We must consider the time. Imagine so many around you suddenly falling. Falling like flies, as if the air had suddenly been filled with poisonous gas. I imagine that, at the end of such an onslaught, only the flies that kept their distance, that went unnoticed, that were lucky, would survive. But once the harmful substance had dissipated, what would the survivors do? Get back to their lives.
Life waits for no one.
If you’re a fly, you keep flying and being a nuisance. If you lived in Linares at that time, you could never stop going out to the fields or ranches to tend to your crops or animals. You might close the store for a few days because of the initial shock, but you would open it again because, even if your relatives were sick or dead, your needs and the needs of others—those who sold to you and those who bought from you—persisted. If you lived at that time, you could not avoid having to go out to buy food, and not a day could pass without washing diapers or underpants, even if you sent your mother to the cemetery two hours earlier. In the midst of this crisis, you had tooth decay, infected toenails, and stomach upsets—slight or severe—that you put up with for a while before having to seek help from a doctor, if you could find one. Others went out to sell goat milk, or whistles, yo-yos, and spinning tops in the square, in the hope that there were still children alive to buy them.
Knowing that the pandemic was over, the new gravedigger must have been only too glad to respond when he was called to bury a Christian, because he knew that they would be sending him someone quite dead, someone who had perhaps suffered a welcome and understandable heart attack. An ordinary death. If a mother or a father had lost a child, they had others to feed, so they had to go back to work, and that was that. With no fuss or extra patience from anybody, not even themselves.
The initial compassion and attention Mercedes Garza and her family received when she fell ill and died were not experienced by anyone else in those three months. There were no women to bring food to fellow mothers when they lost their husbands, nor anyone to dry the newly orphaned children’s tears. By the time the Spanish flu had completed its cycle, there was nobody in Linares who had not lost someone, so there was no one to ease the sorrow of others with their condolences.
By the time my parents arrived, ready to offer their sympathies to all and sundry, nobody wanted to hear them. They had already changed the subject. They had turned the page in that story. They had survived it.
There was nobody with whom to discuss the absence of the usual postman; the storekeeper that knew them; or Father Pedro, who had baptized my sisters and Simonopio, because all they said was Yes, the other one was better or This priest’s a better speaker. Those who stayed in Linares saw one, ten, or twenty such figures die. They were sorry, of course, but the urgent need to fill the gaps left by their deaths forced everyone to be practical and to say, for instance, Don Atenógenes, the butcher, has died; may God have him in His holy glory, and may He send us another butcher soon. Amen.
Their need for meat, groceries, worship, and sharpened knives was greater than their pain and sorrow. Such is life.
My parents, who had not expected to come up against all of this, struggled to understand it and to be practical themselves. For example: it was hard to offer sympathy and commiseration to a mother, a friend younger than my own mama, who had buried a daughter less than three months prior and was two months pregnant now. My mama, who—while I don’t wish to boast—was a paragon of refinement and good taste, did not know what the correct protocol was in such circumstances.
They also faced the sudden loss of dear friends.
Though they had received news of the death of this or that person in Dr. Cantú’s brief notes, they had departed and taken their reality with them. They understood what the deaths meant rationally, but while they were in isolation at La Florida, their lives did not change one bit. Going back and suddenly being faced with the absence of friends, relatives, and acquaintances meant experiencing all the pain at once. Those who had remained had suffered drip by drip, but my parents were caught in a downpour.
Isolated from everything, they had almost managed to believe that the war had also disappeared in their absence. But no. Not even the influenza, as deadly as it proved to be, was enough to stop the violence. And while a great many inhabitants of Linares had died in those three months, the deaths made no dent in the local population, for more and more families arrived every day from the rural areas, in search of refuge from the plundering, the kidnappings of women, and the levy.
Thus, when my parents returned to their previous life, they found it full of gaps that absent friends and acquaintances had left, but also lumps made by the new and unfamiliar faces that appeared in front of them from nowhere, as if by magic.
My grandmother was also suddenly confronted with the fact that her two sons, whom she had been so distraught to leave behind when she went to La Florida, had not only survived but were carrying on with life as if nothing had happened and nobody had missed them. She had known, from the occasional messages she received, that they were still alive, which she attributed to all the prayers she had said for them while she prepared her cajeta.
During her absence, and in spite of the public health crisis, they’d taken good care of their land, but they’d also had the energy to fall in love and to woo the objects of their affection. Emilio was engaged. Carlos was now married and about to make Sinforosa a grandmother for the third time—the first grandchild with the family surname—but those events had not necessarily occurred in the proper order.
Had my grandmother stayed in Linares—and had she still been the woman of days gone by, before life executed her character by firing squad—she would have immediately given Carlos, her youngest son, a dressing down for being so loose and lustful. She would have told him in no uncertain terms to behave like a man of integrity and marry the girl. Then she would have sent them away, to live out of sight for a while, far from the gossips of Linares high society, so that nobody would question the dubious news of a premature grandchild.
Under these new circumstances, Grandma Sinforosa gave an enormous sigh of relief at the fact that Carlos had done the right thing without being told to do so: she learned that María de la Luza Garza’s father had not even had to demand that Carlos honor his obligations to his daughter. As a decent man, as a gentleman, he had gone to the family’s home, asked for her hand in marriage, and sent for the priest, who married them there and then in a discreet ceremony with only Emilio accompanying him.
The hasty marriage had caused something of a scandal. The well-intentioned said it was in very poor taste to have married in the absence of the groom’s mother and amid all the loss of life: they had to remain in mourning for a year, as was only proper, and all social events were supposed to be put on hold. Not least something as joyful and auspicious as a marriage. The not-so-well-intentioned remarked on the audacity of the new couple: In the family way with so many people dying, and When did they find the time?
My grandmother noticed all her friends doing mental arithmetic as they asked about her new grandchild’s arrival, but she did not care. She was grateful she was no longer the woman who would have tried to hide an untimely pregnancy, sending her son away before her grandchild was born. Families had to stay close, because as she had learned, one never knows what might happen. The spark had gone out of her some time ago, and this new grandchild made her realize that it did not matter what tragedies befell them: life went on.