The lower jaw was perfectly formed, but the upper one was open from the corners of the lips to the nose. He had no lip, upper front gum, or palate.
“He was kissed by the devil,” someone in the crowd said. Espiricueta.
“It’s no devil’s kiss,” the doctor replied firmly. “It’s a malformation. It happens sometimes, like when a baby is born without fingers or with too many fingers. It’s sad, but natural. I have never had to tend to a case, though I’ve seen it in books.”
“Can it be fixed?”
“I’ve read there is a procedure, but it’s dangerous and painful. I wouldn’t advise it. Best leave it in the hands of God.”
The boy would be this way for as long as he lived.
“Children like this do not live for long: they die of hunger because they cannot feed, and if by some miracle they can, the liquid drowns them, since it enters the respiratory tract. I’m sorry. I very much doubt he will survive more than three days.”
Before ordering a dairy goat brought or sending for a wet nurse, Francisco requested the presence of Father Pedro, for if this boy was going to die, he needed to be baptized as God intended. The goat arrived before the priest, and the nana requested that a cup be filled with a little warm milk and a little of the honey beginning to seep from the beehive. She soaked a corner of her shawl in the mixture, and squeezing the material drop by drop for over an hour, she fed the baby until he slept.
By the time the priest arrived in a great rush, loaded down with oils and holy water to anoint and baptize the ill-fated child, he found him awake again and with his mouth open, awaiting each sweet, white drop that fell onto his tongue and rolled down it. They had already washed him and dressed him in fine diapers and the white robe the Morales girls had worn in their baptism, which Beatriz had retrieved from a chest. Given the rush, for they expected the boy would die at any moment, the ceremony began without interrupting the feeding. And so, from a drop of white to a holy drop, with the nana on one side and Francisco and Beatriz on the other, Simonopio’s body and soul were saved.
8
War’s Harvest
That day he had lost the entire maize crop. It hadn’t been the most abundant, but he had kept it going in spite of the plague of insects. To save it, he had taken care of it as if it were his own daughter. He felt almost as if he had caressed every cob.
But they had snatched it from him. They arrived to take it once the infestation had passed, once it had been irrigated enough, once it had ripened, once it was tender and juicy and his workers had harvested it under the burning April sun, which sometimes, like this year, could be worse than in July. They arrived to take it when every last corncob was in the wooden crates and about to travel to markets near and far.
It’s for the army, they told him before turning away.
Francisco Morales had no choice but to watch the full crates disappear by the cartload and, in silence, say goodbye to a season’s work.
But it’s for the army, he said with sarcasm to console himself as he poured a whiskey. They had left him not one ear of corn for his dinner. Not a single peso for new seeds. For the army, yes, but for which of the many?
In that war, the armies were just one army, he decided, but one that endlessly shed its parts, like the hourglass-shaped wooden doll a Russian classmate had once shown him at university.
It’s a matryoshka. Open it, the Russian had said to him.
He noticed that the matryoshka had a subtle incision around its middle. He pulled and it opened. To his surprise, inside he saw another identical doll. Then another and then another and another, ever smaller, until he counted ten.
That was how the army—the armies—of the Revolution seemed to him: from one emerged another and another and another, each of them identical, each with the same conviction that it was the nation’s official army and that, therefore, it had the right to violate whomever it pleased. To kill whomever it pleased. To denounce whomever it pleased as a traitor to the fatherland. And each time they passed through his land, it seemed to Francisco that, like the Russian doll, they grew smaller, if not in number then in their credibility and sense of justice. In their humanity.
That harvest was the least of what the war had taken from them. They had lost Beatriz’s father when one of those armies intercepted him on his way to Monterrey and accused him of treachery for offering dinner to General Felipe Ángeles—his childhood friend and the new, but brief, governor of nearby Coahuila—an enemy of the deposed president Carranza.
The war had taken their peace, their tranquility, their certainty, and their family, for bandoleros would come to Linares to kill and rob. They took any women they came across. Beautiful or ugly, young or old, rich or poor, they made no distinction.
Francisco had thought it astounding that such a thing could happen in the modern day. Then he learned that, in war, even modernity evaporated.
His daughters were beginning to leave childhood behind—they were young, pretty, and rich. Fearing they might one day be sought out, Francisco and his wife sent them to board with the nuns. They were safe in Monterrey, but their parents grieved their absence.
They also lost their men if they did not manage to hide when one of the armies passed through: no questions asked, without explanation, they were conscripted to fight. Francisco lost two of his peons this way, which was not easy to forget, because he had known them both since they were children.
Him—men like him—the levy overlooked. Renown and wealth still counted for something in 1917. The war did not require his flesh for another shield, but it still stalked him, winked at him, and threatened more than his maize, for the maize they took that day would not last long. It would never sate a voracious appetite that demanded everything.
The war’s armies now wanted land like his. Land and freedom, they insisted. They all fought for the same thing, and he—men like him—had nowhere to take cover from the crossfire. The only possible outcome with the land reform—which all sides claimed to defend as their own—was to lose land. The only option was to hand it over to someone who wanted it but who had never sweated for it, who would never understand it. To offer it meekly the day they came and knocked on his door, in the same way he had let his crop go that day: in silence. It was that or die.
That was why he had not dared to object when they came for his maize. Not even his renown would shield him from a bullet between the eyes. A crop of maize was not worth dying for. He loved the land that his ancestors had passed down to him, but there was something that he valued even more: his life and the lives of his family.
Until now, all he had managed was to redistribute his lands in his own way: to place some of them in the names of trusted friends. These measures were insufficient. There was no legal way to register the remaining lands in Beatriz’s or the girls’ names, so large tracts remained vulnerable to expropriation. That was why he was now sitting in his office, drinking the single glass of whiskey he allowed himself each day earlier than usual.
“Francisco?”
Beatriz wouldn’t appreciate him getting drunk because I’ve lost or because I’m going to lose everything and there’s no way out. Because how did one defend oneself against legal theft?
“. . . so Anselmo wants to use soap on them.”
He would drink his whiskey. One. As he always did. He would enjoy it, even if he knew it would not give him any answers. Then he would stand up and go walk through the sugarcane fields. He would force himself to take each step. He would caress every stalk, if necessary: it was the only trick he had left to avoid going into the red.