The ranches in Tamaulipas were the first to be sold, at a cut price but just in time: the buyer who had taken advantage of the opportunity to pay a ridiculous price to the widow of his neighboring ranchero had most of his property seized shortly afterward by decree of Lázaro Cárdenas and in accordance with the law.
My papa had died, but the Agrarian Reform was alive and kicking.
We never returned to Linares, even to visit. My grandmother decided to come with us, always supporting and staying with her daughter without hankering after her old life, even if the new people, the new rhythms, and the new places overwhelmed her. There, she finally took off the mourning clothes she had worn since my grandfather’s death. She saw her grandchildren and great-grandchildren every day, and that compensated for how unsettled she felt living in a city. What she never understood and never approved of was my mama making the crazy decision to enroll me in a new school: a secular—senseless, my grandmother would say—institution called the American School Foundation of Monterrey.
“It’s all gringos and atheists and aleluyas.”
“I don’t think so, Mama. I don’t care: he won’t have soldiers greeting him every day when he goes in and out, making sure the children don’t say a single Lord’s Prayer.”
The federal government’s war against the Church raged on, even if shots were no longer being fired. When I received my First Communion that year, it was as if I was betraying the fatherland: at night, in secret, in some family’s home, the ceremony administered by a priest who, in the street, in view of everyone, pretended not to be one.
The Catholic schools continued to exist behind closed doors.
But you didn’t have to hide to go to my school. There was no need to pretend you hadn’t learned what you learned there. The diploma I’d receive would be recognized by the government. We were exempt from singing the socialist national anthem, a requirement Cárdenas soon imposed on other schools. And very importantly, there were boys and girls together in the classrooms, and I always liked girls a lot—even if, as a kid, what I enjoyed doing was terrorizing them with my stories imported from Linares, with the legends I told them at recess, when we sat in a little circle in the shade and, enjoying their suffering, they begged me, Tell us more.
For the first time in my life, I was happy going to school.
I shared my tales of mummies and ghosts there, the other children’s stories about cattle rustlers paling beside them. There the legend of the doll was kept alive, recycled over and over and surviving until my own children were pupils at the same school, in a more modern building.
There, when I was a little older, I became obsessed with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Because I could never forget what I lost that Saturday. And once I’d become a science fiction fanatic, I began to believe and dream that a time machine would be the solution to everything. I would travel back in time, to that birthday Saturday. Somehow, I would save my papa and wipe away the sadness that sometimes caught my mama by surprise; the nostalgia for her old life that assailed my grandmother; the feelings of guilt with which I was filled, without knowing why, about my father’s death; and the feeling of abandonment that I never overcame. Of course, I soon learned that it was not possible: that there is no way to go back in time to fix the past.
But there you go.
In the corridors of that school, I met the girl who would be my wife, though when we shared the building, I barely looked at her because she was so young, and she didn’t like me because of my absentmindedness.
It was also there that I prepared myself to study for a degree in the United States, though my mama objected to my first choice of university.
“You’re not going to Texas A&M. Study whatever you want, except agriculture.”
How right she was. In Monterrey there was no place for land or tractors, only for iron of another kind.
88
You Built a Good Life . . .
Sure, but I never managed to shake off the bittersweet memory of Simonopio, because all the good memories were tainted with his abandonment of me.
89
We’ve Arrived; Turn Here
“But what happened with Simonopio?” Nico the taxi driver asks eagerly while he follows my directions.
This is his first intervention since we left Monterrey.
I realize now that he had been silent not from boredom, as I had thought at the beginning, nor from a desire to be elsewhere or to turn on his radio, but so that he would not interrupt my flow or the story that I began to tell us this morning, after we closed his taxi’s doors and set off. And I know that, had we met before, had we had more time, this young man—who has been told very few stories or tales in his life—could have become my friend.
But there’s no time. There’s no choice: we’ve arrived, and the could haves don’t exist. Nico has nothing to worry about; I’m not trying to delay my story anymore. All the versions of this story, which besieged me for years inside the walls of oblivion that I put up, took me by storm today. They’re other people’s versions, they’re mine, and together they’re a sphere: I see the whole, and I can no longer ignore it or leave it unfinished.
I feel compelled to reach the end.
90
Sweet Ignorance
When Beatriz decided she never wanted to walk the halls of her beloved house or the streets of Linares again, nor continue to receive sympathetic looks, when she decided to take up her husband’s idea to invent a new life in Monterrey, she did so with the intention of including everyone.
Her son, of course, had no choice: he would go wherever she said they would go.
He was lucky to be of an age that had enabled him to recover more quickly than she, Beatriz thought. While she still vividly remembered her unconscious, injured son, he no longer recalled on what side the fracture had been, and on the back of his head, his hair had already covered the wound that had required twelve stitches. When he looked in the mirror in the morning, he did not even notice the scar on his temple, still red to one side of his eye, and that still made her shudder: to him, it was as if he had had it all his life.
She was also surprised that he spoke of his absent father with enthusiasm, sometimes in the past tense, but sometimes in the present. He seemed to forget, or to not understand, that death is permanent. It was as if he did not understand that his father had not gone, like on many other occasions, on a temporary visit to one of the ranches. Sometimes, at night—because at night, as she well knew from personal experience, there is no hiding, distractions, or pretending that something that will be remembered for a lifetime has been forgotten—he spoke unintelligibly and whimpered in his sleep.
I had never done that before.
When Beatriz—when my mama—came to check on me, alarmed by the screams that came from my sleeping consciousness, Simonopio was always there, trying to erase the bad memories forever with gentle but firm strokes on my forehead, between my eyebrows, just like he had seen my mama do when I was a baby. He sang to me in a low voice, without interrupting his song when his godmother came into the room.
My mama did not understand his words, though she recognized the notes. Before long she grew accustomed to that language exclusive to Simonopio and me, and before long she thought it beautiful, because Simonopio had a melodious voice. It was a voice that enveloped you, soothed you, and took you away not only from an orphaned boy’s dreams but also from the fears and doubts of a widowed mother. Of his godmother.
It was a comforting voice.
Although I never woke during those nocturnal serenades, today I can see my mama sitting on the old rocking chair, without interrupting, without intervening, but without going away. She did not want to miss a single minute of the strange coexistence of her son and the godson that life had given them. Because one night, between one sweet-sounding song and another, she understood that, while life offers no guarantees, sometimes it does offer gifts; and understanding that, accepting it even without being fully aware of it, the bitterness, t
he grief, and the deep wound of Beatriz Cortés, now the widow of Morales, began to heal, and her determined streak began to reemerge.
If she had fallen into a dramatic downward spiral from the moment of her husband’s death and my disappearance, that was the moment when the descent ended. It would be the point from which the new Beatriz would rise up, the one born from sheer willpower and the one that would last for as long as there was life in her body. The arrogant Beatriz she had been when she was young; the new fearful one; and the other, even newer, more battered one learned to live together in peace until they completely merged. It would take years, and the climb would be slow, but everything starts somewhere, and for her, it had begun listening to Simonopio’s songs.
Determined, she called everyone to the dining room one morning: Grandmother Sinforosa, Pola, Mati, Leonor, and Simonopio. At that meeting she didn’t explain to them—and she never did—all her reasons. She just said: “This land’s not for a widowed woman with a small child, so we’re leaving.”
They did not all accept the invitation: Leonor didn’t. Nor did Mati. One wanted to marry, and the other wanted to be a grandmother to the grandchild that had arrived. Pola said neither yes or no, but no one was in any doubt.
Discussing it with her daughter in private afterward, my grandmother, Sinforosa, understood that the reasons for moving went beyond a simple inability to manage the land alone, but she did not say anything. She agreed that it was more sensible—safer—for my mama and me to leave Linares, even if it meant breaking ties and losing traditions. And when her daughter asked her if she wanted to stay behind and live with one of her brothers, Sinforosa didn’t think twice.
“I’ll come with you.”
My grandmother, Sinforosa, wouldn’t have liked being a burden or being burdened, as she knew would be the case if she stayed to live with the daughters-in-law.
“Anyway, it’s you that needs me, Beatriz.”
Simonopio had left the dining room in silence, as ever, but with a look of resignation that my mama wanted to interpret as acceptance.
“We’ll take Nana Reja, of course, and Simonopio.”
She knew that, of them all, Simonopio would struggle the most with the change, so she was prepared to find him something to do in Monterrey, to which Simonopio had refused to return since the visit to the circus. They would find something he liked, she was sure. In Monterrey there were also hills and even mountains. Enormous mountains. Simonopio might like to come and go, to explore it all.
Perhaps.
The decision that had been so hard to make soon became the center of Beatriz’s attention and even her enthusiasm. Because once she accepted the idea, she also decided to make the change immediately: to the displeasure of many, they wouldn’t wait until the end of the school year or for me to receive my First Communion there, or for her friends’ daughters’ debuts, much less the parties at the new Linares Social Club premises.
Why, if she wouldn’t even go?
No. As soon as she finished organizing everything, she would leave and take me away from there, far from the dangers to our lives and land. Far from the temptations and dependencies.
Many tried to dissuade her, including my uncles—her brothers—who repeated their offer to manage all her affairs.
“Help me sell everything and manage everything until it’s sold. Nothing more.”
“Think about Francisco’s future.”
“That’s all I am thinking of, but the land is the past.”
They accepted the task but warned her that it would take time, not least because many properties were in the name of friends of her husband’s, and her brothers would have to persuade them to pretend that it was they who were selling them. Beatriz was not surprised that all of them, without exception, agreed to return what belonged to her as a widow. My papa had always chosen his friends well: none of them went back on their word, recognizing that the land they were safeguarding on his behalf from the agrarianism belonged to Francisco Morales’s widow. They would gladly help her to sell it.
Little by little my mama tied up the loose ends, keeping herself busy, gaining some respite from the emptiness of the night, when she sought refuge in the comfort that the songs of her Singer and of Simonopio brought her, even if one was mechanical and the others were not sung for her.
And while my life and my days were filled with Simonopio, with his stories and his songs, to my mama, Simonopio’s life now seemed empty and sad.
It wasn’t resentment, she was certain: he had hugged her after one of her constant requests for forgiveness for the slap, and Beatriz was relieved at his show of affection.
It wasn’t that. Then what was it?
It was the mourning that affected him: since he had come out of his shed, barefoot, two days after returning, the look in his eyes had never been the same. In the first few days, Beatriz had concentrated on his physical well-being. But, distracted by her concern for her son’s recovery and adaptation to life without his father, she had overlooked the emotional state of her godson, who had lost a father more than a godfather.
And it was also desolation: weeks passed, and she did not notice that what woke her earlier than usual was the absence of noise: the absence of the buzzing with which, through her window, the proliferation of bees that had installed themselves in the shed’s roof nineteen years earlier had lulled her to sleep, their hum making it so easy to cling to sleep for the last hour—or the last minutes—before facing the day.
They had arrived with Simonopio, and they had stayed ever since.
However, now the silence of simple birdsong woke her in the mornings. Inexplicably, Simonopio’s face was now free of bees—when even in winter, provided it was not too cold, there had always been some perched there, and in spring or summer they had followed him like a flower. Now, in midspring, Beatriz could see his green eyes and long eyelashes without their extensions of moving wings. She could see his mouth just as God had given it to him, without it being covered in bees, as if they wanted to hide it or feed off his smile. She saw that his skin was not blemished by a single mole, when before it had always seemed like he had several, even if they changed position with every glance.
She didn’t know for certain, having been distracted for weeks and lost in her new widow’s grief, but she suspected that the bees had left Simonopio completely alone since the day of Francisco’s death.
Why had they abandoned him? Why had the creatures that had helped him live deserted him?
Seeing Simonopio spend the day talking, singing, and telling stories to the one audience member who offered his full attention and participation, my mama thought that she could ask him what was wrong and receive a reply from his little interpreter. She decided she would do so a short while later, and went away without approaching him. She would ask him tomorrow, but tomorrow became the day after tomorrow, and then a week or two.
And she didn’t ask.
Had she been brave enough to ask, what would have prevented her from pressing him to tell her what had happened that Saturday? Nothing would have stopped her, even knowing that it would be painful for everyone. She knew that questions hurt him, and the last thing she wanted to do was cause him pain. But she was even more afraid of hating—and never forgetting—the answer. She also feared what I, as the interpreter, would be forced to narrate, to know, and to remember.
And there were things that it was better not to know.
We would leave in order to forget the bad things: the absences and the abandonments. We would go to remember just the good things. And in our ignorance, we would heal.
91
Song from the Past
As ever—whether it passes slowly or quickly—time definitely passes, and from grain of sand to grain of sand, every date arrives.
And so, sure enough, the Saturday of our departure also arrived.
Everything that needed to be packed had been packed. Everything that needed to be given away had found its new owner, including my papa’s clothes,
because, living in heaven—as they’d told me he was—he would no longer need them. We also gave away my Thunderbolt, who would’ve been very unhappy in Monterrey, because on those city streets he would’ve had nowhere to run. He would be happier in my cousins’ orchard, where they had promised to take good care of him.
My mama took her old furniture to replace the pieces in Monterrey, which were of inferior quality and of much less sentimental value. She took a chest of winter clothes and another one of summer clothes. She took her Singer and all her fabric and threads. She packed the few family photographs we had. They were few, perhaps, because it was a very expensive service back then, but it might also have been because they had thought there would be time to take more. From the kitchen they took my grandmother’s copper pot and her big wooden spoons. Nothing else.
They packed very little for me: some clothes and a few toys. I didn’t have much, and in the little chest that they assigned to me, there was still some space: space enough for my .22 rifle, the only reminder of my papa that was mine, very much mine. But it was a space that was impossible to fill, so, leaving it empty, we closed the chest.
We said goodbye to all of La Amistad’s workers, and there were some tears. Most of all I would miss Leonor and Mati, who until then I had thought of as part of the Morales Cortés family, such that it was inconceivable to me that they wouldn’t want to come with us. Nana Pola, on the other hand, cried with sadness because she was leaving, because she would leave behind everything she knew, but I suppose it would’ve hurt more had we left her, and that drove her to follow us.
The Murmur of Bees Page 39
