The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

That early morning in October, the baby’s wails mingled with the cool wind that blew through the trees, with the birdsong, and with the night’s insects saying their farewell. The sounds floated out from the thick vegetation but faded a short distance from their source, as if halted by some magic spell while they went in search of human ears.

All those years on the rocking chair caused the townspeople to forget her story and her humanity: she had become part of the scenery, put roots down into the earth she rocked upon. Her flesh had become wood and her skin a hard, dark, furrowed bark.

Passing by, no one said hello to her, just as nobody would greet an old, dying tree. Some children observed her from a distance when they made the short trip from town in search of the legend; only rarely did any of them have the guts to go closer to check that it really was a living woman and not one carved from wood. They soon realized there was life under the bark when, without even needing to open her eyes, she dealt the daring adventurer a good blow with her stick.

Reja did not abide being the object of anyone’s curiosity; she preferred to preten...

She preferred to be...

At her age, she reckoned, with the things her eyes had seen, her ears had heard, her mouth spoken, her skin felt, and her heart suffered, she had ...

She couldn’t explain why she was still alive or what she was waiting for before she departed, since she was no longer of any use to anybody and her body had dried up, so she preferred not to see or...

There was nothing they needed from her and nothing she wanted to offer them,

She got up from her chair much later, only when, through her closed eyelids, the fireflies reminded her it was night, and when the wooden rocking chair, which grew tired of the constant proximity long before she did, pressed and pinched her hip.

There was nothing to be done but to keep the patient as comfortable as possible until God said enough.

Compassion cut through his fatigue,

Inside, the property was dark. As dark as she felt. Reja had never seen people as white as the woman who received her, though there was a shadow over her face: a sadness.

She wanted to be alone, back in her hut made of wood and mud, even if she died of cold, alone with her sadness. Better that than endure the sadness of others.

For her it was as if the señora had never existed, and sometimes, when the boy let her, when she allowed herself to listen to the silent call of the hills, she could almost believe that this baby that hadn’t come from her body had sprouted from the earth.

Then the widower Morales married his second wife, María, the younger sister of his late spouse, and together they gave Reja twenty-two more little ones to feed.

this gave me whiplash what the fuck

victim of nothing other than old age—he

That Tuesday, the sheets smelled of lavender and of the sun. Can I remember it? No, but I imagine it.

Although I don’t remember it, on the day I was born the house already smelled how it would smell forevermore. Its porous stones had absorbed the good aromas of three generations of hardworking men and three of women who were sticklers for cleanliness with their oils and soaps; the walls were impregnated with the family recipes and the clothes boiling in white soap. The scents of my grandmother’s pecan sweets; of her preserves and jams; of the thyme and epazote that grew in pots in the garden; and more recently of the oranges, blossoms, and honey—they always floated in the air.

As part of its essence, the house also preserved the laughter and games of its children, the scolding and slamming of doors, past and present. The loose tile my grandfather and his twenty-two siblings trod with their bare feet and my father trod in his childhood was the same one I trod as a boy. That tile was a betrayer of mischief, for with its inevitable clunk, the mother of the time would be alerted to whatever plan her offspring had hatched. The house beams creaked for no apparent reason, the doors squeaked, the shutters banged rhythmically against the wall even when there was no wind. Outside, the bees buzzed and the cicadas surrounded us with their mad, incessant song every summer evening, just before nightfall, while I was immersed in my final adventures of the day. As the sun went down, one began to sing and the rest followed, until they all decided at once to fall silent, frightened by the impending darkness, I suspect.

It was a livin...

If it sometimes gave off the scent of orange blossom in winter or some unattributable giggles were heard in the middle of the night, nobody was scared: they were part of the house’s personality, of its essence. There are no ghosts in this house, my father would say to me. What you ...

I’m certain I carry my mama and papa in my cells, but also the lavender, the orange blossoms, my mother’s sheets, my grandmother’s calculated footsteps, the toasted pecans, the clunk of the treacherous tile, the sugar caramelizing, the cajeta, the mad cicadas, the smells of old wood, and the polished clay floors. I’m also made of oranges—green, sweet, or rotten; of orange-blossom honey and royal jelly. I’m made of everything that touched my senses during that time and entered the part of my brain where I keep my memories.

I may be old, but I don’t talk to myself or see things that aren’t there. Not yet. I know a memory from reality, even if I grow more attached to my memories than to reality with each day.

anacahuita.

My mama complained all her life that, after I finally learned to speak, my favorite words were no, I do it, and not fair; that no sooner could I walk than I started to run; that once I mastered traveling at speed, I climbed every tree that appeared in front of me. She did not know what to do with me. She felt too old and thought she had already done her job as a mother with her two grown-up daughters, who were almost perfect.

I was always noisy, my voice shrill. My body was a refuge for every tick, flea, or louse that needed a home and sustenance, so there was little point in my mama letting my blond curls grow. Out of necessity, I was always close cropped. Like an orphan boy. Ay, Dios! Sigh.

He was well aware there was no place for the fragile in our land and in our time, with war surrounding us and sometimes coming to visit.

Simonopio’s arrival was an event that marked us irreversibly. A family watershed. Later, it became the difference between life and death, though we would not understand this until we looked back on it from far in the future.

campesinos

anacahuita,

Espiricueta,”

peon

And so it happened, as things tend to happen, that before Anselmo had even found the physician, all Linares knew about Simonopio’s misfortune and the possible blight on the Morales family and all its descendants.

That day he had lost the entire maize crop. It hadn’t been the most abundant, but he had kept it going in spite of the plague of insects. To save it, he had taken care of it as if it were his own daughter. He felt almost as if he had caressed every cob.

It’s for the army, they told him before turning away.

In that war, the armies were just one army, he decided, but one that endlessly shed its parts, like the hourglass-shaped wooden doll a Russian classmate had once shown him at university. It’s a matryoshka. Open it, the Russian had said to him.

bandoleros

Then he learned that, in war, even modernity evaporated.

Him—men like him—the levy overlooked. Renown and wealth still counted for something in 1917. The war did not require his flesh for another shield, but it still stalked him, winked at him, and threatened more than his maize, for the maize they took that day would not last long. It would never sate a voracious appetite that demanded everything.

That was why he had not dared to object when they came for his maize. Not even his renown would shield him from a bullet between the eyes. A crop of maize was not worth dying for. He loved the land that his ancestors had passed down to him, but there was something that he valued even more: his life and the lives of his family.

expropriation.

Tired of all the responsibility and uncertainty, so defeated that he could barely deal with what already existed, let alone proceed with plans for the future—such

Why he was wasting so much time sitting there. Why he did not feel up to anything that afternoon beyond his whiskey.

Would it not be better to buy properties in Monterrey? To enjoy what was left of his daughters’ youth? The war had stolen time from him, on top of everything else. He wished he had more time for his wife, for his daughters; more time for the boy who had arrived in their lives. That day, he realized to his surprise, there was time.

He would defend the boy’s bees for him, because they were his, because they had arrived with him, because although Simonopio had always had hands to take care of him and godparents to watch over him, Francisco—on his monotonous rides from ranch to ranch—was plagued by the thought that the bees were the boy’s primary guardians. Killing them would be like killing a piece of Simonopio. It would be like orphaning him.

He was for reading life, not books.

stupefied

He would have liked to discuss his bees and ask everyone why they didn’t hear them, given that they spoke to the others, too, as they did to him.

Why did they close their ears, nose, and eyes when there was so much to hear, smell, and see? Was it just him and nobody else who heard and listened?

How could he discuss these things when his own mouth disobeyed the signals he sent to it, when all that came from it were nasal grunts and goose honks? He couldn’t do it, so he didn’t.