Francisco Morales had taken to telling him stories while they secretly cleaned the house. Simonopio always listened intently, for it was what he knew how to do best in a one-sided conversation, as any conversation in which he participated ended up being, silent as he was. He also listened because he was aware of his godfather’s need to express himself, even if it was merely through stories that he himself had been told as a boy. But his main reason for being such a committed listener was that nothing fascinated Simonopio more than the stories told by other people, whether through songs or tales.
This is a legend, Francisco would say to him. And this one’s a fable.
When it came to legends and fables, Simonopio also liked the ones told by Soledad Betancourt, the storyteller at the Villaseca Fair. She told her stories orally, from memory. He listened to her every year without fail in the marquees that went up on the outskirts of Linares. It was not that the woman arrived each time with a complete repertoire of new stories. He wondered at how she often told the same tales, but with little twists that she added masterfully to renew them, to make them fresh, more dramatic, or more terrifying. His godfather, clasping a feather duster, had told him some very similar stories—which, under his control, in his voice, charted their own new course.
Simonopio knew there were stories that one could read in books, with black words on white pages. He was not interested in those, because once printed they were indelible, unchanging. Each reader had to follow the order of words indicated in those pages exactly, until they each arrived inexorably at the same outcome.
Comparing the two storytellers, Simonopio had learned that, just as the words of a story told verbally had the freedom to change, its characters, the challenges they faced, and the ending were also free to change.
His favorite story was the fable Francisco told him about a lion and a coyote in the land of light. Simonopio wanted to be the brave lion, like his godfather suggested to him.
“In a fable, the animals possess human traits, their virtues and flaws. If you know the fable, you can choose to be the gazelle or the mouse, but I think you must be the lion, Simonopio. Just remember to watch out for the coyote.”
Happy that his godfather had compared him to such a majestic character, Simonopio thought constantly about how to be the lion of the tale, how to live up to his godfather’s praise. And it delighted him that his was a story that had never been written down.
Being in possession of that story meant Simonopio could make endless changes, could add or remove characters as he saw fit and give them the traits of the people around him. And he was the lion. Though his mind sent him on thousands of different fictitious adventures, he was the lion. The coyote was always the same, as well, and as much as Simonopio tried, not even in his most skillfully constructed narratives did he manage to remove that character from his story. He suspected that, for as long as there was a lion, there would always be a coyote.
While that fable was just one tale, an invention, the stories Simonopio stored in his mind—the ones only he knew or saw—spoke to him of reality.
The stories of Villaseca and those of his godfather had taught him that he who has a story in his mind, he who does not put it in writing, enjoys the freedom to reshape it at will, and Simonopio thought he had the power to do the same with the stories of real life that he saw in the privacy of his mind. They were not written, either, so he felt it was his duty to be a good, albeit silent, narrator. To twist them, like Soledad did at Villaseca. If, by filling a hole, he could erase an unhappy ending for a horse, then he did it. If allowing himself to fall ill for a few days changed the fate of many of his characters and saved their lives, he would not hesitate. He could not stop those future stories; he could not choose which ones to tell or know them all in full and in time to make plans and changes, like Soledad and Francisco Morales did. But there was always some adjustment he could make, as minor as it might be.
About his own story, which he knew would come—the latent story about him and his coyote—he still did not know what to do.
Simonopio was not a boy who allowed fear to control him. Every day on his walks, he came across bears and pumas in the wild and looked them in the eyes to say, I am the lion, you go your way, and I’ll go mine.
But never until that day had he walked down the forbidden path, and Simonopio knew that an accidental encounter with a wild beast was preferable to a collision with the man who had made this track, pressing down the earth with the weight of his footsteps, his envy, and his grief.
He had to admit that, in a way, he was glad to have the perfect excuse to invade Espiricueta’s territory as his godmother’s escort, with his bees not there to forbid him. Finally, he could sate the curiosity he had always felt: What was there, or what was missing from there, that made the bees avoid the place?
What he discovered with each step he took toward the epicenter of that living piece of land was the same thing he perceived in its tenant’s eyes: that there was only disquiet and unhappiness there. That the land breathed but would struggle to allow any crop to live. That the air blew and brought oxygen, but it also poisoned something deep within the cells. That life there was heavy, dangerous, dark, ominous.
His curiosity sated, he decided that, like his bees, from that day onward he would never set foot on a single grain of earth that Espiricueta occupied.
It had not been easy to take the turn that he had never dared or been allowed to take before. It was the pressure in his chest. It was his body’s instinctive rejection when it breathed that air, and the instruction the bees had given him all his life. It was, of course, because of the risk that he knew he would run.
In spite of the fear, which almost paralyzed him and which he had to hide so as not to alarm the woman under his protection, Simonopio remained steadfast in the task of accompanying and watching over his godmother, observing her closely all the way: Was she short of breath, like he was? Was the palpable weight of the atmosphere affecting her? Was she turning pale? Was her pace slowing as they drew closer to the house? If so, thought Simonopio, we’ll stop and go back. But no. Beatriz Cortés had a mission to complete, and nothing distracted her from the obligation that she had imposed on herself. So, despite his unease, Simonopio walked on with the firm intention of avoiding the coyote’s lair, of remaining hidden.
He promised himself that he would not detonate the future that day.
He longed, at that moment, for the company of his bees, for in their absence he felt blind, restricted to what his body’s eyes could see and the limited information he obtained with his immediate senses from the physical world around him. He was aware that this was the normal state for any person, but for him it equated to extreme myopia and deafness, because 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 bees swarming around him, coming and going, the information he 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.
As much as he wanted to, he could not summon them now. They did not necessarily sleep when winter arrived; rather, the bees hid away in their honeycomb for as long as possible, sharing the heat of their bodies, particularly during a severe winter like the one they were enduring that year. They remained in their beehive, which grew in size and prosperity under the shed roof they had been invading and covering, hexagon by hexagon, with their wax structure. And there they remained for months, living off the fruit of their tireless work the rest of the year.