Napoleon's Beekeeper

by José Luis de Juan

  ‘Any move towards the beehives?’ the beekeeper asks bluntly, cutting short the litany of difficulties.

  ‘Not yet. He mentioned it a great deal in the first meeting of the advisory committee. I told you in my letter.’

  ‘Yes, and the canon of Portoferraio told me so too, crossing himself. He repeated several times that Bonaparte’s sole recommendation was that they spring into action to secure a supply of honey. Only that. Nothing about reinforcing some of the mine tunnels, which have taken the lives of more than a few men before their time. Not a word about rationing the water. Not a single mention of exempting or reducing the peasants’ taxes until they see the result of their harvests in this year of drought. Nothing about reconstructing the bridges destroyed in the March floods…’

  ‘Honey seemed to be his only preoccupation, in effect,’ concludes Pasolini. ‘This buoys my hopes.’

  The beekeeper is distracted for a few moments. He looks at a painting he has seen many times before but now appears to be contemplating for the first time. The morning light comes sifting through the tall, narrow window, and a beam spills on the artwork, which is almost always in shadow. Saint George and the dragon. A canine, toothless dragon. The weak flames coming out of its mouth won’t burn much. Saint George, powerful, armed to the teeth, is going to tear it apart.

  ‘Of course, everything else was already being taken care of, which was amply demonstrated in the days following,’ Pasolini averts his gaze from the painting. ‘Such a frenzy has never been seen on the island before. Two hundred soldiers led by engineers repaired the busiest bridges. Another contingent took care of the roads, which due to the flooding were covered in fallen trees and large rocks where they hadn’t become deep quagmires that swallowed up entire wagons. Then he turned his attention to the valley and the mines. A brigade of agronomists worked to channel and distribute the limited supply of water. The water diviner that the English brought over from Marseilles found abundant wells that had been unknown up to that point, some of them at a depth of four men. But the boldest move was reserved for the mines. Bonaparte visited them with Coronel Legrand. They travelled every inch of the tunnels, even the most dilapidated, and came out black as polish after deciding to abandon forty per cent of them because they were on the brink of caving in. Having skipped lunch, fuelled by a few glasses of Aleatico wine and a little bread, they dedicated the afternoon to drawing up the blueprints for the new tunnels. The next morning, they started the excavations, which couldn’t have been more fortunate…’

  Father Anselmo explodes.

  ‘What’s the point of this paean to Bonaparte and his vanities and public works! I ask if he has made a move towards your bees and you exhale a stinking puff of hot air about his accomplishments in Elba. You’re sounding just like those naïve Bonapartists who sprouted like mushrooms in Lombardy and Emilia during his first Milanese campaign.’

  The beekeeper regards him with a certain resentment. Even if he was once his teacher, who does he think he is, giving him a lesson in politics?

  ‘He hasn’t made a move yet, but he will.’ He draws closer to the priest and meekly looks him in the eye.

  ‘I know him well. I’ve been studying him for years. We were born the same day, not all that far from each other. You are witness, Father, to the fact that I foresaw his defeat in Russia, as well as the opening of the Africa front. I know I’m right about his obsession with bees, even though I don’t know its full scope. And he has me on his mind. He knows that the beekeeper who wrote to him three lustra ago is based not far away, though his enquiries have been discreet.’

  16.

  Why Elba?

  What led the Alliance to allow Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to carry out his exile on an island so close to the coast of Italy, a few days’ journey from Cannes or Nice? Talleyrand proposed Corfu, where he would have been at much more of a remove, and even Saint Helena. It could not have been Montecristo, the denuded island that some years later Dumas would put on the map when he told the tale of Dantès’s laborious revenge. Not Giglio or Cabrera, nor the many other islands or islets of the Mediterranean, because any of those would have been a dungeon for him. Although it would have made Campbell’s job easier; at the end of the day the coastline of Elba extends one hundred and seventy kilometres, with an infinitude of natural ports and anchorages.

  They could have confined him to an island of the Pacific, to Tahiti, for example, with a minimal entourage and zero contact with the outside world. An English frigate could have kept a close watch on him, forever monitoring his movements, just as Pasolini’s neighbours do. No vessel that entered or departed the anchorage could have evaded monitoring by the English commissioner. Or in Lanzarote, where he would have been surprised to see volcanic interruptions, which lasted several years. In Tahiti or Lanzarote, Bonaparte would have disappeared from the political map of the world in less than a year.

  By choosing Elba, what they wanted was for him to rot close by, in the lake of Europe. Perhaps it was Madame de Staël’s bright idea. Or perhaps what they were seeking was to create the conditions for his fateful return, and in this way truly vanquish him on his reappearance. And thus, the Alliance strategists thought, they would destroy his legend forever, as if his impossible feats might be erased from human minds.

  17.

  Being born on an island. Growing up on an island. Corsica. Elba. Great Britain. What meaning to attribute to this? The theory of isolated people’s conservatism, their short-lived rebellions.

  Only an islander can turn the universe into an island to wage war against everyone else. Islands everywhere except one place. Siberia.

  Bonaparte wanted a peace that never suited perfidious England. And he choked on the chancre of Spain, that mountain of granite and guitars.

  Pasolini’s eyes are closed. He thinks of the wisdom that books have afforded him, of what he learned from his father, of the many hopes placed in bees and in himself. All of this should be preparation enough for something that hasn’t yet manifested and perhaps never will.

  The beekeeper opens his eyes and writes:

  Easy island

  Authority is an island

  The waterlogged thoughts of an island

  If the pedlars harass you, you’re on an island

  Beast in rut, it wants to be invaded from coast to coast

  The pigeons in all its squares are mistaken

  Only the sea restrains it

  Whorish island

  The cramped, consistent handwriting, wrought thanks to years of calligraphy, dries on the coarse paper. The beekeeper writes while lying in a rope hammock that hangs from worn-out eyebolts embedded in the rock wall. Because the walls are so close together, the hammock resembles a basket containing a weighty sack of bones. Pasolini’s body is arched and his buttocks almost graze the floor. The discernible swaying lends his writing an angular bent. Perhaps it’s his posture as he writes, lying in a hammock in the cellar beneath the flickering light of a lamp, that gives his texts their suspended tone, of waiting and at the same time of vigilance. He seems to be about to jump up, ready for the beginning of the end of the world or the ardent machete blow as he lies in the hammock.

  His thighs precariously balance the mahogany lap desk. The inkwell rarely spills. It is attached to the left corner of the varnished surface that, with its two copper hinges, lifts to reveal a cavity where he keeps his paper and quills.

  Pasolini gets into his hammock like a warrior onto his mount. The rope has become elastic, and, before he gets in, the hammock seems too high, but then it yields to the point that the beekeeper can pick up the bulky lap desk from the floor. He sets it on his thighs at a certain practised angle, which enables balance and thereby writing.

  It is perhaps at the vertex of that angle, reflects Pasolini, where I generate writing. When his knees are uncomfortable and creak, his grammatical hinges suffer. Everything counts, not just stimulating the mind: the incline of the lap desk, the tilt of the inkwell, the scrape of the quill. H
e often falls asleep lying like so. Only a few minutes, so his fingers don’t let go of the quill, his thighs don’t relax, his ankles don’t abandon the exact hole in the hammock that allows him to articulate his thoughts. In addition, in the cellar there is no difference between day and night. It is easy to lose all sense of time, to get lost in the uncertainty that has been his lot in life.

  When this happens, the sleepless writing lasts a few moments only. The beekeeper’s hand halts, and he wakes. On one occasion it didn’t happen like that. He awoke with a bad taste in his mouth, as happens when he takes a long nap in an uncustomary posture. His hand was still gripping the dry quill, blunted from tracing furrows on the paper. The inkwell was empty. There were hundreds of pages spread across the floor, like Jacobin handbills. He reached for one. It was gibberish, he couldn’t make head or tail of it. The scrawls seemed like fly excrement clustered at random, columns of hieroglyphs in which not a single sign was recognisable.

  With a heavy head, perplexed, he sat up in the hammock and jumped down to solid ground with difficulty. Hundreds of written pages in a barbarian language. He gave no credit to the sea of absurdity that populated the dirt floor. He confirmed that the iron door was still obstructed from the inside by the rusty bar. Everything was in place on the shelves. It seemed no one had touched his pages or the bundles of his writing that were piled on the table, eaten away by woodworm. His unsent letters, his political manifestos against all established powers, his senseless poems: everything was in its place.

  His bottom lip trembling, the beekeeper looked at the strange signs that he alone could have sketched. Some pages showed a sure hand, while on others it was as if he’d hesitated, perhaps overcome with tiredness. The pages seemed to have been composed with the anguish of a prophetic spirit. As if it foresaw catastrophes and misfortunes through thousands of images that, deciphered, would require millions of words.

  It resembled a Far Eastern language. Pasolini consulted tomes that had been relegated to the second and third rows of the shelving dug into the rock. A very old edition of Marco Polo’s Travels put him on the trail of a variety of Chinese spoken in northern Mongolia.

  The Venetian had copied down certain phrases from that language in his diaries, with the belief that it could be a predecessor of the Chinese of the era. The transcribed phrases were the following:

  We welcome the eminent envoy from the world of behind. (welcome banner for Marco Polo in Prince XX’s court)

  cut the heads at the shoulder and let them macerate for two sunsets (from a Mongol penal code)

  Cross-checking the ideograms transcribed by Polo against some of the ones he had generated while he slept, he managed to identify, after several sleepless nights spent concocting different combinations, four words that featured in his mysterious text:

  world

  behind

  heads

  sunsets

  Further investigations confirmed that the ideograms representing these concepts were repeated, every one of them, an identical number of times throughout the nearly one hundred pages he had produced that somnambulant night. It could have been a coincidence, but it wasn’t, for when the beekeeper catalogued the remaining ideograms, he realised that repetitions were few and far between.

  While Pasolini was engrossed in deciphering his dreamlike Mongol script, Bonaparte was unleashing military, political and dynastic battles. Fontainebleau, where the rest of the world would stop him in his tracks, was very close. News of the Alliance closing in on the diminutive Corsican reached the beekeeper when he was travelling around Tuscany delivering samples of honey and collecting orders from wholesalers he’d been supplying for years. He decided to extend his sales trip by several weeks to search for an Orientalist who could decipher the pages that had emanated from his quill. From Arezzo he went to Urbino, where he was assured that Bologna was where one of the most renowned sinologists of Italy taught.

  Professor Solferino was absorbed by the ideograms for two days. He could recognise twenty-two ideograms, as well as the already identified four, which harboured similarities with the prevailing Chinese ideograms of the era of Marco Polo’s travels, though on occasion he had to force his imagination a little to see them. And he ventured to guess the meaning of a dozen more using analogy and the surrounding context. Solferino advised the dispirited Pasolini to consult an elderly merchant of Trieste who had traded with the Mongol court for years.

  On returning to Elba after almost a month of stumbling around the interior of the Italian peninsula, the beekeeper summarised what he had learnt about the text endowed with prophetic qualities that concerned him and the part he would play in the world:

  One. Almost all the ideograms half-recognised by Solferino in his Bologna study seem to refer to the human reproductive organ. They designate the sexual organs of man and woman, but above all of woman. According to the professor, the suggestive repetition of some verbs recalls a memoir written by a frequenter of bordellos.

  Two. The discoveries of the sinologist, even if they are not certain, are disappointing. It is much like using one’s hands to dig up the earth in search of revelations about the origin of the world, only to uncover a troupe of scantily clad Chinese dancers fashioned from age-old clay.

  Three. Given this, the inexplicable fact of my writing while asleep (as far as I know I’ve never sleepwalked) in an archaic Mongol tongue completely unknown to me starts to seem unimportant. What if it were a mere coincidence? Fate needs no explanation. After all, don’t I have an uncommon visual memory? I must have read Polo’s chronicles at least twice. There is nothing strange about retaining those four ideograms and reproducing them that night seventy-six times. The other hundred and twenty-three could have emerged from mere variations on those four.

  Four. As for the Bolognese sinologist’s interpretation, what if Solferino were the infamous satyr who jumps modish young women on Thursday nights in the vicinity of the Porta Saragozza? If that were the case it would not be strange for the scholar to see sexual motivations in ideograms that, because they were invented by me, should be completely unintelligible to him.

  Five. Just before embarking in Piombino on the return journey to Elba I learned that Bonaparte had abdicated in Fontainebleau. This implausible, urgent news dispels the Mongol episode, which has been tormenting my head for more than two sunsets, as if it were no more than a fleeting mist.

  Six. Write without fail to Father Anselmo tomorrow.

  18.

  Back home, a letter from Father Anselmo was awaiting Pasolini. Before breaking the seal, he unloaded the new hive frames purchased in Bologna, which were much more resilient and displayed better workmanship than the ones that could be found in Grosseto or Siena. He had also acquired two new beekeeper suits with copper mesh that were light and comfortable, as well as a smoke blower that featured a separate burner. His wife wanted to know the cost of so many purchases but Pasolini ignored the question.

  The priest’s letter informed him about what he already knew. And, in essence, all he did was assign Pasolini vague tasks, while Anselmo in his parish of Pisa did nothing apart from sending orders gift-wrapped in letters. What ‘information’ was he supposed to obtain ‘to devise a feasible plan’?

  He had agreed to join the Bonapartist Society to indulge his mentor, on the condition that his role be limited to the matter of the imperial bees. If there was action to be had, he would participate in the capacity of celebrated beekeeper, not as an ordinary continental conspirator.

  After skipping his evening meal, restless, Pasolini went to look at his chard and cauliflower. Bonaparte in Elba, he thought, stroking the damp leaves. He felt as if everything had fallen on his shoulders all of a sudden. The map of Europe, meticulously embroidered over for fifteen years, was going to be completely rewoven on a dilapidated loom. The queen had fled. The swarm was disoriented. What had happened in Leipzig and, after that, in Fontainebleau? First and foremost, he had to analyse the atmospheric conditions, the stage of the reproductive
cycle, the configuration of the swarms in Leipzig and in Fontainebleau. The viscosity of the honey, the number of queens, the density of the pollens, the colouring of the wax. The feel of the hive, in short.

  The next morning, he sent dispatches to the Fontainebleau Beekeeping Society and to Quentin Auprey, his colleague in the French region. In Portoferraio he procured maps of the area in which the ominous abdication had occurred. He affixed the maps to wooden planks and hung them on the walls of the porch. In no time, Fontainebleau and its surroundings in a twenty-kilometre radius were dotted with pins and little coloured flags.

  Whenever someone surprised him while he was working on the maps, he said he was reconstructing the movements of the Napoleonic troops, the cavalry charges, the havoc wreaked by the cannon fire. It was a reasonable pastime, considering the eccentricity that his fellow humans attributed him. Could a shepherd whose flock was not sheep but bees ever be normal? In reality, the little flags’ diverse colours corresponded to the presence of hives (the colour yellow), of uncontrolled swarms (the colour red), and of queen-rearing bee farms (the colour blue). A larger flag in black with a white ‘N’ indicated the position of Bonaparte.

  19.

  In his Palazzina office, Bonaparte is fornicating with his boots on. Sitting very erect on one of the simple chairs crafted for him in Pisa, his white breeches slip down his shins. He barely moves. Rather, he is buffeted by the plunger movement of the woman who straddles his crotch, her back to him. She has a lost look in her eyes. A weary expression crosses her freckly face, which Boney, as the English call him, can’t see.