Even without knowing the details, what everyone at first suspected became an irrefutable fact: Simonopio had witnessed Francisco Morales’s murder, and the culprit was Anselmo Espiricueta. They also mentioned the son, but Beatriz doubted that he would have pulled the trigger. However, she did not doubt for a second that his father was guilty.
They had both vanished, and their disappearance was a mystery that caused alarm.
The Guardia Rural were searching for them, though Espiricueta had not returned home and nobody had seen them since before that Saturday. They had left no trace. They abandoned the horses, and they did not leave by train. Everyone reached the same conclusion: the pair were still roaming the hills, evading justice, perhaps living in caves; so they thought it wise to offer a sizable reward to anyone who informed on them. They also decided that guards would be posted around the Morales Cortés house, in case the pair decided to attack again.
Beatriz knew that they did not have many funds available, since the bank had embezzled their money, but she would not skimp. She would figure out later how to pay rewards and salaries, even if she needed to borrow against the next season’s harvest. And she would see what she would do, what Beatriz—the civilized Beatriz—would demand when they were caught. She would see what she would say—or what she would scream—face-to-face with her husband’s murderer. She also had a primitive Beatriz inside, one she would never allow to come to the surface: the vengeful woman, the one she normally kept well under control, for if she let her out, primitive Beatriz would not be satisfied without at least gouging out the murderer’s eyes and tearing his skin to shreds.
Impossible. Impossible, even if they found him. She was a woman, and revenge was still not a woman’s business.
For the moment, there was one thing she could do to begin to satisfy her urge to hurt the murderer back.
“Go to the Espiricueta house with the tractor and tear it down.”
Leocadio and Martín looked at her, clearly distressed.
“With the girl inside?”
“What girl?”
“The daughter. Margarita. They left her there.”
Then she remembered the girl who had been excited to receive the clothes and ragdoll Beatriz had sewn for her, that day when Beatriz tried to offer her condolences to the family; the day when the man tried to attack Simonopio, still a child; the day when she returned home having decided to ask her husband to get rid of the campesino.
She had left it unresolved—she could not remember why—and had done nothing to drive the murderer away from her family when she still had time. She had been negligent. She had ignored her instinct and the evidence, and they had paid a very high price for her carelessness, changing their lives forever with a painful absence.
It was her fault.
She wished she could say sorry to her husband, but it was too late. It was too late for everything now.
“No. Pull the house down, but let the girl gather her things and come out, of course. She can leave if she wants. Give her money so that she can take the train. If she wants to stay, take her to the nuns or find work for her in a house. I don’t want to see her or know anything more about her.”
She did not receive anyone during those days.
Her oldest friends arrived to keep her company, to distract her, to congratulate her on finding her son, but she had no time or desire to be distracted.
Her reclaimed son was still unwell. When Francisco Junior was back to his usual self, when they no longer had to answer the same questions every time he woke because he could not retain the information, when he stopped saying sorry for some mischief for which he imagined he was responsible, when she stopped crying every time she looked into his confused eyes, then she would consider whether she could recover something of the Beatriz she had been. There would be time to see what kind of life she would build.
That woman changed once again by violence no longer had a husband, and for now, she did not want friends or distractions either. Now she was a woman in charge of everything by herself: from the weekly wages and the moths that had returned, to the planning for the future.
Her Singer was calling to her, constantly, with its siren’s song: Come and forget about everything; lull the pain to sleep with the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat. Beatriz did not allow herself that promised rest. It was not the time. There would be time later. There would be time in the future, though it was impossible to think ahead.
Now it was time to tend to what was in front of her and to feign the strength of days gone by, to at least give her mother a well-deserved rest, because since that April Saturday, Sinforosa had filled every gap Beatriz had allowed her to fill during the days when her daughter was lost in anguish. Beatriz was now grateful to her for everything that, at the time, she had complained about and resented. She was grateful that her mother had never allowed her to fall, that she had prevented her from crumbling completely. And Beatriz was also grateful to her for delaying the three masses for Francisco until a better date, without Beatriz asking her to do so.
Her mother had returned to her copper pot, stirring the goat milk and brown sugar while she prayed, tireless in her search for comfort with her Rosaries. For whom did she pray? For her murdered son-in-law’s soul? Possibly. For her grandson’s health? Certainly. For her daughter with the weight of the world on her shoulders? Hopefully.
Beatriz, on the other hand, spent hours beside her injured son’s bed, looking at him, watching over him as he slept, waiting for him to wake a little more clearheaded. When her daughters sat with her, she did not answer their questions about what she would do now. She did not know yet. For the first time in her life, Beatriz Cortés de Morales did not know what to do with the rest of her life. And what was worse: with her son’s life.
She was afraid.
To escape their questions, their pressuring her, she left Carmen and Consuelo taking care of Francisco Junior while she went to tend to Simonopio for a while—he needed her, too, even if Nana Reja never left his side, even if Nana Pola took on the role as well.
Or perhaps it was she who needed him.
Maybe she needed to see forgiveness in his eyes, because she could pretend that the anguish had made her crazy and that it was madness that had dealt the young man a slap and not her, but Beatriz Cortés did not like fooling herself and did not like denying responsibility for her actions. Madness or not, Simonopio did not deserve to be treated in such a way, and now she would devote herself completely to making him understand as much and to earning his forgiveness.
When Francisco and Simonopio regained their health, perhaps she would have time to think about the future.
Before very long, she would have to prepare herself and find the right words for the answer she would offer the moment her son regained his senses and lucidity, and began to ask about his father.
She hoped that, by then, it would be necessary to give him the bad news only once. That his mind would have cleared enough for him to understand and to retain the information. That he would suffer it only once, because the one thing that was certain was that he would suffer and it would hurt, just as she was beginning to allow herself to feel the pain and the loneliness.
“Mama, hurry. Francisco Junior’s awake, and he’s asking for papa and for his .22.”
She did not feel ready to answer the question yet, but would she ever? Was there a better way to tell your son that his papa is dead, that he was killed? No. There were no alternative answers; there was just one, because death is final.
“I’m coming. And, Carmen: your brother’s called Francisco. Just Francisco.”
The only Francisco they had left.
83
Your Father Died, but All You Thought About
was the .22.
No, no, no. Maybe it was taken that way, maybe my mama and my sisters took it that way, but no.
One of the last things I remembered from that Saturday was the moment when my papa gave me the rifle. I couldn’t remember, I didn’t care, whether it was of fine
wood in a light or dark tone.
I never touched it, like I never touched the promise that, in giving me the rifle, my father made me.
And hence my problem, because it was not the rifle that I really wanted when I asked after it. It was my papa who I was looking for, because he had told me that the weapon was to use only when I went out with him.
The gift of the .22 meant that we would spend a lot of time together, and I believe that, in my mind—confused by the head trauma and by my age—I thought that, if the rifle appeared, my papa would appear, too, to invite me to go with him again.
In asking for the .22, I was remembering my papa.
But the rifle never appeared.
84
No. Espiricueta’s Son Took It.
We always suspected it.
Now I know.
85
If Your Mother Had Known
what happened to them, maybe she would’ve made a different decision. But a month after the tragedy, she still had not ventured out of the house or allowed you out, in spite of the fact that you had almost fully recovered, that you had energy and wanted to play and even had an appetite to return to school.
The guards remained outside the house. As far as she was concerned—as far as everyone was concerned—the murderer was at large. He roamed and threatened. They feared. So not even in Simonopio’s company did they let you out. Beatriz Cortés didn’t want to take her eyes off you, the miracle that you now were, her only Francisco, because the new scar on your face reminded her of what she had lost and how close she had come to losing everything.
86
The Future’s Somewhere Else
Beatriz Cortés de Morales knew she was sick with something that not even Dr. Cantú would dare diagnose. Physically, there was nothing wrong with her, but something that resembled a cancer called poor widow had been eating away at her, and she sensed that, the more the cancer grew, the more her essence would disappear.
How tempted she was to give up and surrender to it forever.
Poor widow. Forever, like her own mother. Growing old, poor widow. Alone, poor widow, because the man who was supposed to be with her through the years, until life ended, had made a promise that he only half fulfilled: I’ll never grow old, and I won’t let you either.
How tempted she was by the friends that visited her every day and lavished her with pity, with poor yous, offering to fix everything for her, even doing the shopping, though they would not manage to buy what she liked. What relief that they all allowed her to cloister herself without questioning it, thinking that it was in order to mourn her husband. For the same reason, nobody expected anything of her anymore, neither her attendance at the meetings of the social club ladies nor her presence to supervise the construction work. They did not even expect her to contribute with her good taste when it came to buying or designing the furniture and fittings for the new building.
How enticed she had felt at her brothers’ offer to manage her land, workers, and crops—You mustn’t worry about anything, Beatriz—allowing, as they would be prepared to do for the rest of their lives, the newly discovered indecision of their elder sister.
For the moment, her—previously—unusual hesitation manifested itself in matters of the land, which had been her husband’s concern before:
Shall we plant more or leave it for another year?
I don’t know, whatever you say.
Shall we sell all the grafted trees?
What do you think?
She knew that, if she gave into it, the hesitation would also appear in other areas of life:
Shall we move him to a different school? Will he celebrate his First Communion this year or next year? Who will be his godfather? Will he go away to study? What color shall I wear? Can I go to Monterrey?
Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat . . . How pleasant it would be to lose herself for hours, bewitched by the hypnotic rhythm of her Singer, forgetting her fear, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, her uncertainty, rat-a-tat, how inadequate she felt, how alone, forgetting her son’s questions, his demands to see Lázaro the Resurrected, her eternal debt to her godson, the elderly mother who resented her abandonment, and the recovered son, who now resented the constant attention he received. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.
What a great temptation she felt to escape from the cruelty of the empty nights, the darkness, the loneliness, the cold bed, the sheets that gradually lost the aroma of the beloved body that had been wrapped in them for so many years.
But time does not stop. Despite the painful absence beside her, the sun came up and set each day, though as a veteran of loss, this fact no longer surprised her so much. The empty hours of the night do not pass unnoticed, because in their unrelenting cruelty, they do not allow one to rest; they force one to think, and they demand a great deal. Because it is at night that fear is most frightening, yes, but it is also when sorrow becomes deeper and one regrets what one did or did not do more.
It is in the deepest darkness that one sees things most clearly. Just as the memories tempted her to give up everything for their desert of blackness, they did not allow Beatriz Cortés even the slightest myopia. What she saw in that clear, if unintentional, retrospective forced her to shake off any temptation. It forced her to decide to heal herself of the darkness with which she was filled, but not with unnecessary medications: with willpower.
A month had passed—A whole month, already?—since Francisco’s death. If she did not do it for herself, she would do it because she owed it to him: she would get back on her feet, she would reunite with the strong woman that he had left at home when he died, charged with the care of their son and all their affairs.
She was still afraid to leave the house. That was the truth. Because that Saturday in April, Espiricueta did not just take her husband from her. He also took her peace. Thinking about sending Francisco to school once he was back to full health filled her with terror. She feared that Espiricueta would take him by surprise, like the wolf in the stories. The same fear made her prohibit dear Nana Pola from going to fetch the daily bread alone, as she normally did. Now Martín always had to accompany her, which neither of them was happy about.
But she would not cede a single part of her life or free will to anyone anymore. She decided as much on the night when she found peace in a sweet song that was not being sung to her. She would make her decisions freely, and with free will, she would banish the fear. She remembered the promise that she had once made to no one but herself: not even in her old age would she allow herself to become anyone’s shadow. She would never be set adrift, at the mercy of other people’s decisions. She would never allow herself to stagnate.
It was the same night when, with regret, she remembered stopping her husband from proposing a radical change, back when changes terrified her, when she clung to traditions as if they defined her family. They should go to Monterrey, Francisco had begun to suggest on those nights when he allowed himself to lose heart, but she had never allowed him to continue talking; she had never allowed him to set out the idea in full. She had always refused to let him continue chewing over his crazy plan, but encouraged him to carry on with the same thing, doing the same thing, in the same place, and with the same people.
Leave the ancestral home? Leave the friends with whom they had shared their lives for generations? Leave the promises that life had made them?
She had flatly refused.
And what had happened to those promises? What right did she have to think they were guaranteed? The permanent absence of her husband had given her no choice but to admit it out loud, so that she would never forget it again:
“Life offers no guarantees. To anyone. It waits for nobody. It has no consideration for anyone.”
How arrogant she had been to have felt that, just by existing, she deserved the best in life, that she was worthy of being at the top. How arrogant for not realizing that, believing herself strong—a pillar in her husband’s life—in reality, she had been paralyzed by her fear of change
, which was why she had prevented him from carving out a different destiny for himself, for them, for everyone.
Her arrogance had taken away the possibility of Francisco living until old age. It had prevented him from fulfilling the promise he had made when she sat on his lap, years ago, on an afternoon when they laughed together.
Clinging to the past had cost him his life.
It was a price that Beatriz refused to allow her son to pay as well.
How many times did she have to learn the same lesson? How many times did she have to forget and relearn that life veers in all directions? That there is no limit to the amount of times a person can be knocked down, because life doesn’t believe that third time’s the charm?
She needed no more lessons. The third time had taught her the lesson she would never forget. Even if it took the rest of her life, she would recover from this third lesson, because she felt that it was her duty. But a fourth would kill her.
Then it struck her that the future was no longer connected to the past. And her mind was made up.
“The future’s somewhere else,” she said into the air, in the dark, wrapped in sheets that no longer smelled of her husband.
87
Had My Mama Known Everything,
maybe she wouldn’t have decided to move us to Monterrey, I don’t know.
Or perhaps she would’ve done it anyway.
Because the house’s familiar nocturnal sounds hounded her, rather than comforted her, and even the clunk of the loose floor tile, which had been so useful before, now irritated her. The idea of roaming the long halls reminded her of her constant and permanent loneliness. The smell the house gave off stopped her sleeping at night, and the absence of the buzzing of bees woke her in the morning.
Had she allowed time to pass, would she have gotten used to it? Would she have found peace again between those beloved walls?
We can never know what would’ve been, only what was.
We had a good life in Monterrey. We didn’t have savings, but we had the house there, and we had the land we would sell little by little, if necessary. My mama put her brothers in charge of selling all the family property in Linares—which, in the meantime, would continue to produce. The crops would be sold under their close supervision. The sharecropped land was left to the workers so that they could finish paying for it with fixed installments—a symbolic amount—for the next five years, when the land would be wholly theirs at last.
The Murmur of Bees Page 38