Determined, she called everyone to the dining room one morning: Grandmother Sinforosa, Pola, Mati, Leonor, and Simonopio. At that meeting she didn’t explain to them—and she never did—all her reasons. She just said: “This land’s not for a widowed woman with a small child, so we’re leaving.”
They did not all accept the invitation: Leonor didn’t. Nor did Mati. One wanted to marry, and the other wanted to be a grandmother to the grandchild that had arrived. Pola said neither yes or no, but no one was in any doubt.
Discussing it with her daughter in private afterward, my grandmother, Sinforosa, understood that the reasons for moving went beyond a simple inability to manage the land alone, but she did not say anything. She agreed that it was more sensible—safer—for my mama and me to leave Linares, even if it meant breaking ties and losing traditions. And when her daughter asked her if she wanted to stay behind and live with one of her brothers, Sinforosa didn’t think twice.
“I’ll come with you.”
My grandmother, Sinforosa, wouldn’t have liked being a burden or being burdened, as she knew would be the case if she stayed to live with the daughters-in-law.
“Anyway, it’s you that needs me, Beatriz.”
Simonopio had left the dining room in silence, as ever, but with a look of resignation that my mama wanted to interpret as acceptance.
“We’ll take Nana Reja, of course, and Simonopio.”
She knew that, of them all, Simonopio would struggle the most with the change, so she was prepared to find him something to do in Monterrey, to which Simonopio had refused to return since the visit to the circus. They would find something he liked, she was sure. In Monterrey there were also hills and even mountains. Enormous mountains. Simonopio might like to come and go, to explore it all.
Perhaps.
The decision that had been so hard to make soon became the center of Beatriz’s attention and even her enthusiasm. Because once she accepted the idea, she also decided to make the change immediately: to the displeasure of many, they wouldn’t wait until the end of the school year or for me to receive my First Communion there, or for her friends’ daughters’ debuts, much less the parties at the new Linares Social Club premises.
Why, if she wouldn’t even go?
No. As soon as she finished organizing everything, she would leave and take me away from there, far from the dangers to our lives and land. Far from the temptations and dependencies.
Many tried to dissuade her, including my uncles—her brothers—who repeated their offer to manage all her affairs.
“Help me sell everything and manage everything until it’s sold. Nothing more.”
“Think about Francisco’s future.”
“That’s all I am thinking of, but the land is the past.”
They accepted the task but warned her that it would take time, not least because many properties were in the name of friends of her husband’s, and her brothers would have to persuade them to pretend that it was they who were selling them. Beatriz was not surprised that all of them, without exception, agreed to return what belonged to her as a widow. My papa had always chosen his friends well: none of them went back on their word, recognizing that the land they were safeguarding on his behalf from the agrarianism belonged to Francisco Morales’s widow. They would gladly help her to sell it.
Little by little my mama tied up the loose ends, keeping herself busy, gaining some respite from the emptiness of the night, when she sought refuge in the comfort that the songs of her Singer and of Simonopio brought her, even if one was mechanical and the others were not sung for her.
And while my life and my days were filled with Simonopio, with his stories and his songs, to my mama, Simonopio’s life now seemed empty and sad.
It wasn’t resentment, she was certain: he had hugged her after one of her constant requests for forgiveness for the slap, and Beatriz was relieved at his show of affection.
It wasn’t that. Then what was it?
It was the mourning that affected him: since he had come out of his shed, barefoot, two days after returning, the look in his eyes had never been the same. In the first few days, Beatriz had concentrated on his physical well-being. But, distracted by her concern for her son’s recovery and adaptation to life without his father, she had overlooked the emotional state of her godson, who had lost a father more than a godfather.
And it was also desolation: weeks passed, and she did not notice that what woke her earlier than usual was the absence of noise: the absence of the buzzing with which, through her window, the proliferation of bees that had installed themselves in the shed’s roof nineteen years earlier had lulled her to sleep, their hum making it so easy to cling to sleep for the last hour—or the last minutes—before facing the day.
They had arrived with Simonopio, and they had stayed ever since.
However, now the silence of simple birdsong woke her in the mornings. Inexplicably, Simonopio’s face was now free of bees—when even in winter, provided it was not too cold, there had always been some perched there, and in spring or summer they had followed him like a flower. Now, in midspring, Beatriz could see his green eyes and long eyelashes without their extensions of moving wings. She could see his mouth just as God had given it to him, without it being covered in bees, as if they wanted to hide it or feed off his smile. She saw that his skin was not blemished by a single mole, when before it had always seemed like he had several, even if they changed position with every glance.
She didn’t know for certain, having been distracted for weeks and lost in her new widow’s grief, but she suspected that the bees had left Simonopio completely alone since the day of Francisco’s death.
Why had they abandoned him? Why had the creatures that had helped him live deserted him?
Seeing Simonopio spend the day talking, singing, and telling stories to the one audience member who offered his full attention and participation, my mama thought that she could ask him what was wrong and receive a reply from his little interpreter. She decided she would do so a short while later, and went away without approaching him. She would ask him tomorrow, but tomorrow became the day after tomorrow, and then a week or two.
And she didn’t ask.
Had she been brave enough to ask, what would have prevented her from pressing him to tell her what had happened that Saturday? Nothing would have stopped her, even knowing that it would be painful for everyone. She knew that questions hurt him, and the last thing she wanted to do was cause him pain. But she was even more afraid of hating—and never forgetting—the answer. She also feared what I, as the interpreter, would be forced to narrate, to know, and to remember.
And there were things that it was better not to know.
We would leave in order to forget the bad things: the absences and the abandonments. We would go to remember just the good things. And in our ignorance, we would heal.
91
Song from the Past
As ever—whether it passes slowly or quickly—time definitely passes, and from grain of sand to grain of sand, every date arrives.
And so, sure enough, the Saturday of our departure also arrived.
Everything that needed to be packed had been packed. Everything that needed to be given away had found its new owner, including my papa’s clothes, because, living in heaven—as they’d told me he was—he would no longer need them. We also gave away my Thunderbolt, who would’ve been very unhappy in Monterrey, because on those city streets he would’ve had nowhere to run. He would be happier in my cousins’ orchard, where they had promised to take good care of him.