“Beatriz. What’s on your mind? Don’t you like the flowers we chose?” Aunt Refugio Morales’s voice broke through her absorption.
“Hmm? Oh! Yes . . . I like them. Carnations are always nice,” she replied, though she doubted they would be able to come by flowers of any kind.
“There’s time. It’s only October. I think we can order them in February to make sure they’re delivered on time,” Mercedes Garza went on, her voice weak, labored, hoarse from so much coughing.
“And what if they don’t arrive?” Aunt Refugio asked. She could always be counted on to be clear and direct.
“If they don’t arrive, then they don’t arrive,” said Lucha Doria. “What color are we going to order?”
“Red?” asked Mercedes Garza between coughing spasms.
“No. Not red. Any other color, whichever you want,” said Beatriz sharply. She preferred a color that would not resemble blood. Seeing that Mercedes’s cough was not relenting, she asked, “Are you all right? You look dreadful.”
“No. I woke up today feeling as if I’d been beaten. I think I’m coming down with a cold, or perhaps traveling while pregnant wore me out. Or something. I’d better go home to bed.”
They all agreed it was a good idea and got up with her to leave. As she came out onto the street, Beatriz was surprised to see Simonopio waiting for her, anxious, sitting on a bench in the square. More and more often, the boy had been straying away from the house without telling anyone where he was going or what time he would return, but it was strange to see him walking in the town. Stranger still to see him stop there.
Beatriz knew that Simonopio did not like being among so many strangers that did not take kindly to him. She suspected that they remarked on, and even mocked, his peculiar physical features in front of him, quite without shame. And how had he known exactly where she was?
Simonopio came up to her and took her hand urgently, indicating that she should follow him.
“You’re very hot,” said Beatriz, touching his forehead. “You have a fever!”
He did not turn to look at anyone else. He only had eyes for her.
“Do you feel unwell?” Beatriz asked with alarm.
“Ay, Beatriz. What patience and what Christian charity you have,” said Mercedes Garza between coughing fits, but Beatriz ignored her, as she did the other ladies who, crowding around them, were saying, Poor boy, what a mouth, but what beautiful eyes. When one of them went to stroke him like a pet, Simonopio did not let her. He kept pulling insistently on Beatriz’s hand. She let him separate her by a few paces from the group.
“This boy’s never sick,” she said to them when he insisted on pulling her farther away. “Ándale, quick, let’s go.”
Beatriz turned her head to wish her old school friend a speedy recovery, but Mercedes Garza did not hear her—she had turned the corner.
11
The Spaniard Arrives in October
Someone had to be the first to die that October of 1918. Why not Mercedes Garza?
After her meeting with the other social club ladies, she arrived home, requested a cinnamon tea, and announced that she was going to lie down for a while to rest. At lunchtime she had not gotten up to eat, but nobody was alarmed. At nightfall her husband arrived home from their ranch hungry, expecting his wife to tend to him.
“Ay, Señor, the señora felt a little unwell. She’s been in the bedroom for some time now,” the cook informed him.
The door was locked. Mercedes did not answer. Sergio Garza ended up going in through the courtyard window, only to find his wife lying on her side, the unfinished cinnamon tea on the bedside table. The luggage set the couple had just used on their trip to Eagle Pass, Texas, remained half-unpacked, which was strange, since Mercedes was a very particular and tidy woman. He knew she had been so excited about the fabric she had bought that she could not have let a day go by without going to see her seamstress to order some new maternity dresses. All of this was evidence enough, but Garza had to approach and touch his wife’s cold flesh to be sure.
Dr. Cantú arrived half an hour later to confirm what Garza already knew.
“What did she die of, Doctor?”
“Heart failure,” answered the physician with certainty and authority, though really, he would have liked to admit he did not know.
He did not like lying. At first glance, he could see she had not been poisoned, stung by an insect, or attacked by some criminal. But how could a woman who was healthy in the morning be dead by the afternoon? All he knew was that Mercedes Garza had died from cardiac arrest, for nobody dies without their heart first stopping. He was confident he had stated nothing but the pure truth.
“What do I do now?” the dazed widower asked.
For now, they had to keep vigil over the young mother and then bury her.
Shaken—because it was not every day that a woman of such standing or of such a young age died under such mysterious circumstances—the mourners at the wake wept and offered condolences to the widower, and since there was no explanation for the sudden death, they offered him words of comfort: She was an angel who is now with her baby, or She was a saint and God needed her in heaven, because he always takes the best, and she was the very best. Nobody, not even the husband himself, was able to say at what, precisely, Mercedes Garza had been the best, but as God intended, one must always speak well of the dead. All of them, even Mercedes’s husband, knew that the deceased was bad-tempered, had been conceited since childhood, and mistreated her servants. In short, they all knew she was far from a saint and even less of an angel. But that day, the deceased, since she was dead, would be forgiven her every transgression.
That was the protocol.
Tomorrow would be another day. But while today lasted, What a beautiful wake and What a moving funeral, how lovely she looks, how well they prepared her, the ladies of Linares’s high society said.
“And that poor child!”
It was the best-attended wake of the year. Everyone who had been acquainted with the woman or her husband felt obliged to go. Not even the knife grinder missed it, though the señora still owed him for his last visit. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Mercedes Garza’s death aroused a morbid curiosity in everyone: What did she die of? Nobody dies from a cold, do they? Who was the last person to see her alive? Who helped her when she felt unwell? Who was her closest friend? Who’s to blame for not accompanying her home, for not recommending an excellent infusion? How grief stricken does the husband look? Who will take care of those poor children? How long will it be before he marries again? They discussed all of this in whispers, faces close together, but only between Rosaries, because otherwise it would have seemed in very poor taste.
After the burial, infected by the sorrow of Mercedes Garza’s inconsolable widower and poor motherless children, not a single eye nor handkerchief was left dry. That day, many moist embraces and used handkerchiefs were shared. In the end, Sergio Garza’s right hand was sore from so many commiserative handshakes, and inexplicably, his legs and entire body ached too.
Could it be his heart’s pain spreading everywhere?
That October of 1918, Mercedes was the first to die, but she would not be the last.
The next day, Dr. Cantú received another summons to the Garza house: Sergio Garza was unwell. The barely conscious patient had a burning fever, he was delirious, and he was struggling for air. His lungs were full of water, and his lips and feet were purple. Acute pneumonia, the doctor diagnosed, with confidence now. But Garza was young, healthy, and strong, and the doctor could not explain the ferocity of the attack, the speed with which the illness—whose progress was usually observable—had come on.