When he received the message, the archbishop of Linares, Francisco Plancarte y Navarrete, hastily called a Mass of Thanksgiving to be held the next day. Lazarus resurrexit would be the topic of his sermon. On his death two years later, in 1920, an inspired script for the failed sermon was found among his belongings, along with a letter written in his own hand, unfinished, drafted with the intention of formally asking Rome to send an emissary to attest to the miracle.
In Linares, on the day of the extraordinary event, the people made a pilgrimage in the hope they could see and touch the one who had risen from the dead.
Many townspeople had seen him dead and wrapped in a shroud. From the safety of their homes, they had peered out of windows and witnessed the final blessing that his now-deceased mother had offered. And they all knew with a certainty that sat firmly in the gut, as Lázaro himself had also known, that there is nothing more final than a mother’s mortal blessing. Later, they had seen Vicente López lift the body on top of the others he had collected on his journey of no return. Sra. García had mourned her son in the proper way: she had lit the candle that she usually saved for Easter and closed the shutters. Lázaro had died. Many had witnessed it, but now they saw him come back from the grave: he breathed, he walked, he spoke. If all this evidence failed to convince anyone, the fact that Lázaro stank of death after three days of lying among corpses was enough to persuade even the most skeptical.
Lázaro was happy his recovery brought so much joy to his neighbors and the people who came from farther afield. He had never been the recipient of so much attention, but he did not understand that, when they called him “Lázaro” and touched him with such emotion, they were not thinking of him but of the well-loved and famous friend of the Messiah. And when they cried, You have returned! and he replied, Yes, I’ve returned, the others thought it was from heaven, but he meant from the cemetery.
After elbowing his way through the pilgrims, his neighbor, the father of the girl to whom Lázaro wrote the letter that he never sent, took the opportunity to hug him tightly before starting to cry. Knowing that the neighbor had at no time liked him, Lázaro would never have dared to declare his romantic interest in his daughter, but he decided to seize this moment of intimacy.
“Don Luis: before I went, I wrote a love letter for your daughter Luz.”
At that, the man’s crying intensified, and Lázaro turned to his brother, Miguel, in search of an explanation. Miguel García made a sign with his forefinger, running it from one side of his throat to the other.
Luz was dead.
The man who would have been his father-in-law had Lázaro had the courage to send the letter, had Luz accepted it and accepted him, had Lázaro not fallen sick, had he not kissed her and therefore infected her, and had she not died, looked him hard in the eyes.
“Did you see her there?”
“Er. Um.” In all likelihood, without knowing it, he had witnessed the girl’s body being heaved into the grave. “I think so.”
“Did she seem happy?”
What kind of question was that? Lázaro felt an urgent need to get away from there, to flee into his home and lock the door behind him.
“Er. I don’t know. There were already a lot of them; it was very crowded,” he said, imploring his brother with his eyes to help him get out of there, to help him escape their morbid neighbor.
He was desperate for a bath to wash away the smell of urine and worse. He was desperate to sit or lie down: the muscles in his legs were refusing to hold him upright. He wanted to eat something, even just some cold leftovers. Then perhaps he would be able to understand what was happening to everyone. It was as if, in his three days’ absence, they had all lost their minds.
The crowd insisted that they wait for Father Emigdio to return from the telegraph office to lead the official Rosary, but Miguel García said they would wait inside, that the others must understand that coming back to life was not easy, that it required a great deal of effort, so Lázaro must be allowed to rest.
The brothers went into the house, but before they closed the door, they heard Don Luis, the father-in-law that would now never be, cry out between sobs:
“If only you had brought her with you!”
13
Get Up and Go
Dr. Cantú was just several blocks away, but the news of Lázaro’s return had not yet reached him.
The doctor did not believe in modern miracles. To his close friends, he insisted he believed in only the miracles that had been worthy enough to be mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. Except, one could not call oneself a true Mexican without believing in the miracle of the apparition of the Virgin on the Hill of Tepeyac, who had at any rate been considerate enough to people like him to leave evidence of her visit.
In his opinion, the Virgin of Guadalupe marked the end of the age of miracles.
He supposed that daily life, science, and his knowledge of human nature had turned him into a doubting Thomas. The things he considered miracles in recent times came not from the catechism but from the great advances of medicine. He was certain that, with modern vaccines and medications, man would soon defeat death.
For him, that would be the greatest miracle.
Nonetheless, at this time of persistent death, his faith in science and medicine had been put to the test. The supreme self-assurance he felt as a member of the global medical community had been shattered in just a few days. He was exhausted, tired in body but even more so in spirit, weary of seeing people die.
He felt ready to believe again in some divine miracle if only God would do him the favor.
Of course, as a young man, when he had decided to become a doctor, he had been aware that he would see his patients—friends and strangers—die. He considered it the only certainty that life gave everyone equally: sooner or later, everybody would die. It might be slowly or suddenly, but they would die. And so he had accepted it and he had assumed the responsibility: he would witness the deaths of children, young people, old people. He would be with them in their final moment, until the time came when they would see him die.
This disease, however, had entered their lives treacherously, without warning. Now he traveled around the town wrapped from head to foot in thick clothes, with a scarf over his mouth, protective gloves over his hands, and his head covered. He visited the endless dying and did not dare to have skin-to-skin contact with them. He visited those to whom he could not give words of reassurance or hope in their agony, and those whom, in his outfit, he could not offer the comfort of seeing a friendly face at the end of life. For whenever they saw him arrive, they knew that it was to sentence them to death.
He had begun that day with a sadness he could not shake. He was gripped by the idea that the disease would not stop until it finished off every last living person. Such was the situation in the town, in the country, and in the world: no one who was infected survived. And though he clung to life like anyone else, it terrified him to imagine that he might be the last man standing.
He had tried to convey to the inhabitants of the town how important it was to remain in quarantine, to not leave the house if anyone was sick, and needless to say, to also stay at home if one was lucky enough to have no infection in the family. Following the instructions of Dr. Lorenzo Sepúlveda of the Monterrey Hospital and of Governor Zambrano, he had requested that, in addition to closing public places, people and goods not be allowed to enter or leave. The postal service was now at a complete standstill because its workers had been among the first to die. An occupational hazard, with so many letters passing from hand-to-hand. Sepúlveda had also sent an urgent appeal to the federal government to stop the trains so that the infection would be fenced in and contained in the northern states. But his request had fallen on deaf ears, and the disease had spread all over the country.