After locking up, they turned away from the house and did not turn back. My sisters were already waiting for them in the car. They had my grandmother with them, of course, and all the domestic staff and almost all the hacienda workers traveled in other vehicles with their families.
Only Anselmo Espiricueta and his family were missing from that caravan of one car, four carts, and a pickup truck.
To my papa’s great displeasure, he learned from another campesino that Espiricueta had obeyed the order to stay on the hacienda to guard the entrance, but keen smoker that he was, he had sent his wife to the grocery store in the center of Linares the day before to buy tobacco and rolling papers. Knowing that Espiricueta’s family, as unsociable and unfriendly as they were, always kept its distance from the rest of his workers’ families, my papa felt there was little danger that any infection had spread to the rest of them. But he did not think it prudent to take the Espiricuetas to live in the close proximity that awaited at La Florida. They would stay on La Amistad. My papa wished them luck and good health, but Espiricueta did not accept his good wishes.
“You won’t take us, but you take Simonopio. He’s the sick one. He’s the one who brought the disease.”
“Still on about that? Simonopio had something different, and he’s better now. You knew the danger and knew my orders: you should not have allowed your wife to leave, let alone ask her to go to town and run an errand for you. Had you followed my instructions, you would have had to shoot her rather than let her return.”
“Then maybe I shoulda shot you, Señor, when you came with your daughters.”
For the rest of her life, my mama rued my papa’s overly patient decision not to respond to that seditious comment, taking it as nothing more than a rash outburst.
“This is only going to get worse, Anselmo. Here on the hacienda you have provisions. For you and your family’s own good, forget about your tobacco, because as things are, that vice of yours is going to kill everyone.”
And after this declaration, he turned around and climbed into the car that would lead the caravan of people and supplies.
Out in the open for the first time in days, Simonopio traveled in the first cart behind my family’s automobile. My papa had finally given in and allowed him to take off the mustard sinapism but told him that he had to remain lying down for the whole journey. Martín drove the cart with Trinidad, one of the campesinos, accompanying him. Nana Reja sat beside Simonopio, silent and with her eyes closed as always. Pola, Lupita, and the rocking chair were also with them, of course.
My parents spent the whole journey between the adjoining haciendas discussing Simonopio’s illness and sudden recovery. The discussion would continue for years, but they would never settle their doubts or get to the bottom of the mystery. My mama always took the view that it was no coincidence that the unexplained fever had struck Simonopio just as the Spanish flu gripped Linares, keeping her away from the town and preventing them from attending her friend Mercedes’s deadly wake or returning to town in the early days of the epidemic. The boy’s recovery also seemed suspect to her: What a coincidence that, as soon as you returned saying we were leaving Linares, he woke without a temperature. No aftereffects, no discomfort, she argued.
“It was a miracle,” she insisted.
My grandma Sinforosa, certain that such a declaration could come only from Rome, would always say, Ay, my girl! How? How could it be? And my sister Consuelo would say, Enough arguing! What does it matter?
My papa could not think of any arguments to refute what my mama said, but he did not want to agree with her either. I suppose it would have meant getting into more discussions and questions that were hard to explain or grasp. It would have meant openly accepting that, aside from the strange circumstances of his birth and his arrival in the family and even aside from the inexplicable way that more and more bees followed him, Simonopio was not a normal boy. And so, all the way to the hacienda, my papa insisted, as he would insist for the rest of his life, that he had saved Simonopio’s life with a sinapism.
15
The Abandoned Body
The day when the plague and death arrived in Linares, Simonopio woke very early feeling perfectly calm. Nothing had alerted him to what was coming: neither his bees nor the bright sun nor the cloudless skies. It was a beautiful fall day. An ordinary October day.
Simonopio woke only with the certainty that the Morales girls would soon arrive for a long visit, and that was good.
Later, worried that the red horse could twist its leg in a pothole, he ran to fill it with earth. He was pleased when he was able to get there in time; had it injured itself, the horse would never have recovered.
Satisfied with his day’s good deed, he would have liked to have gone running up into the sierra, following his bees as far as he dared go, but his affection for Lupita kept him close. He did not want her day to be ruined because she had to wash the clothes twice, so he kept watch while Lupita sang and washed, for when she finished, the basket of clothes was going to fall onto the muddy ground while she was distracted, looking at Martín.
What’s more, Simonopio knew that Martín was not right for Lupita. Not because he was a bad man; it was just that, as much as she wanted it, Lupita would get nowhere with him.
To save her happiness that day, Simonopio would offer to carry the basket, knowing that she would not allow it, believing it too heavy a load for him. But Simonopio would insist in order to keep her attention, so she would not notice the presence of the man who made her mind wander. And without the distraction, there would be no stumble, and she would not have to wash all the clothes a second time as a result.
But then, with no warning, between a clean shirt and a dirty underskirt, he saw the new thing, the bad thing that was coming, so he forgot Lupita and abandoned her to her fate as she yelled, “Where’re you going, Simonopio?” from behind him, surprised by the suddenness of his departure.
He ran without stopping down a path he rarely traveled toward the town square. That was where his godmother was, in the big house where people like her gathered.
He knew that folks were looking at him as he passed, but he did not care: he had to get her out of there, he had to take her far away. So that she would live, he needed to get his godmother out of the town. The urgency he felt was great. Sometimes things were hazy at first, but with patience and time, everything would become clear. While he waited outside, he did not know whether there would be a fire, whether some army would pass through firing indiscriminately, or what. But looking around the square filled with people doing what they did every day, strolling in a leisurely, carefree way, he could not shake off the certainty that something terrible was about to happen.
When he saw the ladies come out of the building, he knew: the pretty pregnant lady carried death inside her. She was poison that would kill whatever it touched. Poison that would kill even after she was dead. That very same day.
He saw it. He saw death spread across the square, through the streets. He saw the bodies piled on top of one another on the full cart. He saw them cast outside the houses. He saw the street dogs feasting. He saw the deaths of the Morales family, one after the other. With them, he saw the end of the potential of the child that did not yet live.
And he did not know what to do to stop it.
When Simonopio approached his godmother, he was already hot and sweaty from running all the way there, from the anxiety. Beatriz interpreted his body heat as fever and was alarmed. Then he knew that his temperature would save many lives.