The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

  “You’re here?”

  Francisco Junior fought to emerge from his dreams, and seeing Simonopio there—sitting in the morning’s soft light, the sun’s rays that fell on him intensified by the dust that was normally invisible—he did not know, for the moment, whether Simonopio was real or just the product of wishful thinking.

  “Yes. I won’t go away without you again.”

  He did not have to say anything else. Francisco Junior believed him.

  51

  There Are Monsters

  At six years of age, I was old enough to go to school. Not that I wanted to, but I had no choice.

  The person entrusted to take me there was Simonopio, who walked while I rode my horse: an old, slow, squat pony that I’d insisted on calling Thunderbolt. I’m sure that Simonopio would’ve preferred to keep carrying me on his back, like when I was younger and he carried me everywhere like that, but my papa wouldn’t allow it anymore.

  “You’ll start sagging, Simonopio, and he’ll end up with his legs dragging, without learning what they’re for. Let him walk.”

  And so, I walked everywhere, except school, because before long it became clear that I didn’t have the slightest interest in arriving on time. As part of my stalling strategy, I would stop to look at every worm or stone that crossed my path, to untie my shoelaces so that Simonopio had to tie them again several times, to sit urgently in the shade of a tree to rest my exhausted body and feet.

  In order to avoid more conflict and to get me there as fast as a thunderbolt, they allowed me to ride Thunderbolt.

  Simonopio spent the walk to school trying to educate me in subjects that were important in a child’s personal development. While I was already learning to read and do my first mathematical calculations at the clandestine school, Simonopio tried to teach me to listen and to see the world like he did. I never managed to understand the murmur of the bees or to perceive smells like they did, or to see what was around the bend on the road or concentrate on trying to “see” my mama in my absence, or sense whether the coyote was lying in wait for me out of sight, hidden. Having never seen him—because as soon as Simonopio sensed him close, he made us hide, motionless, or change our route—I would say to him fearfully: Let’s go see him so I can recognize him.

  He never agreed.

  “The less you see him, the less he sees you.”

  Simonopio’s lessons did not stop there: he tried to make me see with my eyes closed and to remember what would happen the next day, but since I could barely remember what I’d had for breakfast that very morning, I was hardly going to remember something that hadn’t yet happened. Then he asked me to see the day I was born, to remember the first contact with my skin, the first sounds in my ear, the first images that had poured into my eyes. However much I tried, I could succeed only in deciphering what was right in front of me: A horse passed through here a short while ago, I guessed. I never fooled him: anyone would deduce it when the horse in question had made use of the road to purge its intestine of its aromatic load.

  I knew it was a source of frustration for poor Simonopio, and to please him—to be like him—I would make the effort to concentrate. But I was not yet seven, and given that I was a very active boy, I found it particularly difficult to stay still for a long time, especially when I was itchy from the mosquitoes that had eaten me alive in the night because I’d slept with the window open; when sitting down was painful because of the nopal thorns in my backside; when my stomach complained about the chorizo and egg I’d had for breakfast; when I knew I was about to face punishment for not doing my homework; when I knew I would have a miserable day doing letters and numbers, longing to go off with Simonopio to enjoy his day, which would be full of adventure, smells, and sensations; when it seemed more important to me that he should tell me another version of the story of the lion and the coyote; and when I didn’t understand what all the things he wanted to teach me were for.

  I arrived at school frustrated to see it appear in front of my eyes so quickly, when I would have preferred to just pass on by. That was why I thought Thunderbolt must be a thoroughbred racing horse, like the ones that competed at the Villaseca Fair.

  Now I admit that Thunderbolt was nothing to boast of, though I felt important with my speedy mode of transport, even if it always got me to my destination more quickly than I would’ve liked. Arriving in the company of Simonopio also fed my arrogance and conceit, because the majority of the other pupils, who lived in the town, arrived on foot with their nana or mama, who never failed to look amazed when they saw us. For months, I thought it was because of my and my companion’s bearing, and I always made sure I was sitting up straight when I arrived, elegant, as I imagined a knight on horseback must ride.

  Simonopio would help me dismount, then he would climb onto Thunderbolt and rush off, almost without saying goodbye. Accustomed since he was a boy to the disdainful stares of the people in the town, he never fooled himself into thinking that a rickety old horse and a boy with curly, close-cropped, fair hair were enough to ward off the blatant looks, devoid of kindness, that sought to decipher the incomprehensible map of his face.

  I was surprised when an indiscreet and careless boy asked if I was scared to be in the company of a young man with the face of a monster. I obeyed my impulse, and as soon as he finished speaking, I socked him. While I might not have left him with the face of a monster, at least I gave him a swollen eye. As punishment, I was sent to stand in the corner for the rest of the day, examining the texture of the wall, without even being able to turn around to watch the school day unfold.

  That day I was more bored than ever, but I felt proud: I had defended my brother. But there was nothing I could do to defend myself against authority. When, still offended, I told the teacher that it was because the boy had said that Simonopio had the face of a monster, he replied that one should not hit someone simply for telling the truth.

  The truth? Simonopio had the face of a monster? I’d never seen it that way. In Linares there were monsters, sure, but he wasn’t one of them. For me, Simonopio’s face was Simonopio’s face, the one my eyes had seen since they first opened. Yes, it was different from mine, my parents’, and my sisters’, I knew, but his features were as familiar and as dear to me as theirs were. I didn’t see the defect or any reason to be shocked. I saw only my brother, and I loved him.

  There and then, I made up my mind to punch anyone who dared speak ill of him again. Simonopio was worth a day of punishment, or two, or ten.

  That was my first fight, but not my last. The school kept complaining, and my poor mama didn’t know what to say to stop me fighting. After a time, she tried to persuade Simonopio to let Martín take me to school, but he emphatically refused. He was responsible for taking me, and no one else. It wasn’t that he wanted to provoke anyone or make me fight for him: I don’t care how they see me, he said, don’t fight for me anymore. But I was incapable of letting any offensive comment go. In the end, my mama went to my papa for support.

  “Francisco: tell Francisco Junior to stop fighting.”

  “No. There’re fights that are worth fighting.”

  Little by little the boys stopped making comments, at least in my presence. They all knew the consequences of mocking my companion, so they were better off keeping quiet. Anyone who wanted to be my friend soon learned that they would have to accept me with Simonopio by my side. With prolonged contact, the new friend did not take long to stop seeing his mouth and start seeing his eyes.

  Simonopio resumed his silence when we had company, since no one understood him other than me. His wordlessness didn’t matter, because being with him meant we could explore the orchard to find the row of orange trees with the most fruit strewn on the ground, rotting: perfect missiles for a pitched battle that ended when the bees, attracted from afar by the juice that ran down from our hair, arrived to take over our game, which always made me the winner, because I was the only one that didn’t run away in terror at the sudden presence of the swarm.r />
  Perhaps that was why I earned a reputation for being brave—or reckless, depending on whose point of view it was. Just as I had grown up used to Simonopio’s unusual appearance, the same thing happened with the bees: I grew up with them, and I wasn’t afraid of them. Or maybe the fact that I’d grown up with them meant they didn’t harm me, because they knew me and accepted me, perhaps, to please Simonopio.

  Nor was I afraid of the characters that I shared liberally with my good and not-so-good friends, telling stories I’d memorized: the Weeping Woman, the Egyptian mummies that roamed the streets of Linares at night—Have you seen them?—the witches of La Petaca, the doll, the vengeful ghost of Agapito Treviño, the vengeful ghost of the soldier abandoned to die in a cave, the vengeful ghost of my grandfather shot on Alta (heartfelt apologies to my grandfather). I should explain that all the ghosts had to be vengeful, or their power to terrify would be reduced. If the other kids wanted to hear about real monsters that roamed the area, I knew them all.

  And friends or not, they listened eagerly: it must be that, even from the most tender age, we all possess a morbid streak that makes us enjoy feeling terror.

  When she returned from a meeting with the social club ladies, my mama always said to me, Stop telling silly stories, Francisco; all the mamas are complaining that their children are too scared to sleep.

  To be honest, I didn’t care whether they slept or not: to each his own. I felt so protected that nothing stopped me from sleeping.

  Nothing and no one troubled me in the depths of night—the time that children fear most—and in all likelihood, it was thanks to Simonopio, who took the time to teach me the words of the extremely effective blessing Nana Pola had taught him years before. Although, as someone who slept deeply, falling into deep sleep easily and with little in the way of a buildup, I never even finished a Lord’s Prayer before dropping off—by the final s of “God bless,” I was asleep.

  Could those two words have been enough to protect me from night terrors? It seems so: they must have been sufficient to dissuade all the monstrous characters that tried to visit me in those vulnerable hours of the night.

  Roaming mummies were no reason to lose or interrupt my sleep, which at any rate was so deep that, had the mysterious dolls—which Simonopio assured me lived on our property—walked or danced on top of me, I never would’ve known. If the Weeping Woman passed through asking after her children, she soon would’ve moved on, for I neither reacted nor replied. The ghosts, whether vengeful or not, never managed to move so much as a hair on my head, and in any case, they must’ve gone to frighten some other soul after using up all their energy without making me so much as open an eye.

  The story I never shared with anyone was the one about the coyote, perhaps because its strange narrative evolved constantly. Perhaps because it felt like a private conversation between Simonopio and me: not even Soledad Betancourt, a professional storyteller who thought she knew every tale or legend, knew of its existence or of the danger of the coyote. Perhaps I didn’t share it because I understood that the one about the coyote was different from the ones about the dolls, ghosts, and the rest of them. That the coyote wasn’t a story, it was real. That it searched for Simonopio and me, for the lions that my brother assured me we were. That against that real monster, no blessing was possible: only precaution, nothing else. Or perhaps because, deep inside, it was the only monster—the only unknown one—that I really feared, day or night.

  If even Simonopio feared it, then how could I not?

  And on those nights when I couldn’t shake it out of my mind, knowing that the constant repetition of Lord bless, Lord bless, Lord bless wouldn’t do me any good, I changed my litany to come-come-come-come. And he never failed me. He arrived in the darkness, with no warning and without saying a word; he unrolled a mat on the floor beside my bed, and there he lay, in order, somehow, to make me match my breathing to his, to slow it down—slow it down until I was hypnotized. And with that human shield between my vulnerable body and any nocturnal threat from the coyote, I slept peacefully, deeply, without interruption.

  I woke up happy to return to school again and spread terror among my willing peers.

  When my mama asked me where I got so many strange stories from, I never admitted that Simonopio told them to me or that he had taken me to listen to Soledad Betancourt when she came to the Villaseca Fair or visited Linares of her own accord. There are things one knows instinctively, and in this case, my instinct screamed at me not to reveal my source. I didn’t, because I suspected that it might spell the end of our outings to see a little bit of the world in the shows that came to Linares.

  And I didn’t want to take that pleasure away from Simonopio.

  52

  A True Wonder

  Simonopio was on his way back to La Amistad, riding across the town square on Francisco Junior’s Thunderbolt, when he heard something he had never heard before. For someone used to hearing sounds, voices, and even thoughts using something other than his ears, it was surprising.

  It was a wonder.

  He stopped. He stopped right there amid everything and everyone, without caring that he was in the way and that people were giving him stranger-than-usual looks. He tried to locate the direction from which the metallic and unintelligible voice came—sometimes from the right and sometimes from the left, it seemed. It bounced off the drugstore wall, which sent it toward the square, where it faded a little among the trees and grew louder again as it left, before causing the same effect on the other side, echoing off the wall of Sr. Abraham’s store, and then returning along the same route. Simonopio tried to follow the sound with his eyes, but he could not locate it because it moved more quickly than his vision, albeit without ruffling a single leaf on the trees that stood in its path.

  The people around him were talking, walking, going about their business, and they did not seem especially surprised at the phenomenon.

  Could it be that only he could hear it? That was very often the case, though now, at the age of nineteen, he generally knew how to distinguish between that which emanated from the world everyone inhabited and that which was exclusively his: the secrets that the world shared only with those prepared, like he was, to allow them in and to interpret them and commit them to memory.

  This was new. He did not know how to interpret it. Amid the confusion, he couldn’t understand the words reaching him from all directions. Quickly uttered words that interweaved and camouflaged themselves with a music of repetitive rhythms.

  Then he saw the people begin stopping what they were doing and looking around also, trying to make out from what direction the racket was coming—it seemed to be approaching more and more from the right.

  Attracted by the noise, the people of Linares came out of their homes and businesses. The ladies, who at that time of day usually spent an hour contemplating the Holy Sacrament in the church, had put their meditation on hold to rush out, their curiosity piqued by such a rare interruption. The teachers at the state-run schools—and those at the secret schools—could not contain their pupils, who in the excitement ran out onto the street to witness the phenomenon. Simonopio saw Francisco Junior in the crowd as well, but with a signal, he told him not to move from where he was.

  Like Simonopio, everyone was wondering what the noise was, and it was not long before they found out. For at that moment, a pickup truck from which the sound seemed to spring forth turned the corner. Mounted on it, the tambora was playing at full volume.

  And the voice? How was it possible that it was not being drowned out by the music that enveloped it? But it was not: over the music, the voice was growing clearer and more distinguishable with every turn of the truck’s wheels.

  Simonopio had always thought that Marilú Treviño’s singing voice was almost miraculous, because while it was soft, it traveled with purity over the music of her instruments and other noises, without stopping until it reached each corner of the pavilion where she sang at the Villaseca Fair. Other less gifted a
rtists were now using the new microphones, their voices taking on harsh, unpleasant metallic properties, albeit less so than this voice now was echoing around the square. Because then Simonopio noticed that was precisely what the man on the truck was yelling—not singing—into without respite: a portable, cone-shaped microphone pressed against his mouth, giving the announcer the strange appearance of someone trying to swallow something bigger than his head. He spoke so quickly and with such energy that Simonopio had to concentrate hard to make out a few of the words. Yet the people, who were multiplying and assembling to walk behind the slow-moving truck, seemed to understand him and celebrate his message. It was not until the vehicle passed in front of Simonopio that the words became clear to him. Over and over, the man was repeating:

  “For just twenty centavos, come on Saturday at five o’clock to the old La Verdad Mill to hear Pedro Ronda, the True Wonder, sing underwater—with no equipment!”

  The people applauded the announcement, no doubt excited for the event that would break the routine and also promised to be magnificent—wondrous.

  Simonopio did not move from his saddle. He did not yell hurrah, cheer, or applaud. He did not even move to follow the party on the truck, like many other people were doing. Hearing the man clearly once was enough to unleash his imagination: How was such artistry, such skill, possible? Singing in public was in itself something that amazed him, which was why he never missed an opportunity to enjoy a show, whether at the Villaseca Fair or smaller events. But listening to someone sing underwater was unheard of, even for Simonopio, who sometimes observed the fish in the river when they approached to see him on the bank. However hard he tried, he could not hear or understand what they wished to communicate to him.