The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  It was the only time Simonopio accepted the invitation. The temptation had been impossible to resist. But in the end, he had to return earlier than planned, because he couldn’t abide being and sleeping in a strange place, far from the hills and his bees. I can imagine my sisters didn’t help: Carmen because, with her romance, she had no mind to think of anything or anyone else, and Consuelo . . . because she was Consuelo, and perhaps because by then she, too, was in love. She never looked at Simonopio with kindness, let alone said anything friendly to him or devoted any time to a boy who was unsettled by all the new things in the city.

  Simonopio waited for two days in Monterrey so that he could go to the circus. He endured those days only for the joy he imagined he’d feel when he saw real lions, he would tell me years later. But on the day when he went to the circus, people looked at him as if he were part of the show, like an interlude between the bearded lady and the man with six fingers on one hand.

  What are you looking at? I can imagine my mama snapping at them, protecting her little guest and taking him to his seat in the front row.

  First the elephant came out.

  While the audience applauded, my mama noticed that Simonopio was gradually losing his vitality and excitement at being there, at seeing an animal that—he had assumed—would be monumental.

  And it was indeed the largest animal that Simonopio had ever seen, but as big as it was, as Simonopio told me later, in truth what had a profound impact on him was that the elephant was dying, that it barely moved. That its color was not what it was supposed to be and that it was showing more ribs than one would expect. The elephant was dying from sadness and imprisonment. And the worst thing was that nobody seemed to notice. They kept making it raise one leg and then the other. They made it complete a lap of the ring with a woman fooling around on its bony back. And then balance on its hind legs while its trunk caught and threw a ball to its trainer.

  Next up was the lion, with its tamer carrying a whip and a torch that he used to make the beast jump through hoops of fire. The tamer managed to get the lion to leap from bench to bench and roar now and then, but it was all a pretense, because in the big cat’s eyes there wasn’t the faintest trace of his fierceness. He lived, he moved, he roared a little, and—awkwardly—he did whatever the tamer requested with his whip, but he was dead inside.

  That was when Simonopio’s eyes welled up.

  Then the clowns came out like a herd, because although the circus had only one elephant and one lion, it had more than a dozen clowns of all sizes, from a tall one to a dwarf.

  Have you heard of coulrophobia, an excessive and irrational fear of clowns?

  Simonopio proved to be instantly coulrophobic. Seeing those painted beings, with their strange physiognomies, parading in the ring near him and doing what they were paid to do, which was simply to behave like clowns, Simonopio burst into tears.

  Not a whimper or a weep—no, a violent explosion.

  I should explain that my poor mama had never seen Simonopio shed a single tear, so you can imagine the fright his coulrophobia gave her, especially since she didn’t know that such a condition even existed. And if we now know that a word exists to describe someone who’s scared of clowns, I think there should also be one for the clown who enjoys his victim’s suffering. That day, it was as if all those clowns had a special radar for detecting easy prey for their torture, especially when it was a rich kid who’d paid a full peso to see them from up close.

  Whenever she retold the anecdote, my mama would say that they went straight for him, and that she hadn’t known what to do: whether to console Simonopio, apologize to the other people in her section for the racket, or beat the clowns with her parasol to get them away from the boy. She opted for the parasol, and to leave the place immediately with a sobbing Simonopio who, terrified and inconsolable, wouldn’t stop crying for the rest of the night and until the next day, when my mama said to him, “All right, Simonopio, stop crying now: if we leave right away, we’ll make the train to Linares.”

  On the way back, when they were passing through Alta—and without being aware of it—my mama lost the thread of the monologue with which she was trying to console Simonopio, and fell silent.

  She knew, of course, that nothing remained of my grandfather who was executed by firing squad. If anything of him did remain in the world, she had no desire to find it. Furthermore, she had no desire for any remnants of him to linger in the place where he was shot. Why would he want to be there, when there were places he had enjoyed much more, like his haciendas or the library in his house?

  Yet each time the train that took her to Monterrey passed through Alta, she couldn’t help but peer through the window, fearing she would see an army lying in wait on the horizon, ready to attack the train as it had so many times before. Years later, she admitted to me that she also did it because of a strange fascination: to see if there were any signs of her father, to feel some kind of shudder produced by the force of the hatred and terror that must have gathered in the trees and the land itself, as silent witnesses to the violence and unwilling recipients of the spilled blood.

  She never saw anything out of place, and she felt nothing but relief. On the several journeys she had already made, nobody had stopped them.

  My papa had explained to her that, tactically speaking, the Alta hill was the perfect place for ambushes, which was why it had been used by various sides to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy. Though it was the scene of many clashes, my mama never found any evidence of violence there, and the trees seemed as dry or as green—depending on the season—as any others: their leaves hadn’t changed shape, and their hidden roots hadn’t mutated in any way from being irrigated with blood and bodily fluids.

  She would always look through the window there, she knew, and she would never lose the now-gentler grief that she felt at her father’s absence.

  Simonopio took her hand softly, distracting her from her contemplation and melancholy.

  When they were back on Linares soil, it was as if the visit to Monterrey had never happened. Simonopio returned to his new routine as an explorer. Regardless of how much they told him not to go, that something might happen to him, Simonopio continued to disappear into the hills without warning.

  My papa continued to hope that the boy would turn up to visit, but the days went by, and Simonopio never appeared in the fields. Seeing that my mama’s plan to take Simonopio to Monterrey had backfired, my papa thought he would invite the boy on one of his trips to Tamaulipas—if what Simonopio wanted was fresh air and adventure, there was plenty of that on the cattle ranches.

  Although the invitation excited him, Simonopio turned this one down as well. My parents’ mistake was to think that Simonopio went wandering with no fixed destination in mind. Eventually, they would learn where he went and what he was searching for, but that wouldn’t happen until many months later.

  They had tried to have Martín go with him on his outings, thinking Simonopio would like the idea, but every time he tried to follow the boy, Martín returned frustrated.

  “There we both were, then suddenly, when I turned around, the kid was gone.”

  After that, it was my father who offered to go with him, though he was very busy with his efforts to save the land. But Simonopio just looked at him fixedly, and my papa understood: I don’t want you to. My mama told me that they even tried, unsuccessfully again, to get Nana Reja to talk him out of going alone; his nana squeezed her eyes shut. She never wanted to be involved in the matter, which my parents, at a loss, took as a sign that it was best they left Simonopio in peace to his expeditions.

  With nothing else he could do, my papa gave Simonopio a light, easily packable sleeping bag, as well as a penknife that his grandfather had given him as a child. He also gave him a canteen and a flint with which to light fires to ward off the cold, darkness, and wild animals. If the boy was intent on spending so many nights out in the open, the least they could do was make sure he was well equipped
.

  “And no more walking off with the blankets from your bed, eh?”

  Not even with time and effort did they manage to completely stop worrying. On one occasion, they saw him add a machete to his camping equipment, but now they said nothing. They didn’t even discuss it between themselves. Each of them would just say, Look after yourself, and send as many blessings as they could think of with him.

  The next time my mama returned to Monterrey by train and it went through Alta, she peered out the window as always. She didn’t see the ghost of her father or any army lying in ambush. The trees were the same, and so was the land. The only thing different in the scene was that, in the distance, standing on a rock, she saw Simonopio waving goodbye with his arm in a wide arc that almost touched the clouds.

  The same thing would happen every time she passed through there, in both directions.

  How did Simonopio manage to travel so far on foot? How did Simonopio know when she was going to be a passenger on the train if sometimes she didn’t even know in advance herself? My mama never found out. This was Simonopio. There was no explanation.

  After the first time she saw him standing on the rock through the window of the moving train, my mama never searched for her papa or the armies again. Peering out through the window of the moving train, she looked only for him, and when she invariably found him there, her fear and nostalgia were banished.

  30

  Where Does the Devil Go When He’s Lost?

  “Where does the devil go when no one can find him?”

  The boy’s existence bothered Anselmo Espiricueta. It bothered him that the boy enjoyed the good life as a spoiled child of the señor and the señora. He had been born and arrived just a couple months after Anselmo’s own daughter, and nobody gave her anything: neither regular meals nor a warm bed. She had nothing but her little girl’s face. Nothing. And the boy, with his face kissed by the devil, had everything, from clothes to free time.

  The boy did not want for anything.

  If the kid decided he wanted his own room, they simply gave it to him. If the kid got lost, they searched for him, without understanding that the devil never gets lost. That the devil hides. That he plans, he waits, and then he ambushes. He takes you by surprise.

  Anselmo Espiricueta did not understand the boss.

  “He may have read books, gone to school, but what good’s all that if he don’t ask himself what the filthy kid does when he disappears?”

  And he spent almost all his time nowhere to be seen.

  Anselmo had his suspicions: he believed the boy hung around him all day and then followed him home at nightfall. He thought himself so smart and sneaky, that devil in a child’s body, but sometimes Anselmo could hear his slow or hurried footsteps, depending on what his own footspeed was. Then the footsteps, which followed him persistently, would stop when he stopped. And Espiricueta would yell, Come out, demon! but the demon never came out to face him; he just resumed his stealthy footsteps when Anselmo set off again. The demon then followed him to his house and waited for him to drift off so that he could interrupt his sleep every night and ruin his peace. He never let himself be seen, like the demon he was, but Anselmo could hear him in every rustling branch, in every shake of the shutters, and in every groan that came from his two remaining children as they slept. Anselmo knew that, if he lowered his guard, if he did not bless his house every night, the devil in a child’s body would come to steal his final breath from him, as he had already done with his wife and children.

  Anselmo Espiricueta always felt the Morales’s adopted child close, day and night, because as everyone knows, the devil does not sleep. Therefore, he always kept a furtive eye out for him when he left his house every morning, when he was clearing the fields, when he was taking up his rhythm to cut the sugarcane.

  And he had felt his malignant presence on the night of the search that Morales organized.

  When he received the order, Anselmo celebrated: if the demon was lost, he could stay lost, as far as Anselmo was concerned. He had no interest in finding him. He would not spend a single minute of his night searching, he decided. But then he thought again: the farther the boy strayed from his own home, the more likely he was to come to Anselmo’s, and the easier it would be to catch him by surprise. This was his chance to do away with the kid.

  As he arrived at the gathering point, he noticed that everyone was frightened to go out into the wild on such a dark night. They were also saying, What’s the point? The animals on the sierra must’ve gobbled him up by now.

  Espiricueta was also afraid to head into the hills in the dark, but his desire to find the boy, preferably alone, was greater than his fear. Because the boy lived—he was certain of it. Not even the animals would dare raise a claw to him, much less eat him. If they had not done it on the night when he was abandoned under a bridge as a newborn, that night when the devil had marked him with his kiss, they would not do it now.

  Defying his fear, Anselmo went and called the demon by his name.

  “Where are you, Simonopio? Come out!”

  But the wretched child did not want to come out.

  Anselmo knew. He knew the boy had heard him, that the boy had been close, because he got goose bumps on every inch of his skin. But this demon was wise: he knew how to hide, like he always did.

  Because he knew that, if he had found him, Anselmo Espiricueta would have killed him.

  31

  Only the Living Understand

  Francisco had just signed the final check he planned to send in the morning. His hand had trembled as he did it, though he would have liked to pretend it was from holding his horse’s reins more firmly than usual—on his return from inspecting the cattle on his Tamaulipas ranch, he had been caught in a violent storm, so he’d had to control the skittish animal.

  He had signed the check while sending a silent but heartfelt apology to the heavens, which was where he hoped his papa was enjoying eternity alongside the rest of Francisco’s known ancestors—or the ones he did not know yet and would meet when he was summoned from up above as reward for being a man who lived by the law of God. But at that moment, as he poured sand on the moist ink with which he had traced the official seal of his name, he suspected his father was frowning on him or perhaps even wanting to send him in the opposite, fiery direction.

  Of my four children, you’re the only one that survived, and you can’t even do right by your father! Francisco imagined him yelling from his cloud.

  Thus, the booming storm of thunder and lightning. On several occasions during his journey on horseback, he had felt his hair stand on end because of a flash of electricity that had missed its target by a very short distance.

  But Francisco did not stop: the world was for the living, and sometimes the living had to make decisions based on new information. Information of which the dead, like his father, knew nothing, because they had had the good fortune to move on before it emerged. Yellow fever had taken his father, but Francisco was still alive; not even the flu had defeated him. He did not want to be guilty of arrogance, but neither could he continue to live life always making decisions based on the views of someone who now lived on the other side.

  The world changed, and one had to adapt.

  In life, his grandfather and his young father survived the secessionist attempt—or an attempt, at least, to submit to the emperor Maximilian—of the then governor of Nuevo León, Santiago Vidaurri. This had led to the federal government punishing the state. The family land had been divided when the state lines were moved: the haciendas where they grew sugarcane and other crops remained in Nuevo León, while the cattle ranches became part of Tamaulipas. Like many other prominent landowners, they’d signed a document declaring themselves loyal to the fatherland, pledging not to support any new attempt at betrayal.

  And yet, the rebellion that cost Vidaurri his life proved to be nothing more than an inconvenience to Francisco’s father and others. After they made their pledge, nobody threatened to take their
lands from them in a legal and systematic way. Had circumstances been different, Francisco was sure that his grandfather or father would also have made use of the family savings, spending whatever they had to in order to save the land.

  But he agreed with one thing: he must not use the funds at his disposal—after the sacrifice of several generations—to buy himself luxuries he had not earned himself with his daily work. He was determined not to touch a single peso in the bank to cover the cost of Carmen’s wedding, for instance. It would have to be done according to his means and the times: an austere and intimate event. Likewise, with great discipline, Beatriz continued to sew her own clothes and those of the girls, while other ladies bought them ready-made or had them sewn by a seamstress. Equally, nobody would see the Morales family driving around in new cars, as others did.

  To Francisco’s mind, it was not that he had become a spendthrift in recent times. True, he had dipped into the gold in the bank to buy the house in Monterrey and all the new land, but that did not mean he had adopted a philosophy of “Spend Now, Worry Later.” For he certainly worried now. And if, by acquiring these new properties, he bought himself a little peace of mind, that in itself was a reason to feel satisfied. It was worth the expense.

  He was the first Morales to live under the threat of being stripped of his wealth, but he would not be the first to lose a single acre of the family estate. At least, he would not do so without putting up a fight.

  With this in mind, he had just signed the check for the new tractor he had been coveting for years. On an impulse, he had also just ordered four wooden hives for Simonopio’s bees. And he would take the rare step of buying everything using the family coffers. With money the fertile land of generations of Moraleses had been incapable of yielding in recent times. And he would buy it all in the United States—where else?