The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  PRAISE FOR THE MURMUR OF BEES

  “Segovia’s nostalgic novel, inspired by family anecdotes, offers seductive prose . . . It resembles García Márquez’s fiction but with its own northeastern Mexico tenor. [The Murmur of Bees] . . . is a very interesting read, it is one of the books of the year with unforgettably well-crafted passages.”

  —Hojeando, El Norte

  “The Murmur of Bees is a story of love, brotherhood, and the inner struggle to heal the pain left by the Mexican Revolution.”

  —Milenio Diario

  “The Murmur of Bees by Sofía Segovia is one of those magical novels where reality meets the enigmatic; some call it magical realism, others letting the imagination speak. I subscribe to the latter.”

  —Todo Literatura

  “An absolutely wonderful read . . . where we can perceive a strong and precise language, full of poetry.”

  —Eduardo Antonio Parra, author

  “The Murmur of Bees . . . transports the reader to prerevolutionary Mexico. A brilliant novel, very well constructed and undoubtedly one of the most outstanding of 2015.”

  —Top Cultural

  “In The Murmur of Bees, Sofía Segovia has achieved an entertaining and profound family saga where the fiction and reality of her country resonate.”

  —El Nuevo Herald

  “[The Murmur of Bees] . . . is a story that invites the reader to make the most of their senses, a ‘sensual and sensory’ story that ‘smells like the honey of bees and the orange blossoms of the Morales Cortés’s orange trees.’”

  —Vanguardia España

  “Sofía Segovia is the new voice of Mexican narrative. In the pages of The Murmur of Bees, the reader breathes a Marquezian air and finds a magical realism that is very much Sofía’s own, one that does not resemble anything previously known.”

  —Wendolín Perla, editor

  “Oranges, bees, and a very special child combine to perfection in this novel by Sofía Segovia.”

  —Página 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Sofía Segovia

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Simon Bruni

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as El murmullo de las abejas by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in 2015 in Mexico. Translated from Spanish by Simon Bruni. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2019.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542040495 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542040493 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542040501 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542040507 (paperback)

  Cover design by David Drummond

  First edition

  CONTENTS

  Map

  1 Blue Boy, White Boy

  2 Echoes of Honey

  3 The Empty Rocking Chair

  4 In the Shade of the Anacahuita

  5 Ribbons and Lice

  6 Wings That Covered Him

  7 White Drop, Holy Drop

  8 War’s Harvest

  9 The Bee Boy

  10 Broken Promises

  11 The Spaniard Arrives in October

  12 Letters and Telegrams

  13 Get Up and Go

  14 Simonopio’s Sinapism

  15 The Abandoned Body

  16 Dust Thou Art . . .

  17 The Singer and Its Rat-A-Tat, Rat-A-Tat

  18 Land Will Always Be Somebody Else’s

  19 The Return to Life, Another Life

  20 The Story That Was Told, Is Told, and Will Be Told, Perhaps

  21 Gaps That Were Left

  22 Letters That Arrived

  23 Verses That Win Hearts

  24 Life That Goes On

  25 The Coyote That’s Coming

  26 This Land Is Not and Never Will Be

  27 The Roof That Breathes

  28 A Journey of Thorns

  29 The Train Passes through Alta and So Does Simonopio

  30 Where Does the Devil Go When He’s Lost?

  31 Only the Living Understand

  32 An Old Look in His New Look

  33 Back on the Trail

  34 The Flight of the Flowers

  35 The Blossoms’ Destiny

  36 Everything Changes

  37 Slaves to Time

  38 He Who Must Arrive, Arrives

  39 A Strange and Confused World

  40 The Day the Mule Takes the Reins

  41 New Stories to Tell

  42 The First Drop

  43 Unrequited Desire

  44 They Happen in the Depths of Sleep

  45 Revenge Is Not a Woman’s Business

  46 In Good Time

  47 Today, a Dead Desire

  48 He Who Lives by the Sword—or the Gun

  49 The Aunt That Nobody Invites

  50 Nothing. Just Crickets

  51 There Are Monsters

  52 A True Wonder

  53 Alchemy

  54 It’s the Best Way to Stop Them Taking My Land

  55 Not All Saturdays Are the Same

  56 Sharing Sweat and Shade

  57 To Each His Own Path

  58 On the Longest Road

  59 And a New Road

  60 It Will Hurt

  61 Yes. Why Would You Want to Remember, Francisco Junior?

  62 A Consecration at the River

  63 Ronda’s Singing

  64 Leap of Faith

  65 The Return

  66 See, Listen, Understand

  67 But Simonopio’s Image Invades Your Mind,

  68 Following the Bee Trail

  69 . . . Dies by the Sword—or the Bullet

  70 . . . Lives by the Sword—or the Bullet

  71 So Close and Yet So Far

  72 Irrigating the Land

  73 Too Late

  74 The Devil’s Thunder

  75 Killing and Dying

  76 The Worst of the Bad

  77 Satin from Another Age

  78 Honey on the Wound

  79 Alive or Dead

  80 An Empty Roof

  81 Your Mama Never Forgave Herself That Slap,

  82 Unanswered Questions

  83 Your Father Died, but All You Thought About

  84 No. Espiricueta’s Son Took It.

  85 If Your Mother Had Known

  86 The Future’s Somewhere Else

  87 Had My Mama Known Everything,

  88 You Built a Good Life . . .

  89 We’ve Arrived; Turn Here

  90 Sweet Ignorance

  91 Song from the Past

  92 A Heap of Masonry

  93 The Future without Him

  94 Goodbye, Francisco

  95 I Always Thought

  96 It Took Me Longer Than He Thought It Would,

  97 But It Wasn’t All about Me

  98 And Here I Am

  99 He Knows I’ve Arrived,

  100 But Now These Bees Are Flying around Us,

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  1

  Blue Boy, White Boy

  That early morning in October, the baby’s wails mingled with the cool wind that blew through the trees, with the birdsong, and with the night’s insects saying their farewell. The so
unds floated out from the thick vegetation but faded a short distance from their source, as if halted by some magic spell while they went in search of human ears.

  For years, people remarked how Don Teodosio, on his way to work on a nearby hacienda, must have passed right by the poor abandoned baby without hearing a peep, and how, in search of a love potion, Lupita, the Morales family’s washerwoman, crossed the bridge that would take her to La Petaca without noticing anything strange. And had I heard him—she said that evening to anyone who wanted to listen—I would have at least picked him up, because as horrible as he may be, I don’t know who could have abandoned a newborn baby just like that, left him there to die all alone.

  That was the mystery. Who from the area had shown signs of an ill-advised pregnancy recently? To whom did this unfortunate baby belong? News of such indiscretions spread faster than measles in that town, so if someone had known, everyone would have.

  Yet, in this case, nobody knew anything.

  There were all kinds of theories, but what captured the collective imagination was the theory that the baby belonged to one of the witches of La Petaca, who, as everyone knew, freely gave their favors of the flesh. A witch who, having produced such a deformed and strange-looking boy—a punishment of the Almighty or of the devil, who knows?—had gone and thrown it under the bridge, to leave it to God’s mercy.

  No one knew how many hours that baby spent abandoned under the bridge, naked and hungry. Nobody could explain how he survived the elements without bleeding to death from the umbilical cord left unknotted, or without being devoured by the rats, birds of prey, bears, or pumas that were plentiful in those hills.

  And they all wondered how old Nana Reja had found him, covered in a living blanket of bees.

  Reja had chosen to spend the rest of her days in one place, outside one of the sheds they used for storage on the Hacienda Amistad. It was a simple, windowless structure, identical to several others still in service, built behind the main house to hide it from social visitors. The only thing that distinguished this shed from the others was its overhanging roof, which enabled the old woman to remain outside whether it was winter or summer. The overhang was nothing more than a lucky coincidence. Reja hadn’t chosen the place for protection from the elements, but for the view and for the wind, which blew down to her from the hills. Just for her.

  The old woman had chosen this as her resting place so long ago that no one living remembered when she had occupied the spot or how her rocking chair had appeared there.

  Now, almost everyone believed she never got up from that chair, and they supposed it was because, at her age—and how old she was nobody could say—her bones no longer held her up and her muscles no longer responded. For when the sun came up, they saw her sitting there already, gently rocking, more from the wind than from any movement of her feet. Then, at night, nobody noticed her disappear, because by that time they were all busy going to sleep.

  All those years on the rocking chair caused the townspeople to forget her story and her humanity: she had become part of the scenery, put roots down into the earth she rocked upon. Her flesh had become wood and her skin a hard, dark, furrowed bark.

  Passing by, no one said hello to her, just as nobody would greet an old, dying tree. Some children observed her from a distance when they made the short trip from town in search of the legend; only rarely did any of them have the guts to go closer to check that it really was a living woman and not one carved from wood. They soon realized there was life under the bark when, without even needing to open her eyes, she dealt the daring adventurer a good blow with her stick.

  Reja did not abide being the object of anyone’s curiosity; she preferred to pretend she was made of timber. She preferred to be ignored. At her age, she reckoned, with the things her eyes had seen, her ears had heard, her mouth spoken, her skin felt, and her heart suffered, she had been through enough to make anyone weary. She couldn’t explain why she was still alive or what she was waiting for before she departed, since she was no longer of any use to anybody and her body had dried up, so she preferred not to see or be seen, not to hear, not to speak, and not to feel.

  Certain people Reja did tolerate, such as the other nana, Pola, who like Reja had seen her best days long ago. She also tolerated the boy Francisco because once, when she had still allowed herself to feel, she had loved him intensely. But she could not stand his wife, Beatriz, or their daughters. The wife because Reja had no desire to allow someone new into her life, and the children because they seemed insufferable.

  There was nothing they needed from her and nothing she wanted to offer them, for old age had relieved her of her servant’s duties. She’d had no part in the running of the house for years, and that was how she had started to become part of her rocking chair. So much so that it was now hard to see where the wood ended and the person began.

  Before dawn, she would walk from her bedroom to the shed, where her moving seat awaited her under the overhanging roof, then close her eyes so she wouldn’t see and her ears so she wouldn’t hear. Pola brought her breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which she barely touched because her body no longer needed much food. She got up from her chair much later, only when, through her closed eyelids, the fireflies reminded her it was night, and when the wooden rocking chair, which grew tired of the constant proximity long before she did, pressed and pinched her hip.

  Sometimes she opened her eyes on her way back to bed, though she didn’t need to open them to see. Then she lay on top of the covers—she didn’t feel the cold, because her skin did not let even that through anymore. But she did not sleep. The need for sleep was something her body had given up. Whether it was because it had slept as much as a being must sleep over a lifetime or because it refused for fear of falling into eternal slumber, she did not know. She hadn’t thought about that for a long time. After a few hours on the softness of the bed, she would begin to feel the pressing and pinching that reminded her it was time to go visit her loyal friend, the rocking chair.

  Nana Reja didn’t know exactly how many years she had lived. She didn’t know how she’d been born or what her full name was, if anyone had ever bothered to give her one. Although she supposed she must have had a childhood, she couldn’t remember it or her parents—if she ever had any—and if someone had told her that she had sprouted from the earth like a pecan tree, she would have believed it. Nor did she remember the face of the man who gave her the child when she was a young woman, though she did recall seeing his back as he walked off, leaving her in a hut made from wood and mud, abandoned to her fate in a strange world.

  Be that as it may, she would never forget the powerful movements in her belly, the twinges in her breasts, and the sweet yellowish liquid that emerged from them even before the only child she would have was born. She wasn’t sure she remembered that boy’s face, perhaps because her imagination played tricks on her, muddling the features of all the babies—white and dark—she suckled in her youth.

  She clearly remembered the day when she arrived in Linares for the first time, half-starved and freezing to death, and she could still feel her baby in her arms, pressed tightly against her chest to protect him from the icy January air. She had never been down from the sierra, so it was natural that she had never seen so many houses in one place, or walked down a street, or crossed a square; nor had she ever sat on a public bench, and that was what she did when weakness made her knees give way.

  She knew she had to ask for help, but she didn’t know how, even if it wasn’t for herself. She would ask for help for the baby she held in her arms, because for two days he hadn’t cried or wanted to feed.

  That was the only reason she had walked down to the town she sometimes contemplated from afar, from her hut on the sierra.

  She had never felt such cold, of that she was certain. And perhaps the inhabitants of the place felt it, too, for she saw no one walking outside, braving the freezing air like she was. All the houses seemed unapproachable. The windows and doors had bars, and
behind them, closed shutters. So she stayed sitting on that bench in the square, wavering, growing colder and more afraid for her baby.

  She was unsure how long she remained like that, and perhaps she would never have moved—would have become one of the square’s statues—had the town’s doctor, who was a good man, not come walking through the square just then and been shocked to come across such a desperate woman.

  Dr. Doria had left his house in spite of the cold because Sra. Morales was about to die. Two days earlier, the woman had given birth to her first child, with a midwife tending to her. Now the husband had called on the doctor in the early hours, alarmed by his wife’s fever. Doria had to coax her to tell him where she felt the discomfort: in her breasts. The infection manifested as a sharp pain when the baby fed.

  Mastitis.

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner, Señora?”

  “I was embarrassed, Doctor.”

  Now the infection was more advanced. The baby was crying nonstop because it hadn’t fed for more than twelve hours—the mother couldn’t bear to breastfeed it. He had never seen or heard of a woman dying from mastitis, and yet it was clear that Sra. Morales was dying. The ashen skin and that sickly shine in her eyes told the doctor that the new mother would soon give up the ghost. Dismayed, he took Sr. Morales out into the hall.

  “You must allow me to examine your wife.”

  “No, Doctor. Give her some medicine, nothing else.”

  “What medicine? The señora is dying, Sr. Morales, and you have to let me establish what from.”

  “It must be the milk.”

  “It must be something else.”

  The doctor did his utmost to convince him: he promised to touch and not look, or to look but not touch. In the end, the husband agreed and persuaded the dying woman to allow the doctor to palpate her breasts, and worse still, to examine her lower stomach and groin. There was little need to touch anything: the intense pain in her pelvis and the purulent lochia emerging from the ailing body betokened death.

  The cause of maternal death and a way to prevent it would one day be discovered, but for Sra. Morales, that day would come too late.

  There was nothing to be done but to keep the patient as comfortable as possible until God said enough.

  To save the baby, the physician sent the Morales’s servant boy to find a dairy goat. Meanwhile, Dr. Doria tried to feed him with an improvised bottle filled with a solution of water and sugar. When the goat milk arrived, the newborn did not tolerate it. He was certain to die a slow and terrible death.