The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

At Nana Reja’s motionless feet, which her rocking chair always pointed in the direction of the road that had brought them together, Simonopio mastered the art of silence.

How long did it take for a tradition to be lost forever? Less than the eight years it had been on hold, possibly. Perhaps—hopefully—there was still life in what appeared to be dead.

She would bring the Holy Saturday dance back to life. She had to try, for her young daughters. How could one generation look the next in the eye and say: One of the few things I took for granted that I would pass on to you, I have allowed to die?

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She wanted to save the memories that Carmen and Consuelo had the right to create, the bonds they still had to forge while living out their youth in their ancestral home.

She could not remedy the shortages. Nor could she stop the war or the slaughter. What she could do was try to stay sane.

The Linares Social Club suffered from the same affliction she suffered from in life: great potential but few achievements, and grand promises broken.

She counted on the certainty that all the promises life had made her were, or would be, fulfilled in proportion to the work and effort invested. In life, only potential was free. The outcome, the achievement, the aim came at a high cost, which she was prepared to pay.

unstinting

How did one woman persuade an entire foolish nation to lay down its arms, return to work, and start producing again? How did a woman pretend that the events happening around her did not affect her? What could she do to change the trajectory of a bullet? Of ten bullets? Of a thousand?

When the Revolution broke out, Beatriz had felt safe in her little world, in her simple life, shielded by the idea that if you bothered no one, no one would bother you. Seen in this way, the war seemed distant from her. Worthy of attention, but distant.

Now she knew she had deceived herself: somehow, she had persuaded herself that, if she did not feel it to be her own, the war would not touch her or her loved ones.

“Effective suffrage, no reelection” had seemed an elegant sentence, deserving of a place in history.

realizing that the indefensible was not worth defending;

They made an obedient people take up arms and placed them under the command of madmen who killed indiscriminately and without the slightest care for military ethics and courtesy. Then the war ceased to be a distant curiosity and became an insidious poison.

like an unwanted, invasive, abrasive, destructive guest.

That was when it knocked on her family’s door, which her father opened with a naivety for which Beatriz still could not forgive him.

battalion

I am not a traitor to anyone, and you are no one to judge me. But if you must kill me, the witness to the accused’s words repeated, shoot me in the chest and not in the face, so that my wife may recognize me.

The lifeless father with a flaccid expression, perforated, bleeding, and covered in the bodily fluids that had escaped as he died. Where was the romance in that? Where was the dignity?

All Mariano Cortés left behind when he died was a deep void.

Beatriz continued to do so, though the rage and hatred that filled her at times like this, when she succumbed to introspection, frightened her.

And finally, His naivety and meekness killed him.

War was waged by men. What could God do against their free will?

As if the six bullets that hit their target had not been enough, the Carrancista soldiers—for the circumstances suggested it had been they—proceeded to kick the body, as though to make sure that the soul would find its way out through one of the many new holes in its shell. And they left him there to move on to something else, to continue their reign of terror, without taking a single step toward peace.

They had become the great losers: almost four years later, Sinforosa, Beatriz’s mother, was not even a shadow of her former self, overcome with grief and the fear of more reprisals.

for when she lost her husband, she lost her essence, her strength, and even her ability to take care of her home and herself.

She was losing opportunities for family plans, put on hold because they were currently inconvenient or impossible. She was losing by hiding her pain to support her mother and her husband. She was losing because, instead of germinating more children in her belly, she germinated fear, suspicion, and doubt in her mind. And worse still: she was losing the absolute belief in herself that she had felt all her life.

The life she was living now did not resemble the life that Beatriz Cortés was supposed to have. In spite of it all, the sun rose and set each day—though even that sometimes disconcerted her. Life went on. The seasons came and went in an eternal cycle that would not stop for anything, not even for Beatriz Cortés’s sorrows and truncated hopes.

Beatriz repeated it to herself every day: I am a grown woman, I am a wife, I am a mother. I don’t depend on my father anymore, I have my own family, and we are well. But it was one thing to say it with her head, and another for her heart to believe it and stop sending pain signals to her soul.

Because it was a lie that a woman left her parents’ home to become one flesh with her husband: for all that she loved him—and she loved Francisco because he deserved it—such a thing had never occurred to Beatriz. In her world, a woman took her parents’ home with her wherever she went: to school, on a foreign voyage, on honeymoon, to bed with her husband, to the birth of her child, to the table each day to teach her children good posture and good manners, and—she believed—she would even take them to her deathbed. In her world, a woman never left her parents behind, even when the parents left her.

And now, in the anonymity that darkness provides even in the marital bed, Francisco had begun to talk about the possibil...

With the intimacy and immediacy that came with sleeping shoulder to shoulder, Beatriz had said: Francisco, go to sleep.

She did not want to lose one more single thing.

All he knew was that Mercedes Garza had died from cardiac arrest, for nobody dies without their heart first stopping. He was confident he had stated nothing but the pure truth.

able to say at what, precisely, Mercedes Garza had been the best, but as God intended, one must always speak well of the dead. All of them, even Mercedes’s husband, knew that the deceased was bad-tempered, had been conceited since childhood, and mistreated her servants. In short, they all knew she was far from a saint and even less of an angel. But that day, the deceased, since she was dead, would be forgiven her every transgression. That was the protocol.

After the burial, infected by the sorrow

The only one to stay to the end, because she had nowhere to go and because her devotion was greater than her superstition, was the orphans’ nana, for the children’s grandparents and other relatives had neither the health nor the courage to enter that infected house.

Those who died in the night or early morning arrived at the cemetery still fresh. Those who passed away later had to wait until the following day, and so they suffered the natural yet cruel transformations that death brings to a body, whether poor or rich, in full view of the family. Because we’re all equal in death, concluded López in a moment of philosophical lucidity.

plodded

The miracle would have been if those arrogant fools with the fate of the country in their hands had listened in time to the voices of the experts. Now it was too late.

Often—most of the time—they turned something ordinary into something extraordinary, and elaborated on the simplest explanations so much that they ended up confusing rather than clarifying the point they were trying to make.

The three most acute months of the Spanish influenza crisis left the survivors of Linares and of the whole world with scars that would never heal and voids that would never be filled.

me with covid

Still, in January 1919, in Linares, these details were of little interest, because absences were not measured in numbers or statistics: they were measured in grief.

when the last door was bolted, her heart had tightened in her chest until it squeezed tears from her eyes, hidden but painful tears.

What he did know at that moment was that the family was traveling away from death and heading toward life.

And this was his punishment: to keep his body in an unnecessary and annoying state of rest despite how he longed to run, to see his bees swirling above him, even if he was unable to follow them into the air no matter how they insisted, and then watch them give up and fly away. On top of this, he had to suffer the searing heat on his chest where the mustard from the sinapism had burned him. Though that pain was the least of his worries.

He had seen the look of relief and satisfaction on his godfather Francisco’s face when he had woken. His godfather proudly told him that he had cured him with his sinapism, and Simonopio would never refute it: one should never contradict an act of love.

He hoped that the curative effect of the sinapism, which he had tolerated with so much patience and stoicism, would also heal all the wounds his beloved godfather’s heart would soon, inevitably, suffer. Because they were heading toward life, yes, but that did not mean that life would be easier.

Still, she stirred endlessly and would not accept help. She did it by herself, she said, because the work was hypnotic, and while her mind was under the almost narcotic influence of her labor, she forgot everything. She forgot her sons, the husband she had lost. She forgot what might have been and what might be. The work was tiring for her arms but restful for her soul.