Napoleon's Beekeeper

by José Luis de Juan

  The woman detaches herself from him. Her brown hair with its russet lustre is gathered in a bun beneath a hairnet. She takes a few steps forward, confused now by what protocol might be appropriate. She turns around to bow her head a little, then strides out of the room. Bonaparte doesn’t move for a few minutes, his torso sunk against the uncomfortable backrest; his arms fallen; his hands, which had grasped the lady’s hips moments before, inert; his gaze lost in thought. Suddenly he gets to his feet, an impulse not even he seems to have decided on. He pulls up his breeches quickly and impatiently, smooths the coattails of his worn green frockcoat, and fastens three buttons, starting at the bottom. He regards himself fleetingly in the Venetian mirror. Its edges duplicate a fragmented image of him. Buona. Parte.

  He moves towards the door, making his spurs jangle. He opens the two shutters abruptly and a summery light invades the office. A rickety anteroom. Everything has been built to a dwarf scale in this house, he says to himself.

  The Elba mouse trap. Corsica must be fifteen times larger. I never should have accepted. Although the island isn’t too bad. I am emperor of twenty thousand countrymen, monarch of the Elbans. Whom do they laugh about in Paris and Vienna? The soldier who penetrated Milan, prevailed in Austerlitz and was so often lauded by the French, the Italians, and even the Egyptian Mamluks? Or the other man, the one who, once a week, gives an audience to the peasants of Elba who can afford shoes without holes and jackets unstained by pig’s blood or olive oil?

  They can laugh all they want. At least I have an island, they don’t have anything.

  What’s happening in Paris? In August the post is even slower. Might my old subjects still be on that monstrous honeymoon with the Bourbon?

  The English: calling me a fool, and yet now they support that fat vulgar king, who cannot move unless he is hauled about on others’ shoulders.

  The sullied Revolution. The privileged few of old, restored. It’s only a matter of time: discontent will return to the streets of France. And then…

  The English, how original. The day before yesterday Lord Whatshisface assured me in his ridiculous French that I would be welcomed with open arms wherever I wanted to settle in England. We lost Nelson, they would say, but we still have Bonaparte. Ending up a justice of the peace in Surrey or in Dover, contemplating the grey channel that I was never able to cross, chilled to the bone. Captaining cats and dogs…

  And Fouché offered me passage to the United States of America. The illustrious immigrant arriving on the coasts of liberty. Kings and idle aristocrats forbidden. Slavery and inequities from the cradle abolished. What could be better for an emperor than a country where opportunities never seem to be exhausted, where what one becomes is the result of one’s will, ingenuity and a dash of luck? There I could more than regain the hundred and twenty-five million that Talleyrand, the ingrate, confiscated. America would make me a tribune, a lifelong member of congress and left hand of the president, since not a president, for the only thing one cannot do in America is be born again.

  No one truly knows me. Not even my beneficiaries, my dynasty, know me. The benefactor falls and it seems as if all he did for his own never took place. It is not even a betrayal. It is an essential weakness of character. Glory has become a chimera that can no longer be seen, and one persuades oneself that one has never seen it in one’s lifetime.

  I confess I’m an impostor. I was never the youngest general of France. I never conquered the north of Italy or reached as far as Naples to cleanse the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies of its bandits. My great Alexander dream was just a boozy night in a tavern. I no longer make the foolish claim of having kept the Revolution from turning against itself, of having tackled the Terror, promoted civil justice, set the lazy clock of the centuries racing. I deny that I ever truly planned to establish the United States of Europe, crush Russia and Turkey, sweep the usurper English from India.

  Yes, I admit to still having delusions of grandeur. I insist on being called the Emperor of I don’t know what lyrical territory and I live happily in the sanatorium of Elba. Everyone humours me. My white clothing still has an ‘N’ embroidered on it. I go out to stroll among the pines wearing my worn-out uniform and a bicorne made from newspaper by the nuns. I eat with gusto and every now and then assault sheep that have lost their way on the mountain.

  20.

  What the hell do they want with him? Pasolini is just a beekeeper, sometimes a man of letters. They can’t expect any action from him. He has no clue about what to do in situations like this. He only came up with an opening through which to peer at the mystery of Napoleon, and it is no larger than a honeycomb cell, no larger than, in other words, the body of a bee. From that minuscule perspective, from the perfect hexagonal shape of a cell, an impression of Bonaparte can be got. And thus, even the coat of arms of France can be explained, because for Pasolini the lilies are but a deformation of the gold bees found, with their red crystal cloisonné wings, in the tomb of Childeric, first king of the French.

  Pasolini paces back and forth, restless, between the rear door of the house and the entrance to the apiary. Deep in thought, his hands empty, he seems not to be doing anything. Undoubtedly the neighbours above are watching these uncharacteristic movements, peeping out of the windows and terraces of what must have been a castle and is now a hotchpotch of uneven levels, divided houses and split flights of stairs that lead to blocked walls, as if one branch of the family had decided to wall themselves off so as not to have to put up with the other.

  What irredeemable sin had he committed to find himself in this situation? If only he hadn’t taken a copy of Le souper de Beaucaire, the pamphlet that Bonaparte wrote, from Marco Aurel Junior, the Avignon bookseller. ‘The town of Marseilles is weak and ill and needs honey to make the pill go down,’ wrote the man who, after being a fugitive shadow for so many years, now intended to materialise in flesh and blood in his own house. And in Toulon, where Napoleon had his first posting as an artillery officer, he gave honey to the people after the siege. Toulon honey, as Pasolini discovered later, is one of the most prized in Provence. Dark and dense, it comes from a forest of chestnut and walnut trees.

  If only he had never found out about the honey from Jena or Montmirail, much less the battles that Bonaparte won there. Montmirail honey is a powerful laxative. Half a spoonful sends those with even the most chronic cases of constipation running to the toilet. It smells of aroused drones awaiting the nuptial flight. That fateful morning, after sweetening his coffee with a spoonful of honey, Napoleon launched his three regiments against the Montmirail defences, cutting the jugular of the enemy and leaving it prostrate by day’s end.

  He realises now that the revelation he had when reading the work of Münker, Bees of the Moselle, is what lured him into the trap in which he now finds himself. That book captivated him. Firstly, because within its pages he learned details about his hundreds of thousands of virgins that he’d never imagined. Secondly, because once he finished reading it, he felt he’d been delivered a lesson on military strategy. Logic, instinct and ambition were naturally interlinked in the lifecycle of the bees of the Moselle. As well as their spirit of service, of course, there was their loyalty to the death, and in the world of war as much as in the world of bees, death is considered a trifle. The next day, moving among his hives like a somnambulist, his eyes smarting from the long hours spent reading in the night, Pasolini made the correlation that would change the course of his life.

  Münker described in detail the case of a queen bee that had survived several uprisings. Far from conceding defeat, she launched successive frenzied swarms to gain control of a vast field of pollens. She squashed the blue eggs of the princesses as soon as they lay them. The longevity of the queen and her absolute dominion over the colony raised doubts as to the truth of the Austrian naturalist’s tale. Pasolini knew that it was exceedingly rare for the disciplined workers to allow such hegemony for more than one reproductive cycle, however close their kinship to the queen, and that i
f they renounced their own chance at maternity it was because helping the queen reproduce was of greater benefit.

  Those were the thoughts he was circling on that now far-off day, protected by his mesh mask and deerskin gloves, when there was a shout from the upper reaches of the former castle, a shout for everyone and no one.

  ‘Napoleon is marching on Rome!’

  The beekeeper’s thoughts immediately pivoted to the resemblances between Münker’s queen and Bonaparte. Both figures were implausible, monsters of nature, legends. Bonaparte had retreated in Terni. Everyone, including his enemies, thought he would send a battalion to cover the rear-guard while the bulk of his army battered Civitavecchia, an easy prey, and took control of Viterbo. The Corsican had other plans. Leading fifty thousand soldiers, a prodigious swarm in search of a new abode, he advanced at the double, and in three days arrived at the gates of the Eternal City and swept away the Austrians. Pasolini saw, in the timeliness and instinct of Bonaparte’s deed, the effortless intelligence of Münker’s queen.

  21.

  And if he packed a few provisions and writing materials and escaped to Mount Capanne? When Bonaparte arrived, no one would be able to locate him. Days later, he would come home with a wound on his leg, hobbling. He would have fallen in a ditch pursuing an enormous swarm on the mountain. He was forced to give up the chase because he couldn’t move, he would say.

  He should stay there, up on the mountain peak, with his books. Reduce everything to knowing and breathing. Not meddle in valley affairs. All his musings and theories about Bonaparte and bees make his monotonous life interesting, it’s true. But previously, the object of his study was far away, and now he is close and threatening. Who is this Emperor of Elba, ultimately? Another tyrant who vomits history as he professes his mission to free men. A tyrant driven by bees is no different from a tyrant driven by thunderclaps and lightning strikes, by vultures or butterflies, by the whistle of the wind or a courtesan pouring venom in his ears.

  Pasolini passes through the farm gate and sets out towards the hamlet. He must get a message to Pisa, explaining the situation he finds himself in. He doesn’t trust Father Anselmo anymore. The Corsican’s aimless drifting has deranged him. Pasolini no longer recognises the patient, well-adjusted priest who taught him to write and to think for himself. He shudders when he recalls the dispute they had at the Tuscan Bonapartist Society meeting a few weeks ago in Grosseto. He said he couldn’t see what they could do on Elba. It seemed Bonaparte was finished. He had become the laughing-stock of Europe ever since he abdicated, left France in disguise and hid from the world in his Elba prison. The so-called sole obstacle to the restoration of peace on the continent remained in check on an island, unable to swim, and with not even a miserly longboat at hand, powerless to flee.

  ‘You understand nothing,’ spat out Anselmo in front of everyone else. ‘The situation is utterly different now. A few years ago, Bonaparte was an inconvenient friend. Though he seemed to free us from our secular shackles and forged a certain cohesion on the peninsula, it was still the French army at his back. In some places we greeted him as a liberator, as the standard-bearer of a new order ruled by human reason; in others we fought him like stupid patriots.

  This dilemma created the strange commingling of passion and dejection that moved within us. We believed in the ideas, not in the one forcing them upon us.’

  Anselmo made one of his rhetorical pauses. He then sweetened his tone, as Pasolini had seen him do so often.

  ‘Now France is a power cast adrift, and chaos is taking over our land. Bonaparte could be useful to us precisely because of his apparent weakness. He speaks our tongue, and he shares our culture in its Corsican manifestation. He finds himself in an alley with no exit and has ample reason to take revenge on his betrayers. France has been but his instrument, and it is invaded and broken. Now is the time to revive the Holy Empire, this is Italy’s chance. And for this we need an emperor. A true emperor to lead an army of Tuscans and Milanese, of Venetians and Romans, of peasants from Naples and Calabria.’

  The beekeeper looked at his teacher, mystified. The Pisan sun had overheated the poor priest’s brains. He could do with a vigorous gust of Elba’s Tramontana.

  Who was speaking out of his mouth? It wasn’t as if Anselmo didn’t know how vehemently Bonaparte was hated south of Eboli. Not to mention in Milan and Venice. In Padua and Mantua, they had burned his effigy during their patron saint festivities. Francophiles were being hunted down like rabbits in Parma. In Turin the archbishop had threatened anyone who didn’t powder their wig with excommunication. In Bologna the learned informed on each other, and entire families, including the Bentivoglios and the Irnerios, had been forced to take refuge in Dalmatia. No one understood the south, except the poet from Weimar, who thought of Sicily as the key to the entire Italian peninsula.

  ‘If anyone can unite the jigsaw puzzle of duchies, princedoms, kingdoms and papal states beneath the same flag, that person is Napoleon Bonaparte. Only he can speak to Calabrian bandits in their own language as if they were Lombard princes and convince them of the exact same idea put differently.’

  ‘And how are we going to convince Napoleon to be our Caesar?’ the Grosseto notary intervened.

  Sceptical chatter broke out among those gathered. For an instant Pasolini saw himself as an actor in one of the operettas performed in the Campania squares on festive evenings, which not infrequently ended in fights breaking out among the spectators.

  ‘What could lead him to try to revive the imperial land and, in so doing, return Rome to its origins?’

  ‘Bees,’ responded Anselmo with a triumphant mildness, looking at Pasolini.

  22.

  Bonaparte contemplates the waterlilies from the edge of the Palazzina pond. He had the pond constructed; he needed a small body of water near his office so that his eyes could wander. The water striders skim across it, barely grazing the still reflection. Beneath the surface golden and red flashes appear fleetingly and then vanish, as well as grey-green shadows. Bonaparte would like to have honey made from the nectar of waterlilies, those aquatic flowers that can’t bear the darkness. It occurs to him to have a great net constructed, one in the shape of a circus tent, large enough to cover the pond. He would position the hives around the edges, perhaps three would be enough. He envisages himself watching over the worker bees from where he stands now, observing how they might react to their confinement, spying on them as they fed on waterlilies alone. A bee would get trapped in one of the flowers when they closed at nightfall, and its asphyxiated body would float in the water the next day.

  23.

  The beekeeper reaches Portoferraio to see the mist rolling clear of the bay towards Piombino. He can no longer send a message to Anselmo. His haste has taken his breath away. He sits on a bundle on the pier, beneath a vine laden with bunches of black grapes that are still the size of peas. A few metres away a two-masted vessel is being unloaded. Pasolini watches the porters come and go out of the belly of the ship, hauling the bundles of clothes, fruit and a variety of household goods on their backs. The voices, the reflection of the ship in the water and the heat of midday make him drowsy. He’s worn out, his eyelids are heavy. He lies back on the bundle and in a few minutes is asleep.

  Pasolini dreams that a contagious disease, brought from Africa no doubt, presents in his combs. Many drones die, mutations arise among the workers and they change their ways. They start to neglect cleaning and tidying the hive’s corridors. Then they stop feeding on flowers, carrying pollen, secreting wax and, naturally, producing honey. The virgin princesses are the first casualties of this strange behaviour, decimated when they stop receiving their special sustenance. Instead, the virgins hover in storm-cloud-like attack squadrons over the streets of the hamlet. They choose their victims very carefully, falling upon them like a volley of poisoned arrows.

  People hole up in their houses. They bar their doors and windows. But it’s useless: the swarm is titillated by the obstacles and redou
bles its ferocity. The bees rage in surges and get through the thickest shutters, even the sturdy new doors made of walnut. Once they are inside, the victims’ torment is awful. Some collapse from panic when they hear the enervating menace of the buzzing.

  The beekeeper wakes from his nightmare just as the neighbours above start lowering themselves on ropes and ladders and head for his house to set it and the hives and everything they find around the farm on fire.

  Someone is shaking him.

  ‘Sorry, sir, but I have to grab the bundle you’re lying on.’

  ‘Where’s the ship headed?’ he asks, relieved it’s not a neighbour from above and that no one is going to set his hives alight. At least not yet.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. The captain is onboard.’

  Lamarck. The golden letters have been hewn on a broad piece of teak. How curious, he thinks. A few months ago, he read Philosophie zoologique by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who put forward the theory that while drones, workers and queens are born with the same genetic features, different diets (for the queens, royal jelly) mould them for their roles in the business of the hive.

  The vessel has a French flag and an ancillary flag that indicates its affiliation with one of the French colonies. Tahiti, perhaps?

  ‘Tomorrow we’re setting sail for Piraeus and Smyrna,’ says the captain, whose right eye is looking elsewhere, towards the sail. ‘Our final destination will be Cochin, in southern India.’

  ‘And when will you reach it, the Indian port?’

  The captain glances at the porters and signals them to leave two bundles on the deck. His right eye seems to be scrutinising the beekeeper all the while. For a second, Pasolini sees himself living a new life in Smyrna or Cochin. Leaving this island forever: the idea suddenly lights up in his mind. An idea that he would have thought ridiculous before Bonaparte’s arrival, but now he feels that Elba is not large enough to accommodate the two of them, the Emperor and him.