For him, at great cost, they had defied the cold and their own instinct which, with good reason, had prohibited them from venturing to this land all these years.
They knew what they were there to do: they would kill that day, and most of them would die doing so.
Without turning around, Simonopio had first heard them behind him, but they soon caught up and then overtook him. He had never seen them fly so fast or with such intensity; they were of a single mind and a single idea: kill. Simonopio, who had always lived surrounded by them, felt afraid when he found himself in the eye of that storm, even knowing that their fury was not directed at him and that they knew their target. They would take revenge against the man who, by existing and treading on a territory, had banished them from there forever.
Simonopio saw them pass over the bodies of the two Franciscos without stopping, but he did not look beyond there. It did not matter if Espiricueta managed to climb the hill and tried to hide in the wilds. The bees would find him wherever he went, because now he was in their sights, and bees never forget: even if they failed that day, even if it took them years and several generations, Espiricueta and his son were dead men.
When Simonopio finally reached his godfather’s body, he barely looked at him with sorrow: he was just an empty shell. There would be time later—a whole lifetime—to mourn him.
Right then, there was no time. He cared about only Francisco Junior now. Only life. It was cold, and night was falling.
“Francisco. Francisco. It’s me. I’m here now,” he said as he examined him, receiving no response.
On the side of his head, near one eye, was the cut that Espiricueta had managed to make with his knife before dropping the boy. On the back of his head was another wide and deep wound, perhaps from hitting a stone when he fell. He was bleeding from one of them, but not from the other anymore: the earth had absorbed almost all the blood his body had been prepared to give it. He also had at least one rib broken by the impact and the pressure of his father’s weight.
Francisco Junior was breathing with difficulty due to the fracture, and Simonopio noticed that he himself was short of air. He would not be able to fill his lungs until they were away from there, from that toxic air, from the coyote’s land. He was filled with uncertainty. What should he do? Moving Francisco would hurt him, but not moving him would kill him. He decided he had to take him away quickly, to safety, because until Simonopio was certain the coyote was dead, he remained a danger.
And it was growing colder. And darker.
And the coyote was at large.
But the horse had bolted.
It was impossible to take Francisco Junior to the house in the state he was in: cut, battered, unconscious, almost frozen.
“I’ll carry you, Francisco. You sleep. I’ll take you home tomorrow.”
With Francisco in his arms like when he was a baby, mindful of his head and trying not to squeeze him too much, because of his ribs, Simonopio headed into the hills with the sole intention of trying to reach a place where it was easier to breathe, anywhere outside of the coyote’s territory.
76
The Worst of the Bad
At ten o’clock that Saturday night, with the moth plague under control, if not defeated, with dinner cold after several hours of waiting, and with the candles on the cake still unlit, Beatriz Cortés de Morales once again allowed panic to set in.
It had been hours since Pola, Mati, and Leonor, after witnessing Ronda’s disappointing trick, returned to fill her in on the details: the con, the stream of water, the pelting with oranges, and finally, Simonopio’s scream.
While she had not been surprised at how the performance ended, Beatriz was alarmed by Simonopio’s unusual outburst. Hearing the news, a knot formed at the entrance to her stomach: something had happened to make Simonopio cry out in such a way, from nowhere, like never before, and she was afraid that the reaction had something to do with Francisco Junior. But he was with his papa, so what could happen? she thought, trying to stay positive.
By eight o’clock in the evening, she had sent Nana Pola to ask Martín and Leocadio whether they had seen their boss out there that day: In the morning or around midday, they replied when she found them on the way to town, where there was a dance that night.
They had seemed fine at that time. They were happy, Martín and Leocadio said.
However, when ten o’clock arrived and they had received no news, Beatriz sent Pola in one direction and Mati in the other. One to the dance to fetch the men, and the other to inform Emilio and Carlos Cortés: the two Franciscos were missing.
They all came quickly, which made her feel even more anxious: it meant that her fears were not unfounded. They promised that they would search for them, that they would find them. The two had surely taken shelter from the cold and would return early in the morning, they predicted hopefully before setting off.
Beatriz spent the night sitting at the dining table, where a birthday cake awaited an absent birthday boy. She didn’t want anything, thanks. Coffee? No. Hot chocolate? No.
“Shall I sit with you, Beatriz?”
“No, Mama. Go to sleep.”
“I can make you some tea—”
“I said no! Leave me in peace!”
And Sinforosa left her, disappointed and unsettled but without resentment, understanding and sharing her daughter’s anguish. She went to stand guard herself in the solitude of her bedroom, seeking the refuge that the beads of her rosary offered.
From her place in the dining room, without moving, Beatriz watched the sunrise. Had it been possible, she would have stopped herself blinking so that she would not miss the moment when her husband and son appeared on the horizon. When it happened, she did not know what she would do: She would run to them, that much was certain, but what would be the first thing that came out of her mouth? A scolding or an expression of relief?
She would cry, she knew. That day she would cry.
At around seven she saw the cart appear over the near horizon, escorted by several riders. She ran, as she had predicted she would do. But as she approached, she saw that it was not Francisco who drove the cart. It was Carlos, her brother.
She stopped dead because of the sudden lack of air in her lungs, but also to prolong her ignorance, even if for just another minute. And had she been a little less brave, had she been a little less aware of her dignity as the wife of the owner of those lands, she would have turned around and locked herself in her bedroom, blankly refusing to hear news of any kind.
Instead she stood there, motionless, with her knees trembling and her heart immobilized, waiting for the news to roll its way to her head-on. And so her ignorance lasted not even a minute longer: they had found the cart and its horse out in the fields, abandoned. They had found Francisco farther on, beside some holes in the ground, watched over by only a sapling orange tree. Murdered.
That much she understood.
The knot that had formed at the entrance to her stomach the day before seized the rest of Beatriz’s body, from her brain to her limbs and even her eyes. Then it seized her ears, so that she could no longer hear, and her vocal cords, paralyzing them to prevent her from screaming.
There she stood in the middle of the road, without asking anything or moving, blocking the path of the funeral carriage and more bad news. But she understood that, now that they had arrived, there was no way to stop them, even if she remained standing there all day.
And yet she stood firm, waiting for them to arrive of their own accord, without her help.
“Beatriz . . .” Was it her younger brother who spoke to her? Carlos? When had he lost his distinctive playful manner? When had his face taken on this severity, this pallor? she wondered as he spoke. “Francisco Junior . . .” It was her brother, but she did not recognize him like this and did not want to know what he would tell her. “Can you hear me? Beatriz!”
But his elder sister, lost in the middle of her own road, did not find any words, nor did she seem to understand
any. Then he took her by her arms to hold her up, or to hold himself up, to hold her or to be held by her, to console her or to be consoled, or simply to make her react. He did not know.
“Beatriz,” he said, rubbing her arms until he saw a reaction in her eyes. Carlos managed to give her the news a second time: “Francisco is dead and Francisco Junior, he’s missing.”
He could no longer contain his sister other than by force when, out of the blue, at full voice, she began to scream Simonopio’s name, again and again.
Perhaps she had not understood, Carlos thought, and in his desperation, he joined his sister in her yelling, but shouting for the only person he could think of.
“Mama!”
77
Satin from Another Age
She had not wanted to see the body. She did not want to clean it or change the clothes. What she had done with great composure for her father and for Lupita, she refused to do for the man with whom she was of one flesh, according to the law of God.
What clothes would you like us to put on him? they asked her, but she did not answer.
Nor was it she who organized the wake or notified relatives and friends of her husband’s death. She had not thought of her daughters, nor of paying for the telegram that would be sent to them, nor had she asked at what time they would arrive. When she was asked whether she minded them using the coffin they had kept, well protected and covered in a storeroom, she did not even question what a casket was doing in one of their storerooms: she would not remember, until she saw it closed on top of the dining table, that she had bought it herself unnecessarily on the day that Simonopio arrived. That she had had it stored in case it was needed one day.
As it was today.
If, after almost twenty years, the satin inside was yellowish and not white as it had originally been, she did not care. Francisco would not care, either, and she knew that, had he been able, he would have said that men don’t pay any attention to such things and that there’s no point in spending money on a new one if we already have one that’s perfectly adequate. What would the aunts and ladies of the social club say about it? She did not care about that either. No one would see the inside, because the one thing she had firmly requested was that the coffin be kept closed at all times.
She did not want anyone to see him like this: dead, defeated, destroyed.
Her mother had changed her into mourning clothes after giving her a few hours to calm down and, on the doctor’s recommendation, several cups of lime-blossom tea for the nerves.
“Hurry, Beatriz,” Sinforosa said to her when she was doing nothing, “the people are arriving now.”
They had taken her to sit beside her husband’s casket to receive the guests, who offered her their condolences without caring that she did not want to hear them.
To one side of her, they had also pulled up a seat for Nana Reja, who left her rocking chair to make her slow journey to the dining-room-turned-mortuary. Nana Reja had known her boy Francisco since he was newly born. Now she would sit with him when he was newly dead. And Beatriz knew that the little old lady was not as insensible as she sometimes seemed. That she was suffering. As if Nana Reja struggled to pass air in and out, she gave a deep groan from her chest every time she inhaled, though it was audible only to Beatriz, only to the woman who shared her pain and who soon began to imitate her.
No one offered condolences to the wooden woman. Nana Reja sat, closed her eyes, and did not open them again during the entire process. The visitors walked past her as if she had nothing to do with the events.
Beatriz, on the other hand, did not want to close her eyes for a single instant, not even to get away from the tide of people coming toward her.
She had not had the strength to say or yell no, she did not want to see anyone or speak to anyone; she did not want anyone to speak to her or look at her; she wanted to be left in peace, because she felt dead, defeated, and destroyed herself. If they could find another coffin in a storeroom, they might as well put her in one too: she, the one with the murdered husband and the missing son, to whom she had not gone out to say goodbye for the last time for no reason other than to attack a plague of moths.
Sitting there without blinking, she was aware of Francisco’s recent, violent, cruel, and permanent premature absence.
Permanent. From now onward. Forever.
She knew that sooner or later she would have to face it. The day would come when she would need to contemplate a life in complete solitude, filling the hours of the day in order to survive them, and surviving the empty nights.
She knew that her grief for Francisco would come out.
For now, that pain was almost stored away, waiting. She had controlled it out of necessity with the other pain, the more demanding one, more urgent. Because that day, she did not have time to think about her widowhood or to receive sympathy from anyone, for she wanted to ask them all: What are you doing here keeping vigil over a dead man if there’s a living child out there, lost in the cold?
If she had been able to trust her body not to betray her, she would have gotten up immediately to wander the hills yelling Francisco Junior’s name until she found him. But at that moment, her body could not remember how to speak, let alone walk or hold itself up without a chair with a back keeping her upright.
She was the mother of a missing boy, but she did not have the strength in her body or the courage in her soul to stand up and go in search of him, for fear of what she would find or what she would never find, destined to wander the sierras calling to her lost son for eternity, like the Weeping Woman of legend.
She allowed herself to be embraced a little and allowed the compassionate words to float around her, but she did not let any of them in, because at that moment there was nothing that could distract her from the fear and uncertainty, from the void she felt at the core of her existence.
She had been the daughter and then the orphan of her father, to which she had grown accustomed. She had been a wife and was now a widow, to which one day she might resign herself. She had been a mother and . . . What does one call a mother who has lost a child?
Amputee? That was how she felt.
Now she was an amputated mother.
How does one resign oneself to that? When?
People approached her; they spoke to her; they offered her advice for which she did not ask. They offered her food or drink, but that day she could only look out through the window to the horizon, concentrating, waiting, longing for the miraculous appearance of her missing boy. And there was no room in her head for anything other than the silent cries that resounded inside it ceaselessly: Where are you, Francisco? Are you cold, Francisco? Are you alone? Are you afraid? Are you hurting anywhere? Are you alive? Francisco!
While dressing her, her mother had assured her that her brothers would continue the search, which the Guardia Rural had also joined, and which they would continue until the child was found.
“Simonopio must be looking for him as well, and if Francisco Junior’s alive, he’ll find him, like he always does, you’ll see.”
“And what if he’s dead?” Beatriz said, refusing to look at her.
“If he’s dead, he’ll also find him.”
Would he already know? Would Simonopio know that his godfather was dead and that Francisco Junior was missing? If Simonopio lived, he would know. If Simonopio knew, then he would find him. But Simonopio had not returned since the day before, either—not since they saw him run off from the river in a sudden and inexplicable manner.
Simonopio was missing, too, like Francisco Junior. They were not dead. Just missing.
Francisco.
I can’t feel you. Are you cold, Francisco? Where’re you hurt, Francisco? Are you alone? Are you afraid? Don’t be afraid of the dark—what else can it do to us? What else? Simonopio’s coming for you. Can you hear him? Simonopio: Can you see him? Where are you? Are you hiding? I can’t hear you. Have you gone? I can’t feel you, alive or dead. Not alive, or dead. And I didn’t go out to
say goodbye. Where are you? Alive? Where are you both, Simonopio? Are you alive? Dead? No, no, no. No, Francisco. Francisco, are you alone? Are you alive? Are you cold, Francisco? I expect you’ve lost your sweater by now, Francisco, or gotten holes in it, child. And the blankets? I gave you blankets. I think I did. I gave you two. Or was it three? They were blue. The good ones. But I didn’t go out. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say goodbye to you both. I had to save the other blankets. It was very important. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you lost them. Come. Come home, now. Come to me. Alive or dead, come home. I don’t care about the blankets. Don’t be afraid now. Nobody will scold you. Are you hurting anywhere? I don’t have the strength. I don’t have the strength to come find you. I don’t have the strength to lose you. Are you alive? Francisco, Francisco, I can’t feel you and I didn’t say goodbye. I can’t feel you because I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say goodbye. Why didn’t I say goodbye? How stupid I was, Francisco. Are you hurting anywhere? Something hurts inside. Something broke inside me and if it doesn’t heal today, it will heal tomorrow . . . No. No. It won’t heal if you’re not here. It won’t heal if you don’t come back. It will never heal. Come back or it will never heal. Where are you alive, Francisco? Tell me. Where are you dead? Why didn’t I go out? Are you cold where you are, Francisco? I am, and there’s no blanket that will make me warm. Bring him now, Simonopio, bring Francisco, and you come as well. If I’d gone out, I would’ve stopped you, Francisco. I would’ve known. Somehow, I would’ve known. I would’ve stopped you. It hurts. I’m hurting. Perhaps you’re not, anymore. Not if you’re dead. And if I’m hurting, I’m hurting because I’m still here, waiting for you. Alone. The waiting hurts. The doubt hurts. Francisco, Francisco, Fr . . . Are you alone? I am. Are you afraid? Me too, Francisco. Me too. Me too. Very much. Afraid of knowing and of not knowing.
Dead or alive, if Simonopio was alive, he would find him—because, dead or alive, she wanted him back: to welcome him or to say goodbye to him. Even if she went after her Franciscos, with that final goodbye.
The Murmur of Bees Page 36
