The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

Not even in winter, with his exploring on hold, could he give himself the luxury of resting and therefore losing what he had gained. He was adamant that, when spring arrived, his feet would still remember every crack and every stone on the trail, and also that the trail would remember him: that it would accept his footsteps as it had learned to do through his efforts.

imbuing

Simonopio with the comforting feeling of being enveloped and protected by the bees’ unbreakable community. There, he slept in peace and slept deeply.

Whenever he slept far away, Simonopio chose his campsite very carefully. He lit his fire with the flint his godfather had given him, not because he was cold, but to warn other animals that the place was taken.

He drank water from his canteen and then spread out his sleeping bag and climbed in it, imagining it was a cocoon that sealed in the smell of his skin—the smell of bees.

At the second table, the youngsters laughed in the way only young people can laugh: with ease, without the weight of worry marring the sound of a good guffaw.

He now tried to call to Beatriz’s eyes with the force of his own,

Hundreds of bees swirled around him. He was ragged, covered in scratches and scrapes, and muddy, and his hair was stiff with dirt, but his stride was purposeful, and his smile so big, so bright, it lit up his eyes.

Every living thing dies, even these flowers, he thought to himself. Putting them in water would only delay the inevitable.

Simonopio had torn them from their life on the tree for a reason, and Francisco, seeing them, understood it perfectly: they had fulfilled their destiny.

She no longer went to the house in Monterrey as often as she had in the last few years. Her married daughters no longer needed supervision. Her responsibility for them, while not ended—because it never would be—had changed.

she was beset with the unpleasant feeling that, in her absence, their relationship would change and she would be left outside, like an intruder in her own home, a voyeur who can only look in through a crack in a closed window. She was afraid that, far away from each other, she would change and he would change in opposite directions, so that they would never find one another again. She was afraid that one day they would look at each other and not recognize each other’s voices, intentions, looks, or the warmth of their bodies in the bed.

And while much of the land remained as it was before, the landscape around her had changed, and the old Beatriz, the one who feared any kind of change, sometimes got goose bumps in protest. But the new one, the extremely modern one who now wore dresses above the ankle—less fabric and less expense, after all—supported her husband unconditionally. She tried to see the good side to the change: at least the scent would be wonderful from time to time, when there were flowers. If there were. When,

What would your father say, Francisco?” “That the world is for the living. That’s what he’d say. And if orange trees produce fruit in Montemorelos, there’s no reason why they won’t here. You’ll see.”

One night, tucked up in bed, he said to her, “I feel like I’m in a race that I appear to be winning, for the time being. But it’s a long, very expensive race, and I can feel them hot on my heels. And I’m tired.” “If you get too tired, tell me. I’ll help you.” And there, lying in bed, Beatriz rested Francisco’s head on her shoulder and stroked the hair on his temple like a child, until he relaxed and fell asleep.

She would hate to cause more pain or anxiety for Francisco, but she could not willfully continue to ignore her discomfort. If it was bad news, she decided that she would confront it without wasting any more time.

Still, from time to time, that mature look—so out of place and that saddened Beatriz so much when she saw it in his eyes—made an appearance. It was as if, for a moment, a prisoner that Simonopio kept inside him managed to escape, subjecting him to a harsh transformation that lasted until the boy—the one he still needed to be—imposed himself again and sent the invader back behind his eyes.

At my age, one realizes that time is a cruel and fickle master, for the more you want it, the faster it appears to vanish, and vice versa: the more you want to escape it, the more stagnant it becomes. We are its slaves—or its puppets, if you prefer—and it moves or paralyzes us at its whim.

it doesn’t matter whether time passes slowly or quickly. What you can be sure of is that, in the end, all you want is to have more. More of those lazy afternoons when nothing happens, despite your best efforts to the contrary. More of those annoying arms that picked you up to stop you doing something crazy. More tellings-off from the mother who you thought was a nag. More glimpses, even, of your father hurrying somewhere, always busy. More soft embraces from the wife who loved you all your life, and more trusting looks from your children’s young eyes.

A short delay so that, in her own time, she could find a way, and the right moment, to inform her husband, daughters, and the wider world that, fearing she was dying, she had discovered more life in her than she had expected.

Life and time had decided otherwise.

The first orange-blossom buds had appeared a few days earlier almost out of nowhere, and now, as if all the trees had agreed to a race, an eagerness to begin their cycle had quickly spread among them, and they put out shoots in abundance.

but the bees’ patience was unlimited:

I never cared, because it had all been Simonopio’s, and in that confused world I’d arrived in, the one thing I knew with complete clarity from the beginning, because he always told me firmly, was that he was my brother.

Like the law, for now, and like the guns, for now, Anselmo Espiricueta remained silent. For now.

The devil was the devil, but a man was just that: a man.

He had always sensed, from a very young age, that nothing stops when the lights go out, when the eyes are closed, and one sleeps deeply. Nothing stops: what must happen will happen, without the slightest consideration and without warning.

His only certainty: something had happened. But what?

Her daughters, with their husbands escorting them, made the trip to be present at the funeral of the young woman whom they had loved in life without realizing it.

No other words were heard, but neither was there silence: the weeping established itself as an accompanying murmur, as if, once the cadence and tone had been set, no one dared break the harmony of their macabre chorus.

They felt obliged to remain with her and tend to her in their mourning, and she understood that, at their young age, they would want to vent their pain and horror with this unstoppable verbosity. But Beatriz wanted silence; she wanted dry eyes, so dry they burned. She wanted revenge and wanted, most of all, to be the main witness when it was wreaked.

Impossible, she knew. Revenge was not a woman’s business, she knew, and she repeated it to persuade herself.

She would not get her hands dirty, though her soul already felt stained, despite being a woman’s.

They did not know who. It could have been anyone in those hills, where a willingness to kill over something or nothing still prevailed. In those hills that were still infested with a plague of bandoleros who, with no trade or principles, roamed surreptitiously and without permission across land that, though they did not want—or it was not convenient for them—to accept it, was privately owned.

When she returned to the kitchen, Simonopio was there. Seeing her come in, with an urgent look, he handed her a bloody handkerchief. Beatriz braced herself: when she unwrapped it, she was horrified to discover Lupita’s dead eyes. Her first impulse had been to complain about the offering, saying, You give your godfather a handkerchief full of flowers and give me one full of horrors? But she reconsidered: it was Simonopio, and there was no morbidity or cruelty in him. Whatever he did, he always did it thinking that it was the right thing to do, and in this case, it was: a body must not be buried incomplete.

That was how Lupita went to the grave and how she would reach God: complete.

It was her turn to rest, and with luck, her body would. But her soul would not, for it was as heavy as lead.

Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow she would do it. Tomorrow she would do everything: Tomorrow I’ll change the sheets, I’ll see my daughters, I’ll look Socorro in the eyes, I’ll bury Lupita. Today, I’ll do no more.

She cried. She gave herself permission there and then. “But not tomorrow.”

Simonopio understood. Tomorrow, or the next day, he would let go of the memory of Lupita’s dead body. Of the feel of her dead eyes in his hand. Of the time he’d spent lying beside her: her body cold—lifeless and cold—and his body alive and warm—warm but limp—given over to crying, with no strength or will to share the terrible news. He knew he had to do it, and he would, as soon as he found the strength, because he knew that his work would not end there: he understood that, after raising the alarm and handing over the body, he would have to go in search of Lupita’s lost eyes.

You lack patience, Beatriz had told her, also with little patience.

Now he knew that nothing happened until it happened.

She moved with difficulty, as if one side of her body required the reluctant cooperation of the other.

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.

we might not have seen each other much, but in the little time we had, we saw each other a lot.

the little universe of my home had changed, and I wanted to know why.

but sometimes, what children don’t understand, they feel, and something monumental had happened in my absence.

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 n...

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.