The Day of the Bees

by Thomas Sanchez

  Llull sold his possessions to support his wife and children. He dressed in sackcloth and let his hair and beard grow. He was determined to go out into the world and preach to the unbelievers. For this he needed to learn their science and philosophy. The unbelievers were Moslems; Llull had been taught that their Arabic voices spoke in devilish tongues. He was determined to master their language and conquer the knowledge that stood behind it. To speed his studies he hired a black Moorish slave who, before the Conquest, had been an educated merchant. One day the Moor derided Llull’s idea that the religions of man were actually one and could be merged. Llull went into a rage, beating the Moor into cowering submission. Two days later, as Llull sat reading in a chair, the Moor attacked him with a knife. Llull wrestled the knife from the Moor and tied his hands with a leather rope. Llull could have had the slave executed, but he did not. He locked the Moor in the house and went to church to pray for guidance. This was Llull’s first test: to find a way, a spiritual path that would convert the unbeliever. Llull returned home from prayer and found the slave had gotten free and, with the leather rope, hanged himself. After this Llull left Palma. He set off on foot for the sacred mountain of Randa.

  I decided to follow the route Llull had walked eight centuries before. I rented a car and drove out of Palma. Once past the airport and its immense parking lot lined with tour buses, the road wound through wheat fields, then groves of carob and almond trees. Solitary Mount Randa shimmered ahead in the hazy heat. When Llull made his pilgrimage the mountain was considered sacred. It was the only place on the island feared by the Moors, who thus never settled on it. Driving closer, the steel skeletons of radar and radio towers on the high peak came into view. The serpentine road I followed up the mountain was paved, but Llull’s path had been steep and stony, strewn with boulders and thorny bushes. The road ended at a tiny chapel built into the base of a cliff. I got out of the car and looked up. The cliff leaned toward me at an angle, creating the unsettling impression that the mountain was collapsing. The cliff was riddled with swallows’ nests. As I walked gravel crunched beneath my feet, startling the swallows. The birds swooped down in a rush of wings over my head, careening off the side of the mountain toward the smudge of blue sea on the horizon. I turned back toward the cliff. I had seen this place before: it was the inspiration for Zermano’s painting, Swallows Looming at Midnight.

  I stopped before the pretty stone chapel. Next to it a rusty Coke machine with an old motor groaned away. At the chapel door was a box with pamphlets telling Llull’s story. A small donation was requested. I made my donation and thumbed through a pamphlet. On the last page an illustration indicated the trail Llull took to a cave where he could see both the sun and moon rise. I found the trail and followed it until it ended at a stone wall. A sign warned in five languages that it was dangerous and illegal to proceed further. I jumped over the wall and down onto the other side. There was no longer a trail, just a rutted path. I climbed higher and was surprised by a breathtaking view—the granite spine of the towering Tramuntana Mountains, slicing down the entire length of the island from sea to sea. Somewhere in the distance the tinkle of goat-bells floated on the wind, unseen animals herded by a ghost shepherd.

  There was no path beyond this point, just thorny bushes and bladed cacti between the rocks. I looked around, trying to get oriented. On the slope above centuries of rain had ripped open a ravine, and at its top, half-hidden in shadow, was the dark mouth of a cave. I scrambled up the ravine. A treacherous slide of stones gave way under my feet and I grabbed hold of bushes, pulling myself up on hands and knees to the top of the steep incline and into the cave.

  It was here that Llull had retreated, fasting and praying. From this vantage point he saw the confining world of his island and knew that his fate lay beyond the sea. He later wrote about this time: “Say, O Fool, perilous is the journey that I make in search of my Beloved. I must seek Him bearing a great burden with all speed. None of these things can be accomplished without great love.”

  I settled into the cave, sitting cross-legged and gazing out over the dramatic landscape, thinking of how great was the burden of guilt that Llull bore: he had provoked the death of a slave whose God went by a different name, and he had shamefully turned from his love when she exposed in the confessional her naked breasts, disfigured and killing her with a curse that didn’t yet have the name cancer.

  The panorama before me glowed as the sun set. Darkness closed in and the perfume of wild plants drifted up from the plain below. The sea glinted as the moon showed a crescent of its orb above the horizon. I heard wings: swallows were rising to the full moon’s false day. The silver light behind the birds lit up their movement, as if they formed the pendulum of an infinite clock swinging back and forth. I fell asleep knowing Zermano had seen this too, witnessed Llull’s vision. Zermano himself bore the burden of having abandoned a great love.

  I awoke from a deep sleep with the sun directly before me, a good light in which to navigate the trail back. When I reached the chapel a busload of vacationing families pulled up. People piled out, dizzied by the heights and the optical illusion of the cliff above about to crash down. Some of them ran to the Coke machine while others hurled stones at swallows nested in the cliff, trying to startle the birds into abandoning their eggs. This was no longer the world of Llull or Zermano. Their world had gone out of fashion. Love had made them believers and desolation delivered them, two hearts that gambled. Had it not been for them I would have given up on delivering Louise’s letters. I too might have picked up a stone and hurled it at the birds with all the other cynics.

  I returned to Palma and went directly to Serena’s house. I banged the iron door knocker. I heard footsteps from within. I heard shallow breathing on the other side of the door. I banged again. I tried to keep my voice steady, nonthreatening. I had to make my case.

  “I don’t mean any harm to you or your father. I have something that belongs to him. I’m the one who wrote you from California. I know you think this is a trick, but it’s not. The truth is—”

  Footsteps sounded from within, walking away from the door.

  “Wait! Just give this note to your father! Give it to him and he’ll know!”

  I slipped my note through the sliver of an opening at the bottom of the door. I waited. There were no more footsteps. I went back to my hotel room. Had I done the right thing? I picked up an old leather-bound book of Llull’s contemplations that I had found in a Palma junk shop. I reread the passage I had copied on the note left for Zermano:

  “Say, thou that for love’s sake goest as a fool! For how long wilt thou be a slave, and forced to weep and suffer trials and griefs?” The answer is only one: “Till my Beloved shall separate body and soul in me.”

  This passage was one Zermano would recognize. He would know that a messenger from Louise had arrived and he could not die until he understood the truth of his Beloved. I waited the rest of the day in the hotel for his answer, for I had also included my phone number on the note. I was afraid to leave my room in case the call came through. No call came that day, nor the next. I ordered all my meals in, sleeping fitfully, and finally the phone rang. I grabbed the receiver:

  “Señor Professor?” inquired a man’s voice.

  “Yes!”

  “This is the hotel manager. We would like to know if anything is wrong. You haven’t left your room for days and refuse to let the maid in. This is most unusual. We must maintain hotel standards.”

  “If she has the vacuum cleaner on I can’t hear the phone ring.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The goddamn vacuum cleaner! Tell her she can’t use it!”

  “How much longer do you intend to stay? Perhaps we can arrange another hotel?”

  “No!”

  “Another room then, so that we may clean yours?”

  “Impossible. I must stay in this room.”

  “One moment, please.”

  The phone clicked. I didn’t know whether he wanted me on hol
d or was on his way up with the hotel detective. I stayed on the line until the phone clicked again. The manager spoke.

  “Sir, the operator informs me there is a call for you. Shall I put the party through?”

  “God, yes!”

  The phone clicked again and a woman’s voice asked calmly:

  “Are you the American professor?”

  “I am!”

  “My name is Señorita Serena-María Zermano. Can you come to my house today at three in the afternoon?”

  “I will, and—”

  The line went dead. I put the phone down, opened the balcony doors, and stepped outside. Before me was the palm-lined waterfront; yachts cruised in the bay among cargo ships steaming toward the docks. On the boulevard below, cars raced and honked their way around a circular traffic island. In the island’s center stood a bronze statue of a powerfully built man in his later years. He was barefoot, his long hair and beard flowing. He wore the cloaked habit of a Franciscan monk and his left hand held an open book. He seemed to be directing a higher traffic, a traffic of souls. It was Llull, facing Africa across the sea, as if to say to those who killed him: “Won’t you let me read these words I wrote, just one more time.”

  I returned through the maze of streets to Serena’s house and knocked on the door exactly at three. I heard footsteps inside; they stopped and the peephole slid open. The sensuous brown eyes I had glimpsed once before peered through the protective steel mesh as locks were being undone. The door swung open.

  Serena-María Zermano was a slight woman, her black hair pulled tightly into a knot at the back of her head. She wore no makeup, black pants, and a white blouse. She had the no-nonsense stance of a female toreador, on guard against the next thrust of the bull’s horns. Her skin was that particular white of Spanish women who respect the omnipresent sun and shelter themselves from it. Even though she wore no jewelry, it was clear that on this island, in another time, she might have been bought for a fortune or stolen at great risk for a harem. She offered no gesture of cordiality, only a simple nod of her head as she closed and locked the door behind her, then led me through the verdant patio and into a formal living room with massive antique furniture. Covering one wall was a watercolor copy of the mural Zermano had left behind in Paris, Nude Walking Her Man on a Leash. Zermano had obviously done the watercolor from memory, a reminder of a lost time. The women in the watercolor, standing above the glow of fires burning along the Seine, all resembled Louise. Was Serena aware of this?

  How ironic of Zermano to name his daughter Serena, knowing that no daughter of his would ever be a docile bundle. Serena was anything but serene. He knew she could withstand all the seduction, duplicity, and fraud with which children of the famous are besieged. She would not abide those who felt that rubbing up against her would cause her father’s greatness to rub off on them; or those who would stroke her with flattery, so that later they could preen at dinner tables or stand behind lecterns, feigning self-deprecation: “Oh yes, I was a friend of his … family. I have so many confidences I’d like to share, but since I’m on the inside I’ll have to obey the higher calling of discretion. I can only tell you about the severe emotional scarification of growing up the child of a megalomaniac.”

  There was nothing I could say to Serena that would ever impress her, nothing that would dissuade her from the notion that I was just another one hoping to get close to her father in order to validate my own superior aesthetic. No matter what I said, it would sound wrong. But she didn’t allow me the refuge of polite silence. She asked me bluntly:

  “You are the same professor who called stating he had intimate details about my father’s life?”

  “Excuse me, I didn’t mean to imply that I myself had intimate knowledge, only that I had come into possession of items belonging to him.”

  “Where are they? You come empty-handed.”

  “They are safe.”

  “I suppose you are willing to give them up for a price?”

  “I want to give them up, but only to him. I don’t want money.”

  “Do you have a small camera or a hidden tape recorder on you?”

  “No.”

  “Let me be frank. I don’t like you. I don’t like what you represent.”

  “I don’t represent what you think.”

  “My housekeeper gave me the note you pushed under the door.”

  “I’m sorry I had to do it that way.”

  “She was going to throw it away, it made no sense to her.”

  “Ramón Llull made no sense?”

  “Not to her. Outsiders like to romanticize that everyone in Mallorca knows the work of Llull by heart. In fact, Llull is thought of as a quaint antiquity, when he is thought of at all. It’s not like the days when his ideas were actually fought over to the death.”

  “They still do fight over him in universities.”

  “Those people will fight over anything. All of this nonsense about not being able to understand the soul of the Mallorcan people, nor even the Catalan language, unless you understand Llull! It’s like saying you can’t understand the French unless you understand Thomas Aquinas. I think you can learn more about the French by watching them make salads.”

  “Your housekeeper gave you the note and it made sense to you?”

  “No. I took it to my father.”

  So Zermano was alive. It became even more important that I did not alienate this woman. Perhaps he was upstairs.

  “And what did your father say when he read the note?”

  “Nothing. A few days later he sent word that he wanted to meet the person who felt that quote meant something to him.”

  “I wasn’t certain it would. I was taking a chance.”

  “You still are. What do you want?”

  “I want only to return what is his.”

  “Give it to me and I will pass it on.”

  “I can’t do that. He might not get it.”

  She was silent. I could see she was thinking that if I was telling the truth, and had something to reveal to her father, did she have the right to keep it from him? She continued:

  “You said it was intimate.”

  “Very.”

  “And you won’t trust his own daughter to give it to him?”

  “No, it concerns Louise.”

  “Louise? Louise who?”

  There was no reason why Serena would immediately think of Louise. She probably kept Louise out of her mind—the great love of her father’s life before he met her mother. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned Louise’s name. The last thing this daughter wanted was to disturb her father with something so volatile. But I had to tell the truth.

  “The Louise I’m speaking of is Louise Collard.”

  “She’s dead. How could she give you something for my father?”

  “It’s something she hid, something she protected her whole life.”

  “My father is in ill health. This mysterious something you speak of could overwhelm him, even kill him. Why should I take the chance?”

  “Because he told you to. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Yes, I never would have allowed it.”

  “There’s something else. A favorite saying of your father’s, translated from the Arabic by Llull.”

  “Since I was a small child I was always in my father’s studio when he painted. He used to talk and talk, often forgetting I was there, perhaps even forgetting who I was as he painted. There’s not much he said that I didn’t hear, especially a favorite saying.”

  “It’s a simple one: a blind man goes to a gypsy and asks, ‘Do you have anything for a broken heart?’ The gypsy answers, ‘Broken hearts are my specialty.’ ‘So what do you prescribe?’ The gypsy says, ‘The same for everyone.’ ‘And what’s that?’ asks the blind man. The gypsy smiles, ‘You will see. If you are patient you will see.’ ”

  Serena stared intently at the mural on the wall, as if it were the last reel in a movie. She turned to me, but not a muscle moved, not an eyelash flickered.
I did not know if it was over, whether I had convinced her, or if I should get up and leave. She turned again to the mural, took a deep breath, and spoke:

  “My father said, after reading your note, ‘Serena, bring the professor to me. This fool wants to see.’ ”

  PART FIVE

  Night Letters

  Village of Reigne

  My Darling Francisco,

  Another week has come and another mysterious basket filled with rare treasures has been left on my door. Can you imagine? Who can be doing this? In any case, I am keeping everything. This time, besides the wonderful food and soap, there were even ration coupons for cloth. Cloth is what I need, and it is very hard to come by. I am making all my baby’s clothes, it is another way I can save money, for I certainly cannot afford to go to Madame Happy’s shop for miniature Coco Chanels! But even she has a limited stock and sells only what she had on hand before all these troubles began. Two years ago there were fur coats on sale in the stores. Now materials are so scarce they’re even making women’s purses out of wood and rope. The trick is to conserve. What extra items are in my basket I can take to my school and share with the children. So many of them have nothing, their fathers having been among the million or so soldiers taken prisoner in the first spring of the war. The children come to me so proudly, asking me to read the letters from their fathers that they have received. It doesn’t take me long to read these “letters,” for they are the official Correspondence of Prisoners of War, little white postcards with enough space to write a few lines, open for all to read. The messages are nearly all the same, such as: “My big boy, you must obey mommy and study hard. Your papa believes in you.” Or, “My precious girl, daddy is coming home soon and he has a pretty present for you.” This is about all they can say, or are allowed to say, painfully prosaic words to convey an aching avalanche of emotions. But emotions are one of the luxuries that everyone is learning day by day to do without. Like the signs in the store windows that say: NO MILK TODAY. The children know this means there can be NO TEARS TODAY. Everyone has to be a big boy or girl. And when I read the flimsy postcards to those eager faces watching me, I feel the tears within. In the short words I read to them a Victor Hugo novel is playing out in their minds, and they see strong Daddy, rising up valiantly among his foes and marching home. Because even though there can be no tears today, there must be bright hope for tomorrow.