“And that’s what they all carried on doing. What we all carried on doing, too: planting near enough the same thing in near enough the same way it has always been done. And look where we are now: about to lose everything. But him . . . well, he’s old now, but the trees he planted perhaps thirty years ago are still there, and they’ll still be there when he dies.”
The tree that had blossomed with the flowers Simonopio gave him had kept the earth in use for some thirty years. And in all that time, its owner had not needed to clear the land each harvest to start the next crop again, or needed to rotate the crop, because trees stayed, and once they began to bear fruit, they did not stop. What’s more, Francisco had tried those oranges: they were extraordinary.
He decided at that moment that he would grow his own orchard. He would find a market for the oranges when his trees began to produce them, he told himself without hesitation, because after thirty years of proven success in Montemorelos, any concerns that the land was no good for oranges were gone.
Putting the ideas that were beginning to run through his mind into practice would be neither easy nor cheap, but he was convinced the answer to his problems lay in those little white flowers.
“Simonopio, I’m going to California tomorrow. Do you want to come with me?”
36
Everything Changes
The movement of the train was lulling her to sleep. She would not fall asleep, because doing so in public would be in very poor taste. She told herself that she would just rest her eyes a little, close them for a while. Beatriz Morales did not know why she was so exhausted. Perhaps it was because, as a grandmother, all the traveling to Monterrey was all the more tiring.
Her two daughters were married now, and Beatriz was glad she was no longer obliged to go chaperone them during their courtships. She knew she would always go to Monterrey, that she would do it to see her grandchildren, but the feeling she had when she boarded the train to travel to see her beloved daughters—tense and aware that she was abandoning her post in the home—was not the same as when she returned to Linares, to the place where she belonged.
Sometimes the years went by in a blink: her daughters had grown up and gone to live their own lives. And now everything had changed in Linares.
Nothing had prevented Carmen’s wedding, and then Consuelo’s, from going ahead. It was a shame the young men’s mother had died before seeing them marry, but that was impossible to remedy. Accordingly, both weddings were very discreet and austere occasions, conducted with great dignity and elegant simplicity. She was sure the guests who came from Monterrey had returned with a very good impression of Linares, particularly since both weddings had taken place around the time of local festivities: Carmen’s on the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in 1921, after that additional year of mourning for Antonio’s mother, and Consuelo’s some months later, during the Villaseca Fair of 1922.
It seemed a long time ago now that she had thought that the celebrations would never return to Linares and that it was her responsibility to keep them alive so her daughters would know the traditions that had enriched family life for generations.
Now the traditional festivities had returned, but her daughters had their lives somewhere else. They would visit from time to time to enjoy them, of course, and they might bring their children as well, but the events would not carry the same significance for them because they had not experienced them as unmarried girls. For them, it would just be an anecdote with which to remember their hometown or their mother, who invested so much time, still, in making sure every detail of the festivities was organized to perfection. They would remember the compulsory period of mourning as a small town’s idle pursuit, with the same formalities and dress that the people of Linares had always observed throughout Lent, waiting anxiously for the day of the Holy Saturday dance, when high society finally stopped wearing black and put on its best spring-colored clothes and dancing shoes.
At times, like now, Beatriz was overcome with nostalgia for the daughters that they had been and that they could have been had the story been different. But they seemed happy in Monterrey, with their husbands and with the children already born or soon to arrive: Carmen had just announced she was expecting her second, too soon after the birth of her son, and Consuelo was already pregnant with her first.
What Consuelo would be like as a mother remained a mystery, for Beatriz had never seen in her so much as a glimmer of maternal instinct or the tenderness only a woman feels for a baby, even someone else’s. Even with a child on the way and full access to her nephew, she was still interested only in the same old things: her friends, her books, and yes, her husband. Beatriz hoped that would change when she had her own child. Carmen, on the other hand, had proved to be a very patient mother. Her first child, a boy that kept her and his nanas busy, was just over two months old and so restless and colicky, he barely slept—and never for long stretches.
When she visited, Beatriz witnessed the trouble he caused his caregivers and was glad she had left that phase behind her. Where had her energy gone? Lately, she felt so tired that, when Carmen came to visit or when Beatriz went to Monterrey, she would request to be left with him only after dinner when, bathed and tired from his unsettled day, he would let himself be held in his grandmother’s arms until the two of them succumbed to sleep in the rocking chair.
She no longer went to the house in Monterrey as often as she had in the last few years. Her married daughters no longer needed supervision. Her responsibility for them, while not ended—because it never would be—had changed. Her life was in Linares, near Francisco, who was now so busy with his new orange orchards and the ranches that it was impossible for him to make the trip to Monterrey, as he used to do from time to time.
No. She did not want to travel so often to Monterrey, even for the grandchildren. They would have to come to Linares.
She could not complain; it was not as if going to Monterrey was hell. The house there was very nice; it was comfortable, though it was not the same as La Amistad, where her bed, her kitchen, her views comforted her. The ties of friendship from her youth had been strengthened by renewed contact with her friends in the larger city, and her new friendships were good and numerous, but they were not the same as her lifelong friendships in Linares. While she enjoyed the activities of the Monterrey Social Club, she did not want to be involved in them. She owed her loyalty to the Linares club, which remained without premises.
Oddly, while she was in Linares, she missed and worried about her daughters, and when she was with them in Monterrey, she felt the same or more so about the people from her life in Linares. It was as if she lived only half a life: incomplete in both places. Because Beatriz felt bad every time she said goodbye to her daughters but felt worse when she went away from Francisco.
Her mother said the same thing on the occasions she agreed to accompany her to Monterrey, but even more so when, reluctantly, she saw her off at Linares Station: Dear girl, your place is with your husband. As much as it infuriated Beatriz when her mother said it, she had to admit that she agreed, because after the experience of the three months in exile, she knew that life stopped for nothing, not even for the needs of a woman abandoning everything, albeit temporarily, to be with her daughters and to get to know her grandchildren. Each time she boarded the train that would take her away from Linares and from Francisco, she was beset with the unpleasant feeling that, in her absence, their relationship would change and she would be left outside, like an intruder in her own home, a voyeur who can only look in through a crack in a closed window. She was afraid that, far away from each other, she would change and he would change in opposite directions, so that they would never find one another again. She was afraid that one day they would look at each other and not recognize each other’s voices, intentions, looks, or the warmth of their bodies in the bed.