Simonopio decided to spur on Thunderbolt, who in the ruckus had made no attempt to move a single leg. He turned the horse around to follow the truck. When he reached it, he directed Thunderbolt toward the right side of the crowd. Then he spotted him: Francisco Junior had climbed onto that side of the vehicle and, as if he were part of the show, was waving at the people on the street, ready to remain with the caravan until the end.
Francisco Junior did not see Simonopio approach and get into position to heave him down and onto Thunderbolt’s back, in front of him. Battling with a boy whose adventure had been interrupted and with a horse that was unaccustomed—and did not like—carrying the weight of two people, Simonopio turned around again to head to the Cortés house and return the child to school for the second time in less than fifteen minutes.
Francisco Junior kicked and waved his arms angrily. He seemed to think that he would miss all sorts of things if he did not go with the truck, but Simonopio also knew he took any opportunity to avoid being shut away for hours with his teacher.
“The show’s not today; it’s on Saturday. Today’s a school day.”
“It’s ages till Saturday.”
“It’s just five days.”
“That’s ages. I can’t wait five days.”
“Yes, you can.”
It seemed like a very long time to Simonopio too. But he would wait and so would Francisco Junior.
“Will you take me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you swear?”
“I swear.”
Simonopio figured he could quite easily raise the forty centavos it would cost the two of them. He would sell some jars of honey to the people on La Amistad. It was expensive, but it might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Nothing in the world would have made Simonopio miss the chance to see Pedro Ronda, the True Wonder, who, with more talent than any fish, was going to sing underwater with no equipment.
53
Alchemy
Francisco Morales was in a bad mood. It was his normal state, of late, every time he dealt with Espiricueta, whether it was to agree to a date to inspect the land he had assigned the man more than nineteen years ago, to hand over the season’s seeds or a new box of ammunition for his Mauser, or simply to ask amiably after his children. There was no getting through to the peon, who grew ever more uncommunicative and unsociable. He always put off the inspections that Francisco routinely conducted on all of his sharecroppers’ land with the aim of finding ways to make it more productive. If Espiricueta answered a question, he always mumbled his response with his head down, without looking Francisco in the eyes like any upright man should address another upright man.
The years of protection had not been of any use to the southerner. The parcel Espiricueta occupied was the only remaining land on the Amistad estate that had not been planted with orange trees, because he refused to change. Francisco did not understand why, considering that, for some strange reason, the maize crops Espiricueta insisted on sowing did not thrive. Sometimes he suspected that the peon did not give his crops the care they needed, but whenever he decided to pay an unexpected visit, the son—what was his name? Francisco could never remember—was always plowing the land with his own sweat and brute force or irrigating it during their allocated irrigation time.
Even so, the Espiricuetas’ harvest was never good. It was never even sufficient to cover the rent agreed upon in 1910. Now Francisco was reaching the limits of his patience. First out of pity and later because of the simple convenience of keeping his land occupied, he had overlooked this ineptitude and lack of productivity.
He could not put it off any longer.
He thought he had managed to frighten the agrarians away from his land, but they were not the only ones threatening the family property: there was also the agrarian bureaucracy, which never tired of sending official letters demanding to inspect the entirety of his properties, to check the deeds of ownership, and to confirm the legality of the transferals of land he had conducted years before to some trusted friends.
Francisco felt harassed. He seemed to spend more time doing paperwork and providing explanations now than he spent on the orchards and ranches. In Tamaulipas he had already had to give up a ranch, but in Linares he avoided expropriation through the deals he had struck, handing over more and more of the land in Hualahuises, which was the property that interested him the least.
He had defended his land in Linares by any means possible.
The orchards were gathering momentum: the orange trees had proved very productive, and there were ever-fewer setbacks from the army or bandits ambushing the shipments of fruit to various parts of the country and to Texas, where the market paid good prices.
With a great deal of pride but even greater relief, he had, in a relatively short space of time, been able to put back the large withdrawals that had depleted the bank account. However, that no longer mattered: two years before, in 1928, the Milmo Bank, which the Morales family had entrusted with their money for generations, had suddenly gone bankrupt, without warning or mercy. One day he received a letter informing him in very formal terms that everything he had believed he had—decades of savings, his inheritance—had vanished. His mind was still trying to solve the financial riddle, the alchemy, that had turned more than a hundred thousand gold pesos into nothing more than a piece of stationary full of apologies as empty as his bank account.
“We’re going to have to start again. It’s all gone, Beatriz.”
“We have land and strength.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“What’re we going to do?”
“You, you’re going to get up tomorrow morning like you do every day. Go to work on your land, like you do every day. And thank God that you were brave enough to use that money for useful things while you had it. And I, I’ll wait for you here, doing my own things, as ever.”
Beatriz was right: the Morales Cortés family’s life had not changed because of the loss of a bank account that they did not depend on to live. Francisco had never stopped working for a single day out of the arrogance and vanity that comes with wealth. He had never lived like a rich man or envisaged himself living extravagantly in the future.
Thanks to the fact that they had used the money in the bank while they had had it, and more recently to the bonanza that the orchards had provided, they had even been able to cooperate with the other members of Linares Social Club to finally fund the long-awaited construction of the club’s building, which was now making good progress. They also had the house in Monterrey and the land. They had the tractor that was so useful, though Francisco had to admit he was now admiring and stroking another cutting from the Farmers’ Almanac advertising a much more modern and compact model—albeit with a heavy heart, for they were unable to purchase it in their current situation. Thanks to that gold, he had been bold enough to change their land’s calling, and the investment had paid off twofold: with the success of the oranges as a crop and as protection from any major expropriation.
He mourned the loss of the gold, of course—how could he not? He even joined a group of creditors from Linares and Monterrey to file a suit against Milmo Bank, though he could not see how, by legal means, they would be compensated for the loss of their fortunes. They organized meetings, they ranted and raved, they cursed, they complained, and some even cried. It was all for nothing: Francisco suspected it was much easier to make a mountain of gold disappear than it was to make it reappear again from nowhere.