The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

He understood: it had been that or to fall to pieces, and true to her essence, Beatriz Cortés de Morales had opted to be strong. Once she recovered her young son, the spark had returned to her eyes, the storm that broke out when Lupita died and that had slowly faded over time.

Her fury was not directed at him. Her fury was for the coyote. There was nothing for which to be grateful. Nothing to thank him for. And nothing to forgive.

Overwhelmed by the memory, instead of answering, Simonopio had burst into tears, until, without realizing it, he moistened Francisco Junior’s face with his drops of grief.

but she had no time or desire to be distracted.

There would be time to see what kind of life she would build. That woman changed once again by violence no longer had a husband, and for now, she did not want friends or distractions either.

Sinforosa had filled every gap Beatriz had allowed her to fill during the days when her daughter was lost in anguish. Beatriz was now grateful to her for everything that, at the time, she had complained about and resented. She was grateful that her mother had never allowed her to fall, that she had prevented her from crumbling completely.

She did not feel ready to answer the question yet, but would she ever? Was there a better way to tell your son that his papa is dead, that he was killed? No. There were no alternative answers; there was just one, because death is final.

But time does not stop. Despite the painful absence beside her, the sun came up and set each day, though as a veteran of loss, this fact no longer surprised her so much. The empty hours of the night do not pass unnoticed, because in their unrelenting cruelty, they do not allow one to rest; they force one to think, and they demand a great deal. Because it is at night that fear is most frightening, yes, but it is also when sorrow becomes deeper and one regrets what one did or did not do more. It is in the deepest darkness that one sees things most clearly.

It forced her to decide to heal herself of the darkness with which she was filled, but not with unnecessary medications: with willpower.

She was still afraid to leave the house. That was the truth. Because that Saturday in April, Espiricueta did not just take her husband from her. He also took her peace.

She would make her decisions freely, and with free will, she would banish the fear. She remembered the promise that she had once made to no one but herself: not even in her old age would she allow herself to become anyone’s shadow. She would never be set adrift, at the mercy of other people’s decisions. She would never allow herself to stagnate.

And what had happened to those promises? What right did she have to think they were guaranteed? The permanent absence of her husband had given her no choice but to admit it out loud, so that she would never forget it again: “Life offers no guarantees. To anyone. It waits for nobody. It has no consideration for anyone.”

Clinging to the past had cost him his life.

That there is no limit to the amount of times a person can be knocked down, because life doesn’t believe that third time’s the charm?

while life offers no guarantees, sometimes it does offer gifts; and understanding that, accepting it even without being fully aware of it, the bitterness, the grief, and the deep wound of Beatriz Cortés, now the widow of Morales, began to heal, and her determined streak began to reemerge.

And there were things that it was better not to know. We would leave in order to forget the bad things: the absences and the abandonments. We would go to remember just the good things. And in our ignorance, we would heal.

She took her Singer and all her fabric and threads. She packed the few family photographs we had. They were few, perhaps, because it was a very expensive service back then, but it might also have been because they had thought there would be time to take more.

But I, who hadn’t even cried when I woke from my concussion with a broken rib, did not want to stop. And not only that, but the more she asked me not to cry, the more I clung to my sobbing and even enjoyed it. I was convinced that I had every right to throw my tantrum. I, who when I woke from my coma, still concussed, confused by my state and by the abruptness of my papa’s departure to heaven—an innocent who didn’t understand that to go to heaven, one first had to die—barely reacted, barely cried when my mama told me.

“You’ll take care of us, won’t you, Simonopio?” I never waited for an answer, because, believing that I knew it, I considered it said—and

That it was a monologue and not a dialogue.

My mama tried to calm me down. But anything she said was futile; I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want comforting or explanations, because there were none. I think I was still looking around me, then, in the hope that Simonopio would arrive at the last minute. I think that, despite all the evidence, deep down I still believed it was impossible that Simonopio had abandoned me. When the train started up without him, I clutched my chest. When the train’s wheels began to turn, all hope died.

And with the strength of my chest, and perhaps also my stomach, I contained my sobbing. And the contained sobbing turned into nausea. I vomited all the way. I vomited so much and for so many days that my poor mama thought I’d die. And I did, too, but boys don’t cry, and how proud I felt that I would sooner have a brush with death than allow myself to live crying over him, missing him, remembering him, talking about him.

It was a trick; saved-up tears come out sooner or later, and mine came in an explosive crying fit tha...

Memories are a curious thing: while I always felt fortunate to have a few photographs of my father, they ended up contaminating my memories of him, because I looked at them so much, they gradually replaced the flesh-and-blood man whose body had a smell, whose voice had a timbre, whose hair would ruffle, and whose smile, when he unleashed it, was more contagious than the flu.

I refused to think about him. Nonetheless, when I opened myself up to doing so, out of love for my girlfriend or whatever it was, Simonopio remained intact in my memory: his smell, his voice, his warmth, his laughter, his eyes, his gestures when he spoke to me, his songs, his stories, his lessons, his words in that other language I learned from the cradle, his hand when I held it, his back when he carried me, his resignation when he found me wandering, his serene company when I was unsettled.

In Monterrey he would’ve died before he died, like that circus lion he had seen as a boy.

I came today believing that I wanted to see it one final time to contemplate the last traces of my childhood, to touch the bricks that protected me when I was a boy, to try to capture, even if just once more, the aromas that had wrapped me up warm and that still define me to this day.

They’re painful because they had to be. And I came because I had to.

Contrary to what I had believed, what I came searching for isn’t here, strewn among these ashlar stones. It was never here, because it was always in me, disappearing from this place, from these ruins ever since the day when I left with my mama for Monterrey. Because my papa was right that time when he took up a feather duster as a weapon: houses die when they’re not fed with their owners’ energy.

Without realizing, in that chest in which my belongings traveled and that I always believed to be half-empty, I had packed all my memories. All of them. Intact.

There was a future in Monterrey, but it didn’t include him or Nana Reja, however many times we invited them to share it with us. He knew that, if they agreed to come with us, they would both be slowly suffocated to death in that city that had already tried to squeeze the life from him on his only short visit there.

I continued to recover faster than my mama thought possible, but slower than was tolerable for me, for while my body healed, my mind was already jumping and spinning. It needed constant distraction to keep me still, and Simonopio provided it because he knew that, without him, I would get bored, I’d be restless, and what was worse: I’d start misbehaving.

when he had thought me lost even when I was in his arms.

Simonopio kept me entertained by talking to me about what the bees knew and how they knew it, and he reminded me how important it was to listen. To listen to what life sometimes murmurs into your ear, heart, or gut. “Listen carefully and pay attention, Francisco.”

It was the way in which she believed she made him feel the obligation, but which in reality communicated what she had already sensed from the beginning: that he did not include himself in our future. That a goodbye was coming.

Looking back, they knew they would see the house waking up for the last time, and neither of them resisted the temptation to do so.

I Always Thought that it was Simonopio who’d abandoned me. It never occurred to me that it was me who abandoned him, leaving him only with the hope that I would return.

I very much enjoyed the whole of what now, looking back, I can see is my life: the many good things and the not-so-many bad things—old age included, because it wouldn’t have happened had youth not also existed. I am what life has made me. I would’ve been nobody without Simonopio’s sacrifice, and I’m grateful to him for it. Only now, but I am grateful.

And there it still lies, slowly disintegrating out in the elements, returning to the land, which reclaims everything—from flesh to iron. Although iron lasts longer than flesh.

What will become of tomorrow? What will become of the flowers, the trees that produce them, the land that needs us? What will become of us, Simonopio?

But I forgot how to be a child a long time ago.

But Now These Bees Are Flying around Us, and I understand what they want to tell me with their murmur: Come-come-come-come, come quickly, come quickly, run. And I know that he sent them to guide me to him. Now I hear, too: it’s a little child’s sigh coming from inside me. I search inside myself, deep inside, and I find the boy that I was. He didn’t disappear with the years, as I’d believed. He was waiting for me, and he spoke to me like Simonopio did: protected in the depths of my memories, silent sometimes, but patient, waiting to be invited out.

Tell them to walk in the shade. To listen with their eyes, to see with their skin, and to feel with their ears, because life speaks to us all and we just need to know and wait to listen to it, see it, feel it.”

We walk without looking back, because on this journey, all we care about is our destination.

This is a novel inspired by the true story of a town in the citrus-growing region of northern Mexico.