Napoleon's Beekeeper

by José Luis de Juan

  Down below, the moon dominates the plain as if it were the eye of God. A warm breeze starts blowing. The Sirocco again, Pasolini laments. Whenever the Sirocco blows, the urge to breathe dissipates: the air is too dense and tangible to ventilate the chest. A few terraces further down, the hives boil in the night.

  9.

  In Portoferraio, some eight kilometres distant, the air is just as dense and palpable, and as humid. As he lies in his camp bed as if the island were just a tactical encampment, a mere summertime island impasse, bathed in sweat, his eyes open, Bonaparte’s breathing is agitated. He tries to reconstruct a nightmare with multiple branches.

  He’d been asleep barely an hour, but the dream had contained decades and generations. Everything took place by making tremendous leaps in time without losing coherence or the connective tissue between events. Now the ordeal is fading as the Corsican gazes at the ceiling and hears his classmates at the Brienne school as a distant echo: La paille au nez! La paille au nez! One year the class clown had made sense of the harsh French pronunciation of his Corsican name, Napolione. How many times had he stayed his left hand, which in the most solemn moments made as if to brush an imaginary wisp of straw from his nose. He had never slept in a barn!

  Wavering, la paille au nez cuts through the room. His small and ever plumper figure goes over to the east-facing window and opens it wide. Outside everything is engulfed by the moonlight and the stars’ silence. It appears the wind wants to push the sea back to the horizon whence it came. It reminds Bonaparte of the back of a scruffy cat.

  He thinks of the visit to the honeybee farms that he has scheduled in a few hours’ time. As if there weren’t more important things that demanded his attention. Betrayal, for instance. It is a human weakness that does not exist in nature, he thinks. Could one bee ever betray another? They never hesitate and thus are free from fear. That said, it is the fear of losing everything – all those days dedicated to feeding on flowers and delivering the pollen to the hive at dusk – that makes them remain inside gathering all the honey they can whenever the beekeeper blows his smoke. They think a fire is coming and that they need to escape laden with honey, the only thing they have. But no, that is a preservation instinct. Bees are not heroic or exalted. Who would want any heroism from them, beyond their virginal self-sacrifice? Tantus amor florum, et generandi gloria mellis, exclaimed the ingenuous Virgil.

  What might be the colour of the honey this year, he wonders as he paces barefooted around the bedchamber. It is never the same, at least not in Ajaccio. Could it be that Ajaccio flowers alter their pollen’s characteristics? Or is it because the correlation of forces between orange flowers and lavender – and not to forget the wild clover and the honeysuckle, the blackberry – vary according to temperature, rain, wind? I will ask this Pasolini about it. Last year, for example, Ajaccio honey showed distinct characteristics at different times. In May it had a clear tone, almost transparent, while in June it was denser and dark, though that was nothing in comparison to the honey in September, when it was black and stony like ebony.

  Bees are disciplined and predictable, but the outcome of their labour is uncertain, the same as happens with the deeds of men, concludes Bonaparte.

  10.

  Andrea Pasolini’s cellar. As he descends the greyish wooden steps, household goods and gadgets appear hanging from the stone walls. Squeezed into one corner, pocked with rust, is protective clothing fashioned from metallic mesh, as well as other outfits and contraptions of the trade that Buffon felt a certain repulsion towards. Leaning against the wall are half-rotted beehives and frames waiting to be repaired.

  Along a passage flanked by watering cans and dented saucepans, pieces of ploughs and harnesses, rolled-up frayed carpets and broken cartwheels, the beekeeper advances. An iron door is hidden behind several layers of fishing nets, and its lock responds smoothly to Pasolini’s key.

  The light from the lamp illuminates the rickety shelves. In the foreground, Voltaire’s oeuvre in twenty-eight volumes in folio. These are accompanied by the forty-six tomes of the Diderot and d’Alembert Encyclopédie. Further down are the bound works of Rousseau, Buffon, Montaigne and Hobbes. Thought and poetry don’t seem to get on, for the beekeeper keeps these at a remove from each other. On a bottom shelf, at hip height, Villon, Ronsard and Racine shine in gold letters. The small niche excavated in the rock and clad with the bark of the cork oak is reserved for treatises on bees. The works of Pliny the Elder, Varro Reatinus, Palladiua, Aristomachus and Phyliscus of Thasos mingle with the more modern Swammerdam, Boerhaave, Schirach and Huber. Some tomes can’t be identified without being opened, as the spines are tattered.

  Pasolini hangs the lamp from a hook that is situated above a hammock, which looks to have been made from a thick damask curtain of the type used to cover the main entrance to rural churches. That is where Pasolini lies down to read and write.

  11.

  Bonaparte walks around the courtyard of the Palazzina. He has just masturbated gazing at the stimulating roundness of the moon, standing, his legs apart, in the middle of the garden. He thinks he pacifies his insomnia in this way, and sometimes it works. The semen has fallen on the leaves of a philodendron, and the holes in its leaves resemble the empty sockets of surprised eyes. From above, at the top of the old windmill, a watchman has seen him do it.

  Two bees confused by the glow of the moon wheel around a rose bush that has white blooms. Bonaparte, without knowing why, suddenly recalls the frustration that seized him after his troops’ defeat at Acre. If he and his men had taken that stronghold in Palestine from the Turks – if that rogue Smith hadn’t arrived in time to come to the Turks’ aid – he would have been able to change the face of the East, would have taken the revolution to the Indies. If…

  12.

  Pasolini’s apiary. Nothing sleeps. Another kind of activity is taking place, different from the daily kind. At the entrance to hive number 7, which now in August houses some forty thousand worker bees, a fierce battle ensues. A squadron of sentinels is engaged in a battle to the death with a small swarm of wasps that, making the most of the bright night, had attempted to break into the hive to gorge on honey. There are casualties on both sides, a melange of eyes, antennas, wings and white abdomens with striated hairs, their stingers torn. It is moments since the queen passed by, causing a great stir among the worker bees on the frontline. Several dozen have died of overzealousness. Indifferent, the cleaner bees collect the warm bodies and carry them off to a distant cemetery.

  13.

  Fabrizio, rival beekeeper to Andrea Pasolini, sleeps face up. He snores resoundingly, his arms crossed.

  The window remains shut, it seems the sleeping man foresaw the Sirocco’s arrival. A dull buzz fills the bedchamber. At the back, rays of light pass through a glass panel. It is a cabinet two spans wide that communicates with the outside of the house. The bees enter and depart the glass case at will, and inside it they construct their wax cells and crystallise their honey in four vertical frames. Fabrizio saw this domestic hive at the house of a naturalist bee scholar in Genoa and, with the help of a ship joiner from Porto Longone, had it copied immediately. If any worry wakes him in the early hours of morning, Fabrizio, without leaving his bedchamber, can find relief in seeing how his slaves keep labouring for him through the night.

  14.

  Pasolini’s honeybee farm is located to the east of the island, close to Capoliveri. The hamlet teeters on a rocky ridge, in the fashion of Tuscan villages that, from their perch on the hills, look out towards Giglio and Montecristo.

  Winding streets that a cart can barely squeeze down; houses huddled together as if holding each other back, as if no one wants to miss out on what is happening in their neighbour’s home. In that apparently unplanned clustering of families is a gregarious instinct that the beekeeper does not share. If the houses were simply to spill down the hillside, everyone could breathe easier, he sometimes thinks.

  Pasolini’s house isn’t down below or high up. It
is located at the midpoint, on a wide steep slope that has almost the same surface area as the peak, where the hamlet’s houses collide with the small church. He has never stopped blessing the wise choice of his ancestors. He couldn’t live in the heart of the hamlet, overwhelmed by the constant presence of neighbours who live more in your house than in their own, whom neither doors nor shutters keep out and who are suspicious of privacy, seeing it as fair motive for rumours. Nor would it suit him to be too far distant, for that could mean he might awaken the curiosity of his fellows even more, perhaps leading them to haunt him with visits, which would interrupt his daily chores and force him to take even more precautions than the ones he takes at present to ensure they don’t spy on him.

  By contrast, he tells himself, here I am in the hamlet and yet at the same time I’m at a remove from it. They can watch me all they want from above. They get the reassuring sense that I don’t escape their gaze and am within shouting distance, for sometimes they call to me from their windows when they see me working in the garden, hauling equipment, fixing the hives. In some ways, by always watching my house and the movements of its household, those on this side of the slope think they can keep a better eye on me than they do on the neighbours they live wall to wall with, or on those who live on the other side of the square. The most they see of those ones is a door with its beaded hemp-twine curtain and a window or two, which are small and always in semi-darkness. They peer from above and see me or believe they see me. They keep track of our hung-out washing, the yield of our trees (the cherries, knocked around by the May mists, have become sparrow feed), our mealtimes, who comes to visit us. Their neighbours from the other side of the square, who have no such entertainment, sometimes visit them just to cast a glance at my house and call out to me. The poor things have no one to keep an eye on from the height of their houses, for the rock they stand on falls away, without slope or terraces, in a sheer drop to the valley. With the excuse of wanting to see what the weather’s like on the Castiglione side, at the first opportunity they make for their host’s kitchen or bedchamber and look, yes, towards Castiglione, and they even scan the peak of Monte Argentario, but above all their gaze lingers on what lies below.

  Very few of them understand that they only see partially, that they barely see anything of relevance. For a start, Pasolini tells himself, our trees are situated strategically to hamper the view. Most of my and my family’s activities are undertaken beneath the shade of the large oak, the two chestnut trees, the walnut tree and the linden trees. At least the most compromising gestures and deeds. For example, if I ever venture to read or write in the garden (my loved ones at church or the market, no one around, the mastiff guarding the entrance), I always do so beneath the oak after depositing my reading or writing material in a wheelbarrow, camouflaged under two bushels of firewood, and after taking a long walk from the shed around the garden clearings (no measure is precaution enough). By all means it’s important to give fodder to the neighbours above, and for that reason I urinate in the clearings or against the medlar trunk (urine is very good for medlars), I let out curses among the mimosas, fix implements beyond the cover of the porch and, in the morning, when there is shade, I strain the honey on the threshing floor. All of it for their eyes.

  As well as this, the neighbours above see what I want them to see, and they can call out, only for me to make as if I can’t hear them (I’m known for being deaf), but they can’t come close to inspect something that has caught their attention (figuring out how to use a spyglass would never occur to them), can’t come touch it with their own hands or snoop around the hidden corners like they do with their neighbours at the square. They cannot. Thank God their houses are constructed right on the rock and the rock plummets vertically above my property to form that broad earth terrace where my family has been settled for more than one hundred years. To bridge the gap, they would have to dangle from ropes and be indifferent to vertigo – would have to be trapeze artists, in other words. My father told me there was a pilgrim project to make a shortcut from here to the church square. It involved carving steps into the rock and making the most of their recesses for the climb. There are still three of them carved into that hard-as-flint rockface, hidden by the undergrowth. To get here, first you must go down the other side and then climb. Which entails a long detour to the base of the hill in order to then take the steep path that snakes up to my house, from where the Capoliveri bells can be glimpsed.

  The geese announce visitors long before they arrive. Then the mastiff and other dogs give a snarling welcome. The visitors can’t do as they do with their neighbours above, calling out softly and coming inside before they receive an answer, crossing the threshold and slipping into the kitchen or living room without encountering the faintest resistance. On balance, here below their presence is always announced. But there’s still a need for caution. Your neighbours’ inquisitiveness is amorphous, and it is only possible to survive among them if that inquisitiveness is made concrete again and again and their knowledge of you made accessible. Information must be proffered on your part: what you’re doing, what you’ve done, what you’re going to do. In this way their curiosity isn’t sated but it does simmer down. If you’re always hiding your life, their attention turns inordinate and voracious: they will want to find out through any means possible and won’t hesitate to use rumour, invention and slander to satisfy their appetite. Every so often you yourself have to give them something to talk about.

  My position is supremely delicate. And more important than what I say to them – I can’t say much, since they can’t speak with me as they do with the neighbour from around the corner or from the other side of the square – is what I do at home so that they can see and take note. When I travel to Grosseto or Pisa for a few days, the neighbours above will know before I announce it. I ensure that my preparations will leave no room for doubt as to my impending trip and its causes. I talk about Grosseto, Pisa or Siena loudly, and get angry with poor Berta for not having my clothing laid out and the vessels for the honey clean and ready to be used. If I bump into one of the neighbours from above on my way to town, I offer to run errands for him in the city and go into meticulous detail about my expedition, which, you can rest assured, means that my neighbour will spread the news all over as soon as he reaches the square.

  In Grosseto I have Lina. I like entangling myself in her long legs, her eagerness to please. After a time I weary of her, of her attention for those two or three days, her distinct scent, and I leave, renewed and sated, for the unchanging and inaccessible life of my Elba house. My secret, and the need to keep up appearances, are what tie me to this place. Being seen in the distance and confused with another, slipping out of sight, transforming myself.

  15.

  In the city of Pisa, at the beginning of July, two months after the Emperor arrived on the island of Elba, the beekeeper Pasolini walks beside an older man with an ashen face and cassock. They bypass the tower and head for the streets in the city centre. They seem intent on an intricate problem.

  ‘Bonaparte’s troops control the island, it’s impossible to get close to him without passing through at least four checkpoints,’ says Pasolini, glancing at his companion out of the corner of his eye. ‘First there are the many sentries stationed three hundred metres from the Palazzina dei Mulini; then, the guardsmen at the garden gate; beyond that, inside the house, the bodyguards and, finally, the chamberlains and secretaries, some of them armed.’

  ‘As I understand it, he ventures outside the grounds a great deal,’ the parish priest objects, sizing up Pasolini as he would an altar server who perennially makes excuses.

  ‘Never without a vast entourage. The trip from Fontainebleau through Provence has convinced him of the risk of attack. Many people hate him.’

  ‘He is not a fearful man. Rumour has it that some nights he goes out in disguise to mingle with the sailors in the port taverns.’

  ‘He has done, that’s true. Yet even on those outings, four of his best a
nd most loyal dragoons don’t take their eyes off him.’

  They step inside a church on Via Consoli del Mare. The priest genuflects before moving through the central nave. The weak bulbs shining in the side chapels light his way.

  ‘The middle of August would be the best time,’ says the priest, closing the door of the sacristy. ‘The day of the Assumption.’

  The beekeeper smiles. ‘Ferragosto? The day Rome is deserted…You forget it’s a pagan celebration above all, Father Anselmo.’

  ‘It has both faces. Emperor Augusto’s instituting it doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s the day the heavens reclaim the Virgin.’

  The beekeeper goes to respond that Saint John’s Day was a good moment too and yet it was impossible to do anything, that his Elba associates are nervous, but the priest’s gaze stops him.

  ‘The heat will be stifling,’ he says instead. ‘These first few days of July have been terrible on Elba.’

  ‘Precisely, Andrea. The heatwave will reach its zenith on the fifteenth of August and then the land will begin to cool. Heat makes the French sluggish. The chancelleries of the entirety of Europe will be on holiday. The monarchs, lounging in their summer residences. Bonaparte will have no choice but to rest, take naps, bathe in the sea, go riding at sun-up. August is not a good month for intrigues, much less the time to recapture what has been lost. Everyone will be off their guard. And that’s when we will act.’

  ‘Then we will have to think of a better plan than the one we had in June, if you permit me, Father Anselmo. No one can get to him if not expected and announced in advance. Two of our men have infiltrated the Palazzina, but they don’t get any closer than the stables or preparing the food in the troop’s kitchen. From them we receive reports, some valuable, but you shouldn’t dream of receiving help from the inside for the moment. The French are very suspicious. And loyal to the death. The soldiers he brought with him were handpicked by Bonaparte himself and his most esteemed officials.’