“It’s all gringos and atheists and aleluyas.”
“I don’t think so, Mama. I don’t care: he won’t have soldiers greeting him every day when he goes in and out, making sure the children don’t say a single Lord’s Prayer.”
The federal government’s war against the Church raged on, even if shots were no longer being fired. When I received my First Communion that year, it was as if I was betraying the fatherland: at night, in secret, in some family’s home, the ceremony administered by a priest who, in the street, in view of everyone, pretended not to be one.
The Catholic schools continued to exist behind closed doors.
But you didn’t have to hide to go to my school. There was no need to pretend you hadn’t learned what you learned there. The diploma I’d receive would be recognized by the government. We were exempt from singing the socialist national anthem, a requirement Cárdenas soon imposed on other schools. And very importantly, there were boys and girls together in the classrooms, and I always liked girls a lot—even if, as a kid, what I enjoyed doing was terrorizing them with my stories imported from Linares, with the legends I told them at recess, when we sat in a little circle in the shade and, enjoying their suffering, they begged me, Tell us more.
For the first time in my life, I was happy going to school.
I shared my tales of mummies and ghosts there, the other children’s stories about cattle rustlers paling beside them. There the legend of the doll was kept alive, recycled over and over and surviving until my own children were pupils at the same school, in a more modern building.
There, when I was a little older, I became obsessed with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Because I could never forget what I lost that Saturday. And once I’d become a science fiction fanatic, I began to believe and dream that a time machine would be the solution to everything. I would travel back in time, to that birthday Saturday. Somehow, I would save my papa and wipe away the sadness that sometimes caught my mama by surprise; the nostalgia for her old life that assailed my grandmother; the feelings of guilt with which I was filled, without knowing why, about my father’s death; and the feeling of abandonment that I never overcame. Of course, I soon learned that it was not possible: that there is no way to go back in time to fix the past.
But there you go.
In the corridors of that school, I met the girl who would be my wife, though when we shared the building, I barely looked at her because she was so young, and she didn’t like me because of my absentmindedness.
It was also there that I prepared myself to study for a degree in the United States, though my mama objected to my first choice of university.
“You’re not going to Texas A&M. Study whatever you want, except agriculture.”
How right she was. In Monterrey there was no place for land or tractors, only for iron of another kind.
88
You Built a Good Life . . .
Sure, but I never managed to shake off the bittersweet memory of Simonopio, because all the good memories were tainted with his abandonment of me.
89
We’ve Arrived; Turn Here
“But what happened with Simonopio?” Nico the taxi driver asks eagerly while he follows my directions.
This is his first intervention since we left Monterrey.
I realize now that he had been silent not from boredom, as I had thought at the beginning, nor from a desire to be elsewhere or to turn on his radio, but so that he would not interrupt my flow or the story that I began to tell us this morning, after we closed his taxi’s doors and set off. And I know that, had we met before, had we had more time, this young man—who has been told very few stories or tales in his life—could have become my friend.
But there’s no time. There’s no choice: we’ve arrived, and the could haves don’t exist. Nico has nothing to worry about; I’m not trying to delay my story anymore. All the versions of this story, which besieged me for years inside the walls of oblivion that I put up, took me by storm today. They’re other people’s versions, they’re mine, and together they’re a sphere: I see the whole, and I can no longer ignore it or leave it unfinished.
I feel compelled to reach the end.
90
Sweet Ignorance
When Beatriz decided she never wanted to walk the halls of her beloved house or the streets of Linares again, nor continue to receive sympathetic looks, when she decided to take up her husband’s idea to invent a new life in Monterrey, she did so with the intention of including everyone.
Her son, of course, had no choice: he would go wherever she said they would go.
He was lucky to be of an age that had enabled him to recover more quickly than she, Beatriz thought. While she still vividly remembered her unconscious, injured son, he no longer recalled on what side the fracture had been, and on the back of his head, his hair had already covered the wound that had required twelve stitches. When he looked in the mirror in the morning, he did not even notice the scar on his temple, still red to one side of his eye, and that still made her shudder: to him, it was as if he had had it all his life.
She was also surprised that he spoke of his absent father with enthusiasm, sometimes in the past tense, but sometimes in the present. He seemed to forget, or to not understand, that death is permanent. It was as if he did not understand that his father had not gone, like on many other occasions, on a temporary visit to one of the ranches. Sometimes, at night—because at night, as she well knew from personal experience, there is no hiding, distractions, or pretending that something that will be remembered for a lifetime has been forgotten—he spoke unintelligibly and whimpered in his sleep.
I had never done that before.
When Beatriz—when my mama—came to check on me, alarmed by the screams that came from my sleeping consciousness, Simonopio was always there, trying to erase the bad memories forever with gentle but firm strokes on my forehead, between my eyebrows, just like he had seen my mama do when I was a baby. He sang to me in a low voice, without interrupting his song when his godmother came into the room.
My mama did not understand his words, though she recognized the notes. Before long she grew accustomed to that language exclusive to Simonopio and me, and before long she thought it beautiful, because Simonopio had a melodious voice. It was a voice that enveloped you, soothed you, and took you away not only from an orphaned boy’s dreams but also from the fears and doubts of a widowed mother. Of his godmother.
It was a comforting voice.
Although I never woke during those nocturnal serenades, today I can see my mama sitting on the old rocking chair, without interrupting, without intervening, but without going away. She did not want to miss a single minute of the strange coexistence of her son and the godson that life had given them. Because one night, between one sweet-sounding song and another, she understood that, while life offers no guarantees, sometimes it does offer gifts; and understanding that, accepting it even without being fully aware of it, the bitterness, the grief, and the deep wound of Beatriz Cortés, now the widow of Morales, began to heal, and her determined streak began to reemerge.
If she had fallen into a dramatic downward spiral from the moment of her husband’s death and my disappearance, that was the moment when the descent ended. It would be the point from which the new Beatriz would rise up, the one born from sheer willpower and the one that would last for as long as there was life in her body. The arrogant Beatriz she had been when she was young; the new fearful one; and the other, even newer, more battered one learned to live together in peace until they completely merged. It would take years, and the climb would be slow, but everything starts somewhere, and for her, it had begun listening to Simonopio’s songs.