It was always in the entryway of the main house, welcoming all the family members. From Motul they took it to Mérida, and from there it emigrated to Monterrey. Brown, serious, with a hard Roman face, it had a simple design, an elegant one. Without a doubt it was always appreciated and envied.

They brought it from a company called Ansonia, in New York, at the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time it was one of the most precise models available, thanks to the marvelous pendulum that swung harmoniously inside its sleek chamber.

It was not more than two meters tall and a little less than forty centimeters wide. With great pride it chimed every quarter-hour and religiously at the top of the hour.

The clock marked many of the family’s happy moments: the hour of births, the hour of weddings, the hour of victories. But it also marked times of suffering: the interminable hours of loss, both human and material.

After being a loyal and punctual witness, the old clock said farewell little by little to each of the family members, with such profound sadness that nothing, not even time itself, could completely remove.

San Nicolás was the plantation that the Novelo Puerto family loved the most. It was the property that gave them more: more experience, more power, more fortune, surely. But the most important thing was that San Nicolás was their second home.

Crescencio and Rita took their first steps as hennequen plantation owners the twenty-fourth of December, 1885, in José Dolores Cámara’s office in the city of Motul. On that day and in that place was when they passed papers on the San Nicolás ranch and its annex, Pakbiholchén.

On this property they eventually had more than 120 heads of cattle, six saddle horses, fifty working mules and a honey farm, with 100 cork beehives. For hennequen production, they had a piece of machinery that transformed the agave leaves into fibers. It was inside a wooden and zinc building, which had, attached to it, a semi-fixed Marshal boiler. They had a Vencedora shredding machine, and a two horse-power Worthington pump. They also had a 400-pound press and 3 Aeromotor windmills. The Pichic field was seven thousand mecates in size, or approximately 140,000 meters of hennequen. The Kuichén field had 6,000 meters of hennequen for cultivation.

But to Crescencio and Rita the most important thing about the plantation was the sixty-three families who lived there and who, in one way or another, become part of their own family: the Pools, the Cans, the Peches, the Batúnes, the Mays, the Cehs, among many others. Most of them lived in houses on the three long streets to one side of the plantation.

The main house was very beautiful. Its walls were decorated with yellow flowers. There was a huge central patio with an enormous tree in the middle of it. The most important workers lived around the patio, like the mayocol, overseer of the col, or fields; the general manager; and the schoolteacher. That was also where the guest houses were. San Nicolás had a church, a school, and the building with the machinery, where they transformed the hennequen.

The Novelo Puerto family worked assiduously for many years and they spent so much time in this place that it became their second home. It was there that their children learned how to ride horses, where they had countless parties, where their beloved Marta was born, where they had many happy times with the family, and there, also, where they buried their family members. The Novelo Puerto family left a large part of their legacy in San Nicolás.

A few years after acquiring San Nicolás, Crescencio and Rita decided to get a second plantation, called San Juan. And some time later came the annex hennequen plantations, San Martín and San Joaquín.

The last plantation they added to the family’s rustic lands was Santa Marta, a country estate situated ten kilometers north of the town of Telchac, part of Motul. They bought it from Pedro Pérez Miranda on the second of March, 1900.

And that’s how they found themselves at the beginning of the twentieth century: as an important center of the hennequen industry, with hundreds of workers depending on them. They had many heads of cattle, mares, donkeys, geldings, mules… So many families, so many animals and so many, so many things.

They passed their days administering the properties, thanking God for all the blessings they had received, and planning the next move. They both loved to work hard, and together they celebrated all their triumphs, even the tiny ones.

But the days were not as long as they would have liked, and unfortunately there were other things that were neglected. It’s not possible to have everything in life. If we could have seen through the keyhole into their home, we would have discovered that they both learned this in a most difficult way. The “saints” that were given to them wound up costing more than they ever could have imagined.