The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  Pola was old and patient, and in Lupita, though she was young, Reja saw a goodness that enabled her to look beyond the cavity in Simonopio’s face. Both would feed the child until the last spoonful, unhurriedly. Nana Pola and Lupita would never kill Simonopio, not with bad intentions or good.

  And while no one else felt welcome when they approached, once Simonopio became mobile like any other normal boy, he would approach them, always with his version of a smile. Those closest to the Morales house stopped being frightened by the boy’s deformed face, and in time they began to feel familiarity and affection, even forgetting the defect that marked him. They heard him coming near and welcomed his presence, for with his pleasant personality, he was the best company while they did their daily work.

  As the years passed, it became clear that, though he had survived and grown proficient at eating, Simonopio would never master communication. The consonants made with the tip of the tongue, which are most of them, escaped back into the cave that was his mouth. And while he could pronounce any sounds that emanated from the back of the mouth, like ka, ga, and ha, as well as all the vowels, most people with whom he spoke lost their patience too soon. The little noises and mumbles baby Simonopio tried to produce to imitate them made them feel most uncomfortable; the words he tried to pronounce without success, even more so. Unable to understand him, some thought he not only had a facial defect but was also soft in the head—and that, consequently, he could not understand them either. Poor Simonopio, some well-intentioned people began to call him. Poor Simonopio is distracted and stupefied by the bees; he laughs by himself, he can’t talk, he pretends to sing, he doesn’t understand anything.

  How wrong they were.

  Simonopio would have loved to sing the song that Lupita was intent on teaching him to pronounce, even if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked was beyond his capabilities. He would have liked to talk to people about the songs they sang of vain women, abandoned women, railway women, soldier women. He would have liked to discuss his bees and ask everyone why they didn’t hear them, given that they spoke to the others, too, as they did to him. Had he been able, he would have talked about the song the bees sang into his willing ear about flowers on the mountain, faraway encounters, and friends that had not made it on the long journey home; about the sun that would beat down hard one day but be covered in storm clouds the next. Then he would have liked to ask Lupita: Why do you hang out the clothes you washed, when it’s about to rain and you’ll have to rush to take them in? Why are they irrigating, when it’s going to rain tomorrow? He would have liked to ask his godfather why he had done nothing to prevent the crops from dying on an icy night last winter; did he not feel the cold coming? And what about the constant impossible images that crossed in front of his closed eyes—or about the events he saw before, after, and while they happened? What did other people see when they closed their eyes? Why did they close their ears, nose, and eyes when there was so much to hear, smell, and see? Was it just him and nobody else who heard and listened?

  How could he discuss these things when his own mouth disobeyed the signals he sent to it, when all that came from it were nasal grunts and goose honks? He couldn’t do it, so he didn’t. Simonopio learned that the great effort required to say the simplest things was worth making only if someone would understand, if someone was interested.

  At Nana Reja’s motionless feet, which her rocking chair always pointed in the direction of the road that had brought them together, Simonopio mastered the art of silence.

  10

  Broken Promises

  Beatriz Cortés was sitting where she was entitled to sit as chairwoman of the organizing committee for the Linares Social Club’s annual Holy Saturday dance. For months, she had been insisting they should resume the tradition she had enjoyed so much in her adolescence and childhood. In the warless past, the annual dance had been a magnet for the families of noble descent of Saltillo, Monterrey, Montemorelos, and Hualahuises, who made the trip each year without fail. Around the big event, several days of activities were also organized on the various haciendas and ranches of the local hosts. Everyone enjoyed the occasion: the older generations, now married, reuniting with friends from their youth; and the young meeting one another and, perhaps—if they were lucky—finding and winning over the love of their life.

  Many ladies of Linares society had refused at first to take part in the organization of the event, but Beatriz persuaded them of the importance of returning to the customs of the past. They won’t come, they had said. They’re all afraid they’ll be robbed on the way. Nobody will come. What’s the point?

  Perhaps they were right, but Beatriz had to try. How long did it take for a tradition to be lost forever? Less than the eight years it had been on hold, possibly. Perhaps—hopefully—there was still life in what appeared to be dead.

  She would bring the Holy Saturday dance back to life. She had to try, for her young daughters. How could one generation look the next in the eye and say: One of the few things I took for granted that I would pass on to you, I have allowed to die?

  Beatriz was not a vacuous woman. It was not the dances or the pretty dresses that she wanted to save; it was the sense of belonging of the next generation, of her daughters, whom she had recently been forced to send to Monterrey to continue their studies at the Sagrado Corazón. She wanted to save the memories that Carmen and Consuelo had the right to create, the bonds they still had to forge while living out their youth in their ancestral home.

  She needed to go through the motions of organizing the dance even though she was the first to admit it would be almost impossible to accomplish: food was scarce in the region, and so was money. Sometimes a woman had to save herself, and for Beatriz Cortés de Morales, organizing this dance, joining the new charitable association, and devising and supervising any kind of social and charitable activity in the town represented just that: salvation. She could not remedy the shortages. Nor could she stop the war or the slaughter. What she could do was try to stay sane. The only way she knew how to do that was to keep herself busy with matters of the family and of the town’s poor, to sew constantly, and yes, to plan the annual dance.

  Usually focused on the task at hand, now she was lost in thought, pondering the irony of the name: it would be called the annual dance even though it had not been held since 1911, a few months after the outbreak of war. It would also be organized by the Linares Social Club in spite of the fact that the club was still without premises. There were grand plans, of course, to construct a building in the style of the Opéra de Paris that would look onto the town’s main square. The Linares Recreational Society had acquired the land near the Cathedral of San Felipe in Linares in 1897, originally intending to exceed or at least equal the elegance of Monterrey’s club.

  A noble ambition, marvelous plans, beautiful drawings; but since the initial investment in the land, the funds of the Recreational Society—thereafter renamed the Linares Social Club—had vanished. Originally, construction was expected to begin within two or three years, but no: two or three more years would be needed. When that proved impossible, the club had insisted, with less conviction now, that construction could begin in the next two or three. Then war broke out, and with the uncertainty and the shortage of all kinds of materials, goods, and even food, the members of the Linares Social Club were forced to reconsider their social and financial priorities. Contributions to a recreational building came at the end of a long list of personal expenses.

  In that October of 1918, twenty-one years after buying the land, Linares’s first association was still waiting for its premises. Each time they went to Mass or to shop in the center of town, members passed back and forth in front of the unoccupied land, and Beatriz was certain that more than one of them lamented the empty space. And most of them, she knew, could not understand or abide the fact that the social club of the nearby and once-insignificant city of Monterrey was already constructing a second building, la
rger and better than the last one, which it lost in a fire in 1914. Monterrey’s high society was building a social club for the second time, and Linares had yet to begin construction of their first. For some, it was a bitter blow. Beatriz strongly suspected that one of Linares’s founding members, a secret pyromaniac, had taken it upon himself to set fire to the social building in the nearby city they so envied. It was a suspicion she would never dare discuss with anybody—what would be the point?

  Beatriz did not care whether Monterrey had its club before, during, or after their own, but the empty town-center lot and glaring, stagnant aspirations weighed heavily on her. The Linares Social Club suffered from the same affliction she suffered from in life: great potential but few achievements, and grand promises broken.

  For life had promised great things to Beatriz Cortés.

  From the cradle, she had understood she belonged to a privileged and respected family that lived from its hard work on its lands. She had known her place in the family was solid, with an unusually affectionate and attentive father and a mother who, if not affectionate, was intelligent and firm. She was aware that, save a deadly attack of dysentery, she would live a long and worthwhile life. It was a given that Beatriz Cortés would meet and befriend the worthy people of Linares and the region. That she would share a classroom and, later, motherhood with the daughters of the best families. That they would always be her friends, and together they would grow old in full view of all, enjoying an old age full of grandchildren. Of course, before the grandchildren, there would be many children. And before the children, marriage to the ideal man. And before even that, a youth full of suitors who would seek to attend the parties where she would be, so they could court her.

  Early in life, she knew what kind of a man she would marry: one from the area, the son of a family of noble descent. She knew it before she was of the age to put a name and a face to her chosen one. They would have many sons and daughters, and most would survive, she was certain. And by her husband’s side, she would see many successes and some failures—salvageable ones, of course. There would also be frosts, droughts, and floods—the inevitable cycle.

  She counted on the certainty that all the promises life had made her were, or would be, fulfilled in proportion to the work and effort invested. In life, only potential was free. The outcome, the achievement, the aim came at a high cost, which she was prepared to pay. So Beatriz Cortés was unstinting in her efforts to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, wife, mother, charitable lady, and Christian.

  How did one woman persuade an entire foolish nation to lay down its arms, return to work, and start producing again? How did a woman pretend that the events happening around her did not affect her? What could she do to change the trajectory of a bullet? Of ten bullets? Of a thousand?

  At that moment in time, she was sitting at a table, surrounded by women feigning interest in preserving the old traditions with a dance that might happen in six months’ time, when none of them were sure they would live that long. They were discussing flowers, announcements, invitations, visits, and venues, when really each of them was thinking about crops that had failed or had rotted for a lack of transportation or buyers. They were thinking about the sudden, unwanted, violent visits from hostile armies, and the death notices that followed. They were thinking of the sons who were growing into men and who, should the armed conflict continue, could be dragged into the endless fighting. They were thinking of the daughters who would never meet the man that life had promised them, because at any moment he could receive a bullet to the heart, the head, or worse, the stomach. A young man whom they would have been destined to meet at some dance in five or ten years’ time, but who might now be nothing more than maggot-filled nourishment for a nopal. Who might become sterile dust instead of planting life in the belly of a woman, the one who would have been his wife had the first shot not been fired one fine day, and had that not been answered with a second shot and followed by an endless volley.

  Her own daughters liked that little game: Mama, who am I going to marry? they would ask. Beatriz understood, of course. She had played it herself with her mother and her cousins when she was a girl. Was there a more important unknown in the life of a young woman? Whom will I marry? A handsome man, I’m sure. Hardworking, brave, from a good family. Now Beatriz refused to play it with her adolescent daughters, daughters of this Revolution. She would not make them any promises or help them construct the fiancé they would have in their dreams, for she was not sure he would even live until the day when they might meet.

  Beatriz herself felt lucky; Francisco Morales was the man life had promised her, the man she had conjured in her youthful imagination. He was everything she could wish for: handsome, from a good family, hardworking, brave, educated, and landed. Back then, there had been no war, no sign of conflict to mar or complicate their courtship. They married after visits, dances, traveling fairs, and days in the country. They were satisfied with each other, and they had the necessary resources at their disposal; life and the future seemed secure. And at first, life had kept its word: Carmen was born a year later and Consuelo two years after that.

  Years of peace and hopes for the future.

  At one time, before the war, with all of life’s promises tangible and in front of her, Beatriz had felt lucky to be a woman of that time and lucky that her daughters were women of the new century. In that era of wonders, anything was possible: the modern railway shortened distances and moved goods and people in large quantities. Steamboats propelled travelers across the Atlantic to Europe in a few weeks. The telegraph communicated the birth or death of a family member—from a great distance and on the same day—and allowed businessmen to quickly strike a deal that would have taken months to arrange before. Electric lighting galvanized an array of nocturnal activities, and the telephone, though still not widely used, kept people in touch with far-flung friends and relatives.

  And yet, far from coming together due to all these wonders, people were intent on dividing themselves. First, in Mexico, with the Revolution. Then, all over the world, with the Great War, which at last seemed close to ending. But not satisfied to fight and suffer in that war, now the Russians were waging their own at home, brother against brother, subject against king. The news had just arrived that in July, after months in captivity, the tsar, the tsarina, their four daughters, and the little prince had been surreptitiously assassinated, their bodies disposed of so that no one would ever find them.

  Beatriz did not know much about Russian royalty or the reason for the conflict, but it had shaken her to learn that, with the twentieth century in full swing, a king had been murdered along with all his offspring, including daughters of a similar age to her own. Her imagination tortured her: time and again, in her mind’s eye she saw the faces of two disfigured, bullet-riddled girls. Always the same two. They had the faces of her daughters.

  And so she concluded that Russia and the rest of the world were closer to home than it seemed. In her region, too, horror stories were circulating about entire families disappearing, women being kidnapped, and houses set on fire with the inhabitants inside. The war between Mexican soldiers, between enemies, was a tragedy, but the worst thing was that it also reached people of peace. People who sought only to work and live as a family, who desired simply to bring up their sons and daughters, see them grow to adulthood, and let God decide after that.

  When the Revolution broke out, Beatriz had felt safe in her little world, in her simple life, shielded by the idea that if you bothered no one, no one would bother you. Seen in this way, the war seemed distant from her. Worthy of attention, but distant.

  After the severe federal punishment that followed Governor Vidaurri’s bid for independence in the middle of the previous century, the people of the state of Nuevo León preferred to keep safely away from this war’s swings of fortune. It’s an ill wind that blows no good, Beatriz had thought.

  Now she knew she had deceived herself: somehow, she had persuaded herself th
at, if she did not feel it to be her own, the war would not touch her or her loved ones.

  At first, she had been young and idealistic enough to support the principle of nonreelection and the right to a meaningful vote. “Effective suffrage, no reelection” had seemed an elegant sentence, deserving of a place in history. Surely it was what the country needed to renew itself and embrace the modernity of the twentieth century. Good sense would prevail, the war would soon end with the much-wanted departure of the eternal president Díaz, and peace would be restored.

  In the end, the only sensible person in the whole story had been President Porfirio Díaz himself when he released his grip on power, realizing that the indefensible was not worth defending; he packed his bags and left for exile after a few months of clashes. That was the outcome for which everyone had hoped. The desired victory. Period. With that, the drama should have ended.

  But no.

  Very soon, the main characters in the farce they called the “Revolution” forgot their agreed-upon lines and took on lives of their own, writing their own dialogues and monologues of betrayals and shootings. The original script disappeared into oblivion. Some wanted to blast their way to land and wealth that did not belong to them; others wanted to sit in the big chair. It occurred to no one—or no one had the desire—to bring two chairs together, talk without bullets, and keep talking until peace was brought about. They made an obedient people take up arms and placed them under the command of madmen who killed indiscriminately and without the slightest care for military ethics and courtesy.