The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

The hair disheveled by his pillow and the striped pajamas contrasted with the ferocity in his eyes and the cocked revolver Francisco held as he came out of his bedroom.

but from experience, he knew that nothing and no one would be able to make the boy open his eyes until he was ready to do so. Francisco Junior slept deeply, and every night he surrendered to his dreams, unsuspecting, unafraid of falling to the depths to which Simonopio no longer dared go.

The light of the new day began to filter into the room until it filled the space. During the process, which started slowly and ended in an instant, Simonopio barely blinked, concentrating, trying, in the slow and gradual luminosity in which the boy’s face was bathed, to see the baby he had been and the man he would become, all at the same time. He had no difficulty making out the baby in those bones, assisted perhaps by his memories, but the face of the man eluded him: he saw promise there, but no certainty.

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 ...

That day I was more bored than ever, but I felt proud: I had defended my brother.

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.

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.

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.

Francisco had never stopped working for a single day out of the arrogance and vanity that comes with wealth. He had never lived like a rich man or envisaged himself living extravagantly in the future.

They organized meetings, they ranted and raved, they cursed, they complained, and some even cried. It was all for nothing: Francisco suspected it was much easier to make a mountain of gold disappear than it was to make it reappear again from nowhere.

His fortune was gone, but his property was not, which was why, now more than ever, he felt not only the obligation but also the need to defend what he had left.

magna...

When I climbed onto the pickup truck, I did so imagining that I was running off with the circus

As ever, whether fast or slow, time always passes, and grain of sand by grain of sand, every date arrives.

He would tell him about how painful death is, but also about the absolute pleasure of life.

so privileged did he feel to be spending the day by his father’s side. One day Simonopio would go with them, but not that day: that day belonged to the two of them and to nobody else.

that day I think I sensed that, in reality, what mattered was the journey and not the destination.

You locked that reality away in a cage like a prisoner, but you didn’t throw away the key, and today the day has come to let it out. It’s time to end the story, to fill in the gaps. All of them. So, take a deep breath: let the memories of that day come out. Remember your own, but recognize and incorporate the memories of others, as well: the ones you’ll allow to enter you only today, even if they’re uncomfortable, even if they’re painful, even if it seems as if they’ll make your heart stop.

prisoners of the hurried pace of modern life,

And you suddenly feel the greatest pain of your life invading you, a pain that must be let out or you will die. You comprehend that the pain belongs to someone else, but it is your responsibility. You know that it comes from the past, though it has reached you only these many years later. Now you know that the pain is called Simonopio.

and the absolute silence in the hills, after the gunshot, thundered in his ears and punctured his heart.

Suspended for a moment between voluntary verticality and permanent horizontality, between lucidity and confusion,

Now a fall felled him like a great tree that, once felled, does not stand up again. Perhaps this means I’m getting old, he thought fearfully.

fastidious,

And his heart—that organ that one feels beating, if not in an insensible body then beating in the soul—his heart broke. But now he could not even surrender to the impulse to wail. He did not have the air for it. There was only moisture for the tears, which flowed freely and without shame and which, in his imagination, watered the orange tree and mixed with the blood that he knew he was giving to his land, draining him, even if he could not feel it.

In the end that he had imagined, they would both be old, as they had promised each other, and by then, they would have had time to say everything to one another and to say it many times, without caring that they repeated it, without ever growing tired of it. He had thought there would be time.

Now it was too late, and while he wanted to find only words of love and parting, he could find nothing but words of pain, sorrow, and recrimination.

Francisco Morales was no longer capable of doing anything except waiting. And knowing what was coming, in the silence imposed on him by a bullet, he sent up a fervent prayer—perhaps not conventional, but certainly from the bottom of his soul and with all the strength he had left:

reneged

prostrated

The bullet ended its journey like a flash of lightning, but its thunder lingered in his ears like a constant reminder that there was no going back.

Moving Francisco would hurt him, but not moving him would kill him. He decided he had to take him away

They all came quickly, which made her feel even more anxious: it meant that her fears were not unfounded.

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.

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.

She did not want anyone to see him like this: dead, defeated, destroyed.

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.

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.

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 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.

And there was no room in her head for anything other than the silent cries that resounded inside it ceaselessly:

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.

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.

Are you alone? I am. Are you afraid? Me too, Francisco. Me too. Me too. Very much. Afraid of knowing and of not knowing.

Sometimes the soul must be allowed to rest, kept away from the things that hurt it.

She did not move from her place, but she closed her eyes like Nana Reja. It was impossible, however, to close her ears: she could hear the cart’s wheels and the horses’ hooves on stones and earth growing closer and closer. Closing her eyes was useless and it made it worse: what her eyes did not see, her mind imagined. So she opened them, so she stood, so she walked out to meet the cart, so she saw that neither Francisco nor Simonopio were riding on its front bench, so she concluded; she contained her breath, her body, and her tears, and she said, “He’s come home dead like his papa.”

He also gave himself permission to rest the wounds on his body and heart.