Then the war ceased to be a distant curiosity and became an insidious poison. Beatriz’s self-deceit came to an end in January 1915, and the armed struggle arrived in her home and her life to stay, like an unwanted, invasive, abrasive, destructive guest.
That was when it knocked on her family’s door, which her father opened with a naivety for which Beatriz still could not forgive him.
According to some of his fellow passengers, Mariano Cortés had boarded the train at the last moment, after saying a hurried, agitated goodbye to his son-in-law. He greeted the handful of other passengers in the first-class coach and took his seat. He was reading peacefully when a battalion blocked the tracks on the hill known as the Alta, taking advantage of the engine’s deceleration due to the slope. Some witnesses said it had been the Villistas. Others said the Carrancistas. They all breathed more easily when they learned it was not a general attack on all the passengers: the battalion was looking specifically for Mariano Cortés in order to kill him.
Later, they would say how he had gone out into the open field, where soldiers were waiting to seize him. According to a witness who was in a good position to hear, the soldiers accused him of fraternizing with the enemy, wherefore they declared him a traitor to the fatherland and deserving of the death penalty. Immediately.
I am not a traitor to anyone, and you are no one to judge me. But if you must kill me, the witness to the accused’s words repeated, shoot me in the chest and not in the face, so that my wife may recognize me.
And so, they stood him alongside the train and, in front of the rest of the passengers, fired six bullets into his chest and stomach. Mariano Cortés returned home dead, but recognizable for his wake.
In the town, her father’s death was romanticized. He had been dressed in his best suit for the journey, tall and upright, with the winter sun on his brow and the cold wind ruffling the hair that he always let grow too long. Standing, alone, facing the battalion. What guts! What love he showed for his exquisite wife with his final words! But none of them had been present when the cart arrived bearing the man of flesh and bone. The lifeless father with a flaccid expression, perforated, bleeding, and covered in the bodily fluids that had escaped as he died. Where was the romance in that? Where was the dignity?
All Mariano Cortés left behind when he died was a deep void.
Now they had to keep enduring the mournful tributes and accept that they were well intentioned. Beatriz continued to do so, though the rage and hatred that filled her at times like this, when she succumbed to introspection, frightened her. If she loved her father, why could she not forgive him for dying? As a good Catholic, why had she been unable to look the bishop in the face since that moment in the middle of the Requiem, when he said that her father’s death was God’s plan, that He sent ordeals as a blessing to those who deserved them most and were most able to endure them? And why did she now look with suspicion and anger at the people of worth, the cream of society, with whom she was supposed to mix?
Perhaps because she knew that one of them had been her father’s betrayer.
A dinner killed him, the locals said. And at the wake, between embraces, the mourners said, God took him because he was a saint; There was no one as good as he was; God needed him; God needed another angel in heaven; and What joy for the Cortés family to have an angel to look over it now. And to herself, Beatriz said, The war’s bullets killed him, not a dinner, not God. The betrayer that reported the dinner held in honor of General Ángeles killed him. He was killed by the man who had him pulled off the train and made him stand there and wait meekly to be filled with lead. He was killed by a small-minded, vindictive man who did not deserve to hold the office that he refused to give up. Each of those wretched gunmen killed him. And finally, His naivety and meekness killed him.
War was waged by men. What could God do against their free will?
And who had gained anything from her father’s senseless death? Nobody. The war had not suddenly stopped because a supposed traitor was dead.
As if the six bullets that hit their target had not been enough, the Carrancista soldiers—for the circumstances suggested it had been they—proceeded to kick the body, as though to make sure that the soul would find its way out through one of the many new holes in its shell. And they left him there to move on to something else, to continue their reign of terror, without taking a single step toward peace.
For the Cortés and the Morales Cortés families, on the other hand, life changed beyond remedy. They had become the great losers: almost four years later, Sinforosa, Beatriz’s mother, was not even a shadow of her former self, overcome with grief and the fear of more reprisals. Now she lived with her only daughter, for when she lost her husband, she lost her essence, her strength, and even her ability to take care of her home and herself. Beatriz’s brothers, Emilio and Carlos, had given up the promises life had made them and were performing the duties of their murdered father. Beatriz was losing in her attempts to cling to her own life’s promises despite suspecting that they would never be entirely fulfilled. She was losing opportunities for family plans, put on hold because they were currently inconvenient or impossible. She was losing by hiding her pain to support her mother and her husband. She was losing because, instead of germinating more children in her belly, she germinated fear, suspicion, and doubt in her mind. And worse still: she was losing the absolute belief in herself that she had felt all her life.
The life she was living now did not resemble the life that Beatriz Cortés was supposed to have. In spite of it all, the sun rose and set each day—though even that sometimes disconcerted her. Life went on. The seasons came and went in an eternal cycle that would not stop for anything, not even for Beatriz Cortés’s sorrows and truncated hopes.
In the town, almost four years after his execution, they still remarked with admiration on the dignified comportment and the final brave words of Mariano Cortés. This was no consolation to a daughter who had lost her father in a moment of violence. Beatriz repeated it to herself every day: I am a grown woman, I am a wife, I am a mother. I don’t depend on my father anymore, I have my own family, and we are well. But it was one thing to say it with her head, and another for her heart to believe it and stop sending pain signals to her soul.
Because it was a lie that a woman left her parents’ home to become one flesh with her husband: for all that she loved him—and she loved Francisco because he deserved it—such a thing had never occurred to Beatriz. In her world, a woman took her parents’ home with her wherever she went: to school, on a foreign voyage, on honeymoon, to bed with her husband, to the birth of her child, to the table each day to teach her children good posture and good manners, and—she believed—she would even take them to her deathbed.
In her world, a woman never left her parents behind, even when the parents left her.
And now, in the anonymity that darkness provides even in the marital bed, Francisco had begun to talk about the possibility of giving up everything—lands, family traditions, and friendships—to start from scratch. Buy some land and start again somewhere else. In a burgeoning Monterrey.
With the intimacy and immediacy that came with sleeping shoulder to shoulder, Beatriz had said: Francisco, go to sleep.
She had not allowed him to continue. She did not want to listen to any more. She did not want to lose one more single thing.