He had not yet finished tending the sick man, knowing that there was little he could do for him, when he was summoned to the home of another patient.
That day, the following one, and every day for the next three eternal months, Dr. Cantú had no rest. No consolation. No knowledge that would help him to help.
It took him a couple days to realize that the speed at which the infection—which seemed like a flu—was spreading was abnormal. That it was of a different nature to anything seen before. It took him a couple more days to send telegrams to alert Governor Nicéforo Zambrano to the alarming death rate in the Linares area.
In Monterrey they already had the same problem, so the governor’s response was slow, occupied as he was awaiting instructions from the nation’s capital on how to deal with this evil that had spread not just through Nuevo León but across all the states along the US border. By the time they managed to identify the plague, they did not have the energy or creativity to invent a name themselves and instead adopted the one that the entire sick world had decided to give it: Spanish flu.
In a way, Mercedes Garza had been lucky to be the first to die, for hundreds of people said goodbye to her with great pomp and ceremony. Her mournful funeral would have been etched in the collective memory for years to come had it not been for the events that followed.
By the time her widower died three days after her, nobody had the inclination, the energy, or the good health to witness his burial, let alone attend a prolonged wake. By then, at least a third of Sra. Garza’s funeral-goers were lying in bed in various stages of the same illness.
When Sergio Garza was in the throes of death, Father Pedro went to administer last rites to him. Then, at the foot of the coffin, he said a few ceremonial words—the bare minimum—before the man was placed in the same grave as his wife.
The sole witness was the gravedigger, Vicente López. The priest, who was in a rush to get to midday Mass, left the cemetery without making sure the grave was filled. And Vicente López left without doing it: What for, if their little ones are going to join them tomorrow or the next day?
The gravedigger was no clairvoyant, just an observer. He had heard the Garza family’s servants say that the children already showed clear signs of the same illness. A shame: you didn’t have to be a doctor to know there was no hope for them.
Once they had delivered their master’s body, the servants no longer considered themselves bound to the family. Each went their separate way to try to save their own skin. Some thought one of the witches of La Petaca had given the Garza family the evil eye, and they refused to spend another moment in that house, afraid the power of the curse would extend to them too. The only one to stay to the end, because she had nowhere to go and because her devotion was greater than her superstition, was the orphans’ nana, for the children’s grandparents and other relatives had neither the health nor the courage to enter that infected house.
By then Vicente López was even busier than Dr. Cantú. At first the physician had tried to visit each house, as was expected of him, and to do so with the usual respect, but the reality was too much for him.
It was too much for everyone.
Afflicted by the curse of which the superstitious spoke or the infection the good doctor described, too many were dying every day. It became necessary to establish a system for collecting the corpses: once a day, early in the morning, in the company of one of his sons, Vicente López traveled the streets of Linares in a cart in search of the dead bodies. He found them wrapped in sheets and dumped in front of the houses; it was not practical to come and go from the cemetery every time someone died. At first, the good families demanded the personal service they were accustomed to, but they very soon lost the desire and the energy to make demands. They limited themselves to leaving a message on the cadaver stating that it was such and such, a devout Catholic, may the Lord now have him in His presence; and then, please bury him in the crypt or grave of the family such and such. Within a few days of the outbreak, nobody stayed on the street to see off the bodies, send a final blessing, or cry. There were other sick people to tend to in the house.
So Vicente López collected corpses in the morning and spent the rest of the day digging the family graves of the rich or throwing the bodies of the poor in the mass grave that, with each swing of his spade, grew ever larger.
Those who died in the night or early morning arrived at the cemetery still fresh. Those who passed away later had to wait until the following day, and so they suffered the natural yet cruel transformations that death brings to a body, whether poor or rich, in full view of the family. Because we’re all equal in death, concluded López in a moment of philosophical lucidity.
The Garza children had the good fortune to die at night. One from the natural causes of the illness. The other suffocated by a pillow held firmly over his face with great love and decisiveness. Although she would take the crime to her grave, his nana hoped with the last ounce of fervor that remained in her soul that God would not make her pay too dearly and would understand she had no longer been able to bear such enormous suffering in such a dear, tiny body.
The gravedigger found her on the street, inert and badly wrapped in her white shroud, lying between the two little boys she had so loved. He lifted one and then the other onto the cart. When it was the nana’s turn, López expected to feel the cold of a soulless body, but it burned with fever.
“I can’t take you like this!”
She opened her opaque eyes.
“Take me,” she said.
“But, lady, you’re still alive . . . Why’re you lying out here?”
“So I die now and not later. Because if I don’t come out to die, I’ll die inside, and then who’ll bring me out onto the street? There’s no one left . . .”
That nana was the first person López found alive, but she was not the last. Mothers with dying children who waited with horror for the hours of darkness to pass, knowing that the cart would soon come by, would take them outside and shroud them even if there was still life in their bodies. Nothing could be done for them except try to make sure they arrived fresh at the cemetery. Some remembered to send them off with a blessing or with a little pendant pinned to the shroud.
Soon Vicente López no longer asked or checked. He understood the practicality of it and took them all, dead or alive, for he knew from experience that many of the living would be dead before the end of the journey. Some clung to life a while longer. Those he left beside the pit for the elements and the disease to finish off. He could take them near to their final resting place, but to push them in while they still lived was quite another matter. No: he would leave them to die alone, as God willed it.
Several times a day he would check on them. Ready? he would yell from a distance, while he labored to make the mass grave bigger or buried the day’s dead. There was always at least one that answered, No, not yet.
And one after the other, they all succumbed. There was just one among them, always the same one, who replied that he was still there.
This one spent his time listening closely for the moment when he would be called or when his guardian angel would come for him. He waited for his soul to finally leave his body. Eventually, tired of seeing the days go by, of patiently waiting and waiting to be summoned into the presence of God, of watching the gravedigger bury body after body, he began to grow bored. He started to feel the stone that was digging into his backside. To feel hungry. Then he was overcome by a craving for some delicious empalmes con frijoles y asado. The bugs crawling over his body and biting his skin began to irritate him. He passed the time listening to the gravedigger’s comings and goings, and he tried to keep count of the dead being rolled into the grave, though he always lost track. He arranged and rearranged the shroud his mother had wrapped him in while she gave him his final blessing and said, Go with God, my son, we’ll see each other there later. He presumed that, when one’s own mother gave one up for dead, one should also accept it; what else can one do?