When he arrived at the Sagrado Corazón, only a few pupils remained. He didn’t let my sisters pack or say goodbye to anybody. Though they were still dressed in their uniforms, he made them get in the car, and they set off.
It is easy to imagine that Carmen sat calmly in the car, content with the arbitrary decision, while Consuelo made my poor papa’s head spin all the way home with her grumbling and fussing. About what? I don’t know. About anything. She always found a reason to be unhappy and would make it known to whoever would listen. Imprisoned in the car, my papa would have had no escape. But that wasn’t what happened. Well, Consuelo was true to character, but Carmen surprised everyone. From comments made years later—reliable accounts of the event—it is known that Consuelo arrived home in a foul temper, and Carmen, far from exhibiting her usual equanimity, was angry, punishing my papa with her silence. What’s more, to my papa’s surprise, she had been the one to berate him most for ordering them to come back with him like little girls.
To make matters worse, as they drove into Linares, my father informed them of his latest decision: they would not go near the dying town. Avoiding the most densely populated streets so his young daughters wouldn’t have to stare death in the face, he explained to them that, when they arrived home, the whole family would pack what they needed to relocate to Hacienda La Florida for a while, in the hope that the disease would not reach them there.
“For how long, Papa?”
“As long as necessary. Until people stop dying. Or stop falling ill.”
My sisters had grown accustomed to living through one catastrophe after another, but not to life stopping altogether. They could barely remember a time without war, and yet they knew that every year they would plant crops, in spite of it, and later they would harvest crops if there was anything to harvest, regardless of the threat of a famished battalion passing through. People also carried on with their plans as much as possible: despite the war—and our parents always told them there was nothing worse than a war—there were weddings, births, baptisms. There were parties and days in the country. If an army was known to be prowling the surrounding area, people would stay close to home, but they would still go out to do their shopping. The milk reached the houses without fail, and friends met in the afternoon for a snack. That was the life they knew: the one that stopped for nothing. Not even for the death of a beloved grandparent.
At their age, they were still strangers to the pain and irreversibility of death, for although they had attended the burial of their grandpa Mariano Cortés, the grown-ups had protected their feelings—the naive sensibilities of young children—from the violence of his death almost four years earlier. In their juvenile minds—for juvenile minds have evolved very little since the first adolescent existed—Grandpa had died because he was a grandpa, and old people die because it’s natural for them to die, while young people live forever and are immune to everything.
Now it seemed as if an eternity had passed since Grandpa Mariano’s death, just as the days they would spend without seeing their friends in Monterrey or Linares because of their father’s whim would seem eternal.
Because it seemed—and they had complained at length about it to each other—that our father announced and feared many calamities that had yet to happen, such as the threat that an army of bandits passing through would steal all the pretty young women, which was why he had sent them to board at the nuns’ school in Monterrey. Or the threat that men might come one day to snatch their lands from them by law or force. Time passed, and as yet, none of that had happened. Maybe the Spanish flu was just another of these catastrophizing exaggerations.
Our father was firm: they would not see their friends even to say hello. There would be no trips to the square. There would be no parties. He knew they thought they would die of boredom in their exile on the remote hacienda. But he also knew they would survive the tedium and, with a little more luck, the epidemic as well.
In an attempt to be kind and patient, as they climbed out of the car, my papa told them that they could read as much as they wished at La Florida.
“You can even read that novel you like so much, that one about heights.”
His well-meaning comment was not well received by either of them: since he had not given them time to pack, he had forced them to leave behind not only Wuthering Heights but also their new favorite novel, Emma. And no, they had no desire for him to lend them any of his books—who was interested in reading A Tale of Two Cities?
My mama used to say that the moment Simonopio heard my papa coming into the house and irritably informing my sisters that Dickens’s novel contained romance, too, and not just killing, he woke up, alert and free of fever or weakness.
And that was that: one minute he was motionless, burning up; the next it was as if the last few days of unconsciousness and convulsions had never happened.
My papa, delighted to see the boy cured thanks to the wisdom of his grandmother, instructed them to continue the treatment for a few more hours to prevent a relapse. Then he left to organize the family’s relocation and speak to the workers who lived with their families on the hacienda. He could do nothing for the people who lived in the town, but he could save as many lives as possible. If they had not visited Linares in the last two days, they were welcome to travel with the family, he told them. They would find a way to house them all on La Florida, where, with luck, all the families would be far enough away from the sickly air of Linares. The men would make the short journey each day between the two haciendas to tend to the sugarcane and other crops on both, but they would not visit the town or have contact with anybody from Linares.
When he finished his speech, Lupita was waiting for him.
“Doña Reja says Simonopio can’t stand his little chest wrap any longer.”
“Well, he’d better stand it.”
The family moved to La Florida the next day. All the workers decided to go with them.
We now know that the epidemic lasted three months, but on the day they covered all the furniture in sheets, when they locked the windows and doors, my family did not know when they would return or if they ever would. The house had never been left unoccupied, even when the family spent a few days on another hacienda.
This would be the first time they left it abandoned.
I managed to grasp what my mama was saying when she admitted, years later, that when the last door was bolted, her heart had tightened in her chest until it squeezed tears from her eyes, hidden but painful tears.
They were leaving behind the house, and they were also leaving behind mementos such as photographs, my sisters’ childhood clothes, the tea set my mama had inherited from her grandmother, the English dinner service she had bought on her only trip to Europe with her father, and her Singer sewing machine.
But her tears were not for the house or for the things. That abandonment hurt, though she knew that the house, with everything that filled it, would be there waiting for them when they decided to return. But that final bolt marked something worse: their abandonment of the town’s people, of her two brothers, of all their cousins and aunts and uncles, of her fellow club members, of the family’s friends. Their abandonment of all the people who gave Linares life. Who would still be there when they were finally able to return?
My mama’s tears, which she quickly got under control, came to her eyes because, that day, it was as if the world were ending.