And he couldn’t see any possibilities for my future in Linares, as much as he tried to find them. I don’t know exactly what he saw: perhaps just a life cut short by drowning under the mill wheel at the river or another bullet that hit its target. Perhaps my life would have ended because of another stunt with a train in my wild young country life. I don’t know. All I know is that something there would have stolen my days and years from me. In Linares there would’ve been no falling in love, no studies, no children or worries. Nor would there have been the pain of losing my wife, hemorrhoids, or the digestive problems of recent years. I’m not the same man now, I know, and that’s why Hortensia makes nothing but soup.
I very much enjoyed the whole of what now, looking back, I can see is my life: the many good things and the not-so-many bad things—old age included, because it wouldn’t have happened had youth not also existed. I am what life has made me. I would’ve been nobody without Simonopio’s sacrifice, and I’m grateful to him for it. Only now, but I am grateful.
He let me go, he saw me leave, and he let me break his heart when I turned around and climbed into the car to leave. I, me, I, me . . . I never learn. I’m stubborn: I keep doing the same thing. I’m an old man and I keep doing the same thing. I’m back here, and I keep on and keep on.
97
But It Wasn’t All about Me
With my departure, he was left alone, sharing Nana Reja’s fate on this land, sharing the fate of the flowers and bees, waiting for my return. Owing a debt for my life and committed for life.
A question would plague my mother every day and night of her life: What happened to the Espiricuetas? When she was brave enough to say it out loud, to nobody, to God, I could never hear it without adding a silent question of my own: What happened to my .22? She replied, as I also replied: God knows. Those questions were impossible to answer at the time.
Until today.
On the day my father died from two bullet wounds, my .22 ended up with its new owner at the bottom of a ravine.
And there it still lies, slowly disintegrating out in the elements, returning to the land, which reclaims everything—from flesh to iron.
Although iron lasts longer than flesh.
It’s what remains on the land as a souvenir of that Saturday when it was my birthday: Espiricueta’s son was already dead before he had finished falling to the bottom of the ravine. The bees showed him no mercy, no matter how fast he ran, or how he tried to escape them, and in spite of the rounds he fired at them from the .22.
It was all in vain. All of them died, yes, but not from a bullet—they died killing him.
The son met his end without knowing his father’s fate, and the father died without even thinking of his son, just minutes later. But he didn’t fall like his son into a ravine, or make the same futile attempt to kill the bees with his Mauser, or even try to hide from them, perhaps sensing that it would be of no use.
They attacked him first from behind, like he did with my father. He died enveloped in them, terrified, curling up like a newborn with his body covered in wings and stings. He died knowing that the devil had sent them after him, that the demon had stung him to death. He died a long distance from his son, facedown, tasting the earth that he had coveted so much.
They did not take long—bees, father, son—to turn to dust. They did it for Simonopio, but the bees, in their swarm, died to save my life and to avenge my father and the land stained with the blood of its owner. The debt was mine, but Simonopio took it on.
And I never thought about them; I never noticed their absence or questioned Simonopio. I didn’t even stop to notice his sadness and loneliness in the days before I left.
I never thanked him for the sacrifice.
Now I know that very few of the bees that answered Simonopio’s call to save me returned to the hive. Those few arrived weak from the cold and from the heat of the fury that they didn’t expend with their sting. Their queen and their young welcomed them home; they were received by a silence full of regret and echoes in the void. They were received by great uncertainty: What will become of tomorrow? What will become of the flowers, the trees that produce them, the land that needs us? What will become of us, Simonopio?
Simonopio took shelter under this pain every night until I left, but he needed only one night to know what he had to do for them.
Their numbers reduced, they needed care; they needed someone to complete their memory, to pass on the flying map to the new generations. Just as they had guided him, now they needed him to be their guide and teacher. They needed time, and they needed to rebuild their strength.
I always thought Simonopio was mine: my brother, my guide, my savior . . . but Simonopio belonged to them. Just as they belonged to him. Before he was mine, he was their brother, their son. Simonopio of the bees, the bees of Simonopio. That was how it was from the beginning. It was the first thing he knew in his life. They told him with their first whisper into his ear; in the early hours of his first day, when wrapped in their warm wings, they introduced him to life.
And they reminded him on the first night Simonopio spent under his cold, empty roof.
Simonopio would’ve slowly died in Monterrey, without doubt. But for me—just to protect me from the pain of his abandonment—he might have given himself over to that incomplete life and to death. He might’ve surrendered to the limitations of those of us who live deaf and blind with just five senses.
But he knew that the few bees that remained in the hive, the ones who saw him being born, the ones who protected him and guided him all his life, the ones who were his first family, they needed him now more than I did. He was theirs and they were his. Both, in turn, belonged to the land, the land they’d filled with orange trees after many patient years and many journeys in the hills. He could not break their pact. There was no way that one part of the triangle would survive without the other.
If he went away, he would die a useless death. Without him, they would die, and without them, the land and the trees for which they had fought so hard would too.
It was not all about me.
Even without infestations, even without frosts, Linares had a very poor orange harvest for the next few years. The owners, accustomed to abundance, counted the fruit one by one and counted them again, but however many times they did so, there was no mistake: there were spaces in the crates that they could not fill.
None of them missed the bees. None of them went to the trouble to count them.
Only Simonopio did.
98
And Here I Am
Stubborn, foolish, egotistical as I am, I’m still talking to you, knowing that he has been waiting patiently for me all these years, that he’s waiting for me on the other side of that hill, along Reja’s road.
99
He Knows I’ve Arrived,
but he’s patient: he has waited so long that he doesn’t mind waiting a little longer.
He has all the time in the world.
Nana Reja’s rocking beside him, in that world that allowed them entry and welcomed them, under the bridge where they both spent their first hours and saw their first light. They’re waiting in that world where there is no time, where they’ve kept a space for me.
I want to go, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of them seeing me as I am now: an old man. I worry that Simonopio’s waiting for me to climb orange trees again, to hunt toads, to crack nuts with our teeth, and to fill me, unashamedly, with the heirs of the same lice, fleas, or ticks that inhabited our bodies decades ago.