The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  I think that’s why it took me a long time to settle into studying. I was always confused by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to do the same things as before when I went to school there—I was used to visiting a house where it was perfectly acceptable for me to mount the banister and slide down it, yelling; to bump down the stairs on my backside; to run in and out as I wished so that I could hear the various vendors going by; to attack the kitchen when I had a twinge in my belly; to go to the bathroom without having to ask permission from anyone; or to go into my cousins’ room to fetch a toy. As a cousin, I could do anything; as a pupil, I had to learn to stay seated, without speaking, eating, or even going to the bathroom, until the teacher told us it was time to answer, eat, or go to the bathroom.

  Becoming obedient was no easy task. I took any opportunity to escape, and knowing every suitable nook and cranny, I did not find it hard to go from hiding place to hiding place until I reached the front door and escaped into the freedom of the street to set off for my home on La Amistad. Of course, my intention was never to reach my house, because I knew what would happen: they’d send me straight back—forcing me, what’s more, to apologize. No: my plan when I fled school was to lose myself among the orange trees. What would I do there all day? I didn’t know. What would I eat? I didn’t know. By that time, I had overcome my fondness for eating beetles. With luck there would be ripe oranges on the trees. Otherwise I would go hungry.

  And how would I return home afterward? My plan wasn’t a very elaborate one, and I hadn’t thought that far.

  I never found out what would have happened at the end of the school day when my mama sent Simonopio to collect me. I didn’t even get to the stage where I felt hungry. I never had the chance, because my adventures as an escapee never lasted more than two hours. However much I tried to hide, Simonopio always knew somehow, without being told, that I wasn’t where he had left me early that morning, and if he didn’t find me on my way back, he would navigate through the orchard’s trees like a bee searching for the only flower until he reached the tree that I’d climbed in order to hide.

  Invariably, he took me straight back to school, without allowing himself to be persuaded by my complaints about how boring it was to be kept in all day with the teacher’s endless blah-blah-blah. With a single disapproving look, he made me be quiet and go obediently with him. I didn’t like him looking at me like that, displeased, or talking to me with the tone that the adults in my life used. He wasn’t an adult: he was Simonopio.

  “Never go out alone. It’s very dangerous. Something could happen to you.”

  “What?”

  “Something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like running into the coyote.”

  By then I knew what fear was, and the figure of the coyote was the root of it, so going out the front door, alone, at six years of age, was an act of courage in which each step took effort.

  If I was so afraid, why did I never listen? Why did I run away from school again and again?

  Now I think I kept reoffending because I knew Simonopio would drop everything to come find me. I think that’s what I wanted. School bored me, I admit, but I easily could’ve found some other mischief to get up to right there, something that would keep me busy without needing to leave the building. But by then I belonged to the outdoors, and Simonopio had made me just another bee in his swarm. The clumsiest, yes; the most annoying, sure; but my days didn’t feel complete if I didn’t spend them with him, buzzing in the open air, playing the games that he and I played.

  At school, my disappearance was always detected. The first time, they wasted a lot of time searching for me in every hiding place they could think of, but once they realized it was a breakout, they immediately sent a message to my mama, repeating the same thing each time thereafter: Your son has disappeared.

  My mama told me much later that, the first time she received the note, she felt her heart stop from the fright, though by the time she had run to confront the negligent teacher and ask for more information, Simonopio had already returned me to my place. On subsequent occasions, she would take the news of my absence more calmly—after learning that what the school lost through neglect, Simonopio would find without fail.

  I don’t remember the spanking that first time I disappeared, which she gave me while she repeated everything that Simonopio had already said. No doubt it hurt, but I never learned anything by dint of a spanking, which was why, when one of my cousins asked to be included in my next escape, we didn’t stop to pass the time in an orange tree. Emboldened, me by his company and he by mine, we went all the way to the tracks, hoping to watch the train go by. But since it was taking a long time, we decided to press our ears against the iron to hear it coming. Step by step, without realizing it, we went and made ourselves comfortable where the track bridged a ford. Maybe it was because of our age: bored of waiting, we forgot our lookout duties, and by the time we realized the train was approaching, it was almost on top of us. Not knowing where to run to save ourselves from the steamroller charging toward us like an enraged bull, we held hands, and emboldened once again, me by his company and him by mine, we leaped. It was not a great height, but we would have earned ourselves a fracture or two had we not landed on the padded softness of a nopal patch. When Simonopio found us—the first and only time he didn’t return me to school—we were pricklier than the nopal, which we had left half-ruined, half-bald. Though in pain, we had no choice but to walk to my house.

  The spanking my mama gave me that time—on impulse, without even waiting to extract the prickles from my backside—I will never forget. My only consolation was that, in the hours she spent trying to remove them one by one, she cried with me.

  My duty-bound, long-suffering, and prickly schooling—it would be years before my skin was as smooth as before—was not yet a reality when I spent three glorious days at the Cortés cousins’ house after Lupita’s death. I must have been around four then, so as you’d expect, no one involved me in the tragedy. I simply learned, to my delight, that my stay—a simple invitation to sleep over that was originally to last one night—would be extended to a vacation of three days, though even that seemed very short to me.

  By the time I returned home, everything had passed: there were no flowers, relatives wearing black, or traces of wax that trickled from the candles that must have been lit. The house had restored its order, but it had not returned to normal. When I asked after Lupita, Nana Pola ran to get my mama so she could give me whatever explanation she considered appropriate.

  “Lupita won’t be here anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her papa sent for her. He asked her to go home because they missed her a great deal.”

  Since mama was saying it, I had no reason to be suspicious. I didn’t like Lupita not being there but understood that her family would want to see her, so I had that idea in my head for years. However, when I returned from my three-day vacation at my cousins’ house, it was impossible not to notice that the atmosphere and routine had changed, and not just because of the woman’s absence: Simonopio was gone too. I searched for him in his shed, but his body and his warmth were not there. I went to see if he was with Nana Reja, but she rocked and didn’t respond to anything. I waited for him to arrive that night in the company of my papa, but my father returned alone and not in a talking mood. I searched for him all the way to the entrance to the orchard, which was as far as I dared go unaccompanied at that time, but there was no trace of him there either. I asked Martín, and he didn’t reply. When I asked Nana Pola, her eyes filled with tears, and she ran off in search of Mama. I was afraid that, like Lupita, he had also been sent for by previously unknown family, but my mama quickly responded that he had only gone on holiday: Just like you, she said to me, but he’ll be home soon, you’ll see.

  That night and the following nights, I fell asleep thinking about him, believing that if I thought as hard as I saw many people pray, he would hear me: as if nothing but my intense desir
e to see him could summon him from a distance. Come, Simonopio.

  Several days passed without news.

  With no Simonopio or Lupita to play with me, I would search for my mama so that she would read to me like she sometimes did, but she shut herself away, sewing endlessly—anyone would’ve thought she had taken it upon herself to supply uniforms to an army. When I woke up, she was already pedaling her machine, and when it was my bedtime, there she still was. And in the midst of all that, she didn’t have so much as a scolding for me, not a complaint, or a story, or a caress. Not even a good morning or a goodnight.

  Nana Pola and Mati were no help: sometimes I found them with tears in their eyes, but when I asked them why they were crying, they always answered that they’d just been chopping onions.

  For years, I was afraid of onions.

  There was something odd about my papa too. He was always busy: even when he was in the house, at the end of his day, it was as if he kept himself outside of his body, as if he’d left part of himself out among the orange trees. Everything he did around the house, he seemed to do mechanically. Now I know—I understand—that he had a great deal on his mind. But at the time I couldn’t comprehend why my papa, who I didn’t see much in the day, wouldn’t pay me the attention I was used to receiving from him: we might not have seen each other much, but in the little time we had, we saw each other a lot.

  In those days after Lupita’s death, the only time he seemed to come out of his self-absorption was when other citrus growers came to discuss things with him behind a closed door. But even if I was silent and listened closely through the wooden panels, I couldn’t understand what they were talking about with any clarity.

  Before then, I’d just been interested in being able to play at whatever I wanted; now, after being away for three days, the little universe of my home had changed, and I wanted to know why. All of a sudden, I could not even gain access to my papa or mama in order to demand an explanation. I might’ve swallowed the story about Lupita having to go to her family, but sometimes, what children don’t understand, they feel, and something monumental had happened in my absence.

  With too much time to spare, bored, worried, I paid more attention to what was happening around me, to what the grown-ups were saying without realizing I was there, and there was one name that kept coming up: Agrarian Reform.

  It was nothing new, but before that day I had not paid much attention when they mentioned it. I thought it was some woman they were referring to, like a gossipy, loud aunt nobody wants to invite to family gatherings.

  What could she have done? I’d used to wonder when I heard her mentioned with disdain. Something bad, I was sure, and off I went to play without a care in the world.

  At that disconcerting time at the age of four, when I listened closely, the penny finally dropped. I finally understood that the sin of this reform, the Reform, was that it sought to destroy everything that we were and all the work that my papa had done. I understood that it sought to take everything from us, from our way of life to our lives themselves, perhaps.

  And for the first time in my life, I was afraid.

  50

  Nothing. Just Crickets

  Simonopio had found a certain amount of peace and distraction wandering among the endless rows of fruit trees, enveloped in the daily song of his bees, immersed in the stories that he had committed to memory, but in doing so, he completely lost the notion of time and his connection with life away from the hills.

  He had left without considering Reja, without telling her, but what for, if she knew already? Simonopio needed to get away from the world to rest, like she did just by closing her eyes. For him, it was not so simple, because when he closed his, he continued to see life. So he kept them open, always open, to fill them with so many images that they did not have time to show him anything that was not right in front of him.

  He had thought he was winning the battle.

  Then, one night when the crickets chirped like any other night, an annoying, unintelligible, indecipherable whisper reached his inner ear. It had attempted to gain entry before, but until then, Simonopio had managed to repel it in much the same way one would wave away a buzzing fly. That night, he also tried to ignore it, for in the repetitive rhythm that those nocturnal insects laid down, he found another source of purification—one that he was reluctant to let go. However, the sound had persisted: it demanded to be heard, to stop being just an annoying noise, forcing Simonopio to allow it to take shape and become a whisper. It demanded the part of his attention that had taken a well-deserved rest, reluctant to come out of the scattered state in which it felt so comfortable. That part wanted to linger here, immersed in the sound of the crickets that talked for talking’s sake, that chirped in their madness, spellbound by their own voices, making the same sound again and again without changing their rhythm, without changing their meaningless message, communicating nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  Simonopio wanted to remain in that soothing balm of nothing, but the whisper would not let him. It kept coming. It was like déjà vu: familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Little by little, without him wanting or anticipating it, it began to take on meaning. Through repetition and insistence, it found its way into his ear, until Simonopio once more understood the language that he had needed to forget temporarily in order to rest the ether of his mind, the conundrum of his heart, the liquid of his bones, the seed of his eyes, the heart of his ear, the filter of his nose, the parchment of his skin.

  Then he recognized the voice. He listened. He understood: Come, come, come, come, the whisper yelled, as repetitively and rhythmically as a cricket, but not without meaning. That come-come-come-come was an urgent call to him, one he should never have ignored for so long, let alone with so much intent.

  It was the boy’s word that called to him: Come-come-come-come. So he shook off his lethargy and left the indifferent concert of the crickets to return to the path he was meant to follow, concentrating on what would be his only companion on his return trip: Come-come-come-come.

  Before long, he had matched his pace to the urgent rhythm of the call, and soon he was forced to trot and then to run at an ever-greater speed so that he would not lose it. But halfway home, in the darkness, the whisper suddenly stopped. It had gone to sleep. That silence tore at him, and the void that the absence of the call left now became a cacophony that thundered in his ears and would not let him breathe deeply or walk with certainty.

  When, before sunrise, he reached La Amistad, he went straight to the house but found that they had locked the door. They had never done so before, but he supposed that in the new world without Lupita, they must have reconsidered and corrected their oversight. He was silent as he entered like a thief through the window in Beatriz’s sewing room: the latch was designed only to hold against strong wind or on days when winter made itself felt, and not as an obstacle to someone breaking in, so Simonopio opened it easily. Treading softly, he was silent as he crossed the house until, reaching the corridor where the bedrooms were, Simonopio forgot about the loose floor tile, which, with its clunk, alerted Francisco Morales to the intrusion.

  “Who’s there?”

  The hair disheveled by his pillow and the striped pajamas contrasted with the ferocity in his eyes and the cocked revolver Francisco held as he came out of his bedroom.

  “Simonopio?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, relieved as he saw his godfather lower the weapon when he recognized him in the darkness.

  “What’re you doing up at this hour?”

  Simonopio had no way to answer the question, because it would have required many more words than a simple uh-huh. How could he reply that he had needed time for himself? He could not say, I’m back and I won’t leave again, I’ll never leave him alone again. Even if he could have uttered those words, Francisco Morales Senior would not have understood the message, so he just said uh-huh again, pointing toward Francisco Junior’s room.

  “He’s sleeping, and you know what he’s l
ike—”

  “Uh-huh,” he answered again.

  “Well, it’s up to you. Good night.”

  As he turned to go into the boy’s room, Simonopio’s foot touched the noisy tile again. He spun around to apologize, but Francisco had already closed his bedroom door. Simonopio would have been very sorry had he woken his godmother with his carelessness. He knew that the last few days had been hard for her and doubted that she managed to sleep easily. He was not worried about Francisco Junior, who was still asleep, insensible. He wanted to shake him awake to tell him, I’ve arrived, you called and I came, I’m late because I got lost for a few days, but from experience, he knew that nothing and no one would be able to make the boy open his eyes until he was ready to do so. Francisco Junior slept deeply, and every night he surrendered to his dreams, unsuspecting, unafraid of falling to the depths to which Simonopio no longer dared go.

  Simonopio sat on the rocking chair where four years earlier he had positioned himself to gaze at the newborn in his crib. This boy no longer slept in his baby bed: before he was two, they had been forced to move him to a lower one, because he insisted on trying to escape from the crib by climbing the bars and throwing himself at God’s mercy, sometimes falling on his backside, sometimes on his knees, and less frequently—Thanks to God and his guardian angel, his mother said after a loud sigh—on his head.

  The bars did not represent safety for him like they had for Simonopio as a small child: they were captivity.

  The light of the new day began to filter into the room until it filled the space. During the process, which started slowly and ended in an instant, Simonopio barely blinked, concentrating, trying, in the slow and gradual luminosity in which the boy’s face was bathed, to see the baby he had been and the man he would become, all at the same time. He had no difficulty making out the baby in those bones, assisted perhaps by his memories, but the face of the man eluded him: he saw promise there, but no certainty.

  He decided that it was time to teach him more. Francisco Junior was no longer a baby, but if he was going to become a man, he had a lot to learn, and Simonopio was determined to teach him. In silence, he promised that he would never leave him alone again. No sooner had he made the promise than the boy slowly opened his eyes, as if he had heard it.