Early in life, she knew what kind of a man she would marry: one from the area, the son of a family of noble descent. She knew it before she was of the age to put a name and a face to her chosen one. They would have many sons and daughters, and most would survive, she was certain. And by her husband’s side, she would see many successes and some failures—salvageable ones, of course. There would also be frosts, droughts, and floods—the inevitable cycle.
She counted on the certainty that all the promises life had made her were, or would be, fulfilled in proportion to the work and effort invested. In life, only potential was free. The outcome, the achievement, the aim came at a high cost, which she was prepared to pay. So Beatriz Cortés was unstinting in her efforts to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, wife, mother, charitable lady, and Christian.
How did one woman persuade an entire foolish nation to lay down its arms, return to work, and start producing again? How did a woman pretend that the events happening around her did not affect her? What could she do to change the trajectory of a bullet? Of ten bullets? Of a thousand?
At that moment in time, she was sitting at a table, surrounded by women feigning interest in preserving the old traditions with a dance that might happen in six months’ time, when none of them were sure they would live that long. They were discussing flowers, announcements, invitations, visits, and venues, when really each of them was thinking about crops that had failed or had rotted for a lack of transportation or buyers. They were thinking about the sudden, unwanted, violent visits from hostile armies, and the death notices that followed. They were thinking of the sons who were growing into men and who, should the armed conflict continue, could be dragged into the endless fighting. They were thinking of the daughters who would never meet the man that life had promised them, because at any moment he could receive a bullet to the heart, the head, or worse, the stomach. A young man whom they would have been destined to meet at some dance in five or ten years’ time, but who might now be nothing more than maggot-filled nourishment for a nopal. Who might become sterile dust instead of planting life in the belly of a woman, the one who would have been his wife had the first shot not been fired one fine day, and had that not been answered with a second shot and followed by an endless volley.
Her own daughters liked that little game: Mama, who am I going to marry? they would ask. Beatriz understood, of course. She had played it herself with her mother and her cousins when she was a girl. Was there a more important unknown in the life of a young woman? Whom will I marry? A handsome man, I’m sure. Hardworking, brave, from a good family. Now Beatriz refused to play it with her adolescent daughters, daughters of this Revolution. She would not make them any promises or help them construct the fiancé they would have in their dreams, for she was not sure he would even live until the day when they might meet.
Beatriz herself felt lucky; Francisco Morales was the man life had promised her, the man she had conjured in her youthful imagination. He was everything she could wish for: handsome, from a good family, hardworking, brave, educated, and landed. Back then, there had been no war, no sign of conflict to mar or complicate their courtship. They married after visits, dances, traveling fairs, and days in the country. They were satisfied with each other, and they had the necessary resources at their disposal; life and the future seemed secure. And at first, life had kept its word: Carmen was born a year later and Consuelo two years after that.
Years of peace and hopes for the future.
At one time, before the war, with all of life’s promises tangible and in front of her, Beatriz had felt lucky to be a woman of that time and lucky that her daughters were women of the new century. In that era of wonders, anything was possible: the modern railway shortened distances and moved goods and people in large quantities. Steamboats propelled travelers across the Atlantic to Europe in a few weeks. The telegraph communicated the birth or death of a family member—from a great distance and on the same day—and allowed businessmen to quickly strike a deal that would have taken months to arrange before. Electric lighting galvanized an array of nocturnal activities, and the telephone, though still not widely used, kept people in touch with far-flung friends and relatives.
And yet, far from coming together due to all these wonders, people were intent on dividing themselves. First, in Mexico, with the Revolution. Then, all over the world, with the Great War, which at last seemed close to ending. But not satisfied to fight and suffer in that war, now the Russians were waging their own at home, brother against brother, subject against king. The news had just arrived that in July, after months in captivity, the tsar, the tsarina, their four daughters, and the little prince had been surreptitiously assassinated, their bodies disposed of so that no one would ever find them.
Beatriz did not know much about Russian royalty or the reason for the conflict, but it had shaken her to learn that, with the twentieth century in full swing, a king had been murdered along with all his offspring, including daughters of a similar age to her own. Her imagination tortured her: time and again, in her mind’s eye she saw the faces of two disfigured, bullet-riddled girls. Always the same two. They had the faces of her daughters.
And so she concluded that Russia and the rest of the world were closer to home than it seemed. In her region, too, horror stories were circulating about entire families disappearing, women being kidnapped, and houses set on fire with the inhabitants inside. The war between Mexican soldiers, between enemies, was a tragedy, but the worst thing was that it also reached people of peace. People who sought only to work and live as a family, who desired simply to bring up their sons and daughters, see them grow to adulthood, and let God decide after that.
When the Revolution broke out, Beatriz had felt safe in her little world, in her simple life, shielded by the idea that if you bothered no one, no one would bother you. Seen in this way, the war seemed distant from her. Worthy of attention, but distant.
After the severe federal punishment that followed Governor Vidaurri’s bid for independence in the middle of the previous century, the people of the state of Nuevo León preferred to keep safely away from this war’s swings of fortune. It’s an ill wind that blows no good, Beatriz had thought.
Now she knew she had deceived herself: somehow, she had persuaded herself that, if she did not feel it to be her own, the war would not touch her or her loved ones.
At first, she had been young and idealistic enough to support the principle of nonreelection and the right to a meaningful vote. “Effective suffrage, no reelection” had seemed an elegant sentence, deserving of a place in history. Surely it was what the country needed to renew itself and embrace the modernity of the twentieth century. Good sense would prevail, the war would soon end with the much-wanted departure of the eternal president Díaz, and peace would be restored.
In the end, the only sensible person in the whole story had been President Porfirio Díaz himself when he released his grip on power, realizing that the indefensible was not worth defending; he packed his bags and left for exile after a few months of clashes. That was the outcome for which everyone had hoped. The desired victory. Period. With that, the drama should have ended.
But no.
Very soon, the main characters in the farce they called the “Revolution” forgot their agreed-upon lines and took on lives of their own, writing their own dialogues and monologues of betrayals and shootings. The original script disappeared into oblivion. Some wanted to blast their way to land and wealth that did not belong to them; others wanted to sit in the big chair. It occurred to no one—or no one had the desire—to bring two chairs together, talk without bullets, and keep talking until peace was brought about. They made an obedient people take up arms and placed them under the command of madmen who killed indiscriminately and without the slightest care for military ethics and courtesy.