The Murmur of Bees

“The lower jaw was perfectly formed, but the upper one was open from the corners of the lip to the nose. He had no lip, upper front gum, or palate.

‘He was kissed by the devil,’ someone in the crowd said. Espiricueta.

‘It’s no devil’s kiss,’ the doctor replied firmly. ‘It’s a malformation. It happens sometimes […] I’ve never had to tend to a case though I’ve seen it in the books.’

‘Can it be fixed?’

‘I’ve read there is a procedure, but it’s dangerous and painful. I wouldn’t advise it.’”

This is Anselmo Espiricueta’s first appearance. Segovia depicts him as the novel’s antagonist from his first words, which reveal him as superstitious and hostile. Francisco, Beatriz, and others are appalled at Simonopio’s cleft palate but feel sympathy for him because he was abandoned to die and because they don’t believe he’ll be able to eat. Historically, surgical repair of a cleft palate was first practiced in France about the same time that this scene takes place, meaning that facial repair was considered virtually impossible.

“At one time […] Beatrice felt lucky to be a woman of that time and lucky that her daughters were women of the new century. And in that era of wonders, anything was possible: the modern railway shortened distances and moved goods and people in large quantities. Steamboats propelled travelers across the Atlantic to Europe in a few weeks. The telegraph communicated the birth or death of a family member—from a great distance and on the same day—and allowed businessmen to quickly strike a deal that would have taken months to arrange before. Electric lighting galvanized an array of nocturnal activities, and the telephone, though still not widely used, kept people in touch with far flung friends and relatives.”

Segovia describes the rapidly changing milieu in which upper-class Mexican families live. This passage contains multiple ironies. First, the author contrasts the technologically advanced world of the Morales family against that of Anselmo and other campesinos whose living experience changed little. Second, Beatriz frets here because the changes happening around them can’t compensate for the war—and soon the pandemic—threatening her family. Third, the author might be describing the technological and scientific advancements of the 21st century, which likewise haven’t quelled human suffering or diminished inequality.

“After the burial, infected by the sorrow of Mercedes Garza’s inconsolable widow and poor motherless children, not a single eye nor a handkerchief was left dry. That day, many moist embraces and used handkerchiefs were shared. In the end, Sergio Garza’s right hand was sore from so many commiserative handshakes, and inexplicably, his legs and entire body ached too.

Could it be his heart’s pain spreading everywhere?

That October of 1918 Mercedes was the first to die, but she would not be the last.”

This description of the funeral, which in light of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was an event now commonly called a “super spreader,” may seem haunting in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Segovia’s account and discussion of the human reactions to Spanish flu in a novel published in 2015 closely track the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the author portrays the 1918 pandemic as ending in three months, the disease actually re-emerged in waves and, much like COVID, lasted more than 12 months.

“[…] Lázaro was elevated to divine status. After plucking up the courage to leave the cathedral, young father Emigdio decreed that the restoration to life of a local parishioner was a sign of the forgiveness of God, who had punished the poor community so much already, making the just pay for the sins of the others, for as its very name indicated, the epidemic was the fault of the socialist, apostate Spanish who strayed even further from the church.”

This passage illustrates a key motif that virtually all the novel’s characters demonstrate: making decisions based on faulty assumptions. When Lázaro, locally famous for being a slacker, is the first to survive a bad case of the flu, the one surviving priest in the parish, Emigdio, proclaims it divine providence. Emigdio opens the church, telegraphs the bishop, and announces that God’s healing grace has been seen. Humiliation and deaths, including Emigdio’s own death, result from this series of events, showing that jumping to a conclusion can have dire consequences.

Only Anselmo Espiricueta and his family were missing from that caravan of one car, four carts, and a pickup truck.

To my papa’s great displeasure, he learned from another campesino that Espiricueta had obeyed the order to stay at the hacienda to guard the entrance, but keen smoker that he was, he had sent his wife to the grocery store in the center of Linares the day before to buy tobacco and rolling papers. […] He [Papa] did not think it prudent to take the Espiricuetas to live in the close proximity that awaited at La Florida. They would stay at La Amistad. My papa wished them luck and good health, but Espiricueta did not accept his good wishes.

Anselmo’s rash decision to send his wife to town for his tobacco seals his fate and that of Francisco. Francisco knows he can’t risk taking Anselmo’s family to their familial quarantine at La Florida because Anselmo put his wife at risk of exposure. Anselmo accepts no responsibility for their exclusion, instead blaming Simonopio, naming him as the demon who brought the flu. Francisco tells Anselmo that his tobacco habit will kill everyone, one of a series of prophetic pronouncements that proves true (though not in a literal sense), as this begins a chain of events that leads to the deaths of everyone in Anselmo’s family as well as Francisco.

“I don’t know whether you have to be as old as me to have learned that women can never be fully understood. Their minds are a labyrinth that men are only permitted to glance from the outside when they want us to, when they invite us.

Until then, the labyrinth remains a mystery.”

These are the words of Francisco Junior the first-person narrator, as he tells his life story to Nico, the taxi driver taking him back to Linares. He has related the story of his mother’s apparent breakdown at their quarantine home and how Simonopio shows up at the main ranch when Francisco Senior is checking its condition. While Francisco Senior thinks Simonopio wants him to see how dusty it has become, Simonopio actually wants them to take Beatriz’s sewing machine to her. The irony here is that, while Francisco Junior says no one can understand women, the child Simonopio understands all people’s hearts perfectly.

“Francisco Morales glanced at the pathetic troop that blocked his path and did not think for one moment that his life was in danger. It never occurred to him that he was looking at desperate souls who would have killed him for a drink of water. So bedraggled were they […] that to him they look like nothing more than hopeless beggars. He thought them so poor, so insignificant, that when he saw the shack they had built, he never suspected an invasion or an attempt to appropriate his land.”

Segovia recounts the first meeting of Francisco Senior and Anselmo, who has built a shack on Francisco’s property and decided to waylay the first passerby for food, water, or money. Because Anselmo’s family is so pathetic, Francisco misunderstands Anselmo’s intentions. Similarly, Anselmo doesn’t recognize that Francisco, despite being a fair-skinned landowner, is a person of integrity who sincerely wants to help him and his family, to the point of letting them purchase part of his land. From the beginning, the two men misunderstand one another.

“Sometimes she wanted to say to him, Tell me what you see with those eyes, Simonopio. Tell me how far they see, when they probe me. How deep into my body, into my soul. For some reason, because the eyes were Simonopio’s, the scrutiny did not unsettle her. It seemed natural to her that she had no privacy with Simonopio. There was never any judgment or disapproval in his eyes. Simonopio was who he was, he was how he was, and all one had to do was accept him, just as she knew he accepted her.”

Simonopio is always kind to Beatriz, to whom this passage refers. Daily he brings her gifts, such as honey from his bees. Beatriz is one of the first to recognize his special psychic ability. She understands he’s the hero who, by his illness, prevented the Morales family from being exposed to the Spanish flu. While the family frets over his safety, as when he disappears into the wilderness for days, Simonopio is anguished that he can’t express the things he wants to tell the Morales family until the birth of Francisco Junior In reality, he’s their protector.

“[…] without his bees, he could not see or hear beyond the hills. Without them, he could not see behind him or observe the world from above when he chose to do so. In their absence, Simonopio could not smell the exquisite aroma of the pollen, just as the bees did. Without the bee swarming around him, coming and going, the information they received from the world was linear; while with them, from the moment he had begun to feel sensation, he had grown accustomed to perceiving the world as it was: a sphere.”

This passage describes Simonopio as he hides in the bushes, waiting for Beatriz to give condolences to Anselmo and his children, and reveals part of Simonopio’s intuitive powers: He communes with the bees. In addition, Segovia indicates that he maintains a peaceful relationship with all animals, including predators. This demonstrates the author’s use of magical realism. The assassination of Francisco Senior happens in cold weather, when the bees are in their hive, preventing Simonopio from anticipating and preventing the attack. Even without the bees, however, he possesses psychic abilities and near-divine insight into people.

“Between the three of them, they brought the heavy box out into the daylight after eight years of being left forgotten in total darkness. Reluctantly, Leocadio and Martín recalled the day when they themselves had very carefully stored it in the shed on the instruction of the lady of the house.

They broke out in goosebumps.

To Simonopio, on the other hand, the box seemed very beautiful. […] This was the first test of his courage: to open it and then evict its possible inhabitants. When, with resolve, he tried to lift the lid, Martín stopped him.

‘Don’t. It’s for a dead body. If we open it, it might want us to fill it.’”

This passage describes the removal of the casket initially intended for Nana Reja when she walked away from the ranch to find the infant Simonopio. Two underlying forces are at work in this passage, one obvious and one subtle, though both are unspoken. The first is superstition: The presence of casket itself results in the ominous feeling that fickle death may be lurking for whoever taunts it. The second is fate: Although it’s unused for ageless Nana Reja, the casket bides its time waiting for the one destined to be its true occupant: Francisco Senior.

“Now, with the new law on unused land, it did not matter how small a property was: if it was uncultivated, it could be seized from them for some stranger—with no knowledge or real connection with the land—to occupy it and tread all over it. The way Francisco saw things, the law was nothing more than thinly veiled expropriation. While it was true that, under the provision, the recipients’ tenancy of the uncultivated land would last only a year, once the recipient was in possession of it, who would force him to leave? And if he did leave, would it be returned to the legitimate owner?”

For Francisco Morales Senior, preserving his land for his children and grandchildren is a continuing angst. Francisco observes the law closely, using its specifics to protect his land from confiscation. He views the land as his family’s birthright, and his ancestral charge is to preserve it for the offspring who come after him. He never considers the irony that his forebears took the land from Indigenous people, who cultivated and depended on it. A second irony is that after his assassination, Beatriz eventually sells off the property to move to the relative security of the nearby industrial city of Monterrey.

“The trees that had blossomed with the flowers Simonopio gave him had kept the earth in use for some thirty years. And in all that time, its owner had not needed to clear land each harvest to start the next crop again, or needed to rotate the crop, because the trees stayed, and once they began to bear fruit, they did not stop. What’s more, Francisco had tried those oranges: they were extraordinary.”

During the engagement party for Francisco’s older daughter, Carmen, Simonopio unexpectedly appears with a handful of orange blossoms. Francisco immediately recognizes the miraculous benefit of the blossoms—partly because he knows Simonopio is a source of blessings and partly because Francisco couldn’t enjoy the party knowing his land would be confiscated if he didn’t plant crops. The orange blossoms provide the answer to securing his property.

“The important thing was that he believed Simonopio would choose well, and time proved him right. Of all the trees that made the long journey southeast, only two died on the way, and no more died after they were transplanted into the black Mexican soil. […]

At the railway station two years after the trip to California, that December 1922, all the first- and second-class passengers with luggage, and the third-class ones with knapsacks and crates, turned in surprised to see the strange-looking boy who had come to welcome the señora home. Beatrice thought that Simonopio, smiling, was approaching to embrace her, but she was wrong: he came just close enough to rest two hands on her belly.”

The proximity of these two paragraphs in the text is Segovia’s way of connecting the intuitive insight of Simonopio to fertility. Previously, he arrived at Carmen’s engagement party—during which Consuelo’s future husband also courted her—with orange blossoms, symbols of fertility. Two years later, both of Beatriz’s daughters have become pregnant. All the orange trees he selected in California are alive and fertile. Now his touch confirms that Beatriz, in her mid-thirties, is pregnant as well.

“Of course, that afternoon when I learned to distinguish between Spanish and ‘Simonopio,’ we went to look for my papa without impediment, without Simonopio returning to the silence that my mom had imposed on him, and therefore without depriving me of everything he taught me in his own language.

Then I became his translator. Although almost everything Simonopio said was just for me—in the moment, things that you had to be there to understand—some things were useful to others.

‘Papa, Simonopio says the bees say it’s going to rain tomorrow.’”

Francisco Junior falls under the protection of Simonopio soon after his birth, picking up the chatter of the one he accepts as his older brother. Francisco explicitly trusts everything Simonopio tells him without reservation, accepting entry into the world of stories and experiences shared only with him. To remain with Simonopio during his daily excursions, Francisco begins to speak flawless Spanish immediately. In this exchange, Segovia points to the faulty assumption of the adults that Simonopio couldn’t communicate verbally. Had they opened themselves to allowing him to speak as a child, they could have benefited from his prophetic insights for years before Francisco Junior’s birth.

“Before returning to the wake, Beatriz took another few minutes when the priest went away. She needed to recover a little before going out into the lamentation that had overtaken her house. The confession had not helped: she would not say one—let alone ten—Lord’s prayers for the murderer or murderers, because she would not forgive their savage act. That was the truth. She admitted it. If she followed the priest’s instructions, pretending that she was praying for Lupita’s murderers, the first person to see her hypocrisy would be Christ Himself, and Beatriz Morales did not want to stoop so low as to try to deceive Him.”

Segovia describes the searing rage Beatriz feels after Lupita’s murder. As the author points out, the fact that Beatriz’s social role calls for her to remain passive, contrite, and mute multiplies her anger. Although the author reveals the inner world of every main character, she particularly explores the manner in which women respond to the strictures and rigid expectations that society places on them.

“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 in the road or concentrate on trying to ‘see’ my mom in my absence, or sense whether the coyote was lying in wait for me out of the sight, hidden. […]

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 had for breakfast that very morning, I was hardly going to remember something that hadn’t happened yet.”

Simonopio tries to share his entire mystic world with his “little brother.” While Francisco Junior is thoroughly enchanted and accepting, he doesn’t have Simonopio’s gift of perception. In the book’s final scenes, particularly when the bees arrive to take Francisco to his brother, Segovia depicts Francisco as beginning to acquire Simonopio’s magical abilities once he stops denying the reason Simonopio couldn’t come to Monterrey with him.

“‘Francisco: tell Francisco Junior to stop fighting.’

‘No. There are fights that are worth fighting.’

Little by little the boys stop making comments, at least in my presence. They all knew the consequences of mocking my companion, so they were better off keeping quiet. Anyone who wanted to be my friend soon learned that they would have to accept me with Simonopio by my side. In prolonged contact, the new friend did not take long to stop seeing his mouth and start seeing his eyes.”

Growing up with Simonopio, it never occurs to Francisco Junior that anything is unusual about Simonopio’s appearance until others at his boys-only school make comments about his cleft palate. Francisco Senior implicitly approves of his son’s belligerence because he recognizes Simonopio as his son’s guardian. Simonopio doesn’t judge those who are repulsed by his appearance, and when people grow accustomed enough to his face to focus on his eyes, they seem to understand him as a gifted, mystical individual.

“Before diving into the river’s icy water to swim to the bank and then penetrate the thickest part of the mass of people, without slowing down, without caring whom he knocked over, the strange boy of the Morales family—the one everyone who witnessed the events that day had thought was mute—let out the most powerful scream they had ever heard in their lives. The most desperate. The most painful. Stunned, all at once, they stopped complaining and yelling [...]”

Segovia’s narrative reaches a confluence of events that enable fate to step in and allow the assassination of Francisco Senior. Simonopio thinks he’ll witness a true wonder—a man singing underwater, which is amazing to him because even the fish can’t speak to him underwater; he doesn’t worry about Francisco Junior who is in the care of his father; and Simonopio’s bees are wintering in their hive, unable to help. When Simonopio pushes aside the con artist’s sham, he senses that Anselmo, the coyote, will attack Francisco Senior.

“[…] Francisco Morales still needs air, as he will continue to need it until he reaches his destination. As he will continue to need it until he finishes telling the story like he has never done before: with the new spherical vision that Simonopio had tried with such enthusiasm to teach him and that he has only just started embracing. The vision that is now enabling him to understand and to feel tenderness for a new, experienced, and older mother of an irrepressible child. That helps him to sympathize with Carmen and even with Consuelo, and understand the crosses that his father had to bear—understand them in his belly and in his cells and no longer just as a simple, if bitter, anecdote […]”

Now a nonagenarian, riding in a taxi to his ancestral home, Francisco asks the driver, Nico, to stop and let him get out. Segovia portrays Francisco as finally grasping all the powerful emotions present in his family that drove them to speak as they did and compelled them to make the decisions they made. The author implies that telling his story melts away the many decades of denial, allowing Francisco to understand his families motives—and those of his father’s murderer.

“After that long day of work, they would drop down dead, he had predicted. […]

It took Francisco Morales Senior only an instant to realize that Anselmo Espiricueta was not aiming at anyone behind him, and to understand with horror that the campesino would fire the weapon Francisco had given him using the bullets he had provided, insisting the man practiced to improve his marksmanship. And in that instant, he concluded that the target was him, and with him, his son.”

The opening part of this quotation is Segovia’s way of reinforcing the idea that prophetic comments throughout the narrative tend to be correct. In making the prognostication plural—“they would drop down dead”—the author builds tension by implying that both father and son will be killed, though the son is clearly the first-person narrator. Francisco’s astonishment at Anselmo firing at him reflects the absurdity of Anselmo’s decision and the vast difference in the assumptions of both men. Each man had wrong understandings of the other.

“He just stared at Espiricueta and weakly, said something that Anselmo heard without understanding.

‘Coyote.’

Then, inevitably, Espiricueta heard a roar that exceeded the thunder in his ears, and he knew immediately that it was the cry of the devil, who was coming for him. After so many years searching for him on the roads without finding him, without coming face-to-face, that day he knew the encounter would be inevitable, and fear seized Anselmo Espiricueta. He did not want to see him anymore, he did not want to confront him, but he understood he could no longer avoid it.”

When Francisco Junior refers to Anselmo as “coyote,” the proclamation confirms that the prophetic story of the lion and coyote—passed from Francisco Senior to Simonopio, to Francisco Junior—is fulfilled. Over the several chapters that refer to these events from differing viewpoints, Segovia depicts each of the individuals involved—the father, son, assassin, and savior—as recognizing the prophetic completion of his own fate.

“For now, that pain was almost stored away, waiting. She had controlled it out of necessity with the other pain, the more demanding one, more urgent. Because that day, she did not have time to think about her widowhood or to receive sympathy from anyone, for she wanted to ask them all: What are you doing here keeping vigil over a dead man if there’s a living child out there, lost in the cold?”

Beyond every other character in the narrative, Segovia examines and chronicles the inner world of Beatriz. The author intimately explores Beatriz’s joy, grief, rage, frustration, and shock. Here, the narrative portrays her as abiding in a near-catatonic state, refusing to weep or accept consolation at Francisco’s funeral because her son has disappeared. In this scene, the relative powerlessness underlying Beatriz’s circumstances throughout the novel is most acute.

“Then the Saturday morning of our departure arrived. We had to get in the car that would take us to the railway station. And Simonopio did not show up. And my mama said to me, Come on, Francisco. And I said to her, No, not without Simonopio. And Simonopio was nowhere to be seen. And neither was Nana Reja. And the rocking chair disappeared with them. And in Simonopio’s shed, there was nothing left of him or his bees. […]

Then I realized. And then I accepted it: Simonopio had gone and taken everything. Everything except me.”

Telling the story in his last days, Francisco acknowledges that Simonopio had to desert him this way. This is in part because no future existed for Simonopio in urbanized Monterrey and in part because if Francisco knew ahead of time Simonopio wasn’t going, he too would have refused to leave. Segovia implies that Beatriz herself wouldn’t have moved if Francisco refused.