The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  That is what he did: he let himself fall ill. And now all the passengers on the caravan heading to La Florida would live. He could do nothing for the people they were leaving behind, but his godparents and the girls, Grandma, Nana Reja and Nana Pola, Mati and Martín, and all the other workers and their families were safe.

  If they had allowed it, he would already have been waiting for the family at La Florida. He knew all the shortcuts through the hills. The bees had shown them to him. He knew it was important, which was why he’d paid close attention when he followed the swarm, but he did not yet know why. What he did know at that moment was that the family was traveling away from death and heading toward life.

  He felt happy. Relieved. Even with his silence, he had found a way to make himself understood—on this occasion, at least. It had not been easy, and perhaps, if he had had more time, he would have thought of some other way.

  For now, Simonopio just lay on the cart obediently. He enjoyed the cool morning air and the warmth of the sun on his face. He had never spent so long between four walls as he had in recent days, and when he returned to his body, his first instinct had been to run to the hills, to leap into the river, to listen to his bees.

  Bodies that fell sick, like his, were not allowed such freedom. He knew that four days had passed since he had made himself fall ill and that he had caused the family anguish; now he must pay. And this was his punishment: to keep his body in an unnecessary and annoying state of rest despite how he longed to run, to see his bees swirling above him, even if he was unable to follow them into the air no matter how they insisted, and then watch them give up and fly away. On top of this, he had to suffer the searing heat on his chest where the mustard from the sinapism had burned him. Though that pain was the least of his worries.

  He had seen the look of relief and satisfaction on his godfather Francisco’s face when he had woken. His godfather proudly told him that he had cured him with his sinapism, and Simonopio would never refute it: one should never contradict an act of love. After hours of the treatment, Simonopio had gestured at them imploringly to take it off, because it burned. But he knew that his godfather’s peace of mind depended on a few more hours of a sinapism for his godson, so he had put up with it.

  The sinapism had been administered to Simonopio, yes, but he knew that it had served to cure something in his godfather. Perhaps it alleviated the anguish or pain in his heart. Yes, the mustard burned, but Simonopio understood how hard his days of sickness had been for Francisco Morales and knew how hard the coming times would be. While he was able, Simonopio would gladly do what he could for him. He hoped that the curative effect of the sinapism, which he had tolerated with so much patience and stoicism, would also heal all the wounds his beloved godfather’s heart would soon, inevitably, suffer.

  Because they were heading toward life, yes, but that did not mean that life would be easier.

  16

  Dust Thou Art . . .

  If he was not supervising his cattle ranches in Tamaulipas, Francisco Morales made a daily trip to inspect the work on his various haciendas. Weeks had gone by and there was still no infection on La Florida, which gave him the satisfaction of knowing he had made the right decision.

  Even so, he knew being far from home was not easy for anyone.

  To avoid thinking about her two adult sons left in Linares, his mother-in-law did not leave the kitchen. She spent the time perfecting her cajeta, which she stirred and stirred, relentlessly. She switched the wooden spoon between hands, but she never allowed anyone to relieve her of her work, even though the constant circular movement wore her out to the point that, at night, the spasming muscles in her arms, shoulders, and neck needed rubbing.

  Still, she stirred endlessly and would not accept help. She did it by herself, she said, because the work was hypnotic, and while her mind was under the almost narcotic influence of her labor, she forgot everything. She forgot her sons, the husband she had lost. She forgot what might have been and what might be. The work was tiring for her arms but restful for her soul.

  Understanding this, Francisco made sure they were never short of goat milk or brown sugar. Which was why liters of cajeta were produced each day, shared out by Sinforosa at snack time between the workers’ children, who, thanks to this generosity, gradually grew plump.

  Meanwhile, Carmen and Consuelo went through various states of mind. Sometimes they were happy, sometimes sad. Sometimes they cried without any provocation whatsoever. At other times they screamed with fury at some offense, real or imagined, but then returned to being complicit in a secret that made them double up with laughter. Worst of all was when they went through all these states in a single day; Francisco would rather smell the charred hair and flesh of the cows he branded than try to decipher each change of tone or look in the eyes of his daughters.

  During that time, he moved cautiously through the house, trying not to be caught and become embroiled. His admiration grew for Beatriz, who seemed both unsurprised and unfazed by the adolescents’ outbursts. To keep them busy, she would give them tasks: to teach the youngest children to read, and to educate the older ones in arithmetic. When they had done that, she asked them to give everybody music lessons. As expected, Carmen was the more patient and persevering in her lessons. Consuelo would disappear when Carmen was distracted; she did not have, nor would she ever have, any patience for other people’s children.

  Francisco tried to understand them. It was not just boredom that was making them this way: they were not used to such basic living conditions. With no electricity, they had to give up their activities at an early hour. They were in the habit of ending the day reading under an electric light, not an oil lamp. And, accustomed to having an icebox at home, they would normally have their drinks with ice, even in winter. But here there was no cooler and no electricity, for they were costly luxuries the family had installed at their house on La Amistad over time, electrifying the social rooms and then moving on to the private areas. The kitchen had been the most recent project, though Francisco hoped to continue very soon with the servants’ quarters and the campesinos’ houses. But that was an expensive project. For the time being, he had no plans to invest in electrifying the hacienda on La Florida, as his daughters were now requesting each time he refused their requests to return to the modern luxury of Linares.

  Beatriz remained impassive at all times, but Francisco knew it was a mask she put on each morning when the sun came up. Every night he heard her tossing and turning in bed. He was aware of her getting up to go check on the girls in their bedrooms. She also checked the locks on the doors, made sure no candles or oil lamps were lit, and confirmed that the woodstove had gone out completely.

  In the mornings, Beatriz pretended she was perfectly rested. She joined Francisco for breakfast. She woke Carmen and Consuelo so that they would perform their duties. She organized the day in the house, the routine cleaning and the deep cleaning. In the kitchen she made sure that nothing was wasted, that not a crumb went astray. From time to time she would go out to see Nana Reja. While they did not complain, neither the nana nor her rocking chair could get used to their new location or their new view: the former barely ate, and the latter hardly rocked. Beatriz did not know who was suffering most, and she worried.

  But she kept going. She kept going because she had to. She would finish one thing and move on to the next, until everything was done, until she had no option but to continue her embroidery by the light of an oil lamp. She kept her body busy so that her mind did not have the energy to wander, to think about anything else, to explode.

  Francisco was grateful for the brave front she put up, because it gave him the strength to also put on a mask each morning, to say goodbye with a smile, and to leave her in charge of whatever happened on La Florida while he went about his various tasks in the surrounding area and farther afield in Tamaulipas. Much like his mother-in-law stirring her cajeta, he had his ranches and plantations to exhaust his body but give respite to his mind.

/>   Beatriz had nothing to bring her comfort. She kept busy all day but without anything really bringing her peace. She knew that her workers also missed their homes, which were simple but their own. They all had a roof over their heads at La Florida, but little privacy. Just one family of servants normally lived on the hacienda there, in an old building of twelve large, independent rooms—originally built to house more campesinos than had inhabited it in recent years. With the sudden invasion, it had been filled, a family in each room.

  While they slogged away or followed a yoke of oxen during the day, on La Florida or on La Amistad, the men told themselves everything was back to normal. Lost in hard work, they forgot that their families were living in exile as far away as possible from the town. Then, when they returned before nightfall, they were surprised by their wives’ ill humor and did not understand it.

  It was the wives that felt the real pressure, for they had no privacy or time away from one another through the day. They had to share a kitchen and washhouse. They had to live with the mayhem of so many children together in one place with nothing to do. They had to take turns cooking for everyone, cutting back on the provisions not grown on their land and, thus, hard to replenish, such as salt, pepper, white flour, rice, beans, and potatoes, all things they had bought from the Chang brothers before the ban.

  Francisco had seen to it that they procured everything in large quantities, but since nobody knew how long their exile would last, they had to be sparing. He was not worried they would go hungry. On his ranches they had plenty of meat and milk from the cattle and goats. All trade had ceased since the onset of the epidemic, so the idea of slaughtering however many animals were needed to feed his people did not trouble him. The plantations meant they had homemade brown sugar, and there would be no shortage of onions, squash, and carrots grown on their vegetable plots. If needed, he would also buy food from his campesinos. They had plenty of their own maize and lime to make cornmeal in the mill, where they also ground the sugarcane.

  Beatriz had recently brought it to his attention that the workers were holding back some of the sugarcane extract in order to ferment it and make aguardiente in a still they’d rigged up from some old copper pans.

  “The women are complaining, Francisco. Especially about the unmarried men who have no family responsibilities. They keep everybody awake, they say, particularly Trinidad, who’s a heavy drinker, but not a good one.”

  Worse, they could not go to the bathroom in the middle of the night for fear of unwanted advances from some drunken seducer, single or married.

  Francisco was not a teetotaler: he enjoyed a beer once in a while. Carta Blanca from the Monterrey Brewery was his favorite, and ever since the ice factory had been set up in Linares, he had liked it ice cold. He also enjoyed his daily glass of the whiskey that he brought back from his trips to Texas. But the alcohol content in the aguardiente that his workers distilled scorched the throat and made the stomach burn. With a few swigs of this liquid, any man would lose his good sense, so combining the potent liquor with the close quarters in which they lived was an invitation to disaster.

  Therefore, he confiscated the ingenious distilling contraption, though he knew it would affect his men’s morale. Believing that the remedy for any demoralization was work, he kept them busy with tasks on the haciendas. It was what they were accustomed to, part of their daily life. The hours they spent tending to the plantations, with no help from their wives, wore them out. They would return to La Florida with no desire to do anything except eat and go to bed early, without making trouble, aware that more work awaited them the next day.

  The only one that dispensed with his routine duties was Anselmo Espiricueta. Francisco allowed him to stay at home because, a week after the caravan’s departure, his wife had fallen ill and died the same day, and it had not stopped there: four of his children were now dead or dying. Only the father, the eldest son, and the youngest daughter remained in good health.

  Francisco did not know how one disease could attack some and have mercy on others, but he did know that this particular tragedy could have been avoided.

  The fact that the woman fell sick a week after the warning he had given his worker told him that Espiricueta had ignored him and sent his pregnant wife into town again—for more tobacco, no doubt.

  Francisco Morales had never been one of those people who go through life saying, See, I told you so. In fact, he hated comments like that—what did they achieve? They were just wasted words, when there was no longer any way to repair the damage. However, he had never been so tempted to grab somebody by the shoulders and yell, I told you not to go to town, I told you your smoking would kill them! Somehow, he found the strength to keep his mouth shut, for Francisco could not imagine the anguish and the magnitude of the grief that such a loss could cause in any man, not least one whose responsibility for his family’s infection must be weighing heavily on his conscience.

  All Francisco could do for them in the circumstances was to leave packages of ready-made food near their house. The first time, he also left Bayer aspirins, but the next day he found them moist on the ground, wasted. He was sad to see something so precious and so expensive squandered. He did not offer them again: he could not afford to leave his own family without medicine, in case they needed it.

  Beatriz was the one who had the idea to send the family food when they heard of the woman’s illness. She also suggested they summon the doctor, but Espiricueta categorically refused to receive him. And now he was paying the price for his decisions.

  What began as an act of kindness on Francisco’s part to help a man, to help a desperate family, eventually became a nuisance. Perhaps it was Espiricueta’s lack of commitment to his work, his lack of effort, or simply the weight of his expression, which held something his employer could not decipher. That look in his eyes, a look that all the good treatment—a home, food, schooling, good company—had not lightened. It might have been that Francisco suspected Espiricueta beat his wife, that he had noticed the usually friendly Simonopio avoided him, or that Beatriz found the man repulsive.

  Now, with the family decimated, Francisco struggled to admit even to himself that he had been mulling the idea of getting rid of Anselmo Espiricueta for some time. Each time he had considered it, sympathy had gotten the better of his determination. If he had dismissed the father, the wife and children would have been left homeless, without work or earnings. Hopeless, again. He also knew that, if he fired Espiricueta, nobody else in the region would give him work.

  And with good reason.

  He could not let him go. Much less now. He did not believe in kicking people when they were down, and it was not possible to fall lower than Espiricueta. Francisco could not turn back the clock or return his wife or children to him. All he could give him was continued employment and, with it, some peace.

  He felt a presence beside him.

  “Simonopio, what’re you doing here?”

  That day, Francisco had left La Florida with no company other than his campesinos, whom he transported in the pickup truck. There was much to do every day. The social life of Linares might have halted, but the land stopped for neither death nor mourning. Each day the cows and goats waited for someone to milk them and the plantations had to be irrigated or harvested.

  He could have sent the campesinos on foot; the distance between La Florida and La Amistad was short. But Francisco believed in investing the body’s energy in the day’s tasks and not the journey, and while the route was not steep, it lacked shade and was very hot, even in fall. If the debilitating hours of sun were impossible to avoid, then they might as well be spent working. He took care of the transportation. Obtaining gasoline was neither easy nor cheap, but he preferred to spend money on fuel than to waste man power.

  Now, suddenly, right beside him, the newly recovered boy had appeared, having found his own way there. He was not out of breath, nor did he seem hot from the effort. Francisco knew Simonopio liked to stray from the house, but he’d ha
d no idea the boy was brave enough to venture such a distance. He felt the urge to tell him, Don’t stray so far, you’ll get lost in the mountains, Simonopio; the bears might eat you, boy, but he contained himself. Francisco did not like wasting energy or words, and at that moment he was certain Simonopio had no need for his. Clearly, he had arrived where he had wanted to arrive, without anybody’s help. In this moment of insight, Francisco understood that the danger of being eaten alive had ceased to exist for Simonopio in the first few hours of his life, and that, should he decide to walk to the Antipodes, the boy would never lose his way.

  And not only that: in that moment, Francisco accepted that, with Simonopio, there were no coincidences. If he was there, it was for some compelling reason.

  “Were you looking for me?”

  Simonopio gestured for Francisco to follow him to the abandoned family house. Francisco had not been back in the house since he and his family had locked the door. And he had not felt the faintest urge to return by himself. Reluctant but curious and certain that Simonopio must have a good reason to lead him there, he entered.

  Francisco had expected that the oppressive emptiness and silence of the house would be heartbreaking, so he had decided not to set foot in it until he returned with Beatriz and his daughters by his side. He was surprised to find, as he walked in, that his heart neither tightened nor stopped beating. Not even the oppressiveness he had so feared materialized. The awareness that he was back did not make him shudder.

  He looked around. Four weeks of neglect, and everything was already covered in a thick layer of dust.

  It occurred to him that houses die when they are no longer fed with the energy of their owners. He wondered whether the ancients had experienced the same thing: the Mayans, the Romans, the Egyptians. He wondered whether, when they abandoned their homes, when they left their villages after some catastrophe, never to return, they had caused the death, deterioration, and then ruin of houses, villages, and temples.