The Murmur of Bees

“No one knew how many hours that baby spent abandoned under the bridge, naked and hungry. No one could explain how he survived the elements without bleeding to death from the umbilical cord left unknotted, or without being devoured by the rats, birds of prey, bears, or pumas that were plentiful in those hills.

And they all wondered how old Nana Reja found him, covered in a living blanket of bees.”

Nana Reja, an Indigenous woman, served as a wetnurse to a generation of Morales children before Francisco Senior’s birth. When her viability as a wetnurse ended, she simply became a fixture at their farm, sitting and rocking. Segovia implies that she has mystical abilities like Simonopio. While no one else could hear the abandoned baby crying, Reja did from miles away. In addition, she intuitively understands how to feed him and care for him.

“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.