Dawn caught her with scissors in hand. She did not want to wake the house pedaling her Singer, but nothing prevented her from starting a new project, starting a new pattern, cutting some fabric. She would light one of the oil lamps she had invested a good part of her nocturnal efforts ensuring was not lit, and she would start her day. She received her husband with a smile, as she always had. Then she accompanied him to breakfast and said goodbye at the door, wishing him a good day and sending a few secret blessings with him. What she requested and promised before God for the good of her family, she did in the privacy of her mind, because if Francisco had known how much protection she requested for him in particular, he would have realized his wife was not the pillar of strength she pretended to be.
Simonopio knew. He was always there when they opened the door in the morning. He stared at her while she said goodbye to her husband. Then he approached her with an offering: some beeswax or a small jar of honey. Beatriz grew accustomed to the taste of the honey sweetening her coffee. It became such a part of her ritual that, with the simple act of pouring a fine trickle into her cup, she found some peace, renewed spirits, and the energy to continue with the strange routine of that place. To deal with her unrecognizable daughters, with the slights and spats between the servant women, or with another servant alarmed by a rash on the stomach of one of her children. Simonopio observed her, and Beatriz had the feeling that the boy knew things she would not even admit to herself. It was he who had found the antidote to the implosion she had felt coming. It was he who had suggested bringing her the Singer. Beatriz knew he had sensed that her sewing machine would make her happy or at least soothe her desperation; that it would keep her sane.
Sometimes she wanted to say to him, Tell me what you see with those eyes, Simonopio. Tell me how far they see, when they probe me. How deep into my body, into my soul. For some reason, because the eyes were Simonopio’s, the scrutiny did not unsettle her. It seemed natural to her that she had no privacy with Simonopio. There was never any judgement or disapproval in his eyes. Simonopio was who he was, he was how he was, and all one had to do was accept him, just as she knew he accepted her.
As the weeks passed, the weather changed. It turned cold, and with the fall in temperature, Simonopio’s gifts to her became rarer. She did not know much about bees, but she supposed that they took shelter in winter and needed their honey. In response to the silent apology Simonopio offered her every day for the shortage, Beatriz reassured him that it did not matter: she had been storing the surplus in jars and had enough honey for two or three months. And who knows, by then your bees might have some more for you, Simonopio.
Although the weather had changed and Simonopio’s features were left bare, the lifelong companions that normally perched on him absent for the winter, he would wander off, as he did every day, to explore the mountain paths. During one wakeful night, Beatriz concluded that the bees were more than just a coincidence or a curiosity for Simonopio. They accompanied him; they guided him; they watched over him. It troubled her when he went out alone, without his guardian angels. She sensed that without them, he was vulnerable, but there was no way to stop him. He did not know how to stay put. If he was given a task to keep him near the house, he would do it willingly, but when Beatriz looked at him, she could see the longing in his eyes. She made sure that he ate well and wrapped up warm. That he took some food with him in his knapsack. All she could do for him was to let him go and, each time he left to wander off into the wooded wilds, to send more secret blessings with him.
From blessing to blessing, the days, the nights, the months passed. Three months.
If leaving Linares had been hard, returning proved, unexpectedly, to be harder still. The very thing she had been looking forward to for almost ninety days—doubting sometimes that it would ever be possible—had robbed her of the desire to sew from the moment Francisco told her that the number of infected and dead were in sharp decline. That they would wait a week or two longer before deciding, though he anticipated they would return to La Amistad and Linares very soon.
The time had come to return to the reality of Linares, to count the dead, to mourn them. To hand over her daughters again for strangers to educate them, to pass out all the clothes she had gathered in a corner of her sewing room to the living who remained.
Two days before leaving, she found Carmen alone, crying. Consuelo had chosen that day to tire of her sister’s company and had locked herself in their bedroom to invent new ways to do her hair.
Alarmed to see the calmer and more even-tempered of her daughters crying, Beatriz sat with her and tried to string together and understand her single-word utterances: her friend Mariqueta Domínguez’s cousin, the handsome one. A debutantes’ ball at Monterrey Social Club at the beginning of September. Her dance card full. Two waltzes and a lemonade with Antonio Domínguez. Love letters from him to her and from her to him, though they had seen each other only that one time.
She listened stoically to the news from the lips of a sobbing Carmen. She did not interrupt her to say that she was very young and that not so long ago she had been playing with dolls, though it was what came to mind with each of her daughter’s words. She had the urge to tell her, See what happens when you read so many romantic novels? But she resisted, of course.
Beatriz and Francisco knew the boy’s family through mutual friends. Though she lived in Monterrey, María Enriqueta was boarding at the Sagrado Corazón. And while Beatriz did not understand the practice of living separately from one’s children when it was unnecessary, she had been glad the girls had forged this friendship at school. Mariqueta returned home every weekend and often invited Carmen and Consuelo to visit her, to have lunch with the family or attend some special event, such as Antonio’s sister’s debut at the Monterrey Social Club.
“And you hadn’t met Antonio Domínguez until then?”
He had just graduated with a degree in engineering from MIT and had not visited Monterrey in two years. He was a good boy, handsome, hardworking, from a good family, and he had asked Carmen to marry him.
With this announcement, the air left Beatriz’s body. Carmen did not give her time to recover it.
“And now he’s dead!”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know it, but I can feel it. I haven’t received a letter from him for three months!”
“Nobody’s sending or receiving letters. The postal service has been suspended. You know that, Carmen.”
“I know. But they stayed in Monterrey. They had nowhere to go like we did. What if he fell sick? What if he died? What if he’s forgotten me?”
“Look, Carmen, I can’t guarantee he’s well. But what I can guarantee you is that, if he is healthy, he hasn’t forgotten you.” In fact, Beatriz had no grounds to make such a guarantee, but she went on. “I also promise you that, as soon as we’re able, we’ll send a message to Mariqueta so that she knows you are all right. Everything else, we’ll wait and see.”
Carmen was reassured after the talk with her mother, but Beatriz had to rush off and lock herself in her own bedroom to regain her breath and study herself in the mirror, as if she would find answers there.
At last she understood the changes in mood, her daughters’ whispering, their secrecy, their complicity, though she would have been grateful if—after bearing the separation from her sweetheart in silence for three months—Carmen had kept her secret for a few more days. At least until they had returned to Linares.