The Murmur of Bees

The chapters in The Murmur of Bees vary dramatically in several ways. Some, such as Chapter 19’s discussion of Beatriz’s frustrations during the pandemic, are more than a dozen pages long. Others, like Chapter 84, are only a sentence or two long. In addition, the story’s chronological progression is frequently interrupted. While Chapters 1 and 3 use an omniscient third-person narrator to describe the discovery of Simonopio, Chapter 2 is a rambling, current-day description of La Amistad, the Morales family’s hacienda outside Linares, given by a first-person narrator eventually revealed as Francisco Junior

Segovia uses these techniques to maintain a degree of mystery about the direction of the story and the identity of certain characters. The author’s shifting of the chronology and narrative detail helps builds suspense, allowing the author to grip attention and precisely impart desired emotions. For example, Segovia alternates narrators, settings, and chapter lengths to create tension before the assassination of Francisco by Anselmo and the disappearance of Francisco Junior.

Virtually every significant character in the narrative except Simonopio makes important decisions based on incorrect information or beliefs. The story begins with Beatriz ordering the construction of a coffin for Nana Reja, who is presumed dead when she disappears; instead, the narrative reveals that she heard the infant Simonopio crying and went to find him. The novel ends with Francisco Junior surrendering his faulty belief that Simonopio abandoned him and, as a result, finding joyous peace.

Two key faulty assumptions frame the narrative’s denouement. Francisco Senior fears the rootless agrarian wanderers who appear at the end of the revolution and assumes that they killed the servant Lupita. Anselmo wrongly assumes that Francisco intends to force him into a lifetime of servitude and prevent him from ever acquiring the land he farms. As a result of their incorrect assumptions, Francisco gives Anselmo a Mauser rifle, and Anselmo shoots him with it.

The author often uses seemingly casual comments in the narrative to foreshadow events that transform a character’s life. The two most prominent instances of this involve comments about death. First, Francisco criticizes Anselmo for sending his wife to Linares to purchase tobacco during the pandemic and adds that his smoking habit will kill everyone. When Anselmo brashly sends his wife for tobacco a second time, she contracts the flu, wiping out most of their family and ironically demonstrating that Francisco was right. Later, Francisco’s jokes that at the end of a day of hard work, he and his son will fall down dead, which provides a second ironic foreshadowing: Just as they finish digging the holes for their orange trees—symbolically digging their graves—Francisco falls down dead when Anselmo shoots him.

In earlier chapters, when Francisco Junior hears the same comment made by one of his aunts about his father, not understanding that it’s just a figure of speech, he panics and tries to save his father’s life. In this way, Segovia cautions about the power of words—the weight of even casual comments.