“When he comes back, we’ll find him, won’t we?”
Years later, my mama would tell me this detailed anecdote about our Lazarus in a half-joking, half-sad tone. Perhaps it was the same tone in which Dr. Cantú had told it to her. It could not have been easy for her to battle with my childish obsession with the matter. But also, I think that when she told the story of Lázaro again, she could not help but remember the story of all the people who suddenly disappeared from her life forever in those final months of 1918—or afterward—in what must have seemed to her like a blink of the eye.
She might say, When we were girls, Mercedes and I would hide in a hollow in the trunk of a pecan tree so that her sister Luisa wouldn’t find us, but she refused to talk about the last time she saw her friend alive, much less about being unable to attend her funeral or about how that entire family disappeared from this earth in less than three days. She spoke about Aunt Refugio, about how clever and prudent she was, but she never mentioned that, on the one day her prudence had let her down, she had invited her inseparable friends Remedios, Amparo, and Concepción to spend the period of forced confinement with her and play a canasta tournament meant to last as long as the quarantine.
All of them spinsters and of an advanced age, they accepted the invitation, pleased for the company and to continue the rivalry they had begun years before, when it became clear to them all that they would never be married and they discovered the card game. Since then, they had earned reputations as ferocious competitors, and it would not be the first time that they spent entire consecutive days without going outside, their minds on the private canasta tournaments they organized at one of their houses.
The Spanish flu meant little to them except another opportunity to do what they liked most. And without silly interruptions, to boot.
By then, they knew about the infection and the death of the Garza family, who, as everybody knew, had traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas. Who knows what kind of people and filth they must have come across in that town of cows and cowboys? they said between games. Perhaps this was why it did not occur to Aunt Refugio that, fine and trusted ladies of decorum that they were, her friends might arrive laden not only with suitcases but also with the same invisible and undesirable passenger the Garzas had brought back from Texas. And much less did she imagine that, whether with an ace, a joker, or a three, they would cheerfully pass it on with each card that exchanged hands.
The four friends were found two days later, each of them sitting in her seat, motionless, holding her cards.
They would have sooner died than end a game before it was finished.
The man who found them would say to whoever wanted to listen that, while the notebook showed Refugio and Remedios were way ahead on points, in their last game of canasta, all of them had lost.
The three most acute months of the Spanish influenza crisis left the survivors of Linares and of the whole world with scars that would never heal and voids that would never be filled.
It is now known that there was nothing Spanish about that influenza. Spain, since it was not involved in the Great War, was simply the first to report the infection to the world. Hence the name. Experts have tried to determine since then whether it began in Boston or in the military barracks of Kansas or Texas; it was exported from there to warring Europe in spring 1918 and to northern Mexico that fall. Some say twenty million or even fifty million perished, and just in Mexico, three hundred thousand—perhaps up to five hundred thousand—died from the virulent disease. It is a well-known fact that the yellow fever epidemic a few years before and the new so-called Spanish pandemic killed more Mexicans than all the bullets fired during the Revolution.
Still, in January 1919, in Linares, these details were of little interest, because absences were not measured in numbers or statistics: they were measured in grief.
When the townspeople gradually tried to resume life—the daily routine, the rhythm that had been laid down over generations—the postmen, the butcher, the grinder, and their entire families were gone. The milkman and several of the garbage collectors no longer traveled the streets. The gravedigger, Vicente López, and two of his sons were gone. The young daughter of the owner of a grocery and tobacco store had to take over the business, without knowing where to start, when her father and three sisters died. Many farmhands and some owners of ranches and haciendas had disappeared. Several ladies from the social club would never worry about the flowers or music at future events again, and many founding members who had signed the club’s memorandum of association would never lay eyes on the social hall they had longed to see built. The position of parish priest at the cathedral was vacant, as was the job of headmistress of the girls’ primary school. The best carpenter had not finished training his son and apprentice. On the desks of the girls’ and boys’ schools, the absentees had left unopened books and notepads with blank pages. There were lessons that had ended abruptly and would never be learned, and friendships that would never be forged. The town was full of friendless friends. There were also many young widowers who had to learn to live without their wives, and many widows whose lives and upbringings had not prepared them to be breadwinners. By the same token, there were a great many childless parents and parentless children.
Perhaps it was from that pain and those absences that the saying I remember from my childhood in Linares emerged: “The unhealthy year of 1918, when the Spanish flu was the worst ever seen.”
I guess that, for those who stayed in the town and witnessed each death, slowly growing accustomed to the horror of seeing the cartful of bodies go past every day, to seeing loved ones or acquaintances walking one day and riding as lifeless passengers on the cart of death the next, the blow was gradual, and resignation came ever more easily.
My parents did not stay to watch anyone die. They did not wait for their people or for themselves to drop, infected, one after the other. Simonopio saved them.
“He saved us with a fever he invented,” my mama would say on the few occasions she said anything on the subject.
He had never fallen ill. He had never even had a simple cold. But the day Simonopio went to find my mama after her meeting with the ladies from the club, his fever gradually rose until it made him convulse and lose consciousness. Dr. Cantú could not see any cause for such a rise in temperature: that morning, the boy had jumped out of bed with all his usual energy. There was no swelling in his respiratory tract, the lungs sounded clear, and his kidneys and liver felt normal. He was neither vomiting nor suffering from diarrhea. His joints were not swollen either. The doctor doubted it was polio, because my mama had noticed nothing strange in his walk, but there were countless other possible causes: a latent eruptive fever, appendicitis, or meningitis, for example.
He could open up the boy’s right side to examine him, he told my parents, but if it was peritonitis, nothing could be done for him anyway. He would be cutting the body open purely to see what the child would end up dying from. If it was meningitis, the prognosis would be even less encouraging.
The doctor’s advice was to wait, observe, keep him hydrated, and do everything possible to lower his temperature with cloths soaked in cold water from the waterwheel, or rags soaked in alcohol. They could give him the Bayer aspirins the physician knew my parents had bought on a trip to the United States when the pills were still sold there. They would help with the fever, pain, and swelling if, by grinding and dissolving them in water, my parents were able to persuade Simonopio to swallow them.