Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat . . . How pleasant it would be to lose herself for hours, bewitched by the hypnotic rhythm of her Singer, forgetting her fear, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, her uncertainty, rat-a-tat, how inadequate she felt, how alone, forgetting her son’s questions, his demands to see Lázaro the Resurrected, her eternal debt to her godson, the elderly mother who resented her abandonment, and the recovered son, who now resented the constant attention he received. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.
What a great temptation she felt to escape from the cruelty of the empty nights, the darkness, the loneliness, the cold bed, the sheets that gradually lost the aroma of the beloved body that had been wrapped in them for so many years.
But time does not stop. Despite the painful absence beside her, the sun came up and set each day, though as a veteran of loss, this fact no longer surprised her so much. The empty hours of the night do not pass unnoticed, because in their unrelenting cruelty, they do not allow one to rest; they force one to think, and they demand a great deal. Because it is at night that fear is most frightening, yes, but it is also when sorrow becomes deeper and one regrets what one did or did not do more.
It is in the deepest darkness that one sees things most clearly. Just as the memories tempted her to give up everything for their desert of blackness, they did not allow Beatriz Cortés even the slightest myopia. What she saw in that clear, if unintentional, retrospective forced her to shake off any temptation. It forced her to decide to heal herself of the darkness with which she was filled, but not with unnecessary medications: with willpower.
A month had passed—A whole month, already?—since Francisco’s death. If she did not do it for herself, she would do it because she owed it to him: she would get back on her feet, she would reunite with the strong woman that he had left at home when he died, charged with the care of their son and all their affairs.
She was still afraid to leave the house. That was the truth. Because that Saturday in April, Espiricueta did not just take her husband from her. He also took her peace. Thinking about sending Francisco to school once he was back to full health filled her with terror. She feared that Espiricueta would take him by surprise, like the wolf in the stories. The same fear made her prohibit dear Nana Pola from going to fetch the daily bread alone, as she normally did. Now Martín always had to accompany her, which neither of them was happy about.
But she would not cede a single part of her life or free will to anyone anymore. She decided as much on the night when she found peace in a sweet song that was not being sung to her. She would make her decisions freely, and with free will, she would banish the fear. She remembered the promise that she had once made to no one but herself: not even in her old age would she allow herself to become anyone’s shadow. She would never be set adrift, at the mercy of other people’s decisions. She would never allow herself to stagnate.
It was the same night when, with regret, she remembered stopping her husband from proposing a radical change, back when changes terrified her, when she clung to traditions as if they defined her family. They should go to Monterrey, Francisco had begun to suggest on those nights when he allowed himself to lose heart, but she had never allowed him to continue talking; she had never allowed him to set out the idea in full. She had always refused to let him continue chewing over his crazy plan, but encouraged him to carry on with the same thing, doing the same thing, in the same place, and with the same people.
Leave the ancestral home? Leave the friends with whom they had shared their lives for generations? Leave the promises that life had made them?
She had flatly refused.
And what had happened to those promises? What right did she have to think they were guaranteed? The permanent absence of her husband had given her no choice but to admit it out loud, so that she would never forget it again:
“Life offers no guarantees. To anyone. It waits for nobody. It has no consideration for anyone.”
How arrogant she had been to have felt that, just by existing, she deserved the best in life, that she was worthy of being at the top. How arrogant for not realizing that, believing herself strong—a pillar in her husband’s life—in reality, she had been paralyzed by her fear of change, which was why she had prevented him from carving out a different destiny for himself, for them, for everyone.
Her arrogance had taken away the possibility of Francisco living until old age. It had prevented him from fulfilling the promise he had made when she sat on his lap, years ago, on an afternoon when they laughed together.
Clinging to the past had cost him his life.
It was a price that Beatriz refused to allow her son to pay as well.
How many times did she have to learn the same lesson? How many times did she have to forget and relearn that life veers in all directions? That there is no limit to the amount of times a person can be knocked down, because life doesn’t believe that third time’s the charm?
She needed no more lessons. The third time had taught her the lesson she would never forget. Even if it took the rest of her life, she would recover from this third lesson, because she felt that it was her duty. But a fourth would kill her.
Then it struck her that the future was no longer connected to the past. And her mind was made up.
“The future’s somewhere else,” she said into the air, in the dark, wrapped in sheets that no longer smelled of her husband.
87
Had My Mama Known Everything,
maybe she wouldn’t have decided to move us to Monterrey, I don’t know.
Or perhaps she would’ve done it anyway.
Because the house’s familiar nocturnal sounds hounded her, rather than comforted her, and even the clunk of the loose floor tile, which had been so useful before, now irritated her. The idea of roaming the long halls reminded her of her constant and permanent loneliness. The smell the house gave off stopped her sleeping at night, and the absence of the buzzing of bees woke her in the morning.
Had she allowed time to pass, would she have gotten used to it? Would she have found peace again between those beloved walls?
We can never know what would’ve been, only what was.
We had a good life in Monterrey. We didn’t have savings, but we had the house there, and we had the land we would sell little by little, if necessary. My mama put her brothers in charge of selling all the family property in Linares—which, in the meantime, would continue to produce. The crops would be sold under their close supervision. The sharecropped land was left to the workers so that they could finish paying for it with fixed installments—a symbolic amount—for the next five years, when the land would be wholly theirs at last.
The ranches in Tamaulipas were the first to be sold, at a cut price but just in time: the buyer who had taken advantage of the opportunity to pay a ridiculous price to the widow of his neighboring ranchero had most of his property seized shortly afterward by decree of Lázaro Cárdenas and in accordance with the law.
My papa had died, but the Agrarian Reform was alive and kicking.
We never returned to Linares, even to visit. My grandmother decided to come with us, always supporting and staying with her daughter without hankering after her old life, even if the new people, the new rhythms, and the new places overwhelmed her. There, she finally took off the mourning clothes she had worn since my grandfather’s death. She saw her grandchildren and great-grandchildren every day, and that compensated for how unsettled she felt living in a city. What she never understood and never approved of was my mama making the crazy decision to enroll me in a new school: a secular—senseless, my grandmother would say—institution called the American School Foundation of Monterrey.