The Murmur of Bees

At the post office, Francisco receives a huge sack of mail containing 89 love letters from Antonio, Carmen’s suitor. Everyone in the town seems to know about the letters.

This infuriates Francisco, who takes the letters into his study, where he kicks and throws them. A servant, Martín, finds Beatriz and tells her Francisco is having a fit. Beatriz rushes home to find Francisco frowning, his eyes closed. She fears he has had a stroke until his eyes open and he explains his anger. Beatriz admits she knew about Antonio. They discuss the aspects of Carmen’s romance, and Francisco sets down some rules about what will happen. When the doctor arrives, Beatriz starts to send him away, but Francisco informs her that he injured his back while kicking the letters.

Beatriz listens to Carmen read all the letters and oversees her reply, expressing permission for Carmen to become Antonio’s fiancée. When Martín returns from posting the reply, he has nine additional letters for Carmen, eight from local boys who have heard Carmen is eligible to date. These events have a transformative effect on Beatriz, softening her harsh attitude. “For the first time in a long while, she felt that the deaths, disease, and war were not the end; life went on” (168).

Francisco builds a home in Monterrey so that Antonio can court Carmen properly. Beatriz travels to Monterrey frequently so that the couple can meet. Their December 1920 wedding date must wait an additional year, however, because Antonio’s mother dies and he must officially mourn for a year. Beatriz makes Francisco promise that if she dies, he won’t make Carmen wait yet another year to marry. He asks, “Would flowers be allowed in this context?” (172), and she pinches him.

The narrative steps back in time to the confrontation between Simonopio and Anselmo. When Simonopio goes with Beatriz to Anselmo’s house and hides outside, he sees Anselmo in the nick of time. He knows the man intends to kill him. Beatriz screams for Anselmo to stop. He accuses Simonopio of being responsible for the death of his wife and children and the infertility of his land. He threatens to kill him. Beatriz threatens him in return, saying that something extremely bad will happen if he even looks at Simonopio again. She tells him, “[…] this land is not and never will be yours” (177).

After Beatriz and Simonopio leave, Anselmo’s daughter comes out of their shack wearing clothes Beatriz made specifically for her. Enraged, Anselmo beats his daughter. He makes her take off the clothes, carries them into the hills, and throws them into the underbrush. There, he proclaims that the property that he lives on will be his.

Simonopio decides to sleep in the shed, where the bees have built a hive. The shed has been closed for eight years, ever since the bees moved in. While taking everything out, he discovers the casket Beatriz ordered for Reja. He realizes the shed is right for him because, under the bees’ protection, he’ll become wise and strong. He’ll be ready when the time comes for his next confrontation with Anselmo.

Simonopio follows the bees wherever they go. He knows the bees want to show him something and have just been waiting for him to follow them to their destination.

Simonopio goes further and further with the bees until one night when he doesn’t return home. Because Simonopio has an unerring sense of direction, Francisco thinks something bad has happened. After hours of looking, Francisco decides to wait until the morning to search further. The next morning, Simonopio stands waiting for Francisco outside the door. The first-person narrator writes, “[…] after two or three rough movements, my papa’s shaking turned into a hug. A huge hug” (195).

Simonopio’s excursions sometimes last for days. Beatriz wants to keep an eye on him. He agrees to go with her to Monterrey to see a circus. He wants to see the animals. Once there, however, he becomes distressed because the elephant doing tricks has a broken heart and is about to die. He then discovers he’s deathly afraid of clowns. Afterward, when Beatriz goes to Monterrey, Simonopio stays behind. He goes to a place in the hills where he can wave at Beatriz on the train as she passes. She has no idea how he can get there so quickly. He knows the paths that the bees showed him. He also knows she’ll return, though no one ever tells him.

Anselmo is watching for an opportunity to catch Simonopio alone. He imagines that the devil, in the form of Simonopio, can sneak into his house at night and steal the breath of Anselmo and his children. He blesses his house every night to keep the demon away. Anselmo takes every opportunity to go out into the dark looking for the boy, hoping to find him and kill him.

Francisco decides to buy a tractor to cultivate his farms and rent it out to other haciendas as well. He reflects on the new property laws and the agrarian council that might take away unused land and allow sharecroppers to cultivate it. He fears his land might be taken away by biased officials. Thus, he makes several legal but marginal decisions allowing him to control his land. His goal is to secure the land for his children and their children.

Francisco receives his new tractor and immediately begins to plow all his fields. He enjoys the tractor so much that he won’t let anybody else on it at first. Beatriz chides him because he’s doing work that should be done by the campesinos. He spends time going to his land near Monterrey with Simonopio.

At the beginning of winter in 1920, Simonopio stops going into the hills for days at a time because the bees are dormant. In the spring, the bees take flight again, and Simonopio returns to the hills.

This chapter again falls back in time, here to Simonopio’s first overnight excursion. He’s not far from where they search but doesn’t want to answer because Anselmo is with them and will try to kill him.

He waits through winter until he can go back out and continue his search for the secret place the bees go every day. He grew over the winter. Simonopio wants the coyote, Anselmo, to realize he’s growing. He becomes more expert at camping out. One night he stays quite close to the terminus where the bees go. The next morning, he arrives at the place where the bees wait for him impatiently. “You’re here. You’re here, they say, buzzing around him. Look. Touch. Smell. Here. Take it. Take it. Quickly” (221).

The Morales family invites Antonio and his family to come to Linares to seek the blessing of the new priest, Father Pedro. The two families share a large meal. All the while, Francisco fears he may lose large portions of his land.

In their midst, Simonopio appears, surrounded by a swarm of bees. As he draws closer, all but one of the bees depart. Simonopio hands something to Francisco: two leathery halves of an orange peel that is full of orange blossoms. When Beatriz asks if the flowers are for the bride, Francisco answers that the flowers are for him. He carries them into his study, followed by Simonopio.

Francisco sits in his study, looking at the blossoms. This gift comes from a grove of trees planted 30 years earlier by a North American. Francisco realizes this is the answer to his fear. Instead of planting different crops each year, he’ll plant orange groves, trees that will remain and produce continually. He turns to Simonopio and asks, “Simonopio, I’m going to California tomorrow. Do you want to come with me?” (229).

Francisco brings home hundreds of orange trees from California, plants them, and devotes himself to them, still fearing his land may be confiscated by the agrarians. Because of a law that bearing fruit trees can’t be confiscated, many others follow his lead and plant orange trees as well.

Beatriz returns to Linares from Monterrey, where both her daughters are married and expecting their own children. She falls asleep on the train, which she never does, and sleeps all the way to Linares. She’s surprised when Simonopio comes to greet her.

The narrator describes Simonopio in California, where people are startled by the bees that flock to him. Watchers find it odd that Simonopio picks the orange trees rather than Francisco. Of the thousand they purchased, only two did not survive the trip and replanting.

Back on the train platform in Linares, Simonopio approaches Beatriz as she gets off the train. He smiles and puts two hands on her stomach, making it clear that she’s pregnant.

The unnamed narrator takes over, noting that the end of his journey is near and ruminating about the meaning of time and how at the end we all want more time to experience the things that brought us joy. He talks about how his mother told Francisco and his two sisters about her pregnancy. Francisco was elated, though the two daughters were dismayed that they’d have a brother younger than their children.

The orange trees take root, and in the springtime, buds appear on them, though they haven’t yet broken into flowers. Simonopio and Francisco go out into the orchards to examine them regularly. Inspecting the flowers one day, they see the first flower. Simonopio grabs Francisco and runs toward the house. Francisco follows him through all Simonopio’s shortcuts.

The still-unnamed narrator describes his birth in April 1923. His family anticipated he’d be born in June. He talks about his relationships with his sisters and the way he spent time in Monterrey as a little boy, surrounded by all his cousins, who were actually nieces and nephews. People thought that his sisters were actually his mother.

Thinking she had two more months, Beatriz didn’t have the baby’s needs prepared. Simonopio produced all his baby paraphernalia for Beatriz to use. The narrator says he was glad for the hand-me-downs from Simonopio because Simonopio told him from the start that they were brothers.

Anselmo continues to resent Francisco, who he thinks is preventing Anselmo from owning his land. Anselmo encounters a number of homeless campesinos on the property one evening and falls in with them. When he tells them of his wife and children’s deaths, the wanderers tell him he should make more children. He thinks of Lupita, the Morales’s unmarried laundry worker.

Here, the first-person narrator reveals that he is Francisco Junior From the beginning, Simonopio watched over the child, whispering in his ear and comforting him when he cried. He told the baby about everything but the coyote, which he intended to tell the baby about when the time was right.

Francisco Junior describes his childhood. Although he chattered constantly until he was three, no one could understand him because he spoke as Simonopio spoke. Francisco Junior finds Simonopio sleeping underneath a tree and asks Simonopio to take him out into the orchards to find his father. Simonopio says they can’t spend any more time together until Francisco learns to speak properly, like the adults. That afternoon, Francisco addresses his mother in proper Spanish. This allows him to once again enjoy adventures with Simonopio.

Francisco says, “Then I became his translator” (265). At the end of a long drought, Simonopio tells Francisco to tell his father it will rain the next day. When the rain comes, Francisco gets so completely covered in mud that he’s not allowed into the house. He says he always remembers that day whenever it rains. He finishes the chapter by saying, “Turn here. Slowly, we’re almost there now” (266).

Anselmo frequently tries to attract the attention of Lupita, who refuses to look at him. Periodically, she goes into the town to a dance and waits for someone in particular to ask her to dance, a man she seems to be in love with. Finally, Anselmo approaches her at the dance and asks her to dance with him. She quickly brushes him off. As she walks home in the darkness, he follows her.

Simonopio wakes from a deep sleep aware that something bad has happened. It’s not yet light, so he takes an oil lamp and goes out. He senses where he must go.

At Lupita’s funeral, when the casket is lowered, it’s uneven. The foot falls first, then the head, dismaying the viewers.

Beatriz offers her confession to Father Pedro. “She wanted revenge and wanted, most of all, to be the main witness when it was wreaked” (274). He tells her she must forgive her enemies and tells her to say 10 Our Fathers, something she can’t bring herself to do. She promised Lupita’s mother when Lupita came to work for her as a 12-year-old girl that she’d take care of her and she’d be safe with the Morales family.

The search for Lupita begins the morning after the dance. Martín, the man whose attention she desired, attended the dance as well. Francisco warned Martín not to flirt with the women on the hacienda. By midday, Simonopio returns with dirt and tears on his face. He has found Lupita where he was found as an infant. He hitches the cart and takes Francisco to Lupita’s body. When Beatriz sees Simonopio, she knows Lupita is dead. Her body has been severely abused and her eyes removed. Beatriz wraps her in a clean linen shroud that Lupita herself washed. When Beatriz goes to bed at night, she allows herself for the first time to cry.

On the day of Lupita’s funeral, Simonopio goes to the orchards and wanders. He seeks peace after having seen Lupita. He understands that Francisco and Beatriz want to find the killer and are willing to search for years. While the others would never be able to find the killer, he knew he could find the killer and would do so in due time.

Anselmo is the only one who doesn’t go to Lupita’s funeral. He stays on the land he has decided to claim as his and sings the song that the wanderers taught him about the coming time when the mule takes the reins.

In response to the murder, Francisco assumes that the roving, homeless bandoleros are the culprits. He illegally buys arms from the local armory and gathers all the men who live on his property. He gives them all new Mauser rifles, telling them to practice shooting. If they see a wanderer on the land, they’re to shoot to kill. One person who’s extremely positive about getting the gun is Anselmo.

Francisco Junior describes how wonderful it was to visit his cousins and spend time with them playing wildly. In his descriptions, they do all kinds of rambunctious, improper things. In addition, they start having school at his cousin’s house. He goes with the other boys but can’t grasp that school is different than visiting your cousins. He likes to sneak out of class, though Simonopio always catches and returns him.

One cousin sneaks out with him, and they climb onto a train trestle. A train enters the trestle, and they jump into a cactus patch to escape. Simonopio finds them and takes them to Amistad, where his mother first spanked him and then spent hours picking the spines out of his bottom.

Francisco Junior reflects on coming home from visiting his cousins after Lupita’s death. He realizes something is dramatically wrong in the house. Listening to adult conversations, he understands that agrarian reform is the problem, one that might take away everything that’s precious and ruin their way of living.

Lying on the ground in the wilderness listening to the crickets, Simonopio hears a summoning call he can’t resist. Francisco Junior calls him. Simonopio hurries to Amistad and must climb through the sewing room window. Francisco Senior hears him and comes out of his bedroom with a cocked pistol. He asks Simonopio what he’s doing. Simonopio points to Francisco Junior’s room. Simonopio sits in the rocking chair beside his brother’s bed and promises to never leave the boy again. Francisco Junior wakes up and asks if he’s really there or if he’s dreaming. Simonopio says, “Yes. I won’t go away without you again” (304).