The Immutable Essence of Dust E-Book

Simone Malacrida

• Herausgeber: Simone Malacrida
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Over thirty years of turbulence and violence lacerate Mexican society in the first half of the twentieth century and the life of Benedicta, a nurse by vocation and by choice, with a continuous mixing of thoughts and passions, ideals and aspirations.
Winners and losers torn to shreds, only dust will cover the memory of great deeds and small pettiness, as has been in her nature since time immemorial.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

The Immutable Essence of Dust

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SIMONE MALACRIDA

“ The Immutable Essence of Dust”

Simone Malacrida (1977)

Engineer and writer, has worked on research, finance, energy policy and industrial plants.

ANALYTICAL INDEX

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AUTHOR'S NOTE:

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In the book there are very specific historical references to facts, events and people. Such events and such characters really happened and existed.

On the other hand, the main protagonists are the result of the author's pure imagination and do not correspond to real individuals, just as their actions did not actually happen. It goes without saying that, for these characters, any reference to people or things is purely coincidental.

Over thirty years of turbulence and violence lacerate Mexican society in the first half of the twentieth century and the life of Benedicta, a nurse by vocation and by choice, with a continuous mixing of thoughts and passions, ideals and aspirations.

Winners and losers torn to shreds, only dust will cover the memory of great deeds and small pettiness, as has been in her nature since time immemorial.

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“All our life is nothing more than a little mold on the crust of a small planet. We imagine, instead, that we possess something great: ideas, works! They are nothing but specks of dust.”

Lev Tolstoj

I

Mexico City, summer-autumn 1909

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“Don't be late, as usual.”

Helena stared at her eldest daughter Benedicta for a long time, just before she left the house.

She was always the first to leave for work reasons and the last to return home.

He had not inherited from anyone, at least in Helena's memory, this great desire to be in business, given that in the family they were mostly dedicated to making a living, like the majority of the middle-lower bourgeoisie of Mexico City.

At twenty-one years old, Benedicta shone with the beauty of youth, with typically Latin facial features.

Not very tall, but with long hair and pronounced shapes.

She would have been one of those women who would have lost her charm with her first pregnancy, gaining weight visibly, but maintaining the demeanor that had been imparted to her by years of education that was liberal in political terms, but very traditionalist in moral terms.

The girl nodded and then slipped through the door, finding herself outside.

The heat was already making itself felt, despite the altitude and the early hour.

Mexico City had no memory of the pre-Columbian past, which was lost and destroyed with the arrival of the first conquistadors and even the colonial era was slowly disappearing, with the incessant pace of the new century.

Progress and crowded and mostly ragged homes did not leave much breathing space for the city centre, creating new focal points around which the major daily aspirations were concentrated.

So Benedicta would head to the hospital, where she worked as a nurse.

He had neither the economic nor intellectual means to aspire to the profession of doctor, which was, among other things, the sole prerogative of men.

There was a clear separation between professions and women could only aspire to backup ones, having to take care of their family and children.

It was like this everywhere, at least in Mexico, but in the countryside it was even worse.

“For this reason, you must not complain”, this is how Helena always closed every conversation with her daughters.

Benedicta only listened to part of it, accustomed to doing her own thing, while Consuelo, perhaps also due to being five years younger than her sister, was more inclined to passively absorb her mother's advice.

Of Helena's three children, Consuelo was the only one who didn't work and had only one thing on her mind, at least for three years now.

Find a husband with a good economic income so that you don't have to work and can remain the queen of the house.

A bit like her mother, but without the part of helping out at the shop that Helena provided to her husband Tuco , a fifty-year-old barber well known in the neighborhood.

Tuco Ramirez 's shop was one of those enchanted places through which all of world history and the vicissitudes of the neighborhood families passed.

Everything was discussed in that shop and there was freedom of speech, as if we hadn't been living for decades under the so-called "porfiriato" or the dictatorship of President Porfirio Diaz.

Benedicta and her brothers had known no other form of government even though Juan, the middle brother, at nineteen had far different aspirations than working as a railway clerk.

Secretly, in accordance with his family's dictates of remaining anonymous, he had become close to liberal and revolutionary groups who saw the President as the worst enemy for the Mexican people.

Tuco , on the other hand, simply listened.

He let the customers talk and generally nodded, occasionally stroking his mustache and thick hair, traits that he took care of personally and which were the shop's calling card.

Like the great issues of Mexico and the world, at the barber shop, whose name certainly did not shine in originality " Da Tuco ", the facts of the families who lived nearby were brought to the attention of the community.

Thus the engagement of the first son of the Munoz, the prestigious job obtained by the founder of the Mendoza "below", not to be confused with the exponents "above" who were landowners and exploited sharecropping to live on income, had been sealed by comments of appreciation right in the Tuco shop .

Generally, the barber opened around nine in the morning, followed after half an hour by his wife Helena, who positioned herself in the back of the shop to carry out all the activities that did not require contact with the public.

Reporting, warehouse, cleaning, inventory.

These tasks were a complement to what she did at home with cleaning and cooking.

Ultimately, with three different incomes they weren't doing badly, even if Tuco was aware that, soon, his children would go their own way and that he would find himself alone with Helena having to shoulder the costs and burdens. of old age.

Consuelo remained indifferent to her mother's activities at the shop, while she was slowly preparing herself for those domestic tasks to which she felt inclined.

All of this, of course, after taking care of your body.

To find an interesting husband, you had to be beautiful and Consuelo lacked nothing, even having a more slender build than Benedicta, almost resembling Juan, who was very thin and his round black eyes stood out like night lights.

The girl was the last to get up in the morning, "because early rising makes you get dark circles under your eyes" she used to say, and she almost never saw Benedicta or Juan leave the house.

His brothers spent most of their days outside the family home, some in search of their ideal life, some of love.

Juan wasn't very interested in working on the railways, but rather in the contacts that the workers' club made available.

It was there that he had his first encounter with clandestine and "revolutionary" ideas, essentially antithetical to those of the President in office.

What everyone wanted was the dismissal of Porfirio Diaz, but this would not have been possible by military means.

The coup attempts of the previous decades had all failed and they were always palace conspiracies.

“It must be a popular uprising.

A revolution.”

Juan got excited when he heard words like that, even if he didn't fully understand what it meant.

Once the dictator was deposed, what would have happened?

Who would take his place?

They were all premature questions and the answers to which certainly did not belong to Juan's cultural background, which was on average low even if he knew how to read, write and do arithmetic and this elevated him above most of the campesinos.

His father had never delved into anything like this.

What passed in his shop was talk, nothing more.

Opinions of harmless people, who would never harm anyone, but who felt obliged to fill the void with words.

Silence scares the majority of people, which is why we feel we have to exchange opinions with anyone, even a stranger, so as not to remain embarrassed by what is left unsaid.

With her determined step, Benedicta reached the hospital.

He knew where to go.

In the changing room, where they left their daily clothes to wear the official uniform, impeccably white and with the acronyms placed on the lapel of the neck.

Once this operation was done, we went to the department we belonged to.

Surgery was one of the most coveted ones due to the higher pay due to the greater commitment in hours, but Benedicta preferred another.

That of infectious diseases.

Not that the practice was very different.

It was still a matter of dealing with something shocking to the eyes and the senses.

Smells and situations that repelled the majority of people, but in which Benedicta found great satisfaction when her treatments led to healing or at least relief from suffering.

Of course, there were more defeats than victories, but that was medicine. Take it or leave it, you had to accept the risk and know that you were working for the advancement of science and the world.

In the infectious diseases department there was a renewed spirit, with a group of young doctors who had introduced the wind of the new century, of that twentieth century which promised to be the most radiant period of human progress.

The founder of this spirit was José Luis Carrasco, a thirty-one-year-old doctor who showed great self-confidence and his means.

He always spoke in a composed and calm manner, without emphasis and without using refined terms.

He knew how to put everyone at ease, without any distinction of sex or wealth.

Benedicta had stopped to observe him several times.

The long thin fingers easily navigated scalpels, needle and thread, laboratory instruments and the preparation of paperwork and reports.

He had never found it out of place or with a flaw, always impeccable and appreciated by both patients and doctors, of whatever specialization, age and generation they belonged to.

He was one of those people destined to make a rapid career, to climb to the top of medical science and to amass a large amount of money and well-being.

Together with this, there was something attractive and magnetic about him, personified mainly by his face, perfectly symmetrical and centered according to the canons of aesthetics and classical proportion.

There wasn't a nurse who didn't look at him and think about it, but Doctor Carrasco's inscrutable aura left no room for hope.

“It's better that you forget it”, so commented Carmen, Benedicta's most trusted colleague, a few years older and already married, more or less happily.

The same sentence had been addressed to her by Consuelo, who despite being five years younger, felt like giving advice to her older sister.

“Either you give yourself to him, or nothing.”

The girl continuously launched provocations towards her sister, testing her reactions and psychological stability.

Benedicta felt conflicted.

On the one hand, he knew that it was an impossible love.

Why on earth would someone like Doctor Carrasco have been interested in her, a simple nurse of middle extraction who could not guarantee him any additional status?

These intentions, however, clashed with his imagination and his will and so he found himself extending his work shift, just to stay in that man's company.

He thought that a greater quantity of moments could serve to create the right opportunity.

However, each time, he withdrew when he could have acted, thinking that this would cause damage to his reputation and professional image.

Consuelo remained at home, waiting for feedback and details, and was the first to see evidence from her sister's face.

"At that time?"

Benedicta preferred not to answer.

It seemed like a morbid attachment to her, almost as if Consuelo saw in her a preview of what she could do shortly thereafter.

“Come on, try it, shake his hand and see.

As a doctor, he will know how to do it. He will have studied.”

Benedicta put on a questioning, frowning and at times annoyed expression.

“And don't do that, you look dazed!”

Consuelo was not known for being diplomatic, preferring not to mince her words.

“Shut up, viper. If you continue like this, you will be alone."

Consuelo moved away abruptly.

“I certainly don't, I know what men want and I know how to get what I want.”

Benedicta felt she had to take it back.

“Ill-mannered.”

They were small spites that had been going on since they were children, venial disagreements that were part of a role-play between the two, without the involvement of other members of their family.

Juan was excluded because he was a man, his parents because of the age difference and the role they assumed.

At home, we didn't talk about work, at least not at dinner.

There was a strict rule in the Ramirez household and it was that at the table we had to talk about family or at most social topics, but nothing related to a professional nature.

This served Tuco as a mental break from his work as a barber and, having structured his existence in this way, he had never asked himself the question of whether this was also good for Helena and her children.

He was not a man used to discussing his own opinions, but rather to listening to and reporting those of others.

So he scolded everyone on what he had learned, starting with local affairs.

Neither Benedicta nor Juan were too interested in these aspects, which were mostly in Consuelo's favor who, thus, could learn valuable details for her future moves.

Every evening he built his canvas and put a small piece in his life, enriching the daily experience he had between home, shops, markets and disparate acquaintances.

Juan only intervened when the conversation moved from local to broader-minded aspects.

He always let his father speak first and then intervened.

Almost all the speeches focused on the role of the President and how to counteract it.

“There will be elections next year...”

As if something had changed for the dictatorship, Juan thought to himself, who understood that it was almost a farce.

First of all, there were very few people entitled to vote, men and almost all very wealthy.

It was necessary to raise the people, so he had been taught and so he had internalized.

“Will he show up again?”

Juan asked his father.

Tuco nodded.

There was no doubt that Porfirio Diaz would show up.

He was the legitimate President and candidate, he would never have left power.

Juan already imagined hordes of campesinos invading the capital in search of freedom and justice, the two key words of the liberal circles who, since the beginning of the new century, had set themselves the goal of ousting the President.

In these glimpses of confrontation between father and son, women were excluded, so Benedicta felt left aside in every type of conversation.

She was only interested in her job, being a nurse in that hospital.

He perceived it as a vocation and a mission, together with the figure of Professor Carrasco.

“You have to think of him as José.”

This is what Consuelo advised her to do.

“Otherwise it will always be an insurmountable obstacle.

He is not a doctor, but first of all a man.

A man, you know?

With his wants and his needs!”

To Benedicta they seemed like idle speeches, but the only ones through which she could talk a little about herself and receive comfort.

After all, with Consuelo they had always been friends even before sisters and there had been no other such intense relationships with girls of the same age.

The acquaintances at school or created during adolescence had gradually disappeared and it was not the same in the workplace, where the tight rhythms and rituals of timetables distorted the spontaneous and mutual knowledge.

It was as if Benedicta was wearing a mask, or rather multiple masks.

That of the daughter, the sister, the nurse, the young woman in love with someone she would never have.

Who was the real Benedicta?

Sometimes he wondered that, especially when the house was shrouded in silence.

Although she was the first to go out in the morning, she certainly wasn't the first to fall asleep.

Compared to the other members of his family, he was the person who got tired the most, but also the one who had the most difficulty falling asleep.

The anxieties of a life spent having to meet the expectations that others have of you became apparent once everyone had fallen asleep.

Although she remained fixed in her bed, motionless, giving the idea of being asleep, her mind wandered towards boundless prairies, located beyond the mountains.

Imaginary landscapes, which perhaps did not exist anywhere and at any time, catapulted her into a parallel universe of emotions and thoughts.

She was always alone, with no one by her side.

And, at that moment, he always asked himself the usual Hamlet question:

"Who am I?"

Invariably he fell asleep before giving himself an answer and before fixing a thought in his head.

The next morning, a subtle reminiscence of this was still imprinted somewhere in her mind, but the day's tasks didn't allow her to dwell on it too much.

“You'll see that today you'll loosen up...” he said to himself during the usual walk to the hospital.

Then, as usual, nothing ever happened.

It was a circle that had been replicating itself identically for at least two years, waiting for a shock.

Of an external or internal event capable of shaking her from her torpor.

Another summer was about to end, one of those that pass by smoothly without anything apparent happening.

But if we went beyond the dust of the surface, we would see a swarm of plots and interconnections.

Juan could have scrutinized the thousand streams of thoughts antagonistic to the existing system of power, understanding its motivations and demands, but he remained faithful to his idealism of small things.

He wouldn't have gotten there, even if he tried with all his might, just as he would never have gained weight despite everything he could eat.

It was a personal and insurmountable limit.

The most he could aspire to was to share his father's aversion towards Porfirio Diaz.

“What do they say at the shop?

What do people think?”

Tuco Ramirez, like a good neighborhood barber, would have reported every single detail.

Helena, born Jimenez and seven years younger, would not intervene.

It wasn't his role.

She had something else to do.

First of all, taking care of Consuelo, the youngest daughter, the only one not yet independent and the only one who would not have found work easily, above all because she would never have looked for it or conceived it.

As much as Benedicta understood her mother and sister, she would never share any of their opinions.

How could one become attached to a house?

And then to that?

There was nothing special or aesthetically fascinating about it.

It was neither spacious nor bright, comfortable and quiet.

There was no luxury, only modesty.

An ordinary house, like many others.

Of course, it was their home.

But Benedicta didn't feel like she was "hers".

He felt he belonged to another place, primarily the hospital.

She felt she was an integral part of it, like the furniture and the facade, in fact she would never have imagined herself outside that building.

As if his life had had no other purpose than finding himself in those large rooms impregnated with chloroform and that typical odor of the disease.

All the hospitals were similar in appearance and sensory feedback, but Benedicta knew how to recognize her hospital with her eyes closed.

The smell in particular.

She knew she looked strange in the eyes of others and had never expressed anything similar to anyone.

He preferred to keep such reflections within himself.

“Nurse Ramirez...”

Doctor Carrasco's behavior was always kind even when it came to giving instructions that were not appreciated or that everyone wanted to avoid.

Cleaning was part of this category, since this task was considered not up to the level of the nursing corps.

Far from conceiving an egalitarian society, almost everyone had internalized the monolithism of the Mexican porfiriato society, where everyone had their own task and role and there was no need to go further.

Doctor Carrasco pointed to a corner of the corridor, where dirt had accumulated.

Benedicta understood what this meant and, without batting an eyelid, got to work.

“Dust is our enemy,” she told him.

The doctor smiled.

It was an adage of his that he often repeated, given that, during his studies, he had learned how the proliferation of bacteria found an ideal terrain in dirt.

For this reason, perhaps the first in the entire hospital, he was so meticulous in making the environment "sanitized and disinfected", as he continually repeated.

What some might have mistaken for obsession, for Benedicta was instead a gift of character constancy.

“I see you're listening to me...”

Benedicta smiled back.

“Still a doctor, for you this and more.”

She felt flushed, as if a mysterious force had taken possession of her and she was afraid to show her feelings clearly.

She was as if naked in front of him.

The doctor shuddered for a moment, but then moved on.

The image of that busty nurse was fixed in his mind, certainly attractive and pleasant, but only for a one-time passionate adventure.

A kind of free hormonal release, but nothing more.

His aims were higher level and he would have used the marriage to aspire to important positions.

Head doctor, hospital director, minister.

Being a doctor was only a viaticum for these future steps, gradually accumulating more and more power and money and, in the same way, being kind was something that put him in a positive light, overshadowing the elaborate and studied actions small table.

He gave one last look at Benedicta, who sensed the man's passion and was afraid of it.

The nurse hurriedly completed her duty and looked forward to returning home to consult with her sister.

Maybe something had happened, there was a glimmer of hope.

“Tell me what he told you...”

Consuelo yearned for spicy details, already imagining scenes of intercourse, while Benedicta was less and less inclined to fantasize about these topics.

"Stop that..."

Only after a few moments did the older sister understand what Consuelo meant and rejected the idea that fascinated her so much.

Only with her could he have opened up, without being judged, but only receiving advice and confidences.

For her part, Consuelo would not hold back.

She knew how far to go and how far to provoke a man to obtain what she had been interested in for a long time, that is, an advantageous marriage that would allow her to be a wife and mother, the maximum of her aspirations.

Doctor Carrasco, however, did not have any kind of feelings towards Benedicta and considered her like many others.

It would have been fine for temporary entertainment, but sharing a job was a danger.

“Do not mix duty with pleasure”, it was said several times, except abandoning the rule in case of personal convenience.

In this way, weeks passed without there being a sudden change, so that custom and repetition prevailed.

Everything passed as it had always passed.

The best for the company that had shaped Porfirio Diaz with slow and minimal changes.

It seemed that the entire people had imbibed this characteristic, but it was a pure general illusion.

Ministers, bishops and priests, officials and professors, industrialists and intellectuals, bourgeois and proletarians were deluding themselves.

To some extent, everyone was shrouded in this cloak of blindness that did not allow them to understand future developments.

Even a foreign eye would not have had any inkling of the tremor and tremor, of the subdued earthquake.

It was taken for granted that people complained, it had happened since time immemorial in almost all latitudes.

“But what have these people ever done? Nothing."

Juan was amazed to listen to one of those speakers at the railwaymen's club who wanted to shake the consciences of the workers through paradox and the technique of shock.

“The Mexican people speak, but do not act.

We are not like the French or the Americans.

We have to come to terms with it and that's why few of us need to act.

The few will decide this country."

Juan didn't sleep for a couple of nights after those words.

What did they really mean?

That they were inept, even those who knew how to read and write?

That everything always worked out so that the powerful could endlessly plunder the weak?

That the few would always overwhelm the many?

There was only one word ostracized by everyone.

Praised by few.

Spoken by no one.

Revolution.

It was the eternal unattainable chimera.

“What do you think of the revolution?”

Juan, when he wanted to receive a profound answer, addressed his father using voi.

It was a sign of reverence.

Tuco , who had never been used to probing into the depths of the soul, was not uncomfortable with his son's questions, given that he had received a formidable training at the barber shop.

There, every discussion had been dissected over several years and Tuco had absorbed the most detailed implications, the changes from youthful positions and second thoughts.

He smoothed his mustache and put down the bowl from which he had just taken a large spoonful of black beans.

"The revolution..."

He used to repeat the last word said by the interlocutor.

“We saw a few, but they always lost.

The old people once talked about independence, that was a glorious time in which we created Mexico."

The first part of the speech was moving towards a conclusion that Juan did not like.

The boy was interested in the future, not the past.

He let his father speak, since he had questioned him.

After about twenty minutes, he concluded that he would have no useful information.

Nothing that mentioned socialism, land distribution, social justice, change of power, the problem of peasants and literacy.

All arguments that Juan had heard in various debates.

What he was missing was the main piece, namely the fight.

No powerful person would ever concede anything without being forced by force.

And here came the most controversial aspect.

Violence, death, battle, war, perhaps civil.

Juan had never wielded a sword nor did he know how to shoot, at most he had used a knife, the kind that butchers use to divide different cuts of meat.

He couldn't imagine what it would be like to attack or kill another man and preferred to idealize everything towards an idyllic and perfect future society.

The women of the family remained excluded from these conversations and usually took the opportunity to retreat and attend to some business.

Of all the thoughts that crowded her daughters' minds, Helena did not care nor could she deduce anything.

At the time, she had been a simple girl without many things in her head.

Tuco was a neighbor boy who worked as a barber's assistant in the shop on the street corner, the same one Helena's father regularly frequented.

They had met like this, in a fortuitous but also predetermined way and everything had gone smoothly.

A modest job, but safe, since men would always need someone to shave them.

Helena had entrenched herself in these certainties and in the life of small things and small gestures.

A house, a family, children, the shop.

This was his world with its boundaries and its rules.

What could have upset him?

In theory, everything.

Life, first and foremost.

An illness, a famine, a revolt or revolution, a fire.

Any event not attributable to normal routine could be a harbinger of enormous problems.

For all this, Helena was the biggest supporter, within the Ramirez family, of the continuation of the porfiriato.

A dictatorship, but predictable.

A change of government would instead have meant calling everything into question.

“Let them talk,” he said to himself.

Looking in the mirror, almost like in the past, he glimpsed the signs of time and how it affects each of us.

He kept a couple of photographs from when he was young, but he didn't keep them on display, both so as not to let them deteriorate and so as not to remember what he once was like.

She preferred to recognize herself in the features of her daughter Consuelo and also of Benedicta, although her eldest daughter was very different in character and thoughts.

“I will never understand you,” he had told her several times.

Benedicta was a mystery to him.

In the first instance, easy to decipher with a solid job that would have given her a living and a position to be able to aspire to a not terrible marriage.

However, deep down in Benedicta's soul there was a strange restlessness.

Something not found either in Tuco or in Helena or in the other children.

Benedicta was like a foreign object dropped from who knows where, with some unsolved puzzles.

“What do you want, my daughter?”

Unanswered question, as always.

Autumn brought a sudden change in ventilation, with dry air that swept away the accumulated humidity and brought a thin layer of dust.

Annoying and penetrating.

Enveloping and bewitching.

Benedicta, walking towards the hospital, felt covered in that tiny granularity, feeling its smoothing features within the mucous membranes of her mouth and nose.

Only inside the structure did he find shelter.

In his hair, black and thick, a yellowish substance had infiltrated which gave iridescent reflections when the light hit it at an angle.

"Are you OK."

It was Carmen, his colleague.

He pointed out the reflection to her.

“It looks like I dyed my hair...”

Benedicta smiled.

She wasn't very used to laughing for no reason, she thought it was stupid, while Consuelo didn't think that way.

Women always had to exude joy and vitality, according to her sister, "to give meaning to the dull lives of men".

Dr. Carrasco turned the corner of the corridor and came across the two nurses.

Carmen caught a glimpse of the young man's gaze.

He understood the desire and who it was aimed at, so he withdrew to the side thinking he was doing something pleasant.

Benedicta felt embarrassed.

She had always hoped to be alone with the doctor, but not under these circumstances and not with this kind of evidence.

The doctor smiled.

“Has anything changed?”

The churches.

Benedicta was unperturbed.

“It's the dust from this wind that has settled on your hair.”

He started to pass a hand between them and demonstrate the effect.

Doctor Carrasco blocked her hand and wanted to test directly, making an instinctive gesture.

As he got closer, he came into contact with Benedicta's breasts and felt their size.

He began to think of her in another capacity.

The girl was petrified. This was not the approach he had dreamed of.

She felt like an object in his hands and understood how defenseless she was.

If the doctor wanted to take advantage of her, she wouldn't have resisted.

She let him do it until the doctor's hand rested on her body, but then he withdrew.

“I will never be his lover...” she told him.

The doctor, perhaps surprised by the truth that had been read in his mind, rejected it.

“But what ideas do you have?

She's the one who's provoking me. Imagine if someone like me thinks of someone like her, at most he will be able to satisfy a delivery boy, not a doctor."

Benedicta fled into an adjoining room and avoided the doctor's gaze and presence.

In the evening, he confided in Consuelo.

"Forget him. He wants you, but for something else.”

Benedicta was moved and hugged her sister.

What would he have done without her?

Would it still be like this between the two of them in the future?

Would they always tell each other everything?

Or would the world, with its changes, have overturned even the only certainty of the day for both of them?

For a moment, the two sisters agreed with their mother's immanent vision.

Thus women, despite being the most overwhelmed and exploited, tended to defend that system of power that subjugated them only out of fear of what was new, while men, even if in prominent positions, were not satisfied and wanted more.

On the other hand, Juan had noticed something obvious.

They were all men.

The speakers, the participants in the circle, the liberals and the so-called revolutionaries, that is, those who hoped for a revolution.

And even if one of the points of change concerned the status of women, there were no women in the process who would have hoped for the change.

Males against males, as in fights between animals for possession of a herd or clan.

Upon closer inspection, there was not much evolution compared to the normal rules of Nature.

All this talk about a new century and innovation, but only a preconceived and stale pattern was known to be replicated.

The difference would only have become apparent with a different ruling class in power.

Porfirio Diaz again or someone else in his place?

And what would come of it from there?

In high-class environments there were already fibrillations, as taking the wrong side would have meant the difference between living and dying, or between living well or trying to survive.

Having refined his characteristics, unlike most of the people, Doctor Carrasco tried to stay ahead of the times.

He had managed to get himself noticed by the official in charge of the hospital, a man of no talent other than loyalty to his superiors.

Age was there to remind him of one fundamental thing.

“Dear José, you have to get married!”

The main occasion would come at the beginning of December, coinciding with the anniversary of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Mexico City would become one of the hubs of Christianity on the entire American continent, at least in those days, with myriads of pilgrims worshiping at the Shrine.

Like everyone, Doctor Carrasco would have gone there and, in other times, also Benedicta's entire family, including the proto-revolutionary Juan.

The power of the Catholic Church was such that it still united all the main aspirants for a change of government.

No one could have thought of ingratiating themselves with the wishes of the Mexican people by desecrating the Virgin.

What interested Dr. Carrasco, however, was the reception to which he had been invited.

All his availability and helpfulness had earned him an invitation to the grand gala, during which there would have been representatives of primary importance from the Mexican power.

This did not interest Jose, who had only one goal.

Put your eyes and hands on the daughter of the official who was director of the hospital.

Court her and start from there with your plan for social ascent.

“I will not remain among the sick and the nurses forever.”

Unseen by anyone, when he was alone, he gave off expressions of disgust towards those he judged inferior.

Benedicta, after the close encounter, was careful not to remain alone with him.

Somehow, his heart beat for a person who, in reality, did not exist.

Only in her mind was there room for that gallant man, with his harmonious demeanor and confident gait, who stood out above the average of all the others, lanky or awkward.

None compared to Benedicta's idea of Dr. José Carrasco.

Aware of this block that would have led to the discarding of any other man, she looked for consolation elsewhere, but found nothing that could replace all this.

He had no religious faith and he understood this definitively during the visit to the Sanctuary they made that year.

He had no political faith, as he was not as enthusiastic about "new" ideas as his brother.

She did not have a mission as a mother and wife, at least not in the way her mother and sister understood it.

She was a nurse.

She liked that.

He had chosen this job and would not have exchanged it for anything else, not even the most noble and best paid profession.

From there she would leave again for the new year, imminent after the Christmas holidays.

1910.

One like many others, one number after another.

Or something completely different?

A clear break from the past?

It all depended on point of view.

Who was the observer?

Because it is enough to change just one parameter to decree total and antithetical diversity.

There is not just one interpretation, but infinite, as many as the ideas that come to mind to every sentient being.

Looking at her life, Benedicta would not have said she was happy or sad.

Somehow, indifferent.

He did not possess the ideals of Consuelo and Juan nor the certainties of his father and mother.

She felt alone, understood as a soul without someone at her side who understood and accepted her.

It was an undulating condition, just as a dress appears shiny one day and dull the next.

The rain accompanied the last days of autumn 1909, those which shortly preceded the beginning of a winter which, although at high altitude, was not at all comparable to what the Europeans used to say.

That was Mexico, a land discovered relatively recently, where the people who lived there had been exterminated and a mixture of blood and somatics detached from the Old Continent had arisen.

The food and the smells were particular, not assimilable.

Peering at the water lapping at the window of the room she shared with her sister, Benedicta lost herself in counting the drops.

He could have spent hours staring at them.

"What do you think?"

She didn't hear Consuelo's question, who touched her arm to wake her up.

“There are many men...”

Benedicta smiled appropriately.

Was it possible that her sister was thinking of nothing else?

In reality, he would have liked to express his ancestral doubts.

Will this rain wash away the dust forever and there will be clear, clean air or is it all part of a cycle and a new situation would reveal itself tomorrow?

What changes in the world?

All or nothing?

He took off his clothes before going to bed, while the insistent roar from outside was drowning out all the noises.

As soon as she touched the pillow with her cheek, she remembered when she was a child and how everything seemed enchanted.

He closed his eyes to mentally get closer to that lost world of a time now gone.

II

Mexico City, June-December 1910

––––––––

“They arrested him.”

Juan couldn't believe what he had just learned.

Francisco Madero, the main presidential candidate against Porfirio Diaz, had been arrested for subversive activity.

The dictatorship once again threw off its mask, much more than what happened four years earlier, on June 1st 1906 during the Cananea strike.

At the railwaymen's club, everyone was in an uproar.

Although he was one of the richest men in all of Mexico, Madero had embraced the liberal cause and sympathized with a large part of the Mexican people, overwhelmed by the abuses of three decades of dictatorship.

To what extent this served only to achieve power and did not correspond to his ideas was not known.

“ The presidential succession in 1910 ”, the book written by Madero two years earlier, as a political manifesto, was one of those writings that were cited by everyone, but which, in reality, few had read, and very few had included.

It didn't matter.

What was needed was a shock to the system.

Tuco had noticed this at the store.

The conversations had changed suddenly.

Everything revolved around those elections, as if they were the first ever and also the last.

It was not clear why they should have assumed such high importance, if not precisely for the expectations that Madero himself had fomented.

However, no one expected his arrest.

There were other weapons in the hands of Porfirio Diaz, mainly the electoral fraud that was the order of the day in Mexico, a practice that was difficult to abandon for those used to managing power without any real evidence of consensus.

That news shocked the two men of the Ramirez household, while it left the women indifferent.

Helena had already experienced similar situations, in which everything seems to change and then inexorably realizes that everything goes back to being as it always was.

Consuelo turned her thoughts to men.

With one more year, his hormonal and passionate charge had increased and now he no longer limited himself to talking to his sister, but began to take the initiative, winking here and there at various offspring, basically belonging to the middle class, but which the girl saw as the maximum she could reach.

Everything was strengthened above all due to the lack of confrontation with Benedicta.

The sister had evidently suffered the consequences of Doctor Carrasco's engagement to the daughter of the official appointed to manage the hospital.

The wedding date was set for Christmas Eve 1910.

In front of her, there was therefore a doctor who was about to get married and who had acted according to precise calculations of economic and political convenience.

Faced with this, Benedicta had retreated into respectful silence.

She was no longer willing to work extra hours to remain in the doctor's company and, in fact, she had been transferred to other departments, moving on to infectious diseases less than one day a week.

For his part, Dr. Carrasco felt like putting himself in the spotlight by openly supporting Porfirio Diaz's campaign.

Had the incumbent President won again, his future father-in-law would have acquired even more importance and this would have meant a greater role for the doctor, launched towards a meteoric social rise.

After the wedding, the final piece would be the birth of an heir, preferably a male and, for this reason, the doctor was impatiently waiting for the moment in which he would show off his love skills with his future wife.

He would not have been a husband reluctant to exploit the marital availability, perhaps preferring the graces that could be found in one of the city's brothels, but he would have worked hard to ensure that his wife became pregnant in the shortest possible time.

The calculation of social ascent would have reached its peak precisely in the fateful moment of the embrace, combining duty with pleasure, in denial of one of his phrases, said more to appear polite.

Before Benedicta arrived home, there were already rumors about where Madero would be held.

In San Luis Potosi.

“So it's all over?”

Juan desperately asked everyone he met at the club.

"Don't worry. It's just the beginning..."

He didn't know whether to feel refreshed or disappointed.

Perhaps consulting with his father would benefit him.

He stared at the clock on the wall.

It was almost there.

In less than an hour he would have learned what was said in the neighborhood and in the city.

Juan's frenzy was the exact opposite of what was in his older sister's soul.

Benedicta was twisted in a vortex of fatalistic thoughts, taking the rest of her life for granted.

“I look like my mother...” he said to himself, taking off his lab coat at the end of the shift and putting on his clothes again, the workmanship of which exactly reflected his background.

Not filthy and botched clothes, as the campesinos and derelict proletarians used to wear, but something more refined, although not new and not of high quality.

A middle ground.

A middle class that was a rarity in a nation full of contradictions and clashes.

A family that, according to Juan and Benedicta, did not have much to lose in the face of a revolutionary upheaval, while for Helena and Consuelo, the entire balance would have been lost.

This sort of internal parity would have remained so, given that Tuco would never have sided with anyone.

Too used to not taking sides, but listening and nodding.

Always.

Whether it was a speech in favor of Madero or Diaz.

Certainly, he had his own beliefs, which tended to be contrary to existing power and inclined towards even radical change, but he was not used to expressing them.

“What are they saying?”

Juan was eager to know details, but strangely he didn't have any news.

It seemed as if the capital was anesthetized in a soap bubble.

If Benedicta had been interested, she might have smelled the same chloroform aroma that permeated the hospital walls.

Neither the wind nor the rain was enough to take him away from the streets of Mexico City.

It had penetrated deeply into the souls of the Mexicans.

The girl put her dress away in her room, waiting to be washed.

She wasn't used to buying something new, but, perhaps for the first time, she felt the need.

He felt he wanted to become another person.

Self-confident until then, she no longer saw any future.

Why stay in the hospital when his idealized love had turned out to be the opposite of what he thought and, in any case, he would have married a woman as vapid as she was rich and close to power?

Thinking about her past, Benedicta realized how she had seen nothing outside of her hometown.

A few surroundings and that's it.

He had never seen the sea, or any other place in Mexico.

Was this what he wanted for the rest of his life?

If she had been asked the question up until the previous quarter, she would have said yes without any hesitation.

But the summer of 1910 had changed his perspective.

It wasn't a year like any other.

How to leave?

What to live with?

What to do?

Who could have helped her?

Of all his acquaintances and family members, there was only one solution.

His brother Juan.

He had always been the one most inclined to change and travel, it was not for nothing that he had found a job on the railways and had been the only one to set foot outside the capital, telling of the endless spaces available.

Now, with the advent of a possible clash at the top between Diaz and Madero, perhaps a transfer elsewhere would have been conceivable.

Benedicta understood how she would have to probe Juan's soul and was afraid.

With his brother, there were few ties.

Juan had grown up detached from his sisters, as befitted porfiriato society.

Males were immediately diverted to fulfill certain roles, only associating with other males at school, on the streets, in the family and then at work.

Women, on the contrary, were immediately channeled into a different path.

Thus the bond between Consuelo and Benedicta remained much deeper than that with Juan, who practically only interacted with Tuco within the Ramirez family.

It was a behavior praised by everyone, by political, social and religious power, because this was always how it had always been done and would always be perpetrated in the future.

There was no doubt in everyone's mind about the rightness of this approach.

Now Benedicta found herself disorientated when faced with having to talk to her brother.

“I'll do it outside this house.”

At least he wouldn't have the eyes of the other family members on him.

One Sunday at the end of September, with the excuse of going out to visit Carmen, he tried to stalk Juan.

His brother's long levers allowed him to easily navigate the streets and move quickly.

Conversely, Benedicta had to trudge and swirl her feet at a high frequency to kick up dust, much like horses or carriages did.

The roads were mostly dirt, even the central ones, and were reduced to small paths on the outskirts, then disappearing outside the city.

Twice, she thought she was about to reach Juan, but at the last moment he suddenly turned and changed direction.

He was putting into practice a directive he had heard in various secret meetings, according to which he should never walk following a direct route, but should introduce variations and circular and ring routes.

“All to deflect possible stalking,” they claimed.

The dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz was based, like almost all regimes of that type, on a lot of repressive action implemented in a preventative way and indiscriminate arrests were the most obvious application.

On the other hand, if the arrest had been arranged precisely during the election campaign and against the President's main adversary, no one could feel safe.

On the third attempt, Benedicta was still not caught off guard and broke out into a sharp call.

“Juan...”

The boy froze.

Hearing his name spoken by a familiar voice, he had the instinct to turn and found himself facing his sister Benedicta.

“What are you doing here?”

The initial astonishment was so great that it called into question any form of questioning except what was easily attributable to the abnormality of that moment.

It was the first time they had met face to face outside of their home and, perhaps, it was the first time they had spoken to each other without any other presence.

A kind of brotherhood rediscovered at a given moment, but without any previous experience in being able to build a healthy relationship made up of memories and sedimented passages.

Benedicta preferred not to answer.

He ran his hand through his hair and pushed his brother aside.

The Sun, still in the middle of its path, illuminated every object and tended to whiten it, giving an effect of general uniformity to a landscape that had nothing similar.

Jumbles of styleless buildings, intricate and illogical streets, sudden changes due to progress, at least that's what was said and that's how it was perceived by those who had been used to seeing nothing change over the course of a few decades.

“How do you leave?”

The question was blunt.

Without any preamble, without any premise.

In Benedicta's mind the reflection had been so predominant that she had already dissected everything.

Juan looked at her in amazement.

Sometimes he seemed stupid in Benedicta's eyes, as he did not immediately come to the conclusions, so obvious to her.

“From where?”

Juan hadn't understood what his sister meant, if the place to escape from referred to the house, the hospital, the city, the state, the family.

“From all this. Living outside of Mexico City.”

The brother was unable to be of much help.

He knew train times, destinations and costs, but not the places themselves.

A town or village were just names on a map reachable or not by a few straight routes and then by an endless series of local journeys, mostly on horseback or on foot.

“I don't know, but I'd like to know.”

Benedicta snorted.

She wasn't willing to wait an indefinite time, she wanted certainties.

“But what do they talk about in your circles?”

Juan explained the topics to her in broad terms, trying to lower his voice and remain alone with her, away from prying eyes and ears.

“You will see that the revolution will break out and then everything will be different.”

He concluded enthusiastically.

Benedicta was not very pleased.

There was nothing concrete, but only vague hopes and promises.

Nothing about times or places.

On the other hand, he had no economic or other faculties to be able to take an initiative on his own.

He decided to postpone his thoughts of escape, taking refuge in the everyday life of small things.

As her mother Helena had once done and as Consuelo was putting into practice.

It was the strongest social anesthetic ever put into practice, a kind of drug that permeated the spirit of a people and made them harmless.

However, when power loses its sense of proportion, the magma compressed for decades tends to boil with ever greater force until it explodes.

The elections led to a landslide victory for the incumbent President.

Madero received less than a thousand votes.

“They're made up, I knew it, as usual.”

Juan was disconcerted and was about to abandon his liberal intentions to embrace something that, in his head, had always been clearly distanced.

The use of violence.

If nothing could be changed by hook or by crook, they would do it by crook.

Tuco had recorded the event through what the men at his shop, mostly supporters of Madero and waiting for a signal, had said to each other.

That day, in his home that he would soon abandon to move to a more sumptuous residence, Doctor Carrasco toasted with some excellent French wine, a gift from a wealthy city family to whom he had provided services in private for the treatment of infectious diseases of the offspring.

“To President Diaz and my bright future!”

Alone, in his room, he already saw himself surrounded by the most important authorities of the new presidential mandate.

The protests that arose from various sides were of no avail and Madero went to Texas.

“Just across the border, it's an exile,” said Juan dejectedly, who was starting out as a self-taught person in trying to use a stick as a sword.

“What I cannot do due to lack of technique, I will make up for with self-sacrifice for the revolution”.

In a few weeks, he was convinced that it was necessary to take action quickly and that this meant drawing blood.

The dead were useful.

They were supposed to be a warning to power.

Diaz and his acolytes had to be exterminated.

Plan of San Luis Potosì " was distributed to the railwaymen's club, i.e. Madero's program for the rebellion against Diaz, who, however, did not sit idle.

He had other members of the Liberal Party arrested and sent into exile.

“Calm down, now it's just a matter of a short time, a few months.”

At the club they were desperately trying to keep immediate revolutionary urges in check.

Everything had to be coordinated and unique.

This would have been the hallmark of the revolution compared to a normal uprising.

So Juan found himself having to share the fate of his entire family, for whom every day was identical to the previous and the next.

One after the other, there were sunsets that no one would have remembered, as they were busy with other things, managing the little things.

The shop, the home, body care, the hospital.

Tuco , Helena, Consuelo and Benedicta seemed immersed in an immutable and enchanted world, almost to the limit of the improbable for someone like Juan.

The month of October was slow to progress.

It seemed like everything was waiting for a trigger event.

A signal and a symbol.

Even nature seemed to participate in this situation and even the patients in the hospital.

Benedicta noticed a change in the atmosphere, as if the air carried with it tiny particles and scents.

Who knows if Dr. Carrasco had ever studied something like this during his previous labors?

After a few days, Benedicta agreed that, if the answer was positive, the doctor would not have received anything.

There is no worse deaf person than someone who doesn't want to hear, so said a popular proverb and in fact this was exactly what was happening.

Accustomed to constant revolts, both noisy and ineffective, the entourage of the presidential power was completely unsuited to receiving even the slightest warning.

So everyone deluded themselves that nothing would ever happen.

A month had already passed since the publication of Madero's program and nothing had moved.

Juan felt he was nervous.

Continuous practice with the stick and some rudiments of how to use a rifle were not enough, nor was the increasing amount of food put into one's body.

The tacos, whose flavor and texture he had always appreciated, were not to be counted during a meal and the same was true for the fruit that, here and there, was sold at street corners.

For Juan it was a direct way of coming into contact with the campesinos, that mass of peasants exploited beyond belief for whom the revolution had to be made.

Every liberal and progressive program put the agrarian question and the reform of land ownership at the center, now in the hands of a few landowners, who had no interest in increasing production and productivity.

They were already rich enough as it was.

While a parcellation of the lands would have allowed greater variety and diversification, together with a better subsistence and survival diet for those who now suffered from malnutrition and related diseases.

Someone like Dr. Carrasco should have understood the close link between poverty and mortality rate, but in his view all this was natural.

The poor had many children and it was right that they were "selected", as he used to say, citing Darwinian natural selection, a very powerful idea that many young doctors had made their own and translated into other areas, mainly social and cultural.

Thus a demographic balance was maintained and diseases were necessary to reduce the number of poor people.

It was a cynical speech, but perfectly in line with the conservative dictates of the Porfiriato.

“When will they move?”

Everyone was just waiting for Madero and his followers to return to Mexico to lead the revolution against the President.

The plan was simple and ingenious.

Cause local revolts to break out enough to send the federal military system into crisis, take control of some provinces and then march on the capital.

Simple, intuitive but also predictable.

Perhaps Madero was waiting for a signal himself.

But how was it possible for a leader not to lead his own people?

“It's started. North."

These were the telegraphic words to the railway workers' committee.

At that announcement, applause rose.

Little was known as information circulated slowly and with many obstacles.

To the north, in the state of Chihuahua, the town of Cuchillo Parado had fallen into the hands of Toribio Ortega Ramirez.

November 14, with Madero still in the United States.

Everyone was certain that now he would cross the river that separated him from Mexico and the Revolution would take hold.

Juan tried to rush to understand what it was like to shoot a rifle or a pistol.

The time seemed right.

“Puebla”.

This name remained on everyone's lips, especially at the Tuco shop , only after a few days.

Attacks on the police.

Riots, mostly.

But nothing revolutionary.

There was still a piece missing to make this movement different from all the previous ones.

For her part, Benedicta didn't have too many illusions.

He continued his usual routine at the hospital, almost without any reason and spirit of self-sacrifice.

It seemed to have become an appropriate and habitual gesture, not even to pay attention to Doctor Carrasco, who, day by day, radiated more and more joy at the approach of the fateful date of the wedding.

In his opinion, Porfirio Diaz's power was very solid, even when Madero proclaimed the general insurrection.

It was November 20th, a date that could have become the very symbol of the new Mexican course.

“He is so afraid of himself that he has already returned to where he came from!”, thus Doctor Carrasco had dismissed this unrealistic attempt.

Juan, from the height of his idealism, did not understand that politician's hesitations.

Didn't he know that there had been numerous uprisings?

From the north to the coast, from rural villages to medium-sized cities.

Surely nothing had happened in the capital, but Juan had been warned of it.

If he had wanted to take an active part in the revolutionary process he would have had to leave.

Where?

Mainly in the north.