The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  “And the beehive too.”

  Reluctant but taking great care, my papa covered it with the apron again before lifting it onto the cart. And only then did they begin the journey home, to the empty rocking chair.

  7

  White Drop, Holy Drop

  Francisco Morales felt little of the certainty with which he had answered his nana. He’s coming with us, he had said. Yes, but why? What were they going to do with a child that had entered the world already marked? Abandoning the boy did not cross his mind, but he could hear what the peons were saying under their breath, especially Anselmo Espiricueta, the newest employee, who’d refused to ride on the cart with the newborn. Had the devil kissed it? Made a pact with it? Was it the devil himself or a divine punishment? Ignorant superstitions. And yet, Francisco could not see how a baby with a hole for a mouth could survive a single day, and he did not know what he could say to subdue the ignorant prejudices of the people that would surround him for however long he lived.

  Near the town, he had ordered Espiricueta to turn off. On the one hand, because someone had to ask Dr. Cantú to come to the house to examine the old nana and the unfortunate baby, and on the other, to get him away from the child and his already nervous entourage. He did not need the southerner with his apocalyptic prophecies to put more ideas into their heads.

  “And don’t start with that gossip about the kiss of the devil, eh? Let’s not go around telling tales of sorcery. The nana found a baby that needs help, and that’s all. Understood, Anselmo?”

  “Yes, Boss,” Anselmo Espiricueta replied as he ran off.

  When he reached the town and saw Juan, the knife grinder, Anselmo did not resist the temptation to explain to him, in confidence, that he had some shocking news—the nana, the bees, a witch’s baby—before continuing his spiel with all manner of terrible predictions.

  “Evil will befall us, you’ll see.”

  And so it happened, as things tend to happen, that before Anselmo had even found the physician, all Linares knew about Simonopio’s misfortune and the possible blight on the Morales family and all its descendants.

  Dr. Cantú, being the serious and professional man that he was, had responded immediately to the Moraleses’ call without stopping to answer the questions of the foolish and the superstitious. He was surprised to find himself riding to the hacienda behind a cart carrying a casket. It was a shame: he had thought there had not been any deaths in this business with the old woman and the baby.

  When he reached the house, he found the nana where she always was: settled into her rocking chair, surrounded by the family and its most trusted domestic staff. The fact that the nana had moved at all was reason enough to be surprised. He struggled to believe that someone of such advanced age had suddenly rushed off on an adventure up a steep road, let alone that she had returned from it having come to no apparent harm. And with a living baby in her arms?

  If Francisco Morales was saying so, all he could do was believe it.

  “Who died?”

  “No one,” Francisco replied.

  “Then who is the coffin for?”

  When they turned around, Martín and Leocadio were there bearing the heavy box, waiting for instructions. The doctor was intrigued; Francisco, confused; and Beatriz, alarmed: the coffin! She had completely forgotten the preparations she had made when the nana was missing, when she had sent Leocadio to the town to fetch a casket. Now Francisco was looking at her in surprise.

  “Er . . . it’s in case of an emergency.”

  Beatriz went over to tell Martín to cover the coffin in thick canvas and store it in the shed, out of everyone’s sight. When she returned, Dr. Cantú was asking to examine the child.

  They did not allow him to approach the bundle the old woman was holding without putting on a pair of thick leather gloves, the property of some day laborer, because the bees are everywhere, Doctor. As he opened the shawl wrapping, he saw what they were saying: hundreds of bees wandered the baby’s body. He wondered how to shoo the insects without alarming them, but Reja took care of it. Cantú did not know whether, helped by her hardened skin, the woman felt she was immune to bee stings, or whether she just knew they would not dare sting her.

  Whatever the reason, with great calm, she proceeded to brush them off without angering them.

  The baby remained alert and tranquil. The doctor was surprised to see him watch the last bees that flew around him and then into the hive that someone had hung from one corner of the overhang with some wire. He noticed that the unknotted umbilical cord was beginning to bleed, so he tied it with some suture thread.

  “This baby was left to die, Morales. They didn’t even try to leave it to fate: he could have bled to death. As a matter of fact, he should have bled to death.”

  And yet he had not bled to death, even with the umbilical cord like a running hose. And against all logic, he had not a single bee sting. He had neither been devoured nor killed by exposure to the elements. This combination of factors added to the mystery that would forever surround Simonopio.

  “The boy is surprisingly healthy.”

  “But, Doctor, the mouth?” asked Beatriz, concerned.

  The lower jaw was perfectly formed, but the upper one was open from the corners of the lips to the nose. He had no lip, upper front gum, or palate.

  “He was kissed by the devil,” someone in the crowd said. Espiricueta.

  “It’s no devil’s kiss,” the doctor replied firmly. “It’s a malformation. It happens sometimes, like when a baby is born without fingers or with too many fingers. It’s sad, but natural. I have never had to tend to a case, though I’ve seen it in books.”

  “Can it be fixed?”

  “I’ve read there is a procedure, but it’s dangerous and painful. I wouldn’t advise it. Best leave it in the hands of God.”

  The boy would be this way for as long as he lived.

  “Children like this do not live for long: they die of hunger because they cannot feed, and if by some miracle they can, the liquid drowns them, since it enters the respiratory tract. I’m sorry. I very much doubt he will survive more than three days.”

  Before ordering a dairy goat brought or sending for a wet nurse, Francisco requested the presence of Father Pedro, for if this boy was going to die, he needed to be baptized as God intended. The goat arrived before the priest, and the nana requested that a cup be filled with a little warm milk and a little of the honey beginning to seep from the beehive. She soaked a corner of her shawl in the mixture, and squeezing the material drop by drop for over an hour, she fed the baby until he slept.

  By the time the priest arrived in a great rush, loaded down with oils and holy water to anoint and baptize the ill-fated child, he found him awake again and with his mouth open, awaiting each sweet, white drop that fell onto his tongue and rolled down it. They had already washed him and dressed him in fine diapers and the white robe the Morales girls had worn in their baptism, which Beatriz had retrieved from a chest. Given the rush, for they expected the boy would die at any moment, the ceremony began without interrupting the feeding. And so, from a drop of white to a holy drop, with the nana on one side and Francisco and Beatriz on the other, Simonopio’s body and soul were saved.

  8

  War’s Harvest

  That day he had lost the entire maize crop. It hadn’t been the most abundant, but he had kept it going in spite of the plague of insects. To save it, he had taken care of it as if it were his own daughter. He felt almost as if he had caressed every cob.

  But they had snatched it from him. They arrived to take it once the infestation had passed, once it had been irrigated enough, once it had ripened, once it was tender and juicy and his workers had harvested it under the burning April sun, which sometimes, like this year, could be worse than in July. They arrived to take it when every last corncob was in the wooden crates and about to travel to markets near and far.

  It’s for the army, they told him before turning away.

  Francisco
Morales had no choice but to watch the full crates disappear by the cartload and, in silence, say goodbye to a season’s work.

  But it’s for the army, he said with sarcasm to console himself as he poured a whiskey. They had left him not one ear of corn for his dinner. Not a single peso for new seeds. For the army, yes, but for which of the many?

  In that war, the armies were just one army, he decided, but one that endlessly shed its parts, like the hourglass-shaped wooden doll a Russian classmate had once shown him at university.

  It’s a matryoshka. Open it, the Russian had said to him.

  He noticed that the matryoshka had a subtle incision around its middle. He pulled and it opened. To his surprise, inside he saw another identical doll. Then another and then another and another, ever smaller, until he counted ten.

  That was how the army—the armies—of the Revolution seemed to him: from one emerged another and another and another, each of them identical, each with the same conviction that it was the nation’s official army and that, therefore, it had the right to violate whomever it pleased. To kill whomever it pleased. To denounce whomever it pleased as a traitor to the fatherland. And each time they passed through his land, it seemed to Francisco that, like the Russian doll, they grew smaller, if not in number then in their credibility and sense of justice. In their humanity.

  That harvest was the least of what the war had taken from them. They had lost Beatriz’s father when one of those armies intercepted him on his way to Monterrey and accused him of treachery for offering dinner to General Felipe Ángeles—his childhood friend and the new, but brief, governor of nearby Coahuila—an enemy of the deposed president Carranza.

  The war had taken their peace, their tranquility, their certainty, and their family, for bandoleros would come to Linares to kill and rob. They took any women they came across. Beautiful or ugly, young or old, rich or poor, they made no distinction.

  Francisco had thought it astounding that such a thing could happen in the modern day. Then he learned that, in war, even modernity evaporated.

  His daughters were beginning to leave childhood behind—they were young, pretty, and rich. Fearing they might one day be sought out, Francisco and his wife sent them to board with the nuns. They were safe in Monterrey, but their parents grieved their absence.

  They also lost their men if they did not manage to hide when one of the armies passed through: no questions asked, without explanation, they were conscripted to fight. Francisco lost two of his peons this way, which was not easy to forget, because he had known them both since they were children.

  Him—men like him—the levy overlooked. Renown and wealth still counted for something in 1917. The war did not require his flesh for another shield, but it still stalked him, winked at him, and threatened more than his maize, for the maize they took that day would not last long. It would never sate a voracious appetite that demanded everything.

  The war’s armies now wanted land like his. Land and freedom, they insisted. They all fought for the same thing, and he—men like him—had nowhere to take cover from the crossfire. The only possible outcome with the land reform—which all sides claimed to defend as their own—was to lose land. The only option was to hand it over to someone who wanted it but who had never sweated for it, who would never understand it. To offer it meekly the day they came and knocked on his door, in the same way he had let his crop go that day: in silence. It was that or die.

  That was why he had not dared to object when they came for his maize. Not even his renown would shield him from a bullet between the eyes. A crop of maize was not worth dying for. He loved the land that his ancestors had passed down to him, but there was something that he valued even more: his life and the lives of his family.

  Until now, all he had managed was to redistribute his lands in his own way: to place some of them in the names of trusted friends. These measures were insufficient. There was no legal way to register the remaining lands in Beatriz’s or the girls’ names, so large tracts remained vulnerable to expropriation. That was why he was now sitting in his office, drinking the single glass of whiskey he allowed himself each day earlier than usual.

  “Francisco?”

  Beatriz wouldn’t appreciate him getting drunk because I’ve lost or because I’m going to lose everything and there’s no way out. Because how did one defend oneself against legal theft?

  “. . . so Anselmo wants to use soap on them.”

  He would drink his whiskey. One. As he always did. He would enjoy it, even if he knew it would not give him any answers. Then he would stand up and go walk through the sugarcane fields. He would force himself to take each step. He would caress every stalk, if necessary: it was the only trick he had left to avoid going into the red.

  “. . . Simonopio.”

  “What?”

  “I think you mean ‘pardon me?’ Your mama brought you up better than that. What are you thinking about, anyway?”

  Tired of all the responsibility and uncertainty, so defeated that he could barely deal with what already existed, let alone proceed with plans for the future—such as expanding the plantations, hiring more campesinos, building more barns for equipment and crops, extending the workers’ lodgings, and buying the coveted tractor—he, too, wondered what he was thinking. Why he was wasting so much time sitting there. Why he did not feel up to anything that afternoon beyond his whiskey.

  Even if all the crops came through, even if they were sold at the best price, in their entirety, without being stolen by the rustlers or the government for its armies, it might all still be of little use. He might end up working his fields so that someone else could harvest them, so that someone else could occupy his property. Why invest time, money, and effort in these inherited lands if he did not know to whom they would belong in a month or a year?

  Would it not be better to buy properties in Monterrey? To enjoy what was left of his daughters’ youth? The war had stolen time from him, on top of everything else. He wished he had more time for his wife, for his daughters; more time for the boy who had arrived in their lives.

  That day, he realized to his surprise, there was time. That day, the war, by taking his maize in a 100 percent tax, had taken away his planned work. However, it had left him time. It had left him with a rare day when his hands were empty, with no maize to protect, no goods to deliver. He would stop grumbling, then. That day, he would not waste any more time on the war or the reform. Or on the lost maize.

  The whiskey could wait until the usual hour. The sugarcane could wait for his visit. He would use this time for something else.

  “Francisco, I’m speaking to you!”

  “Pardon me, pardon me,” he said as he left the glass of whiskey half-drunk on the table and went to hold his wife and smile at her, as he did only when they were alone.

  “Ay, Francisco . . .”

  “At your service, ma’am?”

  “No! Stop fooling around. I came to tell you that Anselmo wants to use soap on the bees to kill them. He says they’re messengers of the devil, or some nonsense. He won’t shut up. I don’t even know what he’s saying anymore.”

  “Tell him no.”

  “I have! Do you think that man listens to me? No. You go. I left poor Nana Reja sitting on the rocking chair, waving her stick. She’s furious. She even opened her eyes!”

  “And Simonopio?”

  “Simonopio’s never there when Anselmo arrives. I don’t know where that boy hides himself.”

  Neither the years nor the stern lectures had persuaded Anselmo Espiricueta to give up his superstitions, thought Francisco, frustrated. He looked at his whiskey. He looked at his wife, sorry to abandon the game they had started playing. The war and the land left him with little time for Simonopio, but today Francisco would give him some. He would defend the boy’s bees for him, because they were his, because they had arrived with him, because although Simonopio had always had hands to take care of him and godparents to watch over him, Francisco—on his monotonous rides f
rom ranch to ranch—was plagued by the thought that the bees were the boy’s primary guardians. Killing them would be like killing a piece of Simonopio. It would be like orphaning him.

  Besides, though the bees had gradually covered the roof of Reja’s shed and no one dared go in there to store things, they never hurt anybody. Most people had become accustomed to their presence around the boy. They seemed interested only in Simonopio, and he appeared interested only in them. His life would be hard enough with the bees by his side. What would become of him without them?

  They had arrived with the boy. There must be a reason for it. Francisco would ensure they were left in peace.

  “Let’s go.”

  That day was Simonopio’s; it was his bees’. Some other day, Francisco would also find a way to defend his land.

  9

  The Bee Boy

  At Nana Reja’s feet, Simonopio learned to focus his eyes by watching the hive. Even as a baby he learned to distinguish them individually, watching them leave the honeycomb early and awaiting their punctual return in the afternoon. He lived his life by the bees’ schedule and soon learned to crawl away from the mat to follow his tireless companions around the garden.

  The day would come when he would follow them beyond the boundaries of the garden and beyond the hills that he could see.

  Reja, who had resumed her wooden motionlessness, kept silent but constant watch over him. She no longer fed him herself, but since the beginning, she had made it clear that the bee boy was to be fed goat’s milk and honey, first with a cloth, then with a spoon, and later with a cup. In the early days, she did not allow anyone near the child for fear that somebody with bad intentions might harm him or somebody with good intentions might drown him by feeding him like an ordinary baby. The only people with permission to go near the child were Beatriz, Nana Pola, and Lupita.

  Reja would never have let Beatriz feed him. Beatriz was always in such a rush to be somewhere else: if she wasn’t supervising the house or her daughters, she was at her club’s social events. Reja also knew that, if she allowed it, Beatriz would turn Simonopio into an indoor boy, a child of books. That was not Simonopio: Simonopio was for the outdoors, for the wild. He was for reading life, not books. When Beatriz wanted to see and hold the boy, she had to go to Reja’s rocking chair to do so.