Doria was still worrying as he made his way home. He had said goodbye to the husband and father after declaring there was nothing more he could do.
“Be strong, Sr. Morales. God knows why He does things.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
As he walked through the square, he caught sight of the woman of black ice, which struck Dr. Doria as a small miracle, for he was exhausted, and with the cold, he was walking with his head down. She was sitting right in front of the bronze plaque announcing that the Morales family had donated the bench to the town. Compassion cut through his fatigue, and he approached the woman to ask her what she was doing there and whether she needed help.
The man spoke too quickly for Reja to know what he was saying, but she understood the look in those eyes and trusted him enough to follow him to his home. Once inside the warm house, Reja plucked up the courage to peek at the baby’s face. It was blue and lifeless. She was unable to suppress a groan. The man, as the town’s doctor, did what he could to revive him. If she had been able to speak in spite of how numb she was from the cold, Reja would have said, What’s the use? But she could only groan and groan some more, besieged by the image of her blue son.
She didn’t recall the doctor undressing her, nor stop to think that it was the first time a man had done so without climbing on top of her. Like a ragdoll, she allowed herself to be touched and examined; she reacted only when the physician brushed against her enormous, warm breasts, tight and painful from the milk that had built up. Then she let herself be dressed in thicker, cleaner clothes without even asking to whom they belonged.
When the doctor guided her back out onto the street, she reflected that at least she would feel less cold when she was returned to the same bench. She was surprised when they passed the square and continued down a road that led them to the door of the most impressive house on the street.
Inside, the property was dark. As dark as she felt. Reja had never seen people as white as the woman who received her, though there was a shadow over her face: a sadness. They sat Reja in the kitchen, where she kept her head down. She didn’t want to see faces or eyes. She wanted to be alone, back in her hut made of wood and mud, even if she died of cold, alone with her sadness. Better that than endure the sadness of others.
She heard a newborn crying, first in her new-mother’s nipples and then with her ears. That was how her body had reacted every time her child cried with hunger, even when he was out of earshot. But her baby was blue now, wasn’t he? Or had the doctor saved him?
The throb in her breasts grew stronger. She needed relief. She needed her baby.
“I miss my boy,” she said softly. Nobody in the kitchen with her seemed to hear, so she ventured to repeat it more loudly: “I miss my boy.”
“What is she saying?”
“That she misses her boy.”
“What’s that about her missing something?”
“She wants her son.”
The doctor arrived with a bundle in his arms and passed it to her. “He’s very weak. He might not be able to nurse properly.”
“Is it my little one?”
“No, but he needs you just the same.”
They needed each other.
She opened her blouse and offered him her breast, and the child stopped crying. In the relief she felt as, little by little, her breasts emptied, Reja observed the baby: it wasn’t her boy. She knew it at once—the noises he made when he cried, suckled, or sighed were different. He also smelled different. For Reja, the effect was the same: she wanted to lower her face to inhale deeply in the hollow of the neck, though she thought they might not allow it, because among other things, the clearest indication that she was holding someone else’s baby was its color. While hers had gone from a dark brown to a deep blue, this one was gradually turning from bright red to white.
They all observed her in silence. The only sound in the kitchen was the baby sucking and swallowing.
Alberto Morales had fallen asleep, watching over his dying wife. After several days of his spouse’s moans and the newborn’s incessant cries, he had gotten used to the idea that, while they made noise, they were still alive. Now, he was woken by the deafening silence: neither was his wife moaning nor the baby crying. Anguished and not daring to touch his wife, he ran in search of his son.
In the kitchen, he found the servants and Dr. Doria standing around what he supposed was his child’s body. Noticing his presence, they all stepped aside to let him through.
He looked at his baby suckling the darkest breast he’d ever seen.
“We found a wet nurse for your son.”
“She’s very black.”
“But the milk’s white, as it should be.”
“Yes. Will the boy be all right?”
“The boy will be all right. He was just hungry. Look at him now.”
“Doctor, my wife was quiet when I woke.”
That had been the end of Sra. Morales.
Reja stayed away from the process of mourning: the wake, the burial, and the wailing. For her it was as if the señora had never existed, and sometimes, when the boy let her, when she allowed herself to listen to the silent call of the hills, she could almost believe that this baby that hadn’t come from her body had sprouted from the earth. Like her, with no memory of anything other than the sierras.
Something stronger than maternal instinct took hold of her, and for the next few years, the only thing in Reja’s world was the baby. She imagined she kept him alive for the earth, his helpless mother, so it never occurred to her to stop offering him her breast after his first tooth, or even a full set of teeth. She would simply say, Don’t bite, boy. Her milk was nourishment, comfort, lullaby. If the boy cried: to the breast; if the boy was angry, noisy, feeling down, sad, bad-tempered, snotty, or sleepless: to the breast.
The boy Guillermo Morales enjoyed six years at Nana Reja’s breast. Nobody could get the idea out of their head that the poor child had almost starved to death, so no one dared refuse him anything. But one day the Benítez aunts arrived to visit the poor widower, and shocked to see a boy almost of school age latched onto the servant’s black breast, they insisted to Sr. Morales that the kid should be weaned.
“It’s not as if he’s about to starve to death, man,” one of them said.
“It’s scandalous, Alberto,” said the other. “Obscene.”
At the end of their visit, as a favor to the bewildered father, the pair of spinsters took Guillermo off to Monterrey for a time, realizing there was no other way the boy would listen to reason or get to sleep, since he had never done so away from the breast of his nana Reja.
They left Reja with empty arms, and so full of milk that she left a trail wherever she went.
“What’re we going to do, Reja?” the other servants asked her, tired of cleaning up behind her.
She didn’t know what to say. All she knew was that she missed her boy.
“Ay, Reja. If you’re going to be like this, best it doesn’t go to waste.”
And so they brought her malnourished or orphaned babies to feed and glass bottles to fill, because the more she nursed, the more milk she had to give. Then the widower Morales married his second wife, María, the younger sister of his late spouse, and together they gave Reja twenty-two more little ones to feed.
In the following years, Reja would never be seen without a child at her breast, though she remembered Guillermo Morales with particular fondness: the first child she wet-nursed, the one who saved her from being utterly alone, who gave her a purpose that would keep her fulfilled for years.
Of course, Guillermo himself returned a short time later, but not to the old house in the square. Tired of living in the bustling center of Linares, his father had made the extravagant decision to abandon the family mansion and live on Hacienda La Amistad, which was located just outside the built-up area of town. There he grew into a man and started his own family. When he inherited the estate following the death of his father—victim of nothing other t
han old age—he also inherited his nana Reja, who wet-nursed his children, too, when they arrived.
A strange situation: a father who’d fed from the same breast as his children. And yet, when he’d suggested finding another wet nurse and giving Reja a rest, his wife had firmly refused: What better milk than their nana’s? There was none. Guillermo gave in, though he avoided thinking much about the situation and tried to pretend he had no memory of his prolonged turn at the breast.
It was at La Amistad that Reja grew old, as did Guillermo, his nana seeing him die of an infection. And like his father before him, when he bequeathed the estate to Francisco, the only son who’d survived epidemics of dysentery and yellow fever, he also bequeathed old Nana Reja, along with her rocking chair.
But she had not nursed the children of Francisco and Beatriz. Time had dried Reja, who no longer remembered how many local children had lived thanks to her abundance. She didn’t even remember the last white drop that had emerged when she squeezed her breasts or how they had once tingled even before she heard the cry of a hungry baby.
That morning in October 1910, the inhabitants of the hacienda woke as they did every day of the year, ready to begin their routine. Pola opened her eyes without turning to look at her roommate’s bed. After decades sharing a room with her, she knew that Nana Reja came and went unnoticed. The sounds of the hacienda were starting up: the laborers arrived with their tools to head to the sugarcane fields, and the house servants prepared to begin the day. She washed and dressed. She had to go to the kitchen to have coffee before leaving for town to buy freshly baked bread from the baker’s shop in the square. After finishing her milky coffee, she collected the money that Sra. Beatriz always left in a tin can.
It promised to be a sunny day, but she needed her shawl because, at that hour and that time of year, the cold night air persisted. She took the shortest path in the direction of town, as she did every day.
“Off to town, Doña Pola?” Martín, the gardener, asked her, as he did every day.
“Yes, Martín. I won’t be long.”
Pola liked this routine. She enjoyed going to fetch the bread every day. It meant she could find out the latest goings-on in Linares, and see from afar the boy, now a grandpa, whom she’d liked so much when she was young. She walked to the rhythm of the constant creaking of Reja’s rocking chair. She liked walking down the road flanked by giant trees that led from the estate to the center of town.
Back when she still spoke, Nana Reja had told her how the widower Alberto Morales had planted them when they were little more than branches.
On her return, she would take Reja her breakfast, as she always did.
Nana Pola stopped all of a sudden, trying to remember. What about Reja? As she did every day, Pola had passed by the black rocking chair. Many years ago, she had given up trying to converse with the old woman, but it comforted her to think that, like these old trees, Reja remained, and that perhaps she would remain forever.
And today? Did I see her when I went past? She turned around.
“What did you forget, Doña Pola?”
“Have you seen Reja, Martín?”
“Course I did, on her rocking chair.”
“You sure?”
“Where else could she be?” said Martín, following Nana Pola at her brisk pace.
They found the chair still rocking, but Reja wasn’t in it. Alarmed, they returned to the bedroom the nanas shared.
They did not find her there either.
“Martín, run and ask the workers if they’ve seen Nana Reja. Look for her on the way. I’ll let Sra. Beatriz know.”
Beatriz’s routine did not involve rising early. She would wake with the certainty that everything was underway: the bread and coffee already set on the table, the gardens being watered, and the clean clothes being ironed. She liked to start her days listening to her husband doing his ablutions, dreaming and from a distance, and then wake herself, still wrapped in the sheets, by saying a Rosary in peace.
But that day, in the Morales Cortés house, there were no ablutions, no Rosary, and no peace.
2
Echoes of Honey
I was born within that pile of masonry stone, plaster, and paint a long time ago. It doesn’t matter how long; all that matters is that the first thing I made contact with outside of my mama’s belly was the clean sheets of her bed, because I was lucky enough to be born on a Tuesday night and not a Monday. Since time immemorial, the women of her family had changed the sheets on Tuesdays, like decent people did. That Tuesday, the sheets smelled of lavender and of the sun. Can I remember it? No, but I imagine it. In all the years I spent living with my mama, I never saw her change her routine, her habits, the way she did things as God intended: on Tuesdays, the beds were made with linen that had been washed the day before with bleach, then dried in the sun, and finally ironed.
Every Tuesday of her life, with just one, painful exception that was still to come.
It could’ve happened the day I was born, but it didn’t. Mine was a Tuesday like any other, so I know what those sheets smelled like that night, and I know how they felt on the skin.
Although I don’t remember it, on the day I was born the house already smelled how it would smell forevermore. Its porous stones had absorbed the good aromas of three generations of hardworking men and three of women who were sticklers for cleanliness with their oils and soaps; the walls were impregnated with the family recipes and the clothes boiling in white soap. The scents of my grandmother’s pecan sweets; of her preserves and jams; of the thyme and epazote that grew in pots in the garden; and more recently of the oranges, blossoms, and honey—they always floated in the air.
As part of its essence, the house also preserved the laughter and games of its children, the scolding and slamming of doors, past and present. The loose tile my grandfather and his twenty-two siblings trod with their bare feet and my father trod in his childhood was the same one I trod as a boy. That tile was a betrayer of mischief, for with its inevitable clunk, the mother of the time would be alerted to whatever plan her offspring had hatched. The house beams creaked for no apparent reason, the doors squeaked, the shutters banged rhythmically against the wall even when there was no wind. Outside, the bees buzzed and the cicadas surrounded us with their mad, incessant song every summer evening, just before nightfall, while I was immersed in my final adventures of the day. As the sun went down, one began to sing and the rest followed, until they all decided at once to fall silent, frightened by the impending darkness, I suspect.
It was a living house, the one that saw me born. If it sometimes gave off the scent of orange blossom in winter or some unattributable giggles were heard in the middle of the night, nobody was scared: they were part of the house’s personality, of its essence. There are no ghosts in this house, my father would say to me. What you hear are the echoes it has kept to remind us of all those who’ve been here. I understood. I imagined my grandfather’s twenty-two siblings and the noise they must have made, and it seemed logical that, years later, remnants of their laughter could still be heard reverberating here or there.
And in much the same way, I suppose my years in that house left some echoes of me there—Shush, boy, you’re like a cicada, Mother would say to me—and the house left its own echoes in me. I carry them inside me still. I’m certain I carry my mama and papa in my cells, but also the lavender, the orange blossoms, my mother’s sheets, my grandmother’s calculated footsteps, the toasted pecans, the clunk of the treacherous tile, the sugar caramelizing, the cajeta, the mad cicadas, the smells of old wood, and the polished clay floors. I’m also made of oranges—green, sweet, or rotten; of orange-blossom honey and royal jelly. I’m made of everything that touched my senses during that time and entered the part of my brain where I keep my memories.
If I could get there of my own accord to see the house and feel it again, I would.
But I’m old. The children I have left—and now, even my grandchildren—make my decisions for me. It has b
een years since they allowed me to drive a car or write a check. They speak to me as if I didn’t hear them or couldn’t understand them. The thing is, I’ll admit: I hear, but I don’t listen. It must be that I don’t want to. Granted, my eyes don’t work as well as they did, my hands shake, my legs tire, and my patience runs out when my grandchildren and great-grandchildren visit me, but while I’m old, I’m not incompetent. I know the times I live in and the outrageous price of things; I don’t like it, but I’m not unaware of it.
I know exactly how much this journey will cost me.
I may be old, but I don’t talk to myself or see things that aren’t there. Not yet. I know a memory from reality, even if I grow more attached to my memories than to reality with each day. In the privacy of my mind I go over who said what, who married whom, what happened before, and what happened after. I relive the sweet sensation of being hidden among the high branches of a pecan tree, reaching out, plucking a pecan, and opening it with the best nutcracker I’ve ever had: my own teeth. I hear, I smell, and I feel things that are as much a part of me today as they were yesterday, and which spring up inside me. Someone can tear open an orange nearby, and the aroma transports me to my mama’s kitchen or my papa’s orchard. The mass-produced bottles of cajeta remind me of the tireless hands of my grandmother, who would spend hours stirring milk and sugar over the fire so it would caramelize without burning.
The sounds of the cicadas and bees, now rarely heard in the city, force me to travel to my childhood, though I can no longer run. I still search with my nose for a trace of lavender, and find it, even when it’s not real. When I close my eyes at night, I hear the clunk of the floor tile, the creak of beams, and the shutters banging, even though, in my townhouse, there are no loose tiles or beams or shutters. I feel like I’m at home, the one I left as a child. The one I left too soon. I feel like it’s with me, and I like it.
The Murmur of Bees Page 2
