Simonopio would have loved to sing the song that Lupita was intent on teaching him to pronounce, even if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked was beyond his capabilities. He would have liked to talk to people about the songs they sang of vain women, abandoned women, railway women, soldier women. He would have liked to discuss his bees and ask everyone why they didn’t hear them, given that they spoke to the others, too, as they did to him. Had he been able, he would have talked about the song the bees sang into his willing ear about flowers on the mountain, faraway encounters, and friends that had not made it on the long journey home; about the sun that would beat down hard one day but be covered in storm clouds the next. Then he would have liked to ask Lupita: Why do you hang out the clothes you washed, when it’s about to rain and you’ll have to rush to take them in? Why are they irrigating, when it’s going to rain tomorrow? He would have liked to ask his godfather why he had done nothing to prevent the crops from dying on an icy night last winter; did he not feel the cold coming? And what about the constant impossible images that crossed in front of his closed eyes—or about the events he saw before, after, and while they happened? What did other people see when they closed their eyes? Why did they close their ears, nose, and eyes when there was so much to hear, smell, and see? Was it just him and nobody else who heard and listened?
How could he discuss these things when his own mouth disobeyed the signals he sent to it, when all that came from it were nasal grunts and goose honks? He couldn’t do it, so he didn’t. Simonopio learned that the great effort required to say the simplest things was worth making only if someone would understand, if someone was interested.
At Nana Reja’s motionless feet, which her rocking chair always pointed in the direction of the road that had brought them together, Simonopio mastered the art of silence.
10
Broken Promises
Beatriz Cortés was sitting where she was entitled to sit as chairwoman of the organizing committee for the Linares Social Club’s annual Holy Saturday dance. For months, she had been insisting they should resume the tradition she had enjoyed so much in her adolescence and childhood. In the warless past, the annual dance had been a magnet for the families of noble descent of Saltillo, Monterrey, Montemorelos, and Hualahuises, who made the trip each year without fail. Around the big event, several days of activities were also organized on the various haciendas and ranches of the local hosts. Everyone enjoyed the occasion: the older generations, now married, reuniting with friends from their youth; and the young meeting one another and, perhaps—if they were lucky—finding and winning over the love of their life.
Many ladies of Linares society had refused at first to take part in the organization of the event, but Beatriz persuaded them of the importance of returning to the customs of the past. They won’t come, they had said. They’re all afraid they’ll be robbed on the way. Nobody will come. What’s the point?
Perhaps they were right, but Beatriz had to try. How long did it take for a tradition to be lost forever? Less than the eight years it had been on hold, possibly. Perhaps—hopefully—there was still life in what appeared to be dead.
She would bring the Holy Saturday dance back to life. She had to try, for her young daughters. How could one generation look the next in the eye and say: One of the few things I took for granted that I would pass on to you, I have allowed to die?
Beatriz was not a vacuous woman. It was not the dances or the pretty dresses that she wanted to save; it was the sense of belonging of the next generation, of her daughters, whom she had recently been forced to send to Monterrey to continue their studies at the Sagrado Corazón. She wanted to save the memories that Carmen and Consuelo had the right to create, the bonds they still had to forge while living out their youth in their ancestral home.
She needed to go through the motions of organizing the dance even though she was the first to admit it would be almost impossible to accomplish: food was scarce in the region, and so was money. Sometimes a woman had to save herself, and for Beatriz Cortés de Morales, organizing this dance, joining the new charitable association, and devising and supervising any kind of social and charitable activity in the town represented just that: salvation. She could not remedy the shortages. Nor could she stop the war or the slaughter. What she could do was try to stay sane. The only way she knew how to do that was to keep herself busy with matters of the family and of the town’s poor, to sew constantly, and yes, to plan the annual dance.
Usually focused on the task at hand, now she was lost in thought, pondering the irony of the name: it would be called the annual dance even though it had not been held since 1911, a few months after the outbreak of war. It would also be organized by the Linares Social Club in spite of the fact that the club was still without premises. There were grand plans, of course, to construct a building in the style of the Opéra de Paris that would look onto the town’s main square. The Linares Recreational Society had acquired the land near the Cathedral of San Felipe in Linares in 1897, originally intending to exceed or at least equal the elegance of Monterrey’s club.
A noble ambition, marvelous plans, beautiful drawings; but since the initial investment in the land, the funds of the Recreational Society—thereafter renamed the Linares Social Club—had vanished. Originally, construction was expected to begin within two or three years, but no: two or three more years would be needed. When that proved impossible, the club had insisted, with less conviction now, that construction could begin in the next two or three. Then war broke out, and with the uncertainty and the shortage of all kinds of materials, goods, and even food, the members of the Linares Social Club were forced to reconsider their social and financial priorities. Contributions to a recreational building came at the end of a long list of personal expenses.
In that October of 1918, twenty-one years after buying the land, Linares’s first association was still waiting for its premises. Each time they went to Mass or to shop in the center of town, members passed back and forth in front of the unoccupied land, and Beatriz was certain that more than one of them lamented the empty space. And most of them, she knew, could not understand or abide the fact that the social club of the nearby and once-insignificant city of Monterrey was already constructing a second building, larger and better than the last one, which it lost in a fire in 1914. Monterrey’s high society was building a social club for the second time, and Linares had yet to begin construction of their first. For some, it was a bitter blow. Beatriz strongly suspected that one of Linares’s founding members, a secret pyromaniac, had taken it upon himself to set fire to the social building in the nearby city they so envied. It was a suspicion she would never dare discuss with anybody—what would be the point?
Beatriz did not care whether Monterrey had its club before, during, or after their own, but the empty town-center lot and glaring, stagnant aspirations weighed heavily on her. The Linares Social Club suffered from the same affliction she suffered from in life: great potential but few achievements, and grand promises broken.
For life had promised great things to Beatriz Cortés.
From the cradle, she had understood she belonged to a privileged and respected family that lived from its hard work on its lands. She had known her place in the family was solid, with an unusually affectionate and attentive father and a mother who, if not affectionate, was intelligent and firm. She was aware that, save a deadly attack of dysentery, she would live a long and worthwhile life. It was a given that Beatriz Cortés would meet and befriend the worthy people of Linares and the region. That she would share a classroom and, later, motherhood with the daughters of the best families. That they would always be her friends, and together they would grow old in full view of all, enjoying an old age full of grandchildren. Of course, before the grandchildren, there would be many children. And before the children, marriage to the ideal man. And before even that, a youth full of suitors who would seek to attend the parties where she would be, so they could court her.