So Beatriz went to Monterrey as little as possible. Less and less often. She knew she could not help her husband with his work, which lately had kept him increasingly occupied. But she thought the least she could do for him was to wait for him and be there to receive him at night, to join him for dinner, to sleep with him very close so she could share her warmth with him and make him forget his doubts and worries, which were more than he admitted.
The changes they were facing now were not easy for Francisco, though he himself chose to make them from one moment to the next. On the day when Carmen and Antonio announced their marriage to the Church and Simonopio showed up with his strange offering, Beatriz had remained with the guests, waiting with all of them for Francisco to finish what he had gone to do in the house and promptly return. But the minutes went by and neither he nor Simonopio came out, so Beatriz began to worry. And, worse, she had run out of excuses to justify her husband’s unusual—and rude—behavior.
When she went in to look for him, she found him in the study writing various messages for Martín to take to the post office so they could be sent by telegram.
“What’re you doing, Francisco? We have guests!”
“I know, but they won’t leave and I’m in a hurry.”
“A hurry to do what?”
“A hurry to beat the land reform.”
The response left Beatriz no less perplexed: How was it possible that some simple flowers had given him the inspiration he needed or helped him defeat federal law? Right then, there was no way to extract more information from him, because Francisco turned his attention straight back to writing his messages and did not consider his wife’s presence again. She left puffing with anger and confusion.
Of course, when she got outside, she hid her feelings and offered excuses with renewed verve.
“Francisco sends you his apologies. He received news of an emergency on one of his haciendas but says to make yourselves at home.”
With such a kind farewell from the host, the celebration continued without interruption. The person who seemed most reluctant to leave was the new Father Pedro, who kept asking Beatriz what time she expected her husband to return.
“I don’t know, Father. With that man, sometimes it’s best not to ask,” she answered, allowing her resentment to show.
The hours seemed eternal, but finally the lunch, which became an afternoon snack and then an improvised dinner—when the group moved to the formal parlor and then to the dining room, hungry again, to enjoy the reheated leftovers—had come to an end. They would meet again the next day, since they were all invited out to La Florida for a day in the country.
“I don’t know whether Francisco will be able to come with us. Sometimes it’s what happens in this business.”
She was right to offer an apology in advance: that night, Francisco informed her that he would leave for Laredo the next day, where he would spend a few days making arrangements for his journey to California, which he would then embark upon by train from San Antonio, Texas.
“What’re you going there for?”
“I’m going to buy some orange trees.”
Her husband’s newfound dynamism, with its untimely decisions and impromptu actions, taking measures that all but contradicted everything he had been before—measured, conservative, forever confined to the patriarchal laws—sometimes gave Beatriz the desire to let the old her come out, the Beatriz who feared change and would not hesitate to object vociferously to the new Francisco.
But the new Beatriz controlled herself and listened. She agreed and later admitted that he might be right, as he had been about buying the house and the land in Monterrey, or about the extravagant purchase of the tractor, which ultimately proved a wise decision.
Now, this Beatriz had to listen to her husband’s plans without showing any doubt. She had to try to ask specific, intelligent questions and draw on all her willpower to stop herself from saying what she really wanted to say: And what will we live on until your orange trees bear fruit?
What Francisco explained to her would change their lives. He would buy orange trees in various phases, for it was a considerable investment—another one. Then he would clear all the sugarcane plantations. At Beatriz’s exclamation, he went on: “Remember that we have to plant all new sugarcane this year. But it’s over; I won’t plant it again. The orange trees will last decades. You’ll see.”
Yes, the sugarcane was renewed every three years. This year the cycle came to an end on their plantations, and the Morales family would no longer be sugarcane producers.
The news formed a knot in Beatriz’s stomach, but she shared a little of it with the part of the heart that compresses with sadness. She had spent her whole life surrounded by sugarcane because her family—first her father and now her brothers—also cultivated it on their land. She had grown up surrounded by the green reeds that seemed to cover any land given over to them. She had been lulled to sleep at night by the wind whistling through thousands of plants and had woken, on blustery mornings, to the spectacle of the sugarcane rolling like waves on an enraged green sea or, when the breeze was too weak to ruffle them, standing still as a calm lake. What would it be like to sleep without their soothing sound? What would it be like to look out through the window and see the landscape of her memories mutilated forever?
What’s more, Francisco would not stop at that: he told her he would plant orange trees on the unused land that very year. Or he would try, at least.
“You’re going to have to buy hundreds.”
“We’re going to have to buy thousands, and that’s just this year. Little by little I’ll buy more, until we’ve filled all our land.”
“And the maize plantations?”
He would not remove them until the first orange trees began to bear fruit. He would not commit the folly of leaving himself completely without income.
“Soon or later they’ll go, too, Beatriz. The landscape of our estates is going to change little by little, even if it takes me ten years.”
And while much of the land remained as it was before, the landscape around her had changed, and the old Beatriz, the one who feared any kind of change, sometimes got goose bumps in protest. But the new one, the extremely modern one who now wore dresses above the ankle—less fabric and less expense, after all—supported her husband unconditionally. She tried to see the good side to the change: at least the scent would be wonderful from time to time, when there were flowers. If there were.
When, a month after Carmen and Antonio had their prenuptial interview with the Church, Francisco and Simonopio returned with two railway cars loaded with root-balled sapling orange trees, several neighbors tried to dissuade him.
“It’s madness. You don’t even know whether they’ll produce. And you’re going to get rid of all your sugarcane and then your maize? What would your father say, Francisco?”
“That the world is for the living. That’s what he’d say. And if orange trees produce fruit in Montemorelos, there’s no reason why they won’t here. You’ll see.”
Beatriz suspected that, in reality, Francisco feared that his father was spinning in his grave at the decision, but he had not let that stop him. And she conceded that he was right: one should not cling to old habits that no longer work in a changing world, even if it felt as if their estates had been hit by another revolution, a bloodless one. Even if she struggled to fall asleep at night without the sound of the sugarcane lulling her.