The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  35

  The Blossoms’ Destiny

  Francisco assumed Beatriz would take care of the guests, who were surely confused that their host had deserted them. He valued good manners highly and was aware that leaving had been in the poorest of taste.

  But Simonopio had brought him the flowers, and until that day, Francisco had never received a better gift.

  In his study, sitting at his desk, he carefully opened his godson’s offering again. He was sorry to see that several flowers were bruised from falling on the ground and, of course, from the time they had been dead. They were beginning to decompose, and Francisco did nothing to prevent it. Every living thing dies, even these flowers, he thought to himself. Putting them in water would only delay the inevitable.

  It did not matter.

  Simonopio had torn them from their life on the tree for a reason, and Francisco, seeing them, understood it perfectly: they had fulfilled their destiny. He looked at Simonopio, who stood waiting patiently for the cogs in his head to shake off the dust and cobwebs they had gradually been covered with over the years of war, uncertainty, habit, and old traditions.

  “You walked to Montemorelos, Simonopio. Over the hills?” He did not need an answer, because he knew it was true.

  Mr. Joseph Robertson had planted those trees at the end of the last century, he told the boy. He had come to build the railway and had stayed there with his foreign ideas. One day, he went to California, and he returned with several freight cars full of orange trees that would take root in Montemorelos, without caring that they called him a crazy and extravagant gringo for not wanting to plant sugarcane, maize, or wheat, as men had done there for as long as anyone could remember.

  “And that’s what they all carried on doing. What we all carried on doing, too: planting near enough the same thing in near enough the same way it has always been done. And look where we are now: about to lose everything. But him . . . well, he’s old now, but the trees he planted perhaps thirty years ago are still there, and they’ll still be there when he dies.”

  The tree that had blossomed with the flowers Simonopio gave him had kept the earth in use for some thirty years. And in all that time, its owner had not needed to clear the land each harvest to start the next crop again, or needed to rotate the crop, because trees stayed, and once they began to bear fruit, they did not stop. What’s more, Francisco had tried those oranges: they were extraordinary.

  He decided at that moment that he would grow his own orchard. He would find a market for the oranges when his trees began to produce them, he told himself without hesitation, because after thirty years of proven success in Montemorelos, any concerns that the land was no good for oranges were gone.

  Putting the ideas that were beginning to run through his mind into practice would be neither easy nor cheap, but he was convinced the answer to his problems lay in those little white flowers.

  “Simonopio, I’m going to California tomorrow. Do you want to come with me?”

  36

  Everything Changes

  The movement of the train was lulling her to sleep. She would not fall asleep, because doing so in public would be in very poor taste. She told herself that she would just rest her eyes a little, close them for a while. Beatriz Morales did not know why she was so exhausted. Perhaps it was because, as a grandmother, all the traveling to Monterrey was all the more tiring.

  Her two daughters were married now, and Beatriz was glad she was no longer obliged to go chaperone them during their courtships. She knew she would always go to Monterrey, that she would do it to see her grandchildren, but the feeling she had when she boarded the train to travel to see her beloved daughters—tense and aware that she was abandoning her post in the home—was not the same as when she returned to Linares, to the place where she belonged.

  Sometimes the years went by in a blink: her daughters had grown up and gone to live their own lives. And now everything had changed in Linares.

  Nothing had prevented Carmen’s wedding, and then Consuelo’s, from going ahead. It was a shame the young men’s mother had died before seeing them marry, but that was impossible to remedy. Accordingly, both weddings were very discreet and austere occasions, conducted with great dignity and elegant simplicity. She was sure the guests who came from Monterrey had returned with a very good impression of Linares, particularly since both weddings had taken place around the time of local festivities: Carmen’s on the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in 1921, after that additional year of mourning for Antonio’s mother, and Consuelo’s some months later, during the Villaseca Fair of 1922.

  It seemed a long time ago now that she had thought that the celebrations would never return to Linares and that it was her responsibility to keep them alive so her daughters would know the traditions that had enriched family life for generations.

  Now the traditional festivities had returned, but her daughters had their lives somewhere else. They would visit from time to time to enjoy them, of course, and they might bring their children as well, but the events would not carry the same significance for them because they had not experienced them as unmarried girls. For them, it would just be an anecdote with which to remember their hometown or their mother, who invested so much time, still, in making sure every detail of the festivities was organized to perfection. They would remember the compulsory period of mourning as a small town’s idle pursuit, with the same formalities and dress that the people of Linares had always observed throughout Lent, waiting anxiously for the day of the Holy Saturday dance, when high society finally stopped wearing black and put on its best spring-colored clothes and dancing shoes.

  At times, like now, Beatriz was overcome with nostalgia for the daughters that they had been and that they could have been had the story been different. But they seemed happy in Monterrey, with their husbands and with the children already born or soon to arrive: Carmen had just announced she was expecting her second, too soon after the birth of her son, and Consuelo was already pregnant with her first.

  What Consuelo would be like as a mother remained a mystery, for Beatriz had never seen in her so much as a glimmer of maternal instinct or the tenderness only a woman feels for a baby, even someone else’s. Even with a child on the way and full access to her nephew, she was still interested only in the same old things: her friends, her books, and yes, her husband. Beatriz hoped that would change when she had her own child. Carmen, on the other hand, had proved to be a very patient mother. Her first child, a boy that kept her and his nanas busy, was just over two months old and so restless and colicky, he barely slept—and never for long stretches.

  When she visited, Beatriz witnessed the trouble he caused his caregivers and was glad she had left that phase behind her. Where had her energy gone? Lately, she felt so tired that, when Carmen came to visit or when Beatriz went to Monterrey, she would request to be left with him only after dinner when, bathed and tired from his unsettled day, he would let himself be held in his grandmother’s arms until the two of them succumbed to sleep in the rocking chair.

  She no longer went to the house in Monterrey as often as she had in the last few years. Her married daughters no longer needed supervision. Her responsibility for them, while not ended—because it never would be—had changed. Her life was in Linares, near Francisco, who was now so busy with his new orange orchards and the ranches that it was impossible for him to make the trip to Monterrey, as he used to do from time to time.

  No. She did not want to travel so often to Monterrey, even for the grandchildren. They would have to come to Linares.

  She could not complain; it was not as if going to Monterrey was hell. The house there was very nice; it was comfortable, though it was not the same as La Amistad, where her bed, her kitchen, her views comforted her. The ties of friendship from her youth had been strengthened by renewed contact with her friends in the larger city, and her new friendships were good and numerous, but they were not the same as her lifelong friendships in Linares. While she enjoyed the activit
ies of the Monterrey Social Club, she did not want to be involved in them. She owed her loyalty to the Linares club, which remained without premises.

  Oddly, while she was in Linares, she missed and worried about her daughters, and when she was with them in Monterrey, she felt the same or more so about the people from her life in Linares. It was as if she lived only half a life: incomplete in both places. Because Beatriz felt bad every time she said goodbye to her daughters but felt worse when she went away from Francisco.

  Her mother said the same thing on the occasions she agreed to accompany her to Monterrey, but even more so when, reluctantly, she saw her off at Linares Station: Dear girl, your place is with your husband. As much as it infuriated Beatriz when her mother said it, she had to admit that she agreed, because after the experience of the three months in exile, she knew that life stopped for nothing, not even for the needs of a woman abandoning everything, albeit temporarily, to be with her daughters and to get to know her grandchildren. Each time she boarded the train that would take her away from Linares and from Francisco, she was beset with the unpleasant feeling that, in her absence, their relationship would change and she would be left outside, like an intruder in her own home, a voyeur who can only look in through a crack in a closed window. She was afraid that, far away from each other, she would change and he would change in opposite directions, so that they would never find one another again. She was afraid that one day they would look at each other and not recognize each other’s voices, intentions, looks, or the warmth of their bodies in the bed.

  So Beatriz went to Monterrey as little as possible. Less and less often. She knew she could not help her husband with his work, which lately had kept him increasingly occupied. But she thought the least she could do for him was to wait for him and be there to receive him at night, to join him for dinner, to sleep with him very close so she could share her warmth with him and make him forget his doubts and worries, which were more than he admitted.

  The changes they were facing now were not easy for Francisco, though he himself chose to make them from one moment to the next. On the day when Carmen and Antonio announced their marriage to the Church and Simonopio showed up with his strange offering, Beatriz had remained with the guests, waiting with all of them for Francisco to finish what he had gone to do in the house and promptly return. But the minutes went by and neither he nor Simonopio came out, so Beatriz began to worry. And, worse, she had run out of excuses to justify her husband’s unusual—and rude—behavior.

  When she went in to look for him, she found him in the study writing various messages for Martín to take to the post office so they could be sent by telegram.

  “What’re you doing, Francisco? We have guests!”

  “I know, but they won’t leave and I’m in a hurry.”

  “A hurry to do what?”

  “A hurry to beat the land reform.”

  The response left Beatriz no less perplexed: How was it possible that some simple flowers had given him the inspiration he needed or helped him defeat federal law? Right then, there was no way to extract more information from him, because Francisco turned his attention straight back to writing his messages and did not consider his wife’s presence again. She left puffing with anger and confusion.

  Of course, when she got outside, she hid her feelings and offered excuses with renewed verve.

  “Francisco sends you his apologies. He received news of an emergency on one of his haciendas but says to make yourselves at home.”

  With such a kind farewell from the host, the celebration continued without interruption. The person who seemed most reluctant to leave was the new Father Pedro, who kept asking Beatriz what time she expected her husband to return.

  “I don’t know, Father. With that man, sometimes it’s best not to ask,” she answered, allowing her resentment to show.

  The hours seemed eternal, but finally the lunch, which became an afternoon snack and then an improvised dinner—when the group moved to the formal parlor and then to the dining room, hungry again, to enjoy the reheated leftovers—had come to an end. They would meet again the next day, since they were all invited out to La Florida for a day in the country.

  “I don’t know whether Francisco will be able to come with us. Sometimes it’s what happens in this business.”

  She was right to offer an apology in advance: that night, Francisco informed her that he would leave for Laredo the next day, where he would spend a few days making arrangements for his journey to California, which he would then embark upon by train from San Antonio, Texas.

  “What’re you going there for?”

  “I’m going to buy some orange trees.”

  Her husband’s newfound dynamism, with its untimely decisions and impromptu actions, taking measures that all but contradicted everything he had been before—measured, conservative, forever confined to the patriarchal laws—sometimes gave Beatriz the desire to let the old her come out, the Beatriz who feared change and would not hesitate to object vociferously to the new Francisco.

  But the new Beatriz controlled herself and listened. She agreed and later admitted that he might be right, as he had been about buying the house and the land in Monterrey, or about the extravagant purchase of the tractor, which ultimately proved a wise decision.

  Now, this Beatriz had to listen to her husband’s plans without showing any doubt. She had to try to ask specific, intelligent questions and draw on all her willpower to stop herself from saying what she really wanted to say: And what will we live on until your orange trees bear fruit?

  What Francisco explained to her would change their lives. He would buy orange trees in various phases, for it was a considerable investment—another one. Then he would clear all the sugarcane plantations. At Beatriz’s exclamation, he went on: “Remember that we have to plant all new sugarcane this year. But it’s over; I won’t plant it again. The orange trees will last decades. You’ll see.”

  Yes, the sugarcane was renewed every three years. This year the cycle came to an end on their plantations, and the Morales family would no longer be sugarcane producers.

  The news formed a knot in Beatriz’s stomach, but she shared a little of it with the part of the heart that compresses with sadness. She had spent her whole life surrounded by sugarcane because her family—first her father and now her brothers—also cultivated it on their land. She had grown up surrounded by the green reeds that seemed to cover any land given over to them. She had been lulled to sleep at night by the wind whistling through thousands of plants and had woken, on blustery mornings, to the spectacle of the sugarcane rolling like waves on an enraged green sea or, when the breeze was too weak to ruffle them, standing still as a calm lake. What would it be like to sleep without their soothing sound? What would it be like to look out through the window and see the landscape of her memories mutilated forever?

  What’s more, Francisco would not stop at that: he told her he would plant orange trees on the unused land that very year. Or he would try, at least.

  “You’re going to have to buy hundreds.”

  “We’re going to have to buy thousands, and that’s just this year. Little by little I’ll buy more, until we’ve filled all our land.”

  “And the maize plantations?”

  He would not remove them until the first orange trees began to bear fruit. He would not commit the folly of leaving himself completely without income.

  “Soon or later they’ll go, too, Beatriz. The landscape of our estates is going to change little by little, even if it takes me ten years.”

  And while much of the land remained as it was before, the landscape around her had changed, and the old Beatriz, the one who feared any kind of change, sometimes got goose bumps in protest. But the new one, the extremely modern one who now wore dresses above the ankle—less fabric and less expense, after all—supported her husband unconditionally. She tried to see the good side to the change: at least the scent would be wonderful from time to time, when there were flowers. If
there were.

  When, a month after Carmen and Antonio had their prenuptial interview with the Church, Francisco and Simonopio returned with two railway cars loaded with root-balled sapling orange trees, several neighbors tried to dissuade him.

  “It’s madness. You don’t even know whether they’ll produce. And you’re going to get rid of all your sugarcane and then your maize? What would your father say, Francisco?”

  “That the world is for the living. That’s what he’d say. And if orange trees produce fruit in Montemorelos, there’s no reason why they won’t here. You’ll see.”

  Beatriz suspected that, in reality, Francisco feared that his father was spinning in his grave at the decision, but he had not let that stop him. And she conceded that he was right: one should not cling to old habits that no longer work in a changing world, even if it felt as if their estates had been hit by another revolution, a bloodless one. Even if she struggled to fall asleep at night without the sound of the sugarcane lulling her.

  There was no going back now, and the orange trees quickly took root in the Linares soil, as Francisco had predicted. So, while they did not flower in the first year, let alone bear fruit—that could take up to three years—by the next year many people, including Beatriz’s brothers, followed suit, now converts to Francisco’s reasoning. When Francisco sent for more trees of various orange varieties that would bear fruit at different times of the year, others did the same.

  There were some who struggled to change, whether because of a lack of funds to invest or because they refused to grow fruit trees—their fields were not ladies’ gardens, they said. But in the end, even the most reluctant were persuaded, thanks to a recent exception included in the Agrarian Reform published in the Constitution: any land planted with fruit trees was exempt from expropriation.

  Why fruit trees and not sugarcane? The published amendment offered no explanation, but the reason became clear before long: Secretary of the Interior General Plutarco Elías Calles—who would later become president—had just bought the Soledad de la Mota hacienda in the vicinity of the nearby village of General Terán, which he would thereafter devote entirely to growing oranges.