I want to go, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of them seeing me as I am now: an old man. I worry that Simonopio’s waiting for me to climb orange trees again, to hunt toads, to crack nuts with our teeth, and to fill me, unashamedly, with the heirs of the same lice, fleas, or ticks that inhabited our bodies decades ago.
But I forgot how to be a child a long time ago.
Listen carefully and pay attention, Francisco.
Now I can hear him clearly, as if he were speaking into my ear, but I resist. He’s calling me with his familiar voice, singing to me with his beloved voice, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid to look him in the face and admit to him that for years I denied him and that for decades I closed my ears and eyes, on purpose, to his calls. That the last fifteen years I have wasted doing nothing, and now that I can see, hear, and understand the things I could not before, I recognize that his call to me was there, ever present, constant, strong.
I’m afraid to look him in the face and read his disappointment in me there.
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But Now These Bees Are Flying around Us,
and I understand what they want to tell me with their murmur: Come-come-come-come, come quickly, come quickly, run. And I know that he sent them to guide me to him.
Now I hear, too: it’s a little child’s sigh coming from inside me. I search inside myself, deep inside, and I find the boy that I was. He didn’t disappear with the years, as I’d believed. He was waiting for me, and he spoke to me like Simonopio did: protected in the depths of my memories, silent sometimes, but patient, waiting to be invited out.
In him, in me, there’s no place for rancor or resentment anymore, and he’s excited, I’m excited, because the day has arrived at last.
He greets me like an old friend and reminds me that we were once brave and bold, that we didn’t stop for anything. He asks me to set off as soon as possible; he’s bored, he says, and the excitement that he feels to get back to our orange wars, to run free, to climb trees at will, to play hide-and-seek, to swim in the river, to hold Simonopio’s safe hand, fills me and infects me.
And I allow it to do so.
The memories are no longer distant. They’re no longer measured in years. They begin to be measured in pure excitement.
Now he holds my hand. I hold his. He asks me to follow the bees along Reja’s road, because at the end of it, our brother is waiting for us. And I say to him, Wait a minute. There’s something I have to do first, because though I’m starting to cast away the old man that I became day by day, I’m still tied to a most basic feeling of responsibility—to the last bond to my mama’s teachings. I can’t forget it so easily. I can’t go, just like that, purely because of the enormous excitement of a reunion.
I look at you, Nico, and I know that you already know what I’m going to say:
“I’m not coming back with you.”
You look at me in astonishment, but nothing will stop me now.
“Take all the money from my wallet but tell this story to my children. They only know pieces of it. It’s time for them to know all of it. Tell them I loved them very much, that they were worth the years I spent without seeing my brother. Tell them to walk in the shade. To listen with their eyes, to see with their skin, and to feel with their ears, because life speaks to us all and we just need to know and wait to listen to it, see it, feel it.”
I know all too well that these lessons come late, but I wasn’t ready to teach them until today.
I’m filled with regret at all the time I wasted, in which I could’ve told them everything in person, when it counted: when they were small, when they looked at me with stars in their eyes. Now it’s too late, and the message, delivered by a stranger, will have to be enough.
“A safe journey to you and to me. I’ll leave you now, because the boy that I was, the one called Francisco Junior, is insisting and insisting. Right now, he’s saying, Come on, Francisco, let’s go now, stop talking, I want to get out.”
And all I can do is listen and pay attention.
Because this boy’s always been very tenacious or very stubborn, depending on the situation and on who was saying it. Which is why I know that, before we reach our destination, he will have managed to get all the way out, to leave the old man behind once and for all, and to run like he hasn’t run for so long. He wants to reach his destination quickly. The blossoms’ destination, Simonopio’s, his own, his, mine, before the sun sets. Because once there, with his little hand—now with no visible veins, no blemishes, no lines—he’ll take his brother’s young hand.
As he has waited for so long to do.
I turn around and take a hesitant step. Then another. I realize there’s more strength in my body than there has been in years. I follow the bees, growing more and more agile and quick, with the old horizon behind me. We walk without looking back, because on this journey, all we care about is our destination.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a novel inspired by the true story of a town in the citrus-growing region of northern Mexico.
There’s no greater freedom than writing a piece of fiction, even when inspired by historical events like mine is.
The key word here is inspiration, because it opens up endless possibilities and allows me—I allow myself—the prerogative to shape certain events, at my convenience, to develop the novel as I imagined it.
This is what they call artistic license. No department in any government issues it. You issue it to yourself as you please, hence the freedom.
Nonetheless, my research for this novel was very extensive. And while respecting the historical events and technical aspects—just as they were—was very important to me as I told the story of my fictional characters, I wasn’t so concerned about respecting the exact dates. Many are as accurate as my research allowed: Ángeles’s government, the dates of the wars, the Spanish influenza pandemic, the references to the Constitution of 1917 and the law on idle land, for instance. Others not so much: the exact date of Ángeles’s visit to Linares, the law on fruit trees, the beginning of Linares’s evolution toward citrus growing, certain events in the region’s Agrarian Reform: in some cases, I put two and two together; in others I brought the dates forward a few years.
In this book I sought to be faithful not so much to the historical details as to my imagination.
This is why Simonopio exists in these pages. Why I suggest that all of what is now an important citrus-growing area exists because of a boy’s journey and the vision of some bees. It’s why I take the liberty, in The Murmur of Bees, of including a hard-fought canasta tournament, though it would be twenty years or so before some bored Uruguayans invented the card game. This is also why fictional characters, extracted from my imagination, coexist in the novel with characters that are in some or all the history books (I decided, for all the fictional ones—except Espiricueta—to use typical surnames from the novel’s location, though this doesn’t mean that the people really existed). And this was why, in another perfectly acceptable clause in the artistic license I awarded myself, I also included some characters that exist, or existed, but not in the context in which they appear in this novel. Like Soledad Betancourt, my own nana, who was the storyteller in my life, from cradle to bedside to rocking chair. I was lucky to have her. I also know that I am a lucky writer in many ways. I’m grateful.
To Wendolín Perla, my wonderful and intrepid editor at Penguin Random House Mexico who welcomed me, an unknown writer, when I came knocking on the door: thank you.
To Simon Bruni, for the day he picked up El murmullo de las abejas somewhere in Spain, “listened closely and paid attention,” and decided to transform it into The Murmur of Bees. Thanks to your art, the murmur of bees sounds beautiful in English.
To AmazonCrossing and the possibilities it offers: a world of new stories, ideas, and sounds within reach.
I am grateful for the opportunity I had to interview some remarkable and much-loved people before their final departure, and for the energy, enthusiasm, and
patience with which they answered my questions. They are gone, but they left their mark on me, in this story, and in the lives they touched during their time in this world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2014 Juan Rodrigo Llaguno
Sofía Segovia was born in Monterrey, Mexico. She studied communications at Universidad de Monterrey, thinking mistakenly that she would be a journalist. But fiction is her first love. A creative writing teacher, she has also been a ghostwriter and communications director for local political campaigns and has written several plays for local theater. Her novels include Noche de huracán (Night of the Hurricane), El murmullo de las abejas (The Murmur of Bees)—which was called the literary discovery of the year by Penguin Random House and named Novel of the Year by iTunes—and Huracán. Sofía likes to travel the world, but she loves coming home to her husband, three children, two dogs, and cat. She writes her best surrounded and inspired by their joyous chaos.
Follow her on Facebook and Twitter or visit www.sofiasegovia.com for more information.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2013 Thomas Frogbrooke
Simon Bruni is a literary translator from Spanish, a language he acquired through “total immersion” living in Alicante, Valencia, and Santander. He studied Spanish and Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London and Literary Translation at the University of Exeter.
Simon’s many published translations include novels, short stories, videogames, and nonfiction publications, and he is the winner of three John Dryden awards: in 2017 and 2015 for Paul Pen’s short stories “Cinnamon” and “The Porcelain Boy,” and in 2011 for Francisco Pérez Gandul’s novel Cell 211. His translation of Paul Pen’s novel The Light of the Fireflies has sold over a hundred thousand copies worldwide.
For more information, please visit www.simonbruni.com.
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