I came today believing that I wanted to see it one final time to contemplate the last traces of my childhood, to touch the bricks that protected me when I was a boy, to try to capture, even if just once more, the aromas that had wrapped me up warm and that still define me to this day. I thought I would find it the same, unalterable, and that when I saw it, sitting in its shade, it would be easy to remember everything and everyone. That it would be less painful.
I was wrong. Though this was always the destination—and still is—I did not need to come here to remember. And the memories are as painful here as they were in my house in Monterrey or on the journey today.
They’re painful because they had to be. And I came because I had to.
Contrary to what I had believed, what I came searching for isn’t here, strewn among these ashlar stones. It was never here, because it was always in me, disappearing from this place, from these ruins ever since the day when I left with my mama for Monterrey. Because my papa was right that time when he took up a feather duster as a weapon: houses die when they’re not fed with their owners’ energy. And this house, recognizing no other owners after us, began its slow return to the land on the day we closed my chest, a process that continued when the last bee left its hive, when Nana Reja and her rocking chair turned away, and even more when Simonopio’s presence could no longer be felt.
Without realizing, in that chest in which my belongings traveled and that I always believed to be half-empty, I had packed all my memories. All of them. Intact.
The living house where I was born—the house that has been utterly dead since they knocked it down—gave me everything that defined it when I left. Its stones are strewn about without rhyme or reason, but the machine that finished it off could not destroy its echoes or the clunk of the floor tile or its smells or its nocturnal creaks. Because I took them all with me, just as today I brought with me the smell of the soup that Hortensia prepared before I left my home.
Just like when I was a boy, on my return, as an old man, I brought with me my memories of Simonopio. Complete. Intact.
93
The Future without Him
Since long before my mama’s first public announcement that our future was to be in Monterrey, Simonopio knew that was how it was and how it would be.
There was a future in Monterrey, but it didn’t include him or Nana Reja, however many times we invited them to share it with us. He knew that, if they agreed to come with us, they would both be slowly suffocated to death in that city that had already tried to squeeze the life from him on his only short visit there. And he knew that, if he went, the story that he had worked so hard to weave would change irredeemably. He knew from the first moment that they would not follow what was left of the Morales Cortés family, and it was from that moment that his heart slowly began to break.
When my mama asked him to help her pack this or that, he did it quickly so he could be back by my side, keeping me company, as soon as possible. I continued to recover faster than my mama thought possible, but slower than was tolerable for me, for while my body healed, my mind was already jumping and spinning. It needed constant distraction to keep me still, and Simonopio provided it because he knew that, without him, I would get bored, I’d be restless, and what was worse: I’d start misbehaving. Simonopio would speak to me about anything except that Saturday of my birthday and the days that followed it, when he had thought me lost even when I was in his arms. I didn’t ask about it, and Simonopio was grateful.
Thinking about that old day was painful, just as every minute of the new days was. Because Simonopio had known since he was little: one day the lion and the coyote would face each other. And the story that the wind, the trees, and the young bees were already telling of that day was one that Simonopio would’ve preferred never to hear, never to know, and most of all never to experience. Life would change, he had predicted since he was a little boy: his own, his enemy’s, mine, his godmother’s, everyone’s, and nothing would ever feel normal again.
And he was right: it had changed for all of us.
His godmother seemed to want to go back to being whole again, but her husband’s death and the days of anguish and not knowing anything of her son’s whereabouts or well-being had made her crumble. The process of reconstructing herself would be very long, and Simonopio would not see it reach its conclusion, though he was glad to know that it had already begun: she feigned strength, as she would do for a long time, and by feigning it she would end up believing it, and by believing it, she would make it reality.
She would be all right, and with her, Grandmother Sinforosa, Nana Pola—who had of course agreed to come to Monterrey—and I would too. But he would not be there to witness it.
Simonopio would miss us all, but my absence in particular would leave him with just half a heart: the half that kept his body alive. I would take the other half with me to my new life; I would pack it in my chest; he would give it to me gladly so that it stayed with me forever, so that I could do something good with it, unburdened by the unbearable weight of the painful events.
Simonopio did not know when, but the day would come when I would be ready to remember. To return.
Still by my side, making the most of the time we had left in the last few days, Simonopio spoke to me about everything and nothing. Unable to go out walking in the fields, as he would’ve liked—prevented by my recovery and my mama’s understandable prohibition—Simonopio kept me entertained by talking to me about what the bees knew and how they knew it, and he reminded me how important it was to listen. To listen to what life sometimes murmurs into your ear, heart, or gut.
“Listen carefully and pay attention, Francisco.”
He told me the same stories as ever, and I listened as I always had: always as if it were the first time.
And just as he did every night to soothe me in the depths of my nightmares—which I wouldn’t remember the next day—the night before the Saturday of our departure, Simonopio kept vigil over me during the dark hours of the night; making the most of every minute; stroking me between my eyebrows, where I’d had the swirl of fluff as a baby; talking and singing into my ear about the truth.
Impassive, peaceful now thanks to the hypnotic effect of his voice and his words, I slept deeply, and not even when Simonopio shook me gently that night to pull me from my unconsciousness did I perceive any of the words about him loving me like a brother. Not the first ones, not the middle ones, and not the last ones, the most painful ones, the parting words:
“Goodbye, Francisco. You’re going because it’s where you’ll grow into a man, where your future is. I’m staying. If I go with you, I’m finished. If I leave them, they’re finished; everything’s finished. Do you understand? No. You won’t understand for a long time, but when you do, will you come back for me? Will you come back to find me? Yes. Goodbye, Francisco. I’ll be here waiting for you.”
When he left that bedroom where he had spent so many nights watching over me, he found his godmother, my mama, waiting for him expectantly.
“Have you packed Nana Reja’s rocking chair?”
She had been repeating it to him several times a day for weeks: Don’t forget the rocking chair, or We’ll have to cover the rocking chair well so that it doesn’t get damaged during the journey. It was her indirect way of making it clear that the family wouldn’t abandon the nana, and that, if the nana went, it was a given that Simonopio would too. It was the way in which she believed she made him feel the obligation, but which in reality communicated what she had already sensed from the beginning: that he did not include himself in our future.