The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  It was too much for everyone.

  Afflicted by the curse of which the superstitious spoke or the infection the good doctor described, too many were dying every day. It became necessary to establish a system for collecting the corpses: once a day, early in the morning, in the company of one of his sons, Vicente López traveled the streets of Linares in a cart in search of the dead bodies. He found them wrapped in sheets and dumped in front of the houses; it was not practical to come and go from the cemetery every time someone died. At first, the good families demanded the personal service they were accustomed to, but they very soon lost the desire and the energy to make demands. They limited themselves to leaving a message on the cadaver stating that it was such and such, a devout Catholic, may the Lord now have him in His presence; and then, please bury him in the crypt or grave of the family such and such. Within a few days of the outbreak, nobody stayed on the street to see off the bodies, send a final blessing, or cry. There were other sick people to tend to in the house.

  So Vicente López collected corpses in the morning and spent the rest of the day digging the family graves of the rich or throwing the bodies of the poor in the mass grave that, with each swing of his spade, grew ever larger.

  Those who died in the night or early morning arrived at the cemetery still fresh. Those who passed away later had to wait until the following day, and so they suffered the natural yet cruel transformations that death brings to a body, whether poor or rich, in full view of the family. Because we’re all equal in death, concluded López in a moment of philosophical lucidity.

  The Garza children had the good fortune to die at night. One from the natural causes of the illness. The other suffocated by a pillow held firmly over his face with great love and decisiveness. Although she would take the crime to her grave, his nana hoped with the last ounce of fervor that remained in her soul that God would not make her pay too dearly and would understand she had no longer been able to bear such enormous suffering in such a dear, tiny body.

  The gravedigger found her on the street, inert and badly wrapped in her white shroud, lying between the two little boys she had so loved. He lifted one and then the other onto the cart. When it was the nana’s turn, López expected to feel the cold of a soulless body, but it burned with fever.

  “I can’t take you like this!”

  She opened her opaque eyes.

  “Take me,” she said.

  “But, lady, you’re still alive . . . Why’re you lying out here?”

  “So I die now and not later. Because if I don’t come out to die, I’ll die inside, and then who’ll bring me out onto the street? There’s no one left . . .”

  That nana was the first person López found alive, but she was not the last. Mothers with dying children who waited with horror for the hours of darkness to pass, knowing that the cart would soon come by, would take them outside and shroud them even if there was still life in their bodies. Nothing could be done for them except try to make sure they arrived fresh at the cemetery. Some remembered to send them off with a blessing or with a little pendant pinned to the shroud.

  Soon Vicente López no longer asked or checked. He understood the practicality of it and took them all, dead or alive, for he knew from experience that many of the living would be dead before the end of the journey. Some clung to life a while longer. Those he left beside the pit for the elements and the disease to finish off. He could take them near to their final resting place, but to push them in while they still lived was quite another matter. No: he would leave them to die alone, as God willed it.

  Several times a day he would check on them. Ready? he would yell from a distance, while he labored to make the mass grave bigger or buried the day’s dead. There was always at least one that answered, No, not yet.

  And one after the other, they all succumbed. There was just one among them, always the same one, who replied that he was still there.

  This one spent his time listening closely for the moment when he would be called or when his guardian angel would come for him. He waited for his soul to finally leave his body. Eventually, tired of seeing the days go by, of patiently waiting and waiting to be summoned into the presence of God, of watching the gravedigger bury body after body, he began to grow bored. He started to feel the stone that was digging into his backside. To feel hungry. Then he was overcome by a craving for some delicious empalmes con frijoles y asado. The bugs crawling over his body and biting his skin began to irritate him. He passed the time listening to the gravedigger’s comings and goings, and he tried to keep count of the dead being rolled into the grave, though he always lost track. He arranged and rearranged the shroud his mother had wrapped him in while she gave him his final blessing and said, Go with God, my son, we’ll see each other there later. He presumed that, when one’s own mother gave one up for dead, one should also accept it; what else can one do?

  He could remember the high temperature and discomfort of the first few days. And in his moments of lucidity, when the fever’s grip eased, he lamented the things he had not had time to do. He lamented that he had never returned his friend’s boots to him and that he had never sent that love letter to Luz, his neighbor, after stealing a kiss. But once he was lying on the street, with his mother’s blessing on him and the cart about to collect his body, what did it matter?

  He had arrived at the cemetery in a daze from the illness, without much memory of the journey in the cart. Three days later, with his fever lifted, lying on the edge of the pit, he felt completely alert. Alert and fed up.

  Little by little, he had moved away from the edge for fear of rolling off as he slept. Of falling in by accident and being given up for dead. Or falling and breaking his neck and actually dying. Each time the gravedigger asked whether he was dead yet, he answered No, first in a weak voice and later more forcefully. Not yet. On the third day, he yelled with all the might he could muster that he was still there, and Can I have some water?

  He had witnessed the deaths of each of the bodies on either side of him. Each had died differently: one in silence and the other making a great deal of fuss—coughing, choking, and wailing—but neither of them, he was certain, suffered one moment’s boredom or hunger. If they had had the time and clarity to think of a wish, they would have wished only to end their torment as quickly as possible. He therefore reached the conclusion that, in the process of dying—well or badly—there was not much time or energy for boredom. So he decided to stop devoting his time to dying.

  Itching’s a sign of healing, his mother always said. Well, now he had his own version: If you’re bored, you’re getting better.

  And truth be told, he was also itching. Fiercely. All over his body. While the dead were being eaten by the insects of the dead, he was being eaten alive by the ones that prefer warm flesh and fresh blood. Living flesh.

  He stood, took off the shroud, and folded it carefully. Though his legs were shaking, he walked for the first time in many days. He plodded forward, slowed by weakness and wary of frightening the gravedigger, though López did not bat an eyelid when he saw him in a vertical position.

  “No, compadre. Nothing frightens me anymore.”

  With some help, he climbed onto the cart, this time so the gravedigger would take him back to town and straight home—without stopping at the cantina that he had also been dreaming of since the day before—for he was eager to give his mother the good news of his recovery.

  “She best find out from me and not from someone else. Can you imagine her reaction, Don Vicente?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  There was little time to imagine it. When she opened the door and saw him, his mother—who in her sorrow had pictured her son infested with maggots in the green sheet she had wrapped around him when he was dying—managed only to let out an ear-piercing scream before collapsing, killed by shock, as the rest of the family and the neighbors who peered through their windows looked on in astonishment.

  Practical as ever, and aware of the long funereal journey ahead
of him, Vicente López asked the young man who had been his only return passenger, “Will you help me lift her onto the cart?”

  And equally practical, as one necessarily becomes on returning almost from the gates of heaven, he answered “Yes” and “Poor Mama, her time had come.” And since he had with him the green sheet that had been his shroud, he wrapped his mother in it, a little unhappy about the dirt it had accumulated in the last three days but certain his mother was beyond worrying about such things.

  One by one the neighbors came out of their houses, which they had not dared to do for days, to marvel at the events and then share the news.

  At the time, the doors to the cathedral were kept locked because the federal government had ordered all gathering places to remain closed: theaters, movie houses, bars, and of course, churches. For a while, poor Father Pedro had defied the order, saying that nobody had the right to close the House of the Lord, much less refuse Communion to believers, even if fewer and fewer attended. Sick but soldiering on, he had died suddenly three days ago while reciting the Credo in the first mass of the day. The handful of churchgoers had run out without even crossing themselves. His body had to wait all day and all night for the gravedigger to come by and collect it, watched over by his young assistant, Father Emigdio. The now-familiar sound of the cart approaching had freed him from his vigil. Since then, a frightened Father Emigdio had kept the doors locked. He did not dare even to look through the peephole when someone knocked, asking to come in and pray.

  He was the only person who prayed there at that time. And that was what he was doing right when they came and knocked insistently on the cathedral doors. Surprised and alarmed by the many fists that thumped the doors with such persistence, he made an exception and opened the peephole.

  “A miracle, Father! A miracle!”

  “What miracle?” Overcome with emotion and longing for them to tell him the disease was gone, he flung the doors wide open.

  “Lazarus has risen!”

  12

  Letters and Telegrams

  News of the resurrection of Lázaro de Jesús García—for that was what the fortunate return passenger had been called since the day of his baptism—spread through Linares in a matter of minutes. Some would soon accept the truth and view the news as a mere curiosity, with nothing more than anecdotal significance. But others clung to the hope brought by good tidings at a time when everything seemed like hell itself, and they would have lynched any birds of ill omen who dared refute the miracle. To this day, some still tell the story—swearing it was witnessed firsthand by a great-uncle or great-grandmother—that on one of the most terrible days in the history of Linares, a Lazarus rose from the dead by God’s hand.

  That day, as the news spread through the town, Lázaro was elevated to divine status. After plucking up the courage to leave the cathedral, young Father Emigdio decreed that the restoration to life of a local parishioner was a sign of the forgiveness of God, who had punished the poor community so much already, making the just pay for the sins of others, for as its very name indicated, the epidemic was the fault of the socialist, apostate Spanish who strayed ever further from the Church.

  Then, overcome with emotion, he went to the home of the last living postal employee.

  “Álvaro. Open up the post office for me. I must send an urgent telegram.”

  Despite the postman’s initial refusal and his doubt as to whether anyone was at the Monterrey office to receive the telegram, the priest persuaded him with the promise of eternal salvation. Thus, he sent the first telegram of his life to the archbishop in Monterrey: URGENT stop MIRACLE HAPPENED IN LINARES stop LAZARUS RISEN stop CONFIRMED BY ME stop RESPOND URGENTLY stop.

  Father Emigdio did not know whether the telegram would reach its intended recipient, but that day, by a stroke of luck—good or bad would be determined later—Governor Zambrano in Monterrey, despondent due to the public health crisis, also required the special services of a telegraphist. While sending official telegrams reporting the number of dead to date, the governor received the good news—At last, some good news!—and sent it immediately to its ecclesiastic addressee.

  When he received the message, the archbishop of Linares, Francisco Plancarte y Navarrete, hastily called a Mass of Thanksgiving to be held the next day. Lazarus resurrexit would be the topic of his sermon. On his death two years later, in 1920, an inspired script for the failed sermon was found among his belongings, along with a letter written in his own hand, unfinished, drafted with the intention of formally asking Rome to send an emissary to attest to the miracle.

  In Linares, on the day of the extraordinary event, the people made a pilgrimage in the hope they could see and touch the one who had risen from the dead.

  Many townspeople had seen him dead and wrapped in a shroud. From the safety of their homes, they had peered out of windows and witnessed the final blessing that his now-deceased mother had offered. And they all knew with a certainty that sat firmly in the gut, as Lázaro himself had also known, that there is nothing more final than a mother’s mortal blessing. Later, they had seen Vicente López lift the body on top of the others he had collected on his journey of no return. Sra. García had mourned her son in the proper way: she had lit the candle that she usually saved for Easter and closed the shutters. Lázaro had died. Many had witnessed it, but now they saw him come back from the grave: he breathed, he walked, he spoke. If all this evidence failed to convince anyone, the fact that Lázaro stank of death after three days of lying among corpses was enough to persuade even the most skeptical.

  Lázaro was happy his recovery brought so much joy to his neighbors and the people who came from farther afield. He had never been the recipient of so much attention, but he did not understand that, when they called him “Lázaro” and touched him with such emotion, they were not thinking of him but of the well-loved and famous friend of the Messiah. And when they cried, You have returned! and he replied, Yes, I’ve returned, the others thought it was from heaven, but he meant from the cemetery.

  After elbowing his way through the pilgrims, his neighbor, the father of the girl to whom Lázaro wrote the letter that he never sent, took the opportunity to hug him tightly before starting to cry. Knowing that the neighbor had at no time liked him, Lázaro would never have dared to declare his romantic interest in his daughter, but he decided to seize this moment of intimacy.

  “Don Luis: before I went, I wrote a love letter for your daughter Luz.”

  At that, the man’s crying intensified, and Lázaro turned to his brother, Miguel, in search of an explanation. Miguel García made a sign with his forefinger, running it from one side of his throat to the other.

  Luz was dead.

  The man who would have been his father-in-law had Lázaro had the courage to send the letter, had Luz accepted it and accepted him, had Lázaro not fallen sick, had he not kissed her and therefore infected her, and had she not died, looked him hard in the eyes.

  “Did you see her there?”

  “Er. Um.” In all likelihood, without knowing it, he had witnessed the girl’s body being heaved into the grave. “I think so.”

  “Did she seem happy?”

  What kind of question was that? Lázaro felt an urgent need to get away from there, to flee into his home and lock the door behind him.

  “Er. I don’t know. There were already a lot of them; it was very crowded,” he said, imploring his brother with his eyes to help him get out of there, to help him escape their morbid neighbor.

  He was desperate for a bath to wash away the smell of urine and worse. He was desperate to sit or lie down: the muscles in his legs were refusing to hold him upright. He wanted to eat something, even just some cold leftovers. Then perhaps he would be able to understand what was happening to everyone. It was as if, in his three days’ absence, they had all lost their minds.

  The crowd insisted that they wait for Father Emigdio to return from the telegraph office to lead the official Rosary, but Miguel García said they would w
ait inside, that the others must understand that coming back to life was not easy, that it required a great deal of effort, so Lázaro must be allowed to rest.

  The brothers went into the house, but before they closed the door, they heard Don Luis, the father-in-law that would now never be, cry out between sobs:

  “If only you had brought her with you!”

  13

  Get Up and Go

  Dr. Cantú was just several blocks away, but the news of Lázaro’s return had not yet reached him.

  The doctor did not believe in modern miracles. To his close friends, he insisted he believed in only the miracles that had been worthy enough to be mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. Except, one could not call oneself a true Mexican without believing in the miracle of the apparition of the Virgin on the Hill of Tepeyac, who had at any rate been considerate enough to people like him to leave evidence of her visit.

  In his opinion, the Virgin of Guadalupe marked the end of the age of miracles.

  He supposed that daily life, science, and his knowledge of human nature had turned him into a doubting Thomas. The things he considered miracles in recent times came not from the catechism but from the great advances of medicine. He was certain that, with modern vaccines and medications, man would soon defeat death.

  For him, that would be the greatest miracle.

  Nonetheless, at this time of persistent death, his faith in science and medicine had been put to the test. The supreme self-assurance he felt as a member of the global medical community had been shattered in just a few days. He was exhausted, tired in body but even more so in spirit, weary of seeing people die.

  He felt ready to believe again in some divine miracle if only God would do him the favor.

  Of course, as a young man, when he had decided to become a doctor, he had been aware that he would see his patients—friends and strangers—die. He considered it the only certainty that life gave everyone equally: sooner or later, everybody would die. It might be slowly or suddenly, but they would die. And so he had accepted it and he had assumed the responsibility: he would witness the deaths of children, young people, old people. He would be with them in their final moment, until the time came when they would see him die.