The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  My parents discovered a kind of mourning that they struggled to understand. People had lost husbands, wives, parents, children, or friends, and they wore black, but they went about their daily business as if nothing had happened. They were happy to be alive, I suppose. I would have been, too, frankly. In the new reality that the influenza brought about, it is easy to believe that people who were honest with themselves could admit such a thing—that they could think My sister died and What a shame, but how nice that I didn’t—even if saying so in front of others would have been in poor taste.

  I do not wish to make light of the pain they must have felt at the loss of loved ones. Anyone who has been bereaved knows that the survivor’s recovery is a torturous road.

  We must consider the time. Imagine so many around you suddenly falling. Falling like flies, as if the air had suddenly been filled with poisonous gas. I imagine that, at the end of such an onslaught, only the flies that kept their distance, that went unnoticed, that were lucky, would survive. But once the harmful substance had dissipated, what would the survivors do? Get back to their lives.

  Life waits for no one.

  If you’re a fly, you keep flying and being a nuisance. If you lived in Linares at that time, you could never stop going out to the fields or ranches to tend to your crops or animals. You might close the store for a few days because of the initial shock, but you would open it again because, even if your relatives were sick or dead, your needs and the needs of others—those who sold to you and those who bought from you—persisted. If you lived at that time, you could not avoid having to go out to buy food, and not a day could pass without washing diapers or underpants, even if you sent your mother to the cemetery two hours earlier. In the midst of this crisis, you had tooth decay, infected toenails, and stomach upsets—slight or severe—that you put up with for a while before having to seek help from a doctor, if you could find one. Others went out to sell goat milk, or whistles, yo-yos, and spinning tops in the square, in the hope that there were still children alive to buy them.

  Knowing that the pandemic was over, the new gravedigger must have been only too glad to respond when he was called to bury a Christian, because he knew that they would be sending him someone quite dead, someone who had perhaps suffered a welcome and understandable heart attack. An ordinary death. If a mother or a father had lost a child, they had others to feed, so they had to go back to work, and that was that. With no fuss or extra patience from anybody, not even themselves.

  The initial compassion and attention Mercedes Garza and her family received when she fell ill and died were not experienced by anyone else in those three months. There were no women to bring food to fellow mothers when they lost their husbands, nor anyone to dry the newly orphaned children’s tears. By the time the Spanish flu had completed its cycle, there was nobody in Linares who had not lost someone, so there was no one to ease the sorrow of others with their condolences.

  By the time my parents arrived, ready to offer their sympathies to all and sundry, nobody wanted to hear them. They had already changed the subject. They had turned the page in that story. They had survived it.

  There was nobody with whom to discuss the absence of the usual postman; the storekeeper that knew them; or Father Pedro, who had baptized my sisters and Simonopio, because all they said was Yes, the other one was better or This priest’s a better speaker. Those who stayed in Linares saw one, ten, or twenty such figures die. They were sorry, of course, but the urgent need to fill the gaps left by their deaths forced everyone to be practical and to say, for instance, Don Atenógenes, the butcher, has died; may God have him in His holy glory, and may He send us another butcher soon. Amen.

  Their need for meat, groceries, worship, and sharpened knives was greater than their pain and sorrow. Such is life.

  My parents, who had not expected to come up against all of this, struggled to understand it and to be practical themselves. For example: it was hard to offer sympathy and commiseration to a mother, a friend younger than my own mama, who had buried a daughter less than three months prior and was two months pregnant now. My mama, who—while I don’t wish to boast—was a paragon of refinement and good taste, did not know what the correct protocol was in such circumstances.

  They also faced the sudden loss of dear friends.

  Though they had received news of the death of this or that person in Dr. Cantú’s brief notes, they had departed and taken their reality with them. They understood what the deaths meant rationally, but while they were in isolation at La Florida, their lives did not change one bit. Going back and suddenly being faced with the absence of friends, relatives, and acquaintances meant experiencing all the pain at once. Those who had remained had suffered drip by drip, but my parents were caught in a downpour.

  Isolated from everything, they had almost managed to believe that the war had also disappeared in their absence. But no. Not even the influenza, as deadly as it proved to be, was enough to stop the violence. And while a great many inhabitants of Linares had died in those three months, the deaths made no dent in the local population, for more and more families arrived every day from the rural areas, in search of refuge from the plundering, the kidnappings of women, and the levy.

  Thus, when my parents returned to their previous life, they found it full of gaps that absent friends and acquaintances had left, but also lumps made by the new and unfamiliar faces that appeared in front of them from nowhere, as if by magic.

  My grandmother was also suddenly confronted with the fact that her two sons, whom she had been so distraught to leave behind when she went to La Florida, had not only survived but were carrying on with life as if nothing had happened and nobody had missed them. She had known, from the occasional messages she received, that they were still alive, which she attributed to all the prayers she had said for them while she prepared her cajeta.

  During her absence, and in spite of the public health crisis, they’d taken good care of their land, but they’d also had the energy to fall in love and to woo the objects of their affection. Emilio was engaged. Carlos was now married and about to make Sinforosa a grandmother for the third time—the first grandchild with the family surname—but those events had not necessarily occurred in the proper order.

  Had my grandmother stayed in Linares—and had she still been the woman of days gone by, before life executed her character by firing squad—she would have immediately given Carlos, her youngest son, a dressing down for being so loose and lustful. She would have told him in no uncertain terms to behave like a man of integrity and marry the girl. Then she would have sent them away, to live out of sight for a while, far from the gossips of Linares high society, so that nobody would question the dubious news of a premature grandchild.

  Under these new circumstances, Grandma Sinforosa gave an enormous sigh of relief at the fact that Carlos had done the right thing without being told to do so: she learned that María de la Luza Garza’s father had not even had to demand that Carlos honor his obligations to his daughter. As a decent man, as a gentleman, he had gone to the family’s home, asked for her hand in marriage, and sent for the priest, who married them there and then in a discreet ceremony with only Emilio accompanying him.

  The hasty marriage had caused something of a scandal. The well-intentioned said it was in very poor taste to have married in the absence of the groom’s mother and amid all the loss of life: they had to remain in mourning for a year, as was only proper, and all social events were supposed to be put on hold. Not least something as joyful and auspicious as a marriage. The not-so-well-intentioned remarked on the audacity of the new couple: In the family way with so many people dying, and When did they find the time?

  My grandmother noticed all her friends doing mental arithmetic as they asked about her new grandchild’s arrival, but she did not care. She was grateful she was no longer the woman who would have tried to hide an untimely pregnancy, sending her son away before her grandchild was born. Families had to stay close, because as she had lea
rned, one never knows what might happen. The spark had gone out of her some time ago, and this new grandchild made her realize that it did not matter what tragedies befell them: life went on.

  On the first day after their return, when my mama left for her tour of sympathy at the Espiricueta household, my papa took the opportunity to go into town, thinking he would find it in a similar state to when he drove through on the way to collect my sisters.

  He was amazed to find that the streets were busy.

  The mayor, Carlos Tamez, was outside the post office, where there was a constant flow of people coming and going. They greeted each other hurriedly, both anxious to continue on their way. As the mayor walked past, my father asked him whether the postal service was now operating.

  “Partially,” he replied.

  There was staff, but since they were just beginning to reorganize themselves, one had to go through to collect one’s letters and telegrams oneself.

  “You’re going to need a wagon,” said the mayor before heading off.

  It was an ominous and cryptic message that my papa did not understand until he walked into the post office, found what awaited him there, and then returned home for what would perhaps be one of the worst experiences of his life.

  By nightfall he was calm again, thanks to the efforts and reassurance of my mama, who in dealing with my papa’s unusual and sudden fit of rage had forgotten her own, equally unusual fury—less sudden in her case because it had been growing slowly since her visit to the Espiricuetas.

  She would bemoan this for the rest of her life: Why did I let it happen? Why did I not tell him when there was a chance to fix it?

  Because the perfect course of action can only be seen in hindsight, which is why we fill life with so many should haves. In that moment, with the blindness that comes from living in the present, my papa’s temper was fiercer than my mama’s.

  22

  Letters That Arrived

  When he walked into the little post office, Francisco Morales was surprised at the activity and the new faces. The former postmen were not there, though the new supervisor seemed familiar; later, he would learn it was the former boss of the garbage collectors. For the growing town, it had made sense to appoint a postmaster who knew its streets and neighborhoods, replacing the one who, after twenty years of service, had succumbed to the flu—perhaps from an infected letter or from the deadly sneeze that took Doña Graciela by surprise at the post office, giving her no time to take out her embroidered handkerchief.

  After him, his subordinates had also met their deaths, one of them, Álvaro, for being the hero or the idiot—depending on who told the story—for coming out of hiding to heed Father Emigdio’s call and write two deadly telegrams.

  Now everyone was new to the business of handling and sorting the letters in a practical way. They knew the streets, but first they had to read the handwriting—whether fine or crude—of the sender. With the rush of missives that arrived or that had to be sent when the service was resumed, they felt as if they were drowning under a sea of paper. They did not know where to begin: all of a sudden, they had three months of good wishes, condolences, death notices, interrupted business, last-minute confessions, and everything else.

  Adding to the novice postmen’s confusion was the desperation of the local population to receive news from friends and relatives. In their attempt to complete their inventory of survivors, they milled around in the small space, demanding to be seen to immediately and as a matter of priority.

  Francisco decided he would wait a day or two. He did not want to become entangled in the human knot that had formed there. When he turned to leave, the postmaster called out to him.

  “Don Francisco! Don’t go! We have your correspondence. Well, some. There might well be more letters in the pile. But we already have masses of letters for your address. Take ’em, for mercy’s sake. Clear some space for us here. Hey, kid! Bring Don Francisco’s!” Joaquín Bolaños said to his assistant, before turning back to Francisco. “They sent these to us from Monterrey in their very own bag, to save us the trouble.”

  The boy returned carrying a white calico sack. It looked like a pillowcase, but it was stuffed with rectangles of fine paper and tied up to protect its contents. The people there, who were waiting anxiously for perhaps four or five letters, stared at it in amazement: Who had so much to say? To whom? And why?

  “All of these are mine?”

  “Well, not exactly yours, no. But they’re for one o’ yours.”

  “One of my what?”

  “One o’ your daughters.”

  “I don’t think so. There must be some mistake.”

  “Nope. We checked each one of ’em, and the writing’s nice and clear. Eighty-nine letters, all of ’em for Señorita Carmen Morales Cortés. We reckon they’re love letters.”

  Francisco took the sack before he could make out what the people were murmuring. He did not need to hear, because he could guess. Love letters for Carmen Morales. Who are they from? they would be thinking. And Will she reply?

  He had parked his car near the square, ready to continue with the visits he had planned for the day, so he headed there, slung the sack into the automobile, and climbed in after it. The smell of paper and ink invaded his nose. He forgot about the remaining visits. Instead he went home, furious because his daughter’s name was now making the rounds, and anxious to know who had devoted so many words to her.

  Neither Carmen nor Consuelo were at home when he walked in. Nana Pola informed him that they had gone to see the Ardines twins and that Beatriz had not yet returned from her visit to Espiricueta.

  Alone, he inspected the letters and confirmed they were indeed all for Carmen and all from the same sender: a certain Antonio Domínguez Garza. They had obviously been written over the course of three months, though he did not know whether the young man had taken them to the post office one by one or, knowing that they would not be sent until the public health crisis was over, had kept them in order to send them all together at a more recent date. At any rate, a fortune had been spent on postage stamps to send some letters that Francisco now wanted to burn without knowing anything more about them.

  The fire was crackling. It would have been very easy to set them on fire, a few at a time, and watch them slowly burn. It would also have been easy to open them one at a time to read what this Antonio was saying to his daughter. But he did neither, as much as he felt the need. One never opens another person’s letters or reads them without permission, he had to remind himself.

  He would not open them out of good manners, but he did want to kick something. He would have liked to have had something solid to punt—Antonio Domínguez, for instance—but he had to make do with the pile of letters that had formed on the floor as he took them, one after the other, out of the sack.

  With frenzied blows, he made the letters fly in all directions, scattering them around his study.

  It was at this moment that Nana Pola arrived carrying his hot chocolate, as she did every winter evening if the master was at home. She reached the door but did not dare step through it. Accustomed to seeing him calm in any situation, Pola did not have the courage to speak. Without spilling a single drop of the chocolate she had so carefully prepared, she quickly closed the door and went back to the kitchen, hoping that Señora Beatriz would soon return, because somebody had to do something.

  The sight of Francisco Morales lost in a violent dance all around the room, his face flushed, snorting from some indecipherable exertion, would be very difficult to forget or to explain.

  She had to send for the señora immediately.

  “Martín!”

  Martín ran off down the path that led to Anselmo’s house. With luck, he would bump into Señora Beatriz on her way back; if not, he would search for her farther on. Alarmed by the urgency with which Nana Pola had ordered him to fetch Señora Beatriz, Martín hoped that the señora had not continued on another path to visit someone else. He was no more than halfway when he foun
d her, in the company of Simonopio. In the early winter half-light, from a distance, he noticed they were both walking fast, holding hands. Simonopio was keeping pace with his godmother. He seemed distressed, disturbed by something. In the minute it took to reach them, Martín tried to guess why they might be in such a state. Señora Beatriz also had a grim face and was holding Simonopio with her left hand and carrying a stick in her right. Martín could not believe that Simonopio had done anything to displease or enrage the señora, who was generally patient and even-tempered. What was happening? They had been back only a few hours, and already everything had been turned upside down. They had not even had time to enjoy their homecoming.

  “Señora Beatriz! Pola says Don Francisco’s having a fit!”

  Beatriz did not ask any more questions. She dropped the stick and Simonopio’s hand and lifted up her obstructive underskirts on each side to double her pace. She did not care if Martín caught a glimpse of her ankles. Her priority was to reach the house as quickly as possible. Pola received her there with the same announcement: Francisco was having a fit. In his study.

  “Now all you can hear is silence—”

  “And you left him like that? On his own?”

  “I was afraid because of the puffing and snorting. I thought it best to close the door and send for you.”

  “Call for the doctor, Pola. Quickly. Go on.”

  At the closed door to the study, Beatriz hesitated. She was frightened of what might await her. Would she find him alive? And if he was alive, what did Pola think Beatriz could do for him if he had lost consciousness? She felt her eyes well up. She controlled herself and went in.

  She had pictured him crumpled on the floor, but he was not—he was sitting in a reclining position in his armchair, his back to her. She approached him gingerly, slowly, until she could see him from the front. His eyes were closed, but he was frowning. He was sweaty but breathing. His face was red all over.