Though it went against her firm commitment to Christian charity and she struggled to admit it to herself, Beatriz was uncomfortable with the Espiricueta family living on La Amistad. The husband’s manners, the wife’s despicable attitude, and the furtive eyes of both disturbed her. And while Beatriz did not in all honesty seek praise or gratefulness, she admitted that she could not help but notice the complete lack of gratitude from both Espiricuetas for the opportunity that they had been given for a new life, new friendships, and new skills.
Francisco looked at her with surprise whenever he offered to send Espiricueta to do some special task in the house and Beatriz turned down the offer. I’ll wait until Gabino or Trinidad are free. There’s no hurry, she would reply. She did not want to feel the weight of those resentful eyes on her. She did not want him near her daughters or Simonopio. She did not want that man inside her house or touching her things.
She had been nervous leaving him at La Amistad unsupervised when everyone had gone into exile, even if the circumstances were exceptional and justified. By day, she knew there was no way of entering the house without a key, but during her interminable sleepless nights, she imagined Espiricueta exploring the house with his eyes, with his hands, with the bare soles of his feet. She imagined him opening their drawers or sleeping in their marital bed at his leisure.
On several occasions, she had considered asking Francisco to get rid of him, but she would never have dared. She did not want to request a man’s removal just because she did not like him. And now she was going to the home of these poor wretches because she knew that—after what the family had suffered, after its loss—now it was impossible to even contemplate throwing them out onto the street.
Simonopio decided to stay out of sight of the house and sat down to wait on a stone behind a bush. Beatriz was not surprised. Whenever Anselmo Espiricueta was close, Simonopio would disappear. It was as if the boy remembered what the man had said about him the day they had found him abandoned, or as if he sensed the ill will that the campesino still harbored toward him, as if he knew about his superstitions. It was as if he did not trust him.
“I won’t be long.”
In the half-light of the winter afternoon, the house seemed like nothing more than a black-and-white photograph: no bright colors interrupted its gray monotony. As she approached its silence and darkness, she thought she would find it empty, as if the surviving members of the Espiricueta family had responded from a distance to her secret wishes and left for good of their own accord—northward, perhaps, as they had always wanted—without anybody asking them to do so. Without saying goodbye to anyone. Without telling anyone.
If this were so, the mystery of the Espiricueta family’s disappearance would live on forever in their community on La Amistad and in all Linares. It would become good material for a legend: what remained of an entire family disappears by the hand of the father who, driven mad by the death of so many of his children, wound up killing the few that survived, perhaps burying them alive, determined in his madness to fill all the graves he had already dug. Then, witnesses—the sweetheart of a cousin’s friend, a friend’s sister, the teacher’s grandmother—would swear that the man, a vile murderer, a possessed or, at the very least, tormented soul, would roam the area forevermore, endlessly searching for his family members. He would wander the region blaming any living person he encountered for his irreversible loss, destined never to remember—or never to want to remember—that it was he who was to blame for his own misery.
And like many other legends, this one would travel through time and space, transcending generations and geographical boundaries. The tale of bloody sightings and loud wails would be retold with ever-increasing eccentricity, until the collective consciousness forgot the origin of the story and the name of its protagonist, and they all believed it belonged to them: from Chiapas to Guanajuato to Texas.
She felt a shiver run from her feet to her head. She knew she did not have a fertile imagination and that the idea that had wormed its way into her mind was almost identical to the legend of La Llorona—the Weeping Woman—that had frightened her so as a child. The thought of the woman who had lost her children and was destined to wander aimlessly, endlessly crying out for them, still scared her. She did not deny it. The idea that she might know the protagonist, the origin, of a possible legend firsthand—even if that idea came from convoluted reasoning spawned only by her imagination in that moment—made her come out in goose bumps.
She knocked on the door without wanting it to be answered.
20
The Story That Was Told, Is Told, and Will Be Told, Perhaps
Simonopio knew almost all the paths: short ones, long ones, wide ones, narrow ones. He knew the paths of animals and the paths of men. Some had even been made by him when he came and went in pursuit of his bees, which rarely kept to the man-made tracks. But he did not know all of them, and some he had not traveled to the end or even to the point where the bees called it a day and decided to begin the journey home.
For him, until now, only one path had been forbidden. He never understood why, but he had blindly obeyed; so until that day, he had never followed the track that would take him straight to Anselmo Espiricueta’s house.
He could feel in the air around him that his swarm grew agitated every time the man with the irreconcilable grudges approached him. It was their way of warning him to flee when they felt Espiricueta close, to avoid crossing paths with him on the tracks where they might meet. Even so, sometimes Simonopio would stop at a crossroads of two paths near Espiricueta’s house, aware that the path on the left would take him straight there, and he felt drawn to the forbidden, to the unknown. But since it was a section of the hills that even the bees avoided, he had always obeyed them: Not there, there’s nothing good there, they often reminded him.
He knew the hostility that the man had felt toward him since they met the first time: Simonopio, a newborn baby, and Espiricueta, a newcomer. How could he not know it, when he thought he could remember it? Or perhaps it was that—much like the old bees told the young bees about each success and failure of the past, to repeat the victories and to avoid the mistakes—his bees had told him so that he would never forget that first encounter. Or perhaps it was the looks Espiricueta gave Simonopio at every opportunity: intense, heavy, dark, ominous.
Between Espiricueta and him there was a story that not even the wind knew yet. It was a story still unfolding that had begun on the day Simonopio was born, but it was also a story that had not yet happened: suspended in stasis, on hold thanks to his bees, but not dead or brought to an end.
It was a story that was waiting patiently. Waiting to exist.
This he knew with certainty. He had always known it, just as he knew the likely stories of others; all he had to do was search the corners of his mind to see them—his own stories or those of other people. Some stories—whether his own or not—he saw very clearly from start to finish. In certain stories, he could make out how they came to be before they had begun, though he did not have a clear picture of the outcome. Other stories materialized from nowhere, with no warning: they just happened.
Some future events—seen in full or in part—were so desirable that he waited for them impatiently. Others made his hairs stand on end when he thought about them, and preferably would never come to pass.