The Day of the Bees

by Thomas Sanchez

  “We won’t do anything to damage it.”

  “It’s not the Bear I’m worried about, it’s the two of you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The barn is in the middle of a killing field. They were all killing fields here, every tree and bush blasted away by the fighting. Just last year thirty farmers died from hitting old bombs and artillery shells while tilling their fields. They don’t just harvest wheat and potatoes, but blood turnips too, deadly things that worm their way to the surface and boom! It’s so dangerous that no one will work this farm. The last man who tried plowed up barbed wire, bayonets, and skulls. He should have stopped, but he kept going and cut through a mustard gas bomb. I came home and found him still sitting in the tractor with the engine running. He was killed before he could make the sign of the cross. Terrible look on his face. Tons of bombs are found each year. The good thing is, it’s kept everyone away from the barn. People are afraid to go near it.”

  Serena looked at me. “Do you want to take the chance, Professor?”

  “We’ll have to watch our steps,” I replied.

  Madame saw us to the back door and waved good-bye as we started off, calling out:

  “Watch for the blood turnips!”

  Serena and I stepped cautiously through a field grown wild from years of neglect. The problem was that we couldn’t see what was ahead or underfoot. I broke off a branch and used it as a probing stick. Brambles tore our clothes. I poked through the bushes and the stick hit something that moved. The air exploded—and a hen pheasant flew up from its nest of eggs, her wings whirring loudly.

  Serena grabbed the belt of my pants from behind, holding close to me as we carefully inched forward until the barn appeared. The barn’s weather-beaten siding was dilapidated and in some places had collapsed completely. It appeared doubtful that anything inside could still be intact beneath the crushing weight of fallen rafters and broken roof slates. We found the one place where it seemed safe to enter. The overhead beams inside appeared ready to crumble from the very sound of our breathing. Rusty farm machinery and bales of mildewed hay were scattered everywhere. The Bearcat was nowhere in sight. We made our way in the gloomy light through the debris, surprising pigeons who flapped up with a great racket and landed on rotting roof rafters. Before us was a jumble of furniture, piled high and forgotten for years. Through a hole in the barn siding sunlight shone on the furniture, and something glinted from under the splintered chairs, ripped sofas, and broken dressers.

  I started digging into the pile, tossing aside furniture as if a living person were trapped underneath. Serena joined in, helping to move the heaviest furniture until we could go no further and our hands touched something hard beneath a layer of straw. We pushed the straw away, revealing the Bearcat. The black paint of its long sloping roof was cracked and peeled, exposing metal underneath. We wiped the dirt-encrusted windows and peered inside. The interior, once luxurious, had been destroyed by animals. The elegant wood dashboard was clawed and scratched; the mahogany steering wheel gnawed down to a nub; the mohair headliner hung in tattered strips, and the leather seats were ripped open. I could see rusty floorboards underneath.

  We shoved more furniture aside until the automobile was completely visible. It was a marvel of the machine age, with its massive chrome grill, high spoked wheels, and flared fender skirts. It seemed more of a yacht than a car, a treasure to equal Cleopatra’s ornate river barge. I ran my hands over it, not quite believing that this wonder existed. This was the car I had read so much about. I felt as if I had driven it. There were dents and scrapes on the front fender and along the car’s side, left from when the tire had blown out, bringing the car to a stop at the cherry orchard in Provence. I could see Louise standing there in her white dress and Zermano, shirtless in the heat, fixing the tire. Serena’s voice brought me back from that fateful day, the Day of the Bees.

  “I’m going to try the key.”

  She attempted to get the key in the door’s lock, but it wouldn’t fit. She tried the lock on the other side. The key refused to go in. She looked at me in despair.

  Now there really was only one last chance. I was almost afraid to speak, for if the key didn’t fit everything was over and Zermano’s secret vanished. “In one of his letters, your father wrote that it was in the trunk.”

  “Yes!”

  We shoved furniture from behind the Bearcat until the downward slope of the trunk was exposed.

  Serena put the key to the lock—and it went in. She smiled. We were in luck. She turned the key and metal snapped. The key had broken in the hole. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Damn! Damn! Damn!” She pounded her fists on the trunk lid and it sprang open.

  We both stared under the lid. Staring back at us were baby rats curled in the nest of the deflated spare tire. Behind the tire, covered in cobwebs and rat droppings, was a long rolled canvas clamped together by wire.

  “Would you mind?” Serena gestured toward the rats. “I don’t want to hurt them.”

  “I don’t mind.” I pushed the squealing rats aside with my hand, grabbed the rolled canvas, and maneuvered it out of the trunk. It was heavy and stiff. I pried off the wire. After being rolled up for more than half a century, the canvas unfurled slowly. I was standing behind it, so I could not see what was on the front, but I could see the astonished expression on Serena’s face.

  “My God! It’s Velázquez’s Las Meninas!”

  “Impossible. That painting’s in Madrid.”

  “Look for yourself.” Serena excitedly grabbed the canvas and swung it around.

  She was right. It was Velázquez’s seventeenth-century masterpiece, The Maids of Honor. But how could this be? That painting was the centerpiece of the Prado Museum, where for hundreds of years a brass plaque beneath its baroque frame had borne the inscription: orbra culminante de la pintura universal, the culminating work of world art.

  The room in the Prado where the painting hangs is always crowded; shocked admiration can be heard in twenty different languages as visitors gape at it, for in its heavenly perversity it is unlike any other painting: it makes the viewer the subject, not the observer. Velázquez himself is in the painting, standing at his easel. A regal blond girl is posed before him. She wears an enormous bell-shaped satin dress; in fact, she is the daughter of King Philip IV. The haughty princess is surrounded by her fawning court of maids-in-waiting, all awestruck except one, a dwarf, who grimaces with a queer expression of disdain. In the king’s palace dwarves were deemed enchanted fools, allowed to wander the gilded corridors passing out insults and farts with giddy abandon, disputing the glory and vanity of the royal household. The dwarf beckons the viewer to look past the princess, past Velázquez himself, to a wall of framed paintings behind. From one of the frames the blurred image of the old king and his very young wife peer out. The trick is, these two are not painted, but reflected on a mirror within the frame. They are actually beyond the tableau playing out on the canvas. It is they whom Velázquez is actually painting on the easel before him. It is they, standing outside of the painting, who are the true subject. Velázquez had smashed the containing frame between art and life, demanding a dialogue between the artist and the subject.

  “Do you think it’s real?” Serena asked.

  “No. Your father made many copies of Las Meninas. He wasn’t alone in his fascination. Many important painters in history have made their own variations. This painting’s invention forced the artist beyond merely representing his world; it held him accountable for his collaboration with the subject of his creation.”

  “But what was my father accountable for? What was his collaboration?”

  “I don’t know. We have to find the true subject of the painting.” I stood back and tried to look at the painting from every angle. What was it I wasn’t seeing?

  “You know,” Serena offered, “in the Prado there’s a mirror positioned across the room from the painting. If you turn your back to the painting and look in the mirro
r, you see reflected precisely the view that the king and queen had while watching Velázquez at his easel. They were the painting’s subject—which means you and I now are.”

  “It’s the mirror. We’ve got to find a mirror.” I rummaged through the pile of furniture, found a battered armoire, and tore its mirrored door off. I leaned the mirror against the barn wall. It caught the entire scale of the painting. All I could see at first was my own agitated face reflected on the painting. I tilted the mirror and suddenly my face was superimposed on that of Velázquez. What deflected truth was I to see in this final bend of illusion? Velázquez was wearing a black vest with a red heraldic cross embroidered across its front. He held his brush poised in one hand and his palette in the other, caught in the act of creating, ready to tip his brush into the paints on the palette.

  I peered closely at the palette. Zermano had placed something there that did not exist in Velázquez’s original. The dabs of paint on the palette vividly spelled out YHVH.

  Zermano had revealed the name of his God, and the reason he had abandoned Louise. I looked again at the artist standing behind the easel. It was Velázquez, but the dark and volatile eyes were Zermano’s. Around them the colors had been forced and deepened, carving out a space of hurt for fools to rush in, a space for the spirit to be reborn.

  “Professor, what do you see?”

  I glanced up. Serena’s face peered intently from above the canvas she was holding.

  “You were right,” I said. I took the canvas from her. “Go look in the mirror.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you see the palette Velázquez is holding?”

  “Yes.”

  “Notice how the swirl of paint on the palette forms four letters.”

  “I can see them.”

  “Without the mirror the letters spell nothing, but in the mirror they are reversed; they read right to left, the way Hebrew is read.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “They signify the personal name of God in the Old Testament, the Name of Four Letters, the creator of the universe. From earliest times Jews were in awe of the power and magic of these four letters and wouldn’t utter them aloud, fearful of the retribution such disrespect would bring. No one knows today how the name is pronounced—it is the secret of secrets, the greatest mystery of all.”

  “So why did my father paint them?”

  “To tell Louise he was Jewish. That’s why he married her with the secret piercing of the gold ring. No one could know. If the truth were discovered he would be killed, and if she was his real wife, she would be killed too.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “When I was researching an article about the religiosity of your father’s work, I traced the family on his mother’s side back to the fourteenth century, when the Jews of Mallorca had to convert or die. Many converted, but secretly remained faithful to their true religion. Your father revealed his secret in this painting.”

  Serena fell silent. I continued to hold the painting, not wanting to disturb her thoughts. The pigeons in the rafters stirred, cooing their deep-throated song. I watched Serena. Finally she spoke.

  “My father didn’t give Louise a chance to stand by him. He didn’t give her a choice. He betrayed her to save her.”

  PART EIGHT

  Last Letters

  Sevilla, Spain

  My Dear Serena,

  I am here in Sevilla going through the ecclesiastical archives of the Spanish Inquisition. I have discovered many more documents confirming the truth of your father’s ancestry. I do not intend to publish any of this; I simply wanted to follow this profound man back to his origins. I hope, as more than a year has passed since you lost your father, that life is returning to normal.

  Thank you for your thoughtful invitation for me to attend your father’s funeral in Palma, but I felt that really wasn’t the way I wanted to remember him. I must confess, his loss affected me deeply, and I was just not up to being around people. However, I do hope you received the flowers and condolences that I sent on that sad occasion. I did read in the newspapers that many famous people came to pay their respects and filled the Palma Cathedral, and that afterward the streets leading to the cemetery were lined with thousands of mourners. I could not help but think that only you and I knew how inside one truth another was hidden.

  May I tell you that yesterday, returning from the archives, I was walking through the old Moorish gardens and passed by the lovely fountain of midnight-blue tiles. The local lore is that the first time one passes the fountain one must stop, make a wish, and toss in a coin. I stopped. I made a wish about you. But I didn’t have a coin, so I dropped a peseta bill into the fountain. The paper, of course, did not sink, but floated on the water’s surface. Some gypsy children who were playing nearby ran up; they thought this was all very funny and good luck—for them. I suppose it was. I watched as they fished the money out.

  I’m here for another several weeks to finish my research. I just wanted to leave you with one final thing, a quote from another American who admired another Spanish artist. It is something written by the painter James Whistler about the muse that inspired Velázquez.

  In the book of her life the names inscribed are few—the list of those who have helped write her story of love and beauty. She yielded up the secret of repeated line, as with his hand in hers, together they measured rhyme of lovely limb and draperies flowing in unison, to the day when she dipped the Spaniard’s brush in light and air, and made his people live within their frames, that all nobility and sweetness, tenderness and magnificence should be theirs.

  Sincerely,

  THE PROFESSOR

  Palma de Mallorca,

  Islas Baleares

  My Dear Professor,

  Things here have finally returned to normal. You, of all people, can imagine what clamor and chaos there was. I do want to thank you for your thoughtful flowers and note of condolence, which meant so much during that painful time. Your recent letter revealing further discoveries in Sevilla was greatly appreciated.

  I was quite touched by your quote concerning the artist and muse. In return I would like to share with you something written by Degas not long before he attained old age and was going blind: The heart is an instrument that grows rusty if it isn’t used.

  It would mean a great deal if you could visit me in Palma after you discover everything you need to know for your research.

  Ever so sincerely yours,

  SERENA