The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

“Be strong, Sr. Morales. God knows why He does things.”

Can I remember it? No, but I imagine it.

Every Tuesday of her life, with just one, painful exception that was still to come.

There are no ghosts in this house, my father would say to me. What you hear are the echoes it has kept to remind us of all those who’ve been here.

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 know a memory from reality, even if I grow more attached to my memories than to reality with each day.

There was a symbiosis between the chair and its owner, and she imagined that, while one lived, so would the other.

To offer it meekly the day they came and knocked on his door, in the same way he had let his crop go that day: in silence. It was that or die.

Because how did one defend oneself against legal theft?

His life would be hard enough with the bees by his side. What would become of him without them?

He was for reading life, not books.

Perhaps—hopefully—there was still life in what appeared to be dead.

In life, only potential was free. The outcome, the achievement, the aim came at a high cost, which she was prepared to pay.

Was there a more important unknown in the life of a young woman? Whom will I marry?

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.

In her world, a woman never left her parents behind, even when the parents left her.

But that day, the deceased, since she was dead, would be forgiven her every transgression. That was the protocol.

Because we’re all equal in death, concluded López in a moment of philosophical lucidity.

He considered it the only certainty that life gave everyone equally: sooner or later, everybody would die.

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.

He had never believed himself worthy enough to see one of the great miracles in person, but today he had thought he was sharing the joy that important figures from the Bible must have felt on witnessing God’s greatness.

That was the life they knew: the one that stopped for nothing. Not even for the death of a beloved grandparent.

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.

Because they were heading toward life, yes, but that did not mean that life would be easier.

She kept her body busy so that her mind did not have the energy to wander, to think about anything else, to explode.

But there’s crying and there’s crying.

The information therefore served to tell them only whether civilization still existed, and not the details and fate of all their friends and relatives.

That it was real: they were the last survivors. That they would never return to the life they had known. That they were isolated forever.

My heart, your automobile, time—it all moves forward and ages at that rhythm.

perhaps—it ended up occupying his entire body until it made him tremble.

They had had nothing more than they were searching for: land and freedom.

He would no longer live at the mercy of others.

But he preferred to take the risk, to die and see his wife and children die, rather than spend another day as a serf, waiting meekly for the beating that would finally kill him.

Hunger and thirst, the new masters of their existence, subjugated him and his offspring faster than any whip.

He managed to retain only the words that invaded his heart.

Why must he live life bowing to a master, any master?

But he had learned from every lash of the whip and every blow he had received in his life, and the good treatment did not fool him: it was just a crueler form of control.

“And left us to die like mangy dogs.”

The mirror gave her no answers. Nor did it offer any hope or promises.

She did not want to feel the weight of those resentful eyes on her.

He would wander the region blaming any living person he encountered for his irreversible loss, destined never to remember—or never to want to remember—that it was he who was to blame for his own misery.

Some stories—whether his own or not—he saw very clearly from start to finish.

“Life offers no guarantees. To anyone. It waits for nobody. It has no consideration for anyone.”

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.