The Day of the Bees

by Thomas Sanchez

  If only my own laughter could have drowned out the other! A mocking laughter came through the stone columns. We turned to find the source of the sound, but saw no one. The laughter grew louder. We hurried back to the Bearcat. Footsteps sounded behind us in the abbey, the scuffling of stones disturbed by many feet. When we got back into the car you started the engine. As we quickly rolled up the windows we saw the empty abbey. But above the rumble of the engine the laughter still echoed, accusatory and ugly. We drove away, the fields blurring as the Bearcat’s heavy bulk swerved around corners of the twisting mountain road. You kept looking into the rear view mirror, trying to angle it for a view of the road behind. The morning sun glared off the glass, slashing a cold white light into your eyes. You pushed the mirror away in frustration, driving faster into the mountains. I placed my hand on your knee and squeezed, not out of fear, but to reassure you that we were in this together. My body had your love and that was comforting. Perhaps what we heard in the abbey was not laughter, but the echo of distant crows cackling in the dawn light. As supple as my body was, yours was growing more rigid, the animal in your blood rising instinctively.

  “See if anyone is following us,” you said.

  I swung around. Through the dusty back window the road unraveled and disappeared around a curve. I assured you, “There’s no one.”

  “Keep watching!”

  Your foot pressed harder on the accelerator as I kept watch out the back window. Then I saw them. At first I thought they were only black specks in the rapidly disappearing road behind. Specks? Or maybe black crows? But … crows on a road? The specks grew larger, closing the gap.

  “Yes,” I murmured under my breath, fearful that someone could overhear my words. “Something is back there. Something is following us.”

  “Bastards!” You gripped the rear view mirror again to try and get a view.

  We both could see them now. The specks took form, as if we were being pursued by speeding winged insects with slick heads and bulbous eyes. The sun glinted off them as they gained on us.

  “They must have been watching all night in Ville Rouge! They must have followed us to the abbey! Why the hell wasn’t I aware?”

  “Aware?”

  The insects sped closer. Now I could see—the wings coming from their bodies were actually their elbows, bent out at the sides of their motorbikes. Their slick heads were leather helmets. The bulbous eyes were large glass goggles strapped to their faces. The whine of their engines screamed with menace as they closed in on us. You rolled down your window and stuck your arm out, waving them to go around us, but they did not. They sped right up to the back bumper of the Bearcat. Your arm out the window clenched into a raised fist. Your foot pressed down on the accelerator. A smell of burning rubber cut the air. We could go no faster. The insects swerved out on either side of us, pulling along-side on their motorbikes, their eyes masked by goggles, their snarling laughter as loud as the whining engines. The laughter was the same we had heard in the abbey. Fists pounded the outside of the Bearcat. Something thudded against my side window, cracking the glass. Then quickly the insects peeled away, darting ahead, their bikes leaning into the curve of the highway as they sped out of sight.

  I didn’t realize until after they disappeared that my hand on your knee had become a claw, my fingernails digging into your flesh through your trousers. I raised my hand and gently brushed the sweat from your forehead. What was this menace you still saw so clearly on the empty road ahead, as if a howling storm darkened the summer sky? A loud pop sounded in our ears, and then another: the rapid pop-pop-pop of the engine backfiring. We both looked quickly at the gas gauge—the indicator arrow pointed to empty. The engine sputtered into silence. The whir of the tires on pavement was the only sound. The Bearcat rolled to a stop. We looked at each other in the sudden stillness. We smiled, relieved there hadn’t been another blowout, relieved the insects were gone. We had each other. What else mattered?

  You continued smiling and said, “Maybe I never should have traded that big blue painting to Elouard for this Bearcat.”

  “And what about the gold chains of Elouard’s wife you also got when you traded the painting? If you hadn’t had those I never would have been chained to your bed.”

  My eyes told you I didn’t mean that. I didn’t need gold to be tied down with. All I needed was your loving glance, your kind thoughts while you treated me roughly as only the true lover can.

  We climbed out of the Bearcat, wanting each other again. For lovers, between desire and the end of the world, there is only desire. There is only the eternal instant of now.

  The distant shrill of cicadas filled the air, the sun-hot metal of the Bearcat pressed against my flesh as you pulled my dress down over my shoulders and pinned me across the long sweep of the fender. I closed my eyes. The shrilling of cicadas grew more insistent. The acrid scent of exhaust came to my nostrils. My eyes were closed to the outside world so that I could feel only you. The cicadas whined in a metallic whir. I opened my eyes as you opened yours. We were surrounded. We were not hearing cicadas, but the whine of menacing insects—men on motorbikes surrounding us, circling the Bearcat, their stubby bike tires kicking up dust and pebbles.

  What happened to us next, Francisco? How do two people remember the same event? As your Spanish poet once said: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Lovers live in the land of the blind, blind to the outside world. They see only each other, the contours of each others’ souls. They each have one eye; in their domain they are supreme rulers. But their two eyes together only allow them to see better in one direction, they have a perverted clarity. Surrounding them the big picture of the universe swirls. They are oblivious.

  What you saw that Day of the Bees with your one eye you will spend the rest of your life reliving. And I wonder if that was not the price of our happiness—everything that came after only served to illuminate how high we had climbed and how low we had fallen. Lovers do not descend of their own accord. It seems to be a law that when lovers go so high they are too close to God. And God will topple them back to earth if they are beyond the reach of a jealous world. Is this what happened to us on what should have been the happiest day of our lives?

  What I saw that Day of the Bees has such clarity! It replays constantly in my mind, like a loop of motion picture film continually spooling through a projector. If I write down what I saw, if I relive with you what my own heart felt, if I tell it to you with my own lips, then perhaps you will not feel the remorse of a man. A helpless man.

  My one eye recorded everything that should have been forgotten but wasn’t: the two of us stranded at the top of the world with the insects circling on their motorbikes in a cloud of spewing exhaust. The insects stopped their bikes and climbed off without removing their leather helmets and goggles. They cut their engines and laughed—the same laughter we had heard in the abbey, the same cynical sound that I had ignored the night before in Ville Rouge when I turned away every other man who wanted to dance with me.

  As the insects laughed I saw you moving toward the trunk of the Bearcat where the tire iron was. The leader of the insects laughed all the louder. He reached into the saddlebag strapped to his motorbike and took out his own tire iron. The crisp uniform he wore, the pants tucked into jackboots, the gun holstered on his hip—he was the Officer from the cherry orchard.

  “Is this what you are looking for?” He smacked the tire iron into the open palm of his hand.

  You didn’t answer, nearing the car trunk where your own iron was.

  “Is this what you want?” The Officer raised the tire iron. “Then let me give it to you.” He moved swiftly, his iron slicing through the air, smashing into your knee.

  Your startled groan filled my ears as I moved to help you. But the other men held me back. You slumped against the Bearcat in pain.

  The Officer raised his tire iron to crack your skull, then stopped. He had a thought. “Maybe you want to watch us?”

  The anguish in your
voice answered. “Watch! I want to goddamn kill you!” You lunged at him, grabbing for his throat. Your smashed knee gave way and you stumbled to the ground. The Officer yanked you up by the shirt and slammed you against the Bearcat. I could see the blood seeping through the knee of your trousers. The Officer shoved the tire iron into your throat; you gasped for breath. With his free hand, the Officer undid your belt buckle and ripped the belt free from your pants. He stepped back, swinging the belt in one hand, the tire iron in the other.

  “You can watch—or you can die,” he sneered.

  “You’ll have to kill me!” You came at him again as he swung his tire iron into your other knee, and I could hear the crack of your bone as if all the bones in my body were being crushed. You staggered to the ground, struggling to stay erect, refusing to bow your head.

  “Now it’s your turn to watch!” The Officer shouted the words in your face. “We watched all last night and this morning!” He spun around and came toward me, his men holding me by each arm. I could not see his eyes through his dark-tinted goggles, but I spat at him.

  He laughed. “This time I was ready for you.” He wiped the splattered spit off his goggles and grabbed me by the throat. He ripped away my dress with his other hand.

  He stepped quickly behind me and tied my arms with your belt. He dug his chin into my bare shoulder.

  “This is how you like it. You aren’t afraid of men, are you? This is your lucky day. You can have us all.”

  The Officer unzipped his pants. You struggled on broken knees to reach me. He moved roughly at me from behind. The heat of his sex was a sharp pain pushing down along the crevice of my buttocks, searching for an opening.

  I whipped my head around, bit his cheek, and a piece of his flesh ripped off in my teeth. His blood spurted onto me. His hands clamped onto my head, holding me in a powerful grip. His fingernails dug into my temples. Then I heard a snap like a rabbit’s neck being wrung. I was unaware that it was my own neck twisting violently just before I passed out.

  When truly unspeakable things happen, some people lose all memory of the event. Other people remember every detail. And still others relive the event over and over until each act of memory reinvents the actual; it is perpetually occurring for the first time, all its horrors unfolding in the fresh terror of not knowing what will happen next. I am always living in this last way.

  What happened to me when my neck was nearly broken and I passed out? If I could remember, would I want to? And when memory, or fear, flashes through my mind, each time it is different: the Officer inside me, then his men. Or was it only the Officer again and again? Or was it the men all at once? I have had time to reflect on this, even though I haven’t wanted to. I have discovered something unnerving—that a woman in sexual ecstasy with her man forgets all detail; when it’s over she wants to return and explore this abyss that still makes her tremble. The same thing can happen when she is raped, but for a different reason. Where joy once deleted memory, horror now destroys it. In two acts in her life can a woman lose all consciousness: in the act of lovemaking, and in rape, its cruel parody.

  I heard your shouted curses in the far distance. I struggled to focus. I saw, through a veil of tears, you kneeling on useless knees. Only your voice had power, but it was overwhelmed by surrounding laughter. I stifled my own cries, swallowing all the comfort and pity I wanted to convey to you. I wasn’t going to let the laughing men take that from me—the sorrow I felt for your humiliation. As for myself, I didn’t care any more. There was nothing left inside me that wasn’t already torn.

  Dogs barked. Was I hallucinating? Did I hear them? Wasn’t it my own breath heaving in rasping gulps of air? The laughter of the men stopped. I held my breath. The barking of the dogs came closer. For the first time I was able to focus on the men around me, fumbling for their pants, pulling them on, buttoning them up. They saw something in the distance that made them afraid. Something coming through the furrowed rows of the lavender field alongside the road. Something that did not stop. The Officer pulled his gun out of its holster and aimed it.

  “Call off your dogs!”

  I tried to see beyond the men. My bruised eyes were too weak for the bright daylight. Everything blurred into one, the rows of blooming lavender meeting the lavender sky. Lavender infinity with dogs barking from it, the Officer’s voice shouting into it.

  “I said stop your goddamn dogs!”

  The loud bang of the gun went off right next to my ear. Maybe the Officer shot me, I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have felt it. Maybe I was already dead. Then I heard the whimper of a dog as it fell. Its death whine faded into lavender infinity.

  “If you don’t stop I’ll shoot!”

  Another shot fired.

  “That’s the only warning you’ll get!”

  Now I could see something in the lavender light taking shape. A man walking. The silhouette of his straw hat shadowed against the sun. Beneath the brim of the hat glowed his eyes. I recognized those eyes, odd and oval, polished smooth as stones, white as mirrored eggshells, reflecting the blue of sky and lavender, a startling clarity that saw all, or the nothing of all. It was the Bee Keeper from whom we had once bought honey. The Bee Keeper kept walking.

  “Oh … I get it. You want some of this too.” The Officer reached down and yanked me up from the ground. He held me straight, for my legs would not support me.

  “I can’t blame you for wanting some of this. It’s what we all want.” The Officer pointed to you on your smashed knees. “Why should only one man have it when there’s enough for us all?”

  The Officer’s men laughed. The Bee Keeper stopped in front of me. His eyes were expressionless, as if he did not see my dirty, blood-smeared body trembling before him, as if he did not see you, groaning with humiliation. The Bee Keeper just stood there, unmoving. Not only his eyes but his whole being seemed made of stone. The Officer pushed me toward him.

  “Go on!” The Officer put the gun to the Bee Keeper’s head. “It’s your turn!”

  The Bee Keeper said nothing. He began to unwrap something from a straw basket he was carrying.

  “What the hell’s in there?” The Officer waved his gun at the basket. “I’m telling you, if I don’t like it I’m pulling the trigger on you!”

  The Bee Keeper unfolded the cloth wrapped around a large lump in the basket. He held the lump in his hand, letting the basket fall. I could see that what he held was a honeycomb.

  “This isn’t no goddamn picnic!” the Officer shoved the gun up to the Bee Keeper’s temple.

  The Bee Keeper snapped the honeycomb in two. Honey oozed onto his fingers. He suddenly reached out and took me by the shoulders, then stroked down over my breasts and held me between my legs.

  “That’s more like it!” the Officer shouted.

  The Bee Keeper’s eyes held me more than his hands between my legs. I could feel the honey running from his fingers, dripping down my thighs. I could hear you plead with him.

  “Don’t do it, man! I’m begging you! Don’t be a part of it!”

  I couldn’t speak because the Bee Keeper’s eyes compelled me to silence. They turned from lavender blue to the stone blue of a hard winter sky, like the eyes of a blind man, which do not see, but feel—a penetrating gaze peering into my heart. What were his eyes saying to me? What was he searching for?

  “Hurry up!” the Officer growled. “We haven’t got all day! Do it to her!”

  The Bee Keeper did not move. There was only stillness. The long silence of hope. Hope is the most violent of emotions. Where was this hope coming from? It came from the Bee Keeper’s eyes. Now I knew what they were saying, what he was looking for. He was looking for his queen.

  I listened to my own silence. It was a new language I had to master if I was going to speak with him. To survive I needed to hear him. He was searching in my heart for his queen, the mother of the honey dripping from my body. His silent words pierced through me and roved across the distant lavender fields.

  We are speakin
g the same language now. He is looking in the lavender bushes for the boxed wooden beehives sheltered beneath ancient oak trees. He is calling his queen. The hum begins within wooden confines. I feel it in my belly even though it is happening far from me. Thousands of wings stir. Bright bee bodies emerge from the hives, spiraling into the hazy air above the fragrant rows of lavender. The hum becomes a roar. They are coming across the field toward us. The Officer and his men hear it too. They look around, bewildered. Bees continue to pour from the hives, as if the earth has opened in a volcanic crack and golden steam ascends higher and higher, clouding the sky, swirling in a glittering halo above me. The Officer is confused, his men frightened. The Bee Keeper does not take his eyes off me. I hear him calming my fears and asking his queen to call her bees down.

  The Officer pulls his gun away from the Bee Keeper’s head. “What the hell is happening? What are you doing?” He and his men back away, their bravado turning to confusion as they look anxiously above at a sky darkening with bees.

  The Bee Keeper’s eyes penetrate deeper into me. I embrace his thought. I feel his queen pulsing in the heart of her hive. The Bee Keeper is the husband of the queen. Each bee above us is a bit of their union, a bright atom forging their communication. I must trust this husband as the bees hover above me.

  One bee lands on my quivering lip. I feel its slight body tingle along my flesh as it crawls, wedging itself into the corner of my mouth. I am perfectly still. There is a flittering rush of wings as a second bee settles on my cheek. Another bee comes to rest on my bare shoulder, another on my back. Others land on my fingers, my nose, my eyelashes. More and more descend from the sky. Their wings brush me intimately as kisses as they crawl over my skin. Their bodies exude a dusty scent of pollen, the sweet smell of lavender, the pungent crush of wild thyme and rosemary.

  I stare into the stone blue eyes of the Bee Keeper. I am not blind; I am silent. I hear what the blind man sees. Honey and death. Honey and venom. Pollen and sperm. Wings brushing kisses. Conception and misconception. Hope dressed in all its iridescent irony. The excited buzz is overwhelming. The bees above unravel like a cloud from the sky and spiral around my body. I close my eyes as they land on me by the thousands, bright atoms called upon by their queen to clothe my nakedness in a living cloak of gold.