The Murmur of Bees

by Sofía Segovia

There were all kinds of theories, but what captured the collective imagination was the theory that the baby belonged to one of the witches of La Petaca, who, as everyone knew, freely gave their favors of the flesh. A witch who, having produced such a deformed and strange-looking boy—a punishment of the Almighty or of the devil, who knows?—had gone and thrown it under the bridge, to leave it to God’s mercy. No one knew how many hours that baby spent abandoned under the bridge, naked and hungry. Nobody could explain how he survived the elements without bleeding to death from the umbilical cord left unknotted, or without being devoured by the rats, birds of prey, bears, or pumas that were plentiful in those hills.

All those years on the rocking chair caused the townspeople to forget her story and her humanity: she had become part of the scenery, put roots down into the earth she rocked upon. Her flesh had become wood and her skin a hard, dark, furrowed bark.

Reja did not abide being the object of anyone’s curiosity; she preferred to pretend she was made of timber. She preferred to be ignored. At her age, she reckoned, with the things her eyes had seen, her ears had heard, her mouth spoken, her skin felt, and her heart suffered, she had been through enough to make anyone weary. She couldn’t explain why she was still alive or what she was waiting for before she departed, since she was no longer of any use to anybody and her body had dried up, so she preferred not to see or be seen, not to hear, not to speak, and not to feel.

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.

The sounds of the cicadas and bees, now rarely heard in the city, force me to travel to my childhood, though I can no longer run. I still search with my nose for a trace of lavender, and find it, even when it’s not real. When I close my eyes at night, I hear the clunk of the floor tile, the creak of beams, and the shutters banging, even though, in my townhouse, there are no loose tiles or beams or shutters. I feel like I’m at home, the one I left as a child. The one I left too soon. I feel like it’s with me, and I like it.

The war had taken their peace, their tranquility, their certainty, and their family, for bandoleros would come to Linares to kill and rob. They took any women they came across. Beautiful or ugly, young or old, rich or poor, they made no distinction. Francisco had thought it astounding that such a thing could happen in the modern day. Then he learned that, in war, even modernity evaporated.

Renown and wealth still counted for something in 1917. The war did not require his flesh for another shield, but it still stalked him, winked at him, and threatened more than his maize, for the maize they took that day would not last long. It would never sate a voracious appetite that demanded everything.