The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  He had never believed himself worthy enough to see one of the great miracles in person, but today he had thought he was sharing the joy that important figures from the Bible must have felt on witnessing God’s greatness. He had participated in and was perhaps even an instigator of the fervor that had blossomed that day on the street where the Lazarus of Linares lived. What’s more, committing the sin of pride, Father Emigdio had announced the miracle prematurely to the archbishop of Linares, a claim that he now had to retract, humiliating himself, in the second and last telegram of his life. And as he went out onto the street like a bird of ill omen and announced that everything had been a misunderstanding, because, since Lázaro had not died, he could not have been resurrected, many people forgot his sacred status as a priest and cursed him for having made a fuss over nothing and for conning them. Some accused him of being a Judas the Betrayer for trying to draw them away from the faith with the miracle of Lázaro the Resurrected. Among these was Álvaro, the postman, who was waiting for him in the crowd and from whom Father Emigdio needed another favor.

  “Come along,” he said to the disappointed Álvaro, “let’s go write another one.”

  He left in a hurry—spattered in vomit, frightened of the heated atmosphere, and disappointed in himself—to write the telegraphic message: URGENT stop ERROR IN LINARES stop LAZARO NEVER DIED stop NEVER RESURRECTED stop JUST RECOVERED BY HIMSELF stop FORGIVE ME.

  The reply that the governor of Nuevo León was expecting from the capital had not yet arrived, so this new telegram surprised the patient telegrapher who, between the two messages from Father Emigdio, had shaken off his depression by thinking about the Lazarus. He was in no hurry to send this latest bad news to the archbishop, thinking, in his renewed depression, that there was no rush when it came to bad tidings and that it could wait until the next day.

  For his part, Father Emigdio, equally depressed, returned to the cathedral. He bolted the doors and, feeling very tired, went to bed, where he would spend the last night of his life. Because, in opening the door that day and going out to celebrate the failed miracle, infected with the fervor that surrounded him, he had also become infected with the disease. Luckily for him, his agony was as short as Mercedes Garza’s had been.

  That day, Lázaro the Resurrected ate, rested, and regained his strength, so it might be considered a good day. But thereafter, he would become the only man in the world—because no other case had ever been known—to be nicknamed with his own Christian name. And the nickname would catch on so quickly that very soon everyone—except his brother—would forget what Lázaro of Linares’s original name had been.

  And his infamy would accompany him for the rest of his life: he would never find a woman who wanted to spend her life or even a night with him. His reputation as a good-for-nothing would not, by itself, have prevented him from finding a partner, for women that fall for such men have always existed, in spite of concerned parents insisting, My child, don’t marry that man: he’s a good-for-nothing. Words in the wind. But none would forget or come to terms with the enduring mental image of Lázaro: dead, half-decomposed, stinking of rotten flesh.

  Though Lázaro had returned to life and soon regained his health and good looks, all of them, even Celedonia Grajeda, the ugliest girl in town, would refuse with a shudder to share their flesh with a man and to touch it against a body that had lain rotten and worm ridden in the mass grave.

  Aware of his misfortune and infamy but longing to be married, Lázaro was forced to search for a bride in nearby villages. But as everybody knows, in those villages, news travels fast, and news like Lázaro’s even faster. In none of them would he find a woman who would have him or even share the warmth of her body with him in a simple and fleeting dance.

  14

  Simonopio’s Sinapism

  In the years that followed his recovery and until the day of his death, I suppose, when they saw him pass by, the people of Linares—whether believers or unbelievers—continued to call him Lázaro the Resurrected of Linares in gossipy or reverential whispers, depending on where the person was on the scale of faith. The coincidence of him sharing his name with the famous figure from the New Testament helped to perpetuate the amazement of the people, many of whom, before the famous incident of his miraculous return, had never had a word to say about him except to declare that he was a good-for-nothing.

  I remember Lázaro. Not from the days when he was newly back to life, because that was years before I was born, but I do remember how he was much later, when little remained of the man he might have been, when all that remained of him was pure legend.

  There was nothing extraordinary about him, physically speaking. All I remember is that he was a silent man with an unhurried gait. And very tall. Even if, to a child, everyone seems tall. Did he have brown, black, or green eyes? I couldn’t tell you now. Was his nose snub or aquiline? Again, I couldn’t say. I watched him pass by with some admiration because, from a young age, I was very fond of listening to stories and reading tales of adventure, and one of the most exciting and wonderful was the Gospel’s recounting of the death and return of Lazarus.

  Or it was to me, at least.

  Truth is, I could think of no greater adventure than a journey to and from that place that Lázaro must have reached when he gave up life. I, who at that age had traveled no farther afield than the family orchards and Monterrey, imagined that such a man must return with much to tell. I wanted to know everything: Did you cross the river? Did you see Charon? Did you fight the souls in purgatory? Or What is God’s face like? But my mama, letting out a sigh, would tell me, Don’t even think about it, and Don’t be so silly.

  The day would come, years later, when I would ask Mama to call him, to invite him to visit me—prevented as I was from going out to find him, with or without permission. By then I had forgotten about the adventures and wanted only to ask him what one has to do to return from there.

  In one of the few lies she would tell me in her life, my mama assured me that she had tried to find him, but that Lázaro had left Linares for a while.

  “When he comes back, we’ll find him, won’t we?”

  Years later, my mama would tell me this detailed anecdote about our Lazarus in a half-joking, half-sad tone. Perhaps it was the same tone in which Dr. Cantú had told it to her. It could not have been easy for her to battle with my childish obsession with the matter. But also, I think that when she told the story of Lázaro again, she could not help but remember the story of all the people who suddenly disappeared from her life forever in those final months of 1918—or afterward—in what must have seemed to her like a blink of the eye.

  She might say, When we were girls, Mercedes and I would hide in a hollow in the trunk of a pecan tree so that her sister Luisa wouldn’t find us, but she refused to talk about the last time she saw her friend alive, much less about being unable to attend her funeral or about how that entire family disappeared from this earth in less than three days. She spoke about Aunt Refugio, about how clever and prudent she was, but she never mentioned that, on the one day her prudence had let her down, she had invited her inseparable friends Remedios, Amparo, and Concepción to spend the period of forced confinement with her and play a canasta tournament meant to last as long as the quarantine.

  All of them spinsters and of an advanced age, they accepted the invitation, pleased for the company and to continue the rivalry they had begun years before, when it became clear to them all that they would never be married and they discovered the card game. Since then, they had earned reputations as ferocious competitors, and it would not be the first time that they spent entire consecutive days without going outside, their minds on the private canasta tournaments they organized at one of their houses.

  The Spanish flu meant little to them except another opportunity to do what they liked most. And without silly interruptions, to boot.

  By then, they knew about the infection and the death of the Garza family, who, as everybody knew, had traveled to Eagle Pas
s, Texas. Who knows what kind of people and filth they must have come across in that town of cows and cowboys? they said between games. Perhaps this was why it did not occur to Aunt Refugio that, fine and trusted ladies of decorum that they were, her friends might arrive laden not only with suitcases but also with the same invisible and undesirable passenger the Garzas had brought back from Texas. And much less did she imagine that, whether with an ace, a joker, or a three, they would cheerfully pass it on with each card that exchanged hands.

  The four friends were found two days later, each of them sitting in her seat, motionless, holding her cards.

  They would have sooner died than end a game before it was finished.

  The man who found them would say to whoever wanted to listen that, while the notebook showed Refugio and Remedios were way ahead on points, in their last game of canasta, all of them had lost.

  The three most acute months of the Spanish influenza crisis left the survivors of Linares and of the whole world with scars that would never heal and voids that would never be filled.

  It is now known that there was nothing Spanish about that influenza. Spain, since it was not involved in the Great War, was simply the first to report the infection to the world. Hence the name. Experts have tried to determine since then whether it began in Boston or in the military barracks of Kansas or Texas; it was exported from there to warring Europe in spring 1918 and to northern Mexico that fall. Some say twenty million or even fifty million perished, and just in Mexico, three hundred thousand—perhaps up to five hundred thousand—died from the virulent disease. It is a well-known fact that the yellow fever epidemic a few years before and the new so-called Spanish pandemic killed more Mexicans than all the bullets fired during the Revolution.

  Still, in January 1919, in Linares, these details were of little interest, because absences were not measured in numbers or statistics: they were measured in grief.

  When the townspeople gradually tried to resume life—the daily routine, the rhythm that had been laid down over generations—the postmen, the butcher, the grinder, and their entire families were gone. The milkman and several of the garbage collectors no longer traveled the streets. The gravedigger, Vicente López, and two of his sons were gone. The young daughter of the owner of a grocery and tobacco store had to take over the business, without knowing where to start, when her father and three sisters died. Many farmhands and some owners of ranches and haciendas had disappeared. Several ladies from the social club would never worry about the flowers or music at future events again, and many founding members who had signed the club’s memorandum of association would never lay eyes on the social hall they had longed to see built. The position of parish priest at the cathedral was vacant, as was the job of headmistress of the girls’ primary school. The best carpenter had not finished training his son and apprentice. On the desks of the girls’ and boys’ schools, the absentees had left unopened books and notepads with blank pages. There were lessons that had ended abruptly and would never be learned, and friendships that would never be forged. The town was full of friendless friends. There were also many young widowers who had to learn to live without their wives, and many widows whose lives and upbringings had not prepared them to be breadwinners. By the same token, there were a great many childless parents and parentless children.

  Perhaps it was from that pain and those absences that the saying I remember from my childhood in Linares emerged: “The unhealthy year of 1918, when the Spanish flu was the worst ever seen.”

  I guess that, for those who stayed in the town and witnessed each death, slowly growing accustomed to the horror of seeing the cartful of bodies go past every day, to seeing loved ones or acquaintances walking one day and riding as lifeless passengers on the cart of death the next, the blow was gradual, and resignation came ever more easily.

  My parents did not stay to watch anyone die. They did not wait for their people or for themselves to drop, infected, one after the other. Simonopio saved them.

  “He saved us with a fever he invented,” my mama would say on the few occasions she said anything on the subject.

  He had never fallen ill. He had never even had a simple cold. But the day Simonopio went to find my mama after her meeting with the ladies from the club, his fever gradually rose until it made him convulse and lose consciousness. Dr. Cantú could not see any cause for such a rise in temperature: that morning, the boy had jumped out of bed with all his usual energy. There was no swelling in his respiratory tract, the lungs sounded clear, and his kidneys and liver felt normal. He was neither vomiting nor suffering from diarrhea. His joints were not swollen either. The doctor doubted it was polio, because my mama had noticed nothing strange in his walk, but there were countless other possible causes: a latent eruptive fever, appendicitis, or meningitis, for example.

  He could open up the boy’s right side to examine him, he told my parents, but if it was peritonitis, nothing could be done for him anyway. He would be cutting the body open purely to see what the child would end up dying from. If it was meningitis, the prognosis would be even less encouraging.

  The doctor’s advice was to wait, observe, keep him hydrated, and do everything possible to lower his temperature with cloths soaked in cold water from the waterwheel, or rags soaked in alcohol. They could give him the Bayer aspirins the physician knew my parents had bought on a trip to the United States when the pills were still sold there. They would help with the fever, pain, and swelling if, by grinding and dissolving them in water, my parents were able to persuade Simonopio to swallow them.

  “You must prevent any more convulsions, but be aware that the fever is a sign of another ailment that might be killing him.”

  When he arrived home that night, an urgent message awaited Dr. Cantú. That was when he found Mercedes Garza dead.

  The first to learn of her death and arrive to hold a wake were her parents, brothers, and sisters. At two o’clock in the morning, by which time the body had been washed, dressed, and prepared for an open coffin in the parlor, the rest of the family members, friends, and acquaintances began to arrive, all ready to accompany the widower on his night’s vigil. At dawn, some left to rest, eat breakfast, and prepare to come back later, while others arrived to continue the wake.

  In this coming and going of people sharing the widower’s pain, of prayer chains and gossip before the mass and burial, my parents were not present.

  They, too, had been awake all night and must have prayed, but I assume it would have been for the boy who had come to them from the sierra. No sooner had his temperature gone down a little and they relaxed their vigil than it suddenly went up again, making him convulse in a way that frightened them all. When they learned of Mercedes’s death, with great sorrow they dedicated some prayers to her as well, but they never considered leaving the boy, their godson, the son of nobody and of everybody, who had brought so much joy with him.

  They worried about Simonopio but also about Nana Reja, who would not move from his side. They had sent for her rocking chair so she would be more comfortable, but they were concerned that the pain of seeing her beloved little one die would cause her irreparable damage. They tried to explain and prepare her for what was certain to happen, but if anyone remained calm, it was her. Serene but active for the first time in years, she gave herself to the task of keeping Simonopio hydrated. As she had done when the boy was just a bundle in her arms, she squeezed a constant drip of milk into his mouth, with added honey from the bees that accompanied him all his life.

  At that time caring for the sick was mostly women’s work, but my papa, worried as he was, did not want to go far from Simonopio’s room. Running the hacienda took him away some, for work did not stop even when a death was near, but as soon as he had given his instructions, he returned. With the compassion for which she was known, my mama gave him jobs to keep him calm and make him feel he was doing something to help. If more goat milk or cold water was needed, she would ask him, and he would send for it. When it was time for anoth
er dose of aspirin, my father would grind the tablets, taking care not to waste a single precious gram.

  The day after Mercedes’s burial, when they heard that there was a strange, devastating, deadly epidemic in Linares and Monterrey, for a moment they thought Simonopio must have caught it, as many who had attended the wake and funeral had.

  “But where?”

  “The day he came to wait for me when I had my meeting. Perhaps Mercedes passed it on to him.”

  “No, remember he already had a fever. And he would’ve infected us by now.”

  My papa gave strict instructions that no workers from the hacienda or their families must go to Linares for any reason.

  “And if they go, they’d best not return.”

  He gave instructions to Anselmo Espiricueta to stand guard at the entrance to the hacienda with harsh but necessary orders, under the circumstances: Anyone who wants to leave can leave, but we won’t let them or anybody else back in. Not even Dr. Cantú.

  If needed, Espiricueta had permission to fire his rifle.

  Simonopio’s fever remained a mystery, but while it was clear it was not the same illness attacking and killing so many in Linares, my papa wanted to prepare for every possibility. He remembered a cure that, according to his maternal grandmother, was infallible against any affliction of the lungs, from a cough to pneumonia. He sent for a piece of canvas, which he smothered on one side with a thick layer of mustard, and he applied it to Simonopio’s chest.

  “What’re you doing, Francisco?”

  “A sinapism for Simonopio.”

  He remembered Grandma’s sinapisms. They were very unpleasant, but every time one was administered to him against any congestion, he was cured. Sometimes, just knowing they would put one on him cured him. He hoped that the heat the mustard produced in contact with the skin would draw out any malignancy from Simonopio’s chest.