The Murmur of Bees

Francisco Junior is the unplanned, blonde-headed, rambunctious son of Beatriz and Francisco Senior, born in April 1923. Beginning with his premature birth, everything about the boy is unexpected. Although Beatriz wants to dress him in finery and school him in proper deportment, Francisco loves getting so dirty that his clothes must be discarded. He starts fights and skips school at every opportunity, though Simonopio always locates and returns him easily. Francisco communicates with Simonopio perfectly, loves him profoundly, and trusts him completely.

Although he doesn’t appear as a character until Chapter 39, Francisco narrates many of the chapters throughout the book. He writes as someone quite elderly; given that he was born in 1923 and assuming his narration is around the time of the novel’s publication (2015), Francisco is a 94-year-old narrator. In the chapters he narrates, he rides in a taxi headed from Monterrey to his ancestral home in Linares. He tells the story of his life to Nico, the taxi driver. Francisco reveals that he has lived a successful, happy, prosperous life. He’s unsympathetic toward himself, candidly describing his ornery behavior and lamenting that, despite Simonopio’s efforts to teach him, he never gained Simonopio’s spherical sight and consequent psychic ability.

Francisco is the last character whose story is resolved, as he refuses to speak about or emotionally deal with what he considers Simonopio’s abandonment of him after his family’s move from Linares to Monterrey. Without warning, Simonopio disappeared to avoid going to Monterrey. The major shift for Francisco that allows a resolution is his recognition that Simonopio didn’t abandon him; rather, he abandoned Simonopio by moving to Monterrey, a place where Simonopio couldn’t live.

As the wife of Francisco Morales, Beatriz is the matriarch of their two ranch haciendas near Linares—La Amistad and La Florida—as well as their home in Monterrey. A lovely woman, she’s the mother of two beautiful daughters, Carmen and Consuelo, and a late-life son, Francisco Junior At the beginning of the narrative, Segovia portrays Beatriz as traditional in her attitudes, behavior, expectations, and religious practices. She works diligently to preserve all the social and sacred rituals she learned in childhood, intent on raising her children with values identical to her own.

She tends to be anxious, which she deals with by sewing for others. Her tremendous anxiety stems from numerous stressors. Some are her own failed expectations, as when she unsuccessfully attempts to restore an Easter celebration or when her daughters refuse to learn how to sew. In addition, fate creates many burdens for Beatriz, who awaits word of missing loved ones several times. Her well-ordered life is disrupted even more when the family moves overnight to a location safe from the Spanish flu. Beyond her worries, she’s plagued by tragedy. Soldiers drag her father, an upper-class businessman, from a train and execute him for providing supper to a counter-revolutionary. She mourns the loss of her laundry worker, Lupita, who is brutally murdered. After the murder of her beloved husband, Francisco, she finds herself unable to mourn because their young son, Francisco Junior disappears. She weathers numerous smaller crises as well: the estrangement of her daughters, facing down the enraged Anselmo, and becoming pregnant at what she considers an advanced age, and raising a boy who becomes more unruly each day.

Segovia portrays Beatriz as the embodiment of an upper-class matriarch in early 20th-century Mexico. The author follows her moods, anxious concerns, great joys, and unrefined grief. Because the male characters are the primary movers. Beatriz must endure, maintain appropriate composure, and do nothing overt in response to every calamity. More than any other character in the novel, Beatriz evolves into someone no longer willing to accept traditional norms. She refuses to pray as directed by her priest, sells off the farms developed by her husband after his death, stops sending her son to church schools, and—breaking with generations of tradition—insists that Francisco Junior become a businessman rather than a farmer.

Francisco Senior is the eldest of 22 upper-class siblings and therefore inherits La Amistad, the family’s primary hacienda. Like his wife, Francisco holds traditional values. His priorities are maintaining the family’s land, providing for his family, and overseeing the campesinos who work as tenant farmers. A pragmatic individual, he cautiously monitors the new, post-revolution property laws that threaten his ownership of many fields. Francisco is inherently benevolent and idealistic. Ultimately, his patience and trusting nature are his undoing, as he continually accepts Anselmo’s insubordinate hostility, believing that eventually the campesino will change for the better if given enough opportunity.

Francisco is a consummate family man who prizes the welfare of his wife and daughters above all. He’s fond of Simonopio, who often shows up in the fields just as Francisco is about to head home. The birth of Francisco Junior is a great fulfillment for Francisco, who assumed he’d never sire a boy. Francisco’s place in the story ends after his death on the birthday of Francisco Junior He’d perceived the day as a watershed moment marking the bond of father and son, as he intended to prepare his son to one day run their farms.

In addition, Francisco has a darker side. His fear of the agrarian reforms resulting from the revolution makes him an instigator of the “Guardia Rural,” an extralegal vigilante association established to protect the property and lives of landowners. Segovia portrays Francisco’s fears of the roving, homeless campesinos and war veterans as mostly unfounded. Francisco’s baseless belief that indigents murdered Lupita results in his arming her real killer, Anselmo, with the rifle he later uses to assassinate Francisco.

Anselmo, often referred to in the narrative simply as “Espiricueta,” is the novel’s antagonist. A descendant of Indigenous individuals in the southern part of Mexico, Anselmo endured humiliation and abuse tantamount to slavery. Unwilling to endure more with no hope of change in his fortunes, he gathers his family and heads north, intending to resettle in northern Mexico or the US. At their worst moment of hopelessness and starvation, when Anselmo’s journey falters and he instructs his family to waylay the next person they see, Francisco Senior discovers them camping on his property. This is a triple irony in that the powerless Anselmo meant to rob the man who became his savior; Anselmo fails to recognize Francisco’s benevolence, instead perceiving it as simply another imposition of servitude; and Francisco never grasps (until his final moments, when it’s too late) the danger that Anselmo embodies.

Superstitious, distrusting, hostile, lacking in gratitude, and cruel—even to his own children—Anselmo feels perpetually aggrieved. He never appreciates the reality that Francisco saved his family from starvation and offered them dignity and a prosperous future. He perceives himself akin to the displaced workers who wander the wilderness at night, living off what they can scavenge but convinced of a better day ahead, when they’ll supplant the upper class. Anselmo continually sings their symbolic song in which the mule displaces the farmer who holds the reins. Ironically, Anselmo is named for Saint Anselm, one of the most rational, open-minded monks in Catholic history.