All the latest country wares were advertised in the Farmers’ Almanac, including the most recent discovery: a maize seed created in Oklahoma to withstand droughts and intense heat. With these innovative seeds, Francisco could plant on tracts of land that had never been used for want of an adequate irrigation system. And water.
In the same edition, John Deere was also advertising a motorized tractor even more powerful than the original machine, which for years Francisco had been merely caressing in a photograph that he had cut out. With the new tractor, he could work more land in half the time it took him with a mule-driven plow.
With the investment he had decided to make, he would render his land more productive. And never before had putting the land to work been more necessary than now.
Francisco Morales did not like land being left idle. It was another practice inherited from his father and grandfather, he supposed: if you can’t sow it, water it, fertilize it, and harvest it, you may as well sell it.
If it were that easy, he would already have sold a large tract. But during the economic depression and with the uncertainty of the war, the land reform, and the new law on unused land, who would buy it?
Now any unsowed land was eligible to be seized by the government and passed on to a resident of Linares, who would work it for a year and hand over a percentage of the yield to its legitimate owner, a payment determined in advance through a system of sharecropping.
Francisco had been practicing sharecropping for many years without needing a law to dictate it to him. He owned plots of land that were in the hands of trusted, hardworking men. Married men, with someone for whom they wanted to better themselves. Reliable men he chose, who nobody imposed upon him.
He did not mind knowing that someone else was occupying his land in such a way, and had seen the real benefit of forming partnerships: he provided the land, which would otherwise be left untended; he also contributed the seeds, water, and even the peon’s house, in exchange for 50 percent of the crop. Fifty percent that neither he nor the peon would otherwise have.
However, he would never, without a fight, allow just any stranger—someone seeking to abuse the system and appropriate another man’s land—to show up and, with a simple request, be allocated the land for no reason other than wanting it.
As part of his strategy to protect his land, some time ago Francisco had made the decision to distribute it in his own time and manner: he registered some of the family’s land in the names of trusted friends with no agricultural property of their own. Honorable men who would act as owners of the small pieces of land in the eyes of the law, even if it was a mere formality. What’s more, as soon as Carmen and Antonio were married, Francisco would ask his son-in-law to act as the symbolic holder of another tract. By verbal agreement, responsibility for the property and the rights to its use would continue to fall to Francisco and his family. With this covert but entirely legal measure, the risk of his land being snatched at the whim of the government was diluted, and he remained one step ahead of the authorities and those who coveted his property.
All the same, his satisfaction had not lasted long.
Now, with the new law on unused land, it did not matter how small a property was: if it was uncultivated, it could be seized from them for some stranger—with no knowledge or real connection with the land—to occupy it and tread all over it. The way Francisco saw things, the law was nothing more than thinly veiled expropriation. While it was true that, under the provision, the recipient’s tenancy of the uncultivated land would last only a year, once the recipient was in possession of it, who would force him to leave? And if he did leave, would it be returned to the legitimate owner?
In Francisco’s mind, the law was nothing more than a precursor to what was to come with the Agrarian Reform.
Francisco did not like being at the government’s mercy. The new mayor, Isaac Medina, was a self-professed agrarian who, wanting to enforce the law, had formed a cooperative to oversee private property in Linares. The three members of the committee had named themselves as the judges of something everyone in Linares knew they were biased about. Francisco feared that their criteria for snatching a hacienda from its owner were based not on facts, but on whims and on the benefit to themselves or their friends. He did not think he was crazy to fear that, by decree of those arbitrary judges, anyone could be stripped of their best land without reason—on the pretext of the new law, but with the true motive of greed. They supervised the land, but who supervised them? The mayor who had appointed them?
No. Francisco did not want the fate of the land he had inherited from his parents and that he planned to leave to his daughters’ families to be at the mercy of these people.
With the measures the government was taking, Francisco feared violence could escalate among the peons as they sought to take possession of land, or among the landowners as they sought to protect or reclaim their property. In Linares, the tension was beginning to be felt: each inspection by the cooperative was taken as a threat by the owners of the sugarcane haciendas. On the fringes, agrarians circled like vultures, with no permission other than what they granted to themselves or agreed to as a group. No longer content to settle for mere promises or rich men’s scraps, the agrarians turned from scavenging birds to birds of prey. The attacks had begun, and several landowners were now dead. After the violent and illegal invasion of the San Rafael estate, landowners had been forced to form—and fund—a rural force to protect their interests.
Francisco considered himself fortunate to have retained his lifelong employees and to be able to lease the land to them without reservation. The newest peon had arrived ten years ago, and Francisco had not hesitated to offer him the same as the rest, because while he did not know him, he judged that the large family he had with him was the best letter of introduction Espiricueta could have: in Francisco’s view, anyone with such a responsibility would never give up or neglect the excellent opportunity being offered to him. He would be loyal. Francisco still did not think he’d been mistaken. Espiricueta would never be a very capable farmer, and—perhaps even more so now, since the death of almost his entire family—he still struggled to get along with the others, but he quietly did what was asked of him and turned up to work without fail.
Francisco had resigned himself to it. Sometimes that was the most one could expect from somebody.
He cared little that Espiricueta remained unable to yield good harvests on his designated plot or to pay the agreed rent. Francisco listened to his complaints and excuses patiently: the land was bad, the water insufficient, the quality of the seed poor. He would take a deep breath and remember that it was better to have the land occupied by a trusted incompetent than by a greedy stranger.
Under different circumstances, he would have asked Espiricueta to vacate his plot by now. But Francisco still had unused land in Tamaulipas and in Linares and the surrounding area, whether because he had left it fallow out of necessity or because the violence had prevented him from investing in irrigation or in the new tractor. There was other land he had left idle because he had bought it when he was newly married, thinking of the many children he would have with Beatriz. The many children had not arrived, and instead the war had, at which time he lost the urge to begin something new on those properties. Carmen would soon be married, and Consuelo was soon to be engaged in Monterrey, too, he expected. Why leave two daughters who might never settle in Linares with the burden of tending to so much land?
With the new agrarian cooperative and its dubious judges overseeing it, the last thing Francisco needed was another plot unoccupied, so he resigned himself to Anselmo Espiricueta staying put.
Between the war, the deaths from the influenza, and the new opportunities for factory work in Monterrey, campesino labor was in short supply, especially men he could trust. During the three months he had spent in exile due to the influenza, people from the nearby rural communities had settled in Linares to escape the violence—whether from bandits or the army itself—abandon
ing their properties in a state of complete misery. All that was known about them was that they were desperate. Francisco would have felt the same if someone had appropriated his land or forced him to abandon it. Francisco might offer work to some of them eventually, but he did not want to give these people the chance to simply settle on his property. He knew that, in time and under the protection of the land reform, they would try to keep it.
The subject had been occupying his mind in recent times, until he found a solution that seemed perfect: among the letters he would send the next day, one would be delivered to Linares with a proposal for the Chang brothers, the Chinese men who bought vegetables to sell in the town’s market: Would you like to grow your own vegetables on my land? He was certain the Changs would accept, for Francisco had been observing them for a long time. They were hardworking husbands and fathers, to all appearances honorable and honest, with a good nose for business. Francisco hoped the Changs would also see it as an opportunity, and he thought they would understand the advantages it offered, for as foreigners, they would have no chance of becoming beneficiaries of the reform.
Vegetable cultivation did not require large expanses of arable land or major investment. It would have to be done, even if his father cursed him even more for leasing land to Chinamen. Francisco reflected on the irony of the fact that he was being forced to break up his property of his own accord so that the government would not do it for him.
Sometimes, when he lay awake at night, it occurred to him that the government’s attempt to make the countryside more productive, unstitching it into so many threads, would end up killing it like a plague. That the future was in cities like Monterrey, which had found a new calling, divorced from agricultural activity.
He could not imagine how the country would survive if it allowed the rural areas to die, for in spite of all the changes—the emergence of iron cities like Monterrey, all the technological advances, all the marvels of the modern world—if there was one thing that never changed, it was that people, whether of a city or a village, needed to eat every day.
Consequently, someone must continue to produce food. If only the government and the moochers would stop interfering . . .
He left the sealed envelopes on his desk. He was tired. He went to change into his nightwear, but the storm was raging on. He doubted he could sleep with all the noise, but he would try.
Recently, he had received a letter signed by the owner of Milmo Bank himself, alarmed at the unusual withdrawal from his account, fearful—Francisco suspected—that the Moraleses were transferring their funds to another bank. Despite that letter, despite Beatriz’s increasingly minor objections, some friends’ incomprehension, and above all, the thunder his father was sending him from up above that night, Francisco did not regret using their savings to invest in land, in a house in the city, and—now that he’d plucked up his courage—in the tractor and in extending the irrigation system.
Ironically, all the land he had acquired in Monterrey was unused—uncultivated—and nobody in the government cared.
It was time to turn his attention back to the estates and to buy the region’s first tractor. If the government wanted agricultural productivity, he would give it to them. In the morning he would travel to Laredo. Irrespective of the letter from Patricio Milmo and despite the thunder and lightning persisting in the sky, it was time to slim the bank account down a little more, though he would make sure the investment in the tractor paid for itself. He would move it between his properties to use fewer hands on the crops and to produce more. And he would lease it to other haciendas at idle times, to cover the high cost of the kerosene and gasoline it required.
He heard a final clap of thunder.
“I know. You mind your own business, Papa; leave me to mine.”
And with that, in the sudden silence of the night, he fell asleep.
32
An Old Look in His New Look
Years later, my mama would always laugh when she recalled how my papa used the tractor for the first time, with the instruction manual in his hand and the clear intention, in due time, to train the most capable of his campesinos and turn over responsibility for the vehicle. However, he grew so fond of that steel monster that it took him months to let go of the wheel, arguing that it was a complicated and expensive machine, so it was unlikely that anyone other than him would be able to control it properly, without mishandling it. She understood that he wanted to make sure he could train someone well, but insisted there was no need for him to wash every last bolt himself, to grease the machine, or to cover it up like a baby every night.
“You have plenty to do aside from spending your time stroking a plow. Besides, your horse is missing you—he’s growing fat from the lack of exercise,” she said to him.
In the end, reluctantly—but remembering, as his wife had told him, that his destiny was not to spend his life following a mechanized plow around the fields—he declared that one of the peons would at last be given the honor of driving the tractor.
His original plan had been to plow all the fields, even the ones that had to be left fallow, to give the appearance he would make use of them. He knew that the strategy would only work for one sowing season, but that was better than nothing. As it turned out, by the time the tractor finally arrived in Linares, his plans—and options—had changed.
After placing the order, and to keep him busy while he waited, my papa went ahead with his alternative investment plan in Monterrey, pretending that the regular work on the hacienda and the plans for Carmen’s wedding kept him satisfied. He also tried to ignore his concerns about his godson, but that was a difficult task.
That past winter, my papa had thought he’d managed to stop Simonopio wandering so much by inviting him several times to spend a couple days on the ranches in Tamaulipas. There, my papa would see signs of the old Simonopio—his constant companion, the happy, fun-loving boy whom he had not seen for a full year. But when they returned to Linares, Simonopio would disappear again. Sometimes he came to find my papa, but only to join him on the way back from supervising the work. He would go off for hours, but not days. And though my papa did not understand the reason for his godson’s melancholy, he felt satisfied and relieved that the boy had given up his constant solitary and dangerous vagrancy.
My mama told me that Simonopio’s transformation—after he moved to his new sleeping quarters with his bees to begin his new life as a wandering knight—had been a shock, because while he had never been a silly child, there was always a sparkle in his eyes that only a child can have, whether it be of innocence or of blind faith in everything and everyone. My mama swore that, while it was to be expected that any child would lose this sparkle little by little in the inevitable transition to adulthood, Simonopio lost it suddenly, like a light going out, without giving them the opportunity to gradually get used to the new person who emerged in the blink of an eye.
Truth is, if I’d been the one who announced to them one day—in silence or with my absence, as Simonopio did, or with a rambling speech, as I would’ve done—that I was going off into the wild and there was nothing they could do to dissuade me, my parents would have taken a belt to me and said, You little rascal, don’t even try it. With that, I would have quickly given up any plan to devote myself to wandering the hills, because I was always a relatively normal boy—although if she could, my mama, may she rest in peace, would say to you, Normal? I had to battle with him all my life! And like any normal boy, I hatched lots of plans for my life, plans for marvelous adventures, ideas that would change the world and eradicate injustice forever, all of which I gave up and forgot at the first sign of hunger, at the next invitation to play at a friend’s house, or on receiving a stern look from my mama or papa.
But from that year on, Simonopio, who had never really been a normal boy, was even less so.
My mama believed that sleeping under the vapors and fluids of his bees changed his character, so she felt obliged to insist to my papa—because it was impossi
ble to persuade Reja—that he in turn must insist to Simonopio that he move back into the house. My papa listened to her but didn’t do as she asked, because he knew she was talking for talking’s sake, as a mother does when she doesn’t want to accept that her children have grown up and she feels obliged to continue fussing over them and organizing their lives. To decide for them. But her godson, this child with the body of a nine-year-old boy, had an old look in his new look, a look that suggested an unshakable wisdom and determination, like they had never seen in anyone.
So they respected his transformation. If he accepted the invitations to Tamaulipas, all the better. If not, they would try to insist, but then let him be. If he wanted to continue living under his bees’ roof, they would let him, because though my papa had extolled the virtues of the system, he had been unable to persuade Simonopio to use the wooden beehives that would soon be arriving from the United States. The boy had accepted the gift when he told him about it, grateful for the gesture, but my father understood right then that the boxes would do little except gather dust. What must my papa have thought? That just by having the wooden hives nearby, the bees would have the urge to leave the one that had been their home for a decade?
No. For the bees to move, Simonopio would have had to ask them to do so, and he would never do that voluntarily.
Anyway, like I was saying: my parents had a peaceful winter that year, with no invasions and fewer worries about their godson, who kept relatively close. They rested a little. But if they thought Simonopio had gotten over his eagerness to explore the hill paths once and for all, they were wrong: once again, with the bees’ first spring flight in 1920, Simonopio disappeared.
33
Back on the Trail
For a few weeks he had been feeling it in his bones, in his muscles, and in his nose: it was the end of winter. His bees announced it to him a day in advance with their frenetic, excited drone: Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
The Murmur of Bees Page 21