The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  He would no longer live at the mercy of others. After making this wish, Espiricueta did not have the patience to wait.

  The risk that his employer would snare them on their escape from the South was great. The chances of climbing onto the train and going unnoticed were slim. But he preferred to take the risk, to die and see his wife and children die, rather than spend another day as a serf, waiting meekly for the beating that would finally kill him.

  There, in the distant North, which at first—for a few weeks—he had believed was the North for which he had yearned, he had felt like lord, owner, and master. His children would never see him humiliated or knocked down by a foreman again. They would not have to stand aside for anyone, to let anybody through, to try to go unnoticed. They would not have to be less, to have less, or to count their beans every day.

  In that North, there would be no more hunger, no more poverty.

  However, it was one thing to want it, to think it, to consider it; seeing it through was quite another. A few days after settling there, they had no beans left to count or share out: they were all hungrier than ever, and crueler still, their thirst was no less acute, perhaps worse. Their bodies had never felt such heat, and however much they searched, neither Anselmo nor his sons could find water.

  People who take for granted that water always falls from the generous sky to wet the earth do not develop the skills needed to find it deep underground. If it does not rain today, then it will tomorrow, they thought; but the days passed, and the rain they longed for never arrived. The vegetation around them was foreign, strange, and they soon realized they would obtain no food or even a single drop of moisture from it.

  With traps and spears, they managed to kill rabbits and opossums, but they did not provide enough nourishment for the whole Espiricueta family, and they were no replacement for water.

  Hunger and thirst, the new masters of their existence, subjugated him and his offspring faster than any whip.

  Anselmo Espiricueta heard the cart approaching on the same day his wife told him her breasts no longer produced milk. Better we crush the kid than let it starve, Anselmo. But he was proud of one thing that set him apart from most: all his children had been born alive, and all had survived. They had not lost any to the runs, to fevers, to anything. Nor would they lose any to hunger, he promised himself. So, when he heard the horses’ hooves and the wheels of a heavy cart grow nearer, he ordered his eldest sons and daughters to position themselves, threateningly, on each side of the track of fine, dry, airborne yellow dirt that now covered the members of his family.

  Now, years later, he would not know exactly how to explain why he went out to meet the cart. He wanted something. He wanted to save his family. He wanted to block the path through his property, to rob the people on the cart of something, even if just their feeling of safety. If their efforts were interpreted by the group they intended to accost as a plea for help, it was only because of the arrogance of the driver, the leader of the group.

  Francisco Morales glanced at the pathetic troop that blocked his path and did not think for one moment that his life was in danger. It never occurred to him that he was looking at desperate souls who would have killed him for a drink of water. So bedraggled were they—covered in dry and desiccating dirt, their cheekbones protruding, their dark skin turned deathly pale, their lips parted and covered in a thick layer of white foam, and their eyes bulging—that to him, they looked like nothing more than hopeless beggars. He thought them so poor, so insignificant, that when he saw the shack they had built, he never suspected an invasion or an attempt to appropriate his land.

  It soon became clear to Anselmo, despite the thirst and hunger also thickening his mental processes, that this enormous, pale-skinned, fair-haired man was the real lord and master of every stick and every stone the Espiricueta family had used in those days when he had thought he had his land and freedom. Conveniently, he quickly forgot his initial attempt at aggression and felt that servile part of his soul, that backbone of the spirit so accustomed to bowing down, do so again—defeated by the presence of a great lord prepared to help them, by the humiliation of being stripped of everything in an instant, yes, but also overcome by the ambition to survive above all else.

  Were they lost? Yes, lost, he replied, swigging water. Did they stop because of the baby? Yes, cause of the little one, he said, looking at his children, now restoring the moisture to their dried-out cells. Can you work the land? I know a little. Are you from the South? The south of the South. Do you have anywhere to stay? He could feel his moist tongue’s gratitude, but looking at the humble shack they had built themselves when they still had strength in their bodies, he answered, No. Do you need work? Yes, Boss, I need work.

  Yes, Boss. Yes, Boss.

  Since then, they had remained in this North sometimes of fire and sometimes of ice, prisoners of their will to live and the unexpected and cruel kindness of these people who offered only false hope, taking from them the land that had begun to feel like their own, preventing them from continuing their journey farther north with their Not a good idea and their Why go there when you don’t even speak the language?

  The greatest cruelty was the offer of land and a home, which rekindled Anselmo’s hopes of independence.

  Spanish was not Anselmo’s mother tongue, and his previous experience did not include speaking to the landowner, only with foremen, who switched between the first language they shared with Anselmo and Spanish at their convenience. The fast, relentless words of this northern landowner entered one ear, reached his mind like a whirlwind inside his head, and then escaped out of the other ear as quickly as they had arrived. He managed to retain only the words that invaded his heart.

  Would he like to have his own plot, his own house? Yes, Boss.

  Morales had him taken to the two-room house.

  He understood the apologetic words that the men who took him there spoke on the way. It’s a very basic house, and it’s been empty for a long time. And it’s far away, but it’s better than nothing.

  While the other workers’ houses had been built more recently to form a little community, with a plot of land for each one, the one allocated to Espiricueta was separate from the hacienda’s cluster of buildings. Espiricueta did not care: when he saw it, he thought it a much better and bigger house than any he could have imagined.

  He understood that wild animals had made their nests there, since it was cool and dark, but it would be easy to flush them out and make it habitable again. Since neither of the two windows had shutters, he would find a tree and make some himself at the next opportunity. As for the isolation, Espiricueta had no interest in having neighbors snooping on them or criticizing his wife or children. They had lived crammed together with other families in the South, and this house gave them the chance to do as they pleased. The house was also built directly on the field he was offered—his house, his field—where he would work shoulder to shoulder with his sons.

  He understood that the boss was a fair man who paid well, as the men told him when they instructed him to turn up early the next day to work. That with his first wages, he would buy his first seeds to sow the allocated family plot, and that they, or someone, would lend him the tools needed to fix the house and prepare the field.

  The problem arose when Espiricueta realized that Morales was making a promise in which the land would belong to him, but it did not, and that the house would also be his, but it was not. He would have to work double time—work the boss’s land and his own—to pay rent with each harvest so that eventually, if he saved, he could buy the plot and leave it to his children when he died.

  Anselmo Espiricueta did not have the patience for all that saving and waiting. Why wait until he was so old he could no longer straighten his back before he owned his own plot? Why must he live life bowing to a master, any master? He did not care whether it was a southern or a northern master. He had left the South, risking his own neck and his children’s, in order to escape poverty. In his eagern
ess to start a new life, he had not hesitated to leave behind the language of his childhood, the moist earth of his birthplace. Why would he want to wait patiently in this land of biting cold and searing heat?

  At first, Señora Beatriz had seen to it that they received supplies for several weeks and used clothes for the whole family. They had accepted it: the only clothing they possessed was what they had been wearing when, in total darkness, they left the tobacco estate where they had been predestined to spend their lives. They were also sent soap and a lotion for lice, fleas, and ticks, which they had been forced to accept. They don’t want dirty, foul-smelling folks near them, thought Anselmo. Is that why they gave us a house so far from the others?

  Then came the worst insult: the offer to pay for the Espiricueta children’s schooling. To send his daughters to the charity school for girls, his sons to the one for boys. They’re good schools, the señora assured him. The Morales girls went to the same school, though they called it “college,” because they went to the side for elegant señoritas of high society, the side for those who could afford to pay. Then she spoke to them about the opportunity to better themselves by learning their letters and numbers, but Señor Morales was not present, so Anselmo set aside his reverence and put an end to the monologue.

  “No, Señora. My children won’t be doing that. What for? What good will it do them? We need the boys for the sowing and harvesting. And what could they teach my daughters there that would be of any use? To be better maidservants? Best they stay here, where they can be useful.”

  Señora Beatriz had rushed away, disturbed.

  The years that passed had not made Anselmo Espiricueta forget his ambition for land and freedom. The idea was beginning to be bandied around in the area, but the workers on the hacienda and in the town did not seem to understand it: Why would they want to give us land for free, land we haven’t bought?

  They believed that life smiled on them by giving them good work and the chance to better themselves by planting their own plot. By educating their children. Anselmo thought that all the consideration, all the kindness, and the lack of beatings had ended up taming them, had made them conform. But he had learned from every lash of the whip and every blow he had received in his life, and the good treatment did not fool him: it was just a crueler form of control.

  As he cut the sugarcane every day—a task that required only strength and rhythm—planted it, or loaded it onto the cart, he promised himself, as he had done from the beginning, that this would be the last day he would work for someone else. That he would leave this place, with or without his family, in search of the land he knew awaited him. He did not know where it was, but he would have to search for it, find it, and defend it better than they had defended the little tract of land they had taken as theirs between La Amistad and La Florida. He would plant tobacco, which was what he knew best.

  However, his treacherous belly, full and grateful, subdued his willpower, so it proved very difficult to turn around and leave the place, with or without children.

  Years later, there he still was, waiting with ambition and without patience, in the freezing place that had stolen his time, wealth, strength, and family: his wife and most of his children had met their end in that icy inferno with the plague that had come upon them.

  Now he had lost almost everything, and if he had disapproved of Simonopio before, now he was convinced that all his terrible predictions on the day of the boy’s birth were coming true. War had arrived a few days after the boy, and since then, the misery had continued: the disease and death of so many, and in particular his family, were caused by the evil that Simonopio had brought. And he had warned the boss: That boy was sent by the devil, and he’s gonna bring us nothing but disaster, you’ll see.

  And had that arrogant lump listened to him? No, of course he hadn’t. What did Anselmo Espiricueta know if he couldn’t even read and write? All I know’s what life’s taught me. What I learned in the firelight at midnight, listening to the old shamans.

  As he got to his feet, his back stiff and sore from holding it in the same bent position, resting against the tree for so long without taking his eyes from the road the caravan of healthy people had driven down, Anselmo Espiricueta promised himself he would never forget that they had taken the cursed child with them.

  “And left us to die like mangy dogs.”

  19

  The Return to Life, Another Life

  The three months of exile had marked Beatriz Cortés de Morales. They had changed her. Sometimes she felt as if she had spent what should have been the best years of her life as a silent spectator in a drama in which the lead role was her double: sharing the same name and identical features, but with an adversarial temperament.

  Who was this woman who could not get through to her own daughters? This woman who had sent them to be brought up by nuns and then spent her days feeling upset because she had lost them, because they were growing up outside her supervision—and who, now that she had them all the time, found it impossible to strike up a conversation with them beyond the most basic social courtesies between mere acquaintances?

  When she walked into the sewing room, which she shared with her daughters when they read, she often found them whispering between themselves, as was natural for young girls to do. When they saw her come in, they would immediately fall silent. They never confided in her like they had when they were little, and it was not unusual for them, when they noticed her presence, to rush out, giggling and pulling vexed faces.

  Beatriz no longer recognized her daughters and did not know how to repair their relationship. She had no idea how to strike up even a simple conversation with them. Her daughters did not want to be with her. They did not want to speak to her. What she had hoped would be an opportunity—albeit a forced one—to spend time together had become an exercise in tolerance. They did not want to sew, though that did not surprise her: they had never liked it. They did not want to help teach the children of the families sharing their refuge, whether the subject was music, reading, or games. In the evenings after dinner, when the busy day was over, they would refuse to sing or read for the family. All they wanted was to be with each other, though by no means in absolute peace: such close coexistence wore them down and made them explode at one another or at everyone else.

  Whenever Beatriz found something to say to restore harmony, Carmen and Consuelo would look at her with surprise in their eyes, as if to ask, What are you talking about? Whatever had happened an hour or two ago was now history, and they had no intention of revisiting or remembering it. They changed subjects, moods, interests, and conversations at a giddy speed. A speed that Beatriz had neither the mind nor the energy to match. A speed, it seemed to her, that made her age.

  It was not just her daughters she blamed for her distress.

  Her concern for the people who had remained to face death in Linares had stopped her sleeping, and since she never managed to fall into deep sleep, the house itself put her on guard several times each night. La Florida creaked like any old house, but its creaks were not like the creaks that lulled her to sleep at La Amistad. The same could be said of the house’s smells, its dimensions, its hallways, its colors.

  In the day, it did not matter so much. But each night, exhausted, she was overcome with a burning desire to run away and keep running until she was back lying in the bed where her married life had begun.

  Instead of running out, terrorizing any wild animals that roamed those sierras by night, Beatriz wandered in silence through the halls of La Florida. It was not the time for sewing, as much as she would have liked to, so instead she inspected doors and windows that she had locked herself earlier on. She checked the oil lamps several times, in complete darkness, to be certain none of them remained lit, especially in her daughters’ bedroom. While she was there, she would tuck them in, even when it was not cold; stroke their brows; brush the hair from their faces. Then she would sit at the end of their beds to gaze at them while they slept.

 
In the day, it was if she did not recognize them, but in the solitude of night, she was reunited with her little girls. That was when she had understood them well, when they breathed the same air as she did with no complaints, no running off. In the darkness, interrupted only by the moonlight, they seemed to shrink under their sheets, to take up less space in the bed, to return to a shape and size that she recognized. Sometimes she lay down with one of them. Sometimes she dozed a little, enveloped in their breath. She recognized her daughters in their open mouths as they slept or in their little sighs and snores. At night, as they dreamed, they did not run off, and nothing got between them: they were hers again.

  Dawn caught her with scissors in hand. She did not want to wake the house pedaling her Singer, but nothing prevented her from starting a new project, starting a new pattern, cutting some fabric. She would light one of the oil lamps she had invested a good part of her nocturnal efforts ensuring was not lit, and she would start her day. She received her husband with a smile, as she always had. Then she accompanied him to breakfast and said goodbye at the door, wishing him a good day and sending a few secret blessings with him. What she requested and promised before God for the good of her family, she did in the privacy of her mind, because if Francisco had known how much protection she requested for him in particular, he would have realized his wife was not the pillar of strength she pretended to be.

  Simonopio knew. He was always there when they opened the door in the morning. He stared at her while she said goodbye to her husband. Then he approached her with an offering: some beeswax or a small jar of honey. Beatriz grew accustomed to the taste of the honey sweetening her coffee. It became such a part of her ritual that, with the simple act of pouring a fine trickle into her cup, she found some peace, renewed spirits, and the energy to continue with the strange routine of that place. To deal with her unrecognizable daughters, with the slights and spats between the servant women, or with another servant alarmed by a rash on the stomach of one of her children. Simonopio observed her, and Beatriz had the feeling that the boy knew things she would not even admit to herself. It was he who had found the antidote to the implosion she had felt coming. It was he who had suggested bringing her the Singer. Beatriz knew he had sensed that her sewing machine would make her happy or at least soothe her desperation; that it would keep her sane.