In 1940 the inheritance of their mother finally came to the Quintero girls. She had died tragically ten years earlier and left her five daughters to their grandmother’s care. The Andean regional capital of San Cristobal knew the Quintero women for two important reasons: their classic beauty and their business savoir-faire.
Rosa’s faithful chauffer had sent word of a family emergency that would keep him from driving La Doña to her appointment in the town’s center. Above all, Rosa was a woman of her word, even if it meant riding the bus to her meeting. But Doña Rosa never did make it to see her friends in the center. In a jolt of the vehicle through the hill sides, La Doña flew out of the hind door, wearing her long pearl necklace and lace gloves. Unaware of the shrieks from the passengers, the bus driver rode his loud machine for five miles before he realized a human body dragged from the rear. No person deserved such an end, much less a lady.
The girls sat around the old oak table, they had 25 pesos to their name and a casona to remind them of their family’s gone glory. Aida, the older sister, stood up to her full height (she had learned young that a six-foot-tall woman did not need much to command respect in a city where most men came up to her ribs).
“I think it best to split the money and sell the house”
Her implacable tone scared the cat, who at her statement’s end ran to Carmen’s lap at the end of the table.
“Aida, darling, have you considered all our options?”
Though the sweetest of them all, Carmen knew how to manipulate a situation like a master orchestrator. She gently placed the cat on the floor and approached her sister, reaching out to caress her lovely brown curls,
“The rooms facing the back street are useless to us. Let’s turn them into stores and rent them out. We’ll have ourselves a good income without moving a finger.”
It was little use arguing with a logical solution to their predicament and, besides, nobody could deny Carmen her wishes. Not even an Amazon like Aida.
That was the moment that sealed my family’s life, almost 45 years before my mom and dad rushed to the hospital for my birth. La Casona would be divided. The main patio and adjacent rooms would accommodate the sisters and grandmother while the other wings would be sold.
The front of the house became my grandfather’s gas station once he and my grandmother, Carmen, settled down to build their own home. A gift and business, my grandmother promised her husband, would allow them live well and peacefully.
That corner gas station, at the city’s highest hill, on the main street made my grandfather eternal. Even after his death in 2000, people refused to believe of his passing, insisting that the week before they had seen him, Don Simeon, leaning on his wooden chair, doodling on his notebook and pumping gas under the blazing sun without so much as a spot on his chaste white shirt.
Never underestimate the power smell has over the human memory. To this day, as I pump gas into my own car—thousand and thousands of miles away from that Andean mountains in Venezuela, where Simeon met an elegant green-eyed girl named Carmen—I can close my eyes and imagine running around that corner gas station, at the city’s highest hill, on the main street as grandpa leans on his favorite chair waiting for the next customer to pull in for some gas.
