The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  Then the war ceased to be a distant curiosity and became an insidious poison. Beatriz’s self-deceit came to an end in January 1915, and the armed struggle arrived in her home and her life to stay, like an unwanted, invasive, abrasive, destructive guest.

  That was when it knocked on her family’s door, which her father opened with a naivety for which Beatriz still could not forgive him.

  According to some of his fellow passengers, Mariano Cortés had boarded the train at the last moment, after saying a hurried, agitated goodbye to his son-in-law. He greeted the handful of other passengers in the first-class coach and took his seat. He was reading peacefully when a battalion blocked the tracks on the hill known as the Alta, taking advantage of the engine’s deceleration due to the slope. Some witnesses said it had been the Villistas. Others said the Carrancistas. They all breathed more easily when they learned it was not a general attack on all the passengers: the battalion was looking specifically for Mariano Cortés in order to kill him.

  Later, they would say how he had gone out into the open field, where soldiers were waiting to seize him. According to a witness who was in a good position to hear, the soldiers accused him of fraternizing with the enemy, wherefore they declared him a traitor to the fatherland and deserving of the death penalty. Immediately.

  I am not a traitor to anyone, and you are no one to judge me. But if you must kill me, the witness to the accused’s words repeated, shoot me in the chest and not in the face, so that my wife may recognize me.

  And so, they stood him alongside the train and, in front of the rest of the passengers, fired six bullets into his chest and stomach. Mariano Cortés returned home dead, but recognizable for his wake.

  In the town, her father’s death was romanticized. He had been dressed in his best suit for the journey, tall and upright, with the winter sun on his brow and the cold wind ruffling the hair that he always let grow too long. Standing, alone, facing the battalion. What guts! What love he showed for his exquisite wife with his final words! But none of them had been present when the cart arrived bearing the man of flesh and bone. The lifeless father with a flaccid expression, perforated, bleeding, and covered in the bodily fluids that had escaped as he died. Where was the romance in that? Where was the dignity?

  All Mariano Cortés left behind when he died was a deep void.

  Now they had to keep enduring the mournful tributes and accept that they were well intentioned. Beatriz continued to do so, though the rage and hatred that filled her at times like this, when she succumbed to introspection, frightened her. If she loved her father, why could she not forgive him for dying? As a good Catholic, why had she been unable to look the bishop in the face since that moment in the middle of the Requiem, when he said that her father’s death was God’s plan, that He sent ordeals as a blessing to those who deserved them most and were most able to endure them? And why did she now look with suspicion and anger at the people of worth, the cream of society, with whom she was supposed to mix?

  Perhaps because she knew that one of them had been her father’s betrayer.

  A dinner killed him, the locals said. And at the wake, between embraces, the mourners said, God took him because he was a saint; There was no one as good as he was; God needed him; God needed another angel in heaven; and What joy for the Cortés family to have an angel to look over it now. And to herself, Beatriz said, The war’s bullets killed him, not a dinner, not God. The betrayer that reported the dinner held in honor of General Ángeles killed him. He was killed by the man who had him pulled off the train and made him stand there and wait meekly to be filled with lead. He was killed by a small-minded, vindictive man who did not deserve to hold the office that he refused to give up. Each of those wretched gunmen killed him. And finally, His naivety and meekness killed him.

  War was waged by men. What could God do against their free will?

  And who had gained anything from her father’s senseless death? Nobody. The war had not suddenly stopped because a supposed traitor was dead.

  As if the six bullets that hit their target had not been enough, the Carrancista soldiers—for the circumstances suggested it had been they—proceeded to kick the body, as though to make sure that the soul would find its way out through one of the many new holes in its shell. And they left him there to move on to something else, to continue their reign of terror, without taking a single step toward peace.

  For the Cortés and the Morales Cortés families, on the other hand, life changed beyond remedy. They had become the great losers: almost four years later, Sinforosa, Beatriz’s mother, was not even a shadow of her former self, overcome with grief and the fear of more reprisals. Now she lived with her only daughter, for when she lost her husband, she lost her essence, her strength, and even her ability to take care of her home and herself. Beatriz’s brothers, Emilio and Carlos, had given up the promises life had made them and were performing the duties of their murdered father. Beatriz was losing in her attempts to cling to her own life’s promises despite suspecting that they would never be entirely fulfilled. She was losing opportunities for family plans, put on hold because they were currently inconvenient or impossible. She was losing by hiding her pain to support her mother and her husband. She was losing because, instead of germinating more children in her belly, she germinated fear, suspicion, and doubt in her mind. And worse still: she was losing the absolute belief in herself that she had felt all her life.

  The life she was living now did not resemble the life that Beatriz Cortés was supposed to have. In spite of it all, the sun rose and set each day—though even that sometimes disconcerted her. Life went on. The seasons came and went in an eternal cycle that would not stop for anything, not even for Beatriz Cortés’s sorrows and truncated hopes.

  In the town, almost four years after his execution, they still remarked with admiration on the dignified comportment and the final brave words of Mariano Cortés. This was no consolation to a daughter who had lost her father in a moment of violence. Beatriz repeated it to herself every day: I am a grown woman, I am a wife, I am a mother. I don’t depend on my father anymore, I have my own family, and we are well. But it was one thing to say it with her head, and another for her heart to believe it and stop sending pain signals to her soul.

  Because it was a lie that a woman left her parents’ home to become one flesh with her husband: for all that she loved him—and she loved Francisco because he deserved it—such a thing had never occurred to Beatriz. In her world, a woman took her parents’ home with her wherever she went: to school, on a foreign voyage, on honeymoon, to bed with her husband, to the birth of her child, to the table each day to teach her children good posture and good manners, and—she believed—she would even take them to her deathbed.

  In her world, a woman never left her parents behind, even when the parents left her.

  And now, in the anonymity that darkness provides even in the marital bed, Francisco had begun to talk about the possibility of giving up everything—lands, family traditions, and friendships—to start from scratch. Buy some land and start again somewhere else. In a burgeoning Monterrey.

  With the intimacy and immediacy that came with sleeping shoulder to shoulder, Beatriz had said: Francisco, go to sleep.

  She had not allowed him to continue. She did not want to listen to any more. She did not want to lose one more single thing.

  “Beatriz. What’s on your mind? Don’t you like the flowers we chose?” Aunt Refugio Morales’s voice broke through her absorption.

  “Hmm? Oh! Yes . . . I like them. Carnations are always nice,” she replied, though she doubted they would be able to come by flowers of any kind.

  “There’s time. It’s only October. I think we can order them in February to make sure they’re delivered on time,” Mercedes Garza went on, her voice weak, labored, hoarse from so much coughing.

  “And what if they don’t arrive?” Aunt Refugio asked. She could always be counted on to be clear and direct.

  “If they don’t ar
rive, then they don’t arrive,” said Lucha Doria. “What color are we going to order?”

  “Red?” asked Mercedes Garza between coughing spasms.

  “No. Not red. Any other color, whichever you want,” said Beatriz sharply. She preferred a color that would not resemble blood. Seeing that Mercedes’s cough was not relenting, she asked, “Are you all right? You look dreadful.”

  “No. I woke up today feeling as if I’d been beaten. I think I’m coming down with a cold, or perhaps traveling while pregnant wore me out. Or something. I’d better go home to bed.”

  They all agreed it was a good idea and got up with her to leave. As she came out onto the street, Beatriz was surprised to see Simonopio waiting for her, anxious, sitting on a bench in the square. More and more often, the boy had been straying away from the house without telling anyone where he was going or what time he would return, but it was strange to see him walking in the town. Stranger still to see him stop there.

  Beatriz knew that Simonopio did not like being among so many strangers that did not take kindly to him. She suspected that they remarked on, and even mocked, his peculiar physical features in front of him, quite without shame. And how had he known exactly where she was?

  Simonopio came up to her and took her hand urgently, indicating that she should follow him.

  “You’re very hot,” said Beatriz, touching his forehead. “You have a fever!”

  He did not turn to look at anyone else. He only had eyes for her.

  “Do you feel unwell?” Beatriz asked with alarm.

  “Ay, Beatriz. What patience and what Christian charity you have,” said Mercedes Garza between coughing fits, but Beatriz ignored her, as she did the other ladies who, crowding around them, were saying, Poor boy, what a mouth, but what beautiful eyes. When one of them went to stroke him like a pet, Simonopio did not let her. He kept pulling insistently on Beatriz’s hand. She let him separate her by a few paces from the group.

  “This boy’s never sick,” she said to them when he insisted on pulling her farther away. “Ándale, quick, let’s go.”

  Beatriz turned her head to wish her old school friend a speedy recovery, but Mercedes Garza did not hear her—she had turned the corner.

  11

  The Spaniard Arrives in October

  Someone had to be the first to die that October of 1918. Why not Mercedes Garza?

  After her meeting with the other social club ladies, she arrived home, requested a cinnamon tea, and announced that she was going to lie down for a while to rest. At lunchtime she had not gotten up to eat, but nobody was alarmed. At nightfall her husband arrived home from their ranch hungry, expecting his wife to tend to him.

  “Ay, Señor, the señora felt a little unwell. She’s been in the bedroom for some time now,” the cook informed him.

  The door was locked. Mercedes did not answer. Sergio Garza ended up going in through the courtyard window, only to find his wife lying on her side, the unfinished cinnamon tea on the bedside table. The luggage set the couple had just used on their trip to Eagle Pass, Texas, remained half-unpacked, which was strange, since Mercedes was a very particular and tidy woman. He knew she had been so excited about the fabric she had bought that she could not have let a day go by without going to see her seamstress to order some new maternity dresses. All of this was evidence enough, but Garza had to approach and touch his wife’s cold flesh to be sure.

  Dr. Cantú arrived half an hour later to confirm what Garza already knew.

  “What did she die of, Doctor?”

  “Heart failure,” answered the physician with certainty and authority, though really, he would have liked to admit he did not know.

  He did not like lying. At first glance, he could see she had not been poisoned, stung by an insect, or attacked by some criminal. But how could a woman who was healthy in the morning be dead by the afternoon? All he knew was that Mercedes Garza had died from cardiac arrest, for nobody dies without their heart first stopping. He was confident he had stated nothing but the pure truth.

  “What do I do now?” the dazed widower asked.

  For now, they had to keep vigil over the young mother and then bury her.

  Shaken—because it was not every day that a woman of such standing or of such a young age died under such mysterious circumstances—the mourners at the wake wept and offered condolences to the widower, and since there was no explanation for the sudden death, they offered him words of comfort: She was an angel who is now with her baby, or She was a saint and God needed her in heaven, because he always takes the best, and she was the very best. Nobody, not even the husband himself, was able to say at what, precisely, Mercedes Garza had been the best, but as God intended, one must always speak well of the dead. All of them, even Mercedes’s husband, knew that the deceased was bad-tempered, had been conceited since childhood, and mistreated her servants. In short, they all knew she was far from a saint and even less of an angel. But that day, the deceased, since she was dead, would be forgiven her every transgression.

  That was the protocol.

  Tomorrow would be another day. But while today lasted, What a beautiful wake and What a moving funeral, how lovely she looks, how well they prepared her, the ladies of Linares’s high society said.

  “And that poor child!”

  It was the best-attended wake of the year. Everyone who had been acquainted with the woman or her husband felt obliged to go. Not even the knife grinder missed it, though the señora still owed him for his last visit. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Mercedes Garza’s death aroused a morbid curiosity in everyone: What did she die of? Nobody dies from a cold, do they? Who was the last person to see her alive? Who helped her when she felt unwell? Who was her closest friend? Who’s to blame for not accompanying her home, for not recommending an excellent infusion? How grief stricken does the husband look? Who will take care of those poor children? How long will it be before he marries again? They discussed all of this in whispers, faces close together, but only between Rosaries, because otherwise it would have seemed in very poor taste.

  After the burial, infected by the sorrow of Mercedes Garza’s inconsolable widower and poor motherless children, not a single eye nor handkerchief was left dry. That day, many moist embraces and used handkerchiefs were shared. In the end, Sergio Garza’s right hand was sore from so many commiserative handshakes, and inexplicably, his legs and entire body ached too.

  Could it be his heart’s pain spreading everywhere?

  That October of 1918, Mercedes was the first to die, but she would not be the last.

  The next day, Dr. Cantú received another summons to the Garza house: Sergio Garza was unwell. The barely conscious patient had a burning fever, he was delirious, and he was struggling for air. His lungs were full of water, and his lips and feet were purple. Acute pneumonia, the doctor diagnosed, with confidence now. But Garza was young, healthy, and strong, and the doctor could not explain the ferocity of the attack, the speed with which the illness—whose progress was usually observable—had come on.

  He had not yet finished tending the sick man, knowing that there was little he could do for him, when he was summoned to the home of another patient.

  That day, the following one, and every day for the next three eternal months, Dr. Cantú had no rest. No consolation. No knowledge that would help him to help.

  It took him a couple days to realize that the speed at which the infection—which seemed like a flu—was spreading was abnormal. That it was of a different nature to anything seen before. It took him a couple more days to send telegrams to alert Governor Nicéforo Zambrano to the alarming death rate in the Linares area.

  In Monterrey they already had the same problem, so the governor’s response was slow, occupied as he was awaiting instructions from the nation’s capital on how to deal with this evil that had spread not just through Nuevo León but across all the states along the US border. By the time they managed to identify the plague, they did not have the energy or creativity
to invent a name themselves and instead adopted the one that the entire sick world had decided to give it: Spanish flu.

  In a way, Mercedes Garza had been lucky to be the first to die, for hundreds of people said goodbye to her with great pomp and ceremony. Her mournful funeral would have been etched in the collective memory for years to come had it not been for the events that followed.

  By the time her widower died three days after her, nobody had the inclination, the energy, or the good health to witness his burial, let alone attend a prolonged wake. By then, at least a third of Sra. Garza’s funeral-goers were lying in bed in various stages of the same illness.

  When Sergio Garza was in the throes of death, Father Pedro went to administer last rites to him. Then, at the foot of the coffin, he said a few ceremonial words—the bare minimum—before the man was placed in the same grave as his wife.

  The sole witness was the gravedigger, Vicente López. The priest, who was in a rush to get to midday Mass, left the cemetery without making sure the grave was filled. And Vicente López left without doing it: What for, if their little ones are going to join them tomorrow or the next day?

  The gravedigger was no clairvoyant, just an observer. He had heard the Garza family’s servants say that the children already showed clear signs of the same illness. A shame: you didn’t have to be a doctor to know there was no hope for them.

  Once they had delivered their master’s body, the servants no longer considered themselves bound to the family. Each went their separate way to try to save their own skin. Some thought one of the witches of La Petaca had given the Garza family the evil eye, and they refused to spend another moment in that house, afraid the power of the curse would extend to them too. The only one to stay to the end, because she had nowhere to go and because her devotion was greater than her superstition, was the orphans’ nana, for the children’s grandparents and other relatives had neither the health nor the courage to enter that infected house.

  By then Vicente López was even busier than Dr. Cantú. At first the physician had tried to visit each house, as was expected of him, and to do so with the usual respect, but the reality was too much for him.