frightened to death, smothered her younger sister’s face with kisses until, by some sleight of God’s hand, she came around again, with a terrible belch that forced open the passageway to her lungs.

When it happened yet another time, while the sisters were accompanying their papito to town, it didn’t take María long to figure out that Teresita, detesting the bitter taste of those pills, only pretended to be taking them. From then on, María made sure Teresita actually swallowed them down, even if she had to force her mouth open by twisting her hair back before shoving one of those píldoras in herself. It wasn’t easy. Just slapping Teresa in the face for her own good, in the same way that her papito had sometimes slapped hers, nearly brought María to tears-of anger and grief. She came to hate the way Teresita spat that phenobarbital at her face or doubled over, clutching her belly and sinking to the ground, trembling-not from bad nerves but from the very thought that María, who had always loved her so, had started making her life a misery. Every time Teresita told her “Tú no me quieres”-“You don’t love me,”-or “Te odio, hermana”-“I hate you, sister,” her voice cracking and eyes blistering from the strain of crying, María’s heart broke a little more. (Long after Teresita was gone, those memories pecked at María like crows.)