The finca was called El Silencio, a name it had carried for as long as anyone in the valley remembered. The name was painted on a weathered wooden board above the gate, the letters faded by the sun and the rain of many seasons. Three generations of women had grown coffee on this steep slope of the western range of the Colombian Andes, and the name had remained unchanged through all of them.
Valentina had been born on this farm and had learned to walk in the dirt between the coffee rows. She had learned the names of the trees, the birds, and the seasons by being among them, and now at thirty-two she ran the farm herself. Her mother had run it before her and her grandmother before that, a line of women who had grown coffee on this slope for more than seventy years. They had developed an intimate knowledge of this piece of ground, its slopes and its soils, the way the light fell across it in each month of the year.
The grandmother had bought the land in the early nineteen fifties, when the valley was still reached by a track that became impassable in the wet season. The coffee was carried down to the road on the backs of mules in those days, the track too narrow for a vehicle. The grandmother cleared the first section herself, cutting the brush and the secondary forest with a machete and planting the first coffee trees from Bourbon seedlings. She carried them from a nursery in the town on the other side of the ridge in a basket on her back, walking the old trail that the indigenous people of the mountains had used to travel between the valleys.