“Lupita won’t be here anymore.”
“Why?”
“Because her papa sent for her. He asked her to go home because they missed her a great deal.”
Since mama was saying it, I had no reason to be suspicious. I didn’t like Lupita not being there but understood that her family would want to see her, so I had that idea in my head for years. However, when I returned from my three-day vacation at my cousins’ house, it was impossible not to notice that the atmosphere and routine had changed, and not just because of the woman’s absence: Simonopio was gone too. I searched for him in his shed, but his body and his warmth were not there. I went to see if he was with Nana Reja, but she rocked and didn’t respond to anything. I waited for him to arrive that night in the company of my papa, but my father returned alone and not in a talking mood. I searched for him all the way to the entrance to the orchard, which was as far as I dared go unaccompanied at that time, but there was no trace of him there either. I asked Martín, and he didn’t reply. When I asked Nana Pola, her eyes filled with tears, and she ran off in search of Mama. I was afraid that, like Lupita, he had also been sent for by previously unknown family, but my mama quickly responded that he had only gone on holiday: Just like you, she said to me, but he’ll be home soon, you’ll see.
That night and the following nights, I fell asleep thinking about him, believing that if I thought as hard as I saw many people pray, he would hear me: as if nothing but my intense desire to see him could summon him from a distance. Come, Simonopio.
Several days passed without news.
With no Simonopio or Lupita to play with me, I would search for my mama so that she would read to me like she sometimes did, but she shut herself away, sewing endlessly—anyone would’ve thought she had taken it upon herself to supply uniforms to an army. When I woke up, she was already pedaling her machine, and when it was my bedtime, there she still was. And in the midst of all that, she didn’t have so much as a scolding for me, not a complaint, or a story, or a caress. Not even a good morning or a goodnight.
Nana Pola and Mati were no help: sometimes I found them with tears in their eyes, but when I asked them why they were crying, they always answered that they’d just been chopping onions.
For years, I was afraid of onions.
There was something odd about my papa too. He was always busy: even when he was in the house, at the end of his day, it was as if he kept himself outside of his body, as if he’d left part of himself out among the orange trees. Everything he did around the house, he seemed to do mechanically. Now I know—I understand—that he had a great deal on his mind. But at the time I couldn’t comprehend why my papa, who I didn’t see much in the day, wouldn’t pay me the attention I was used to receiving from him: we might not have seen each other much, but in the little time we had, we saw each other a lot.
In those days after Lupita’s death, the only time he seemed to come out of his self-absorption was when other citrus growers came to discuss things with him behind a closed door. But even if I was silent and listened closely through the wooden panels, I couldn’t understand what they were talking about with any clarity.
Before then, I’d just been interested in being able to play at whatever I wanted; now, after being away for three days, the little universe of my home had changed, and I wanted to know why. All of a sudden, I could not even gain access to my papa or mama in order to demand an explanation. I might’ve swallowed the story about Lupita having to go to her family, but sometimes, what children don’t understand, they feel, and something monumental had happened in my absence.
With too much time to spare, bored, worried, I paid more attention to what was happening around me, to what the grown-ups were saying without realizing I was there, and there was one name that kept coming up: Agrarian Reform.
It was nothing new, but before that day I had not paid much attention when they mentioned it. I thought it was some woman they were referring to, like a gossipy, loud aunt nobody wants to invite to family gatherings.
What could she have done? I’d used to wonder when I heard her mentioned with disdain. Something bad, I was sure, and off I went to play without a care in the world.
At that disconcerting time at the age of four, when I listened closely, the penny finally dropped. I finally understood that the sin of this reform, the Reform, was that it sought to destroy everything that we were and all the work that my papa had done. I understood that it sought to take everything from us, from our way of life to our lives themselves, perhaps.
And for the first time in my life, I was afraid.
50
Nothing. Just Crickets
Simonopio had found a certain amount of peace and distraction wandering among the endless rows of fruit trees, enveloped in the daily song of his bees, immersed in the stories that he had committed to memory, but in doing so, he completely lost the notion of time and his connection with life away from the hills.
He had left without considering Reja, without telling her, but what for, if she knew already? Simonopio needed to get away from the world to rest, like she did just by closing her eyes. For him, it was not so simple, because when he closed his, he continued to see life. So he kept them open, always open, to fill them with so many images that they did not have time to show him anything that was not right in front of him.
He had thought he was winning the battle.
Then, one night when the crickets chirped like any other night, an annoying, unintelligible, indecipherable whisper reached his inner ear. It had attempted to gain entry before, but until then, Simonopio had managed to repel it in much the same way one would wave away a buzzing fly. That night, he also tried to ignore it, for in the repetitive rhythm that those nocturnal insects laid down, he found another source of purification—one that he was reluctant to let go. However, the sound had persisted: it demanded to be heard, to stop being just an annoying noise, forcing Simonopio to allow it to take shape and become a whisper. It demanded the part of his attention that had taken a well-deserved rest, reluctant to come out of the scattered state in which it felt so comfortable. That part wanted to linger here, immersed in the sound of the crickets that talked for talking’s sake, that chirped in their madness, spellbound by their own voices, making the same sound again and again without changing their rhythm, without changing their meaningless message, communicating nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Simonopio wanted to remain in that soothing balm of nothing, but the whisper would not let him. It kept coming. It was like déjà vu: familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Little by little, without him wanting or anticipating it, it began to take on meaning. Through repetition and insistence, it found its way into his ear, until Simonopio once more understood the language that he had needed to forget temporarily in order to rest the ether of his mind, the conundrum of his heart, the liquid of his bones, the seed of his eyes, the heart of his ear, the filter of his nose, the parchment of his skin.
Then he recognized the voice. He listened. He understood: Come, come, come, come, the whisper yelled, as repetitively and rhythmically as a cricket, but not without meaning. That come-come-come-come was an urgent call to him, one he should never have ignored for so long, let alone with so much intent.
It was the boy’s word that called to him: Come-come-come-come. So he shook off his lethargy and left the indifferent concert of the crickets to return to the path he was meant to follow, concentrating on what would be his only companion on his return trip: Come-come-come-come.