The Day of the Bees Read online

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR THOMAS SANCHEZ

  Rabbit Boss

  Named by the San Francisco Chronicle as One of the Best Books of the Twentieth Century

  “The big themes are in Rabbit Boss … beauty of language, compassion for the downtrodden, a sense of the frontier past that carried its own seeds of destruction. Thomas Sanchez has dared to put the dream to paper.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A rare and wonderful book…. Vividly [brings] to life the Indians’ ironic vision of the white man.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rabbit Boss will haunt the conscience of history forever.”

  —Figaro

  Mile Zero

  A New York Times Notable Book

  “A magnificent tapestry…. Sanchez forges a new world vision…. Rich in the cultural and literary intertextuality of Steinbeck and Cervantes, Joyce and Shakespeare.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Mile Zero reads as if it were written in the author’s own blood, carved on his soul, plucked from a mind on the brink…. It is what the Great American Novel was supposed to be about: the great American experience.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Dazzling….A comic masterpiece crackling with backhanded wit…. Bursting with vital characters…. A novel of uncommon richness…. Its brilliantly contrived plot uncoils with the suspense of a thriller.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Zoot-Suit Murders

  “Zoot-Suit Murders matches the best of the war novels in its execution, and may be the best of the home-front novels of World War II…. The novel alternates between intimacy and sweep, a cinematic quality similar to that of Chinatown, an excellent, near-Hitchcockian technique.”

  —Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

  “Powerful fiction …a vivid tale of political intrigue and romance by a master of pictorial detail.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Riveting, fast-moving and fiercely visual … and for once, a believably human and non-prescient protagonist, in a novel of ideological intrigue, set in the war-time Los Angeles of 1943 against the historical backdrop of the now-famous zoot-suit riots.”

  —Los Angeles Magazine

  THOMAS SANCHEZ

  Day of the Bees

  Thomas Sanchez’s first novel, Rabbit Boss, the hundred-year saga of a California-Nevada Indian tribe, was named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Sanchez’s second novel, Zoot-Suit Murders, was cited by the Los Angeles Times on its map of Los Angeles literary history. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his third novel, Mile Zero, set in tropical Key West. His fourth novel, Day of the Bees, was written over a ten-year period in San Francisco, Mallorca, Provence, and Paris, where the French Republic awarded him the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

  ALSO BY THOMAS SANCHEZ

  Mile Zero

  Zoot-Suit Murders

  Rabbit Boss

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JULY 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Thomas Sanchez

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Sanchez, Thomas. Day of the bees / by Thomas Sanchez.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945 Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—France Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.A469D39 2000

  813’.54—dc21 99-31385

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76609-0

  Author photograph © David Carr

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For the three Muses

  and

  A. Green

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE Discovery Chapter 1

  PART TWO Journey to Reigne Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART THREE Day of the Bees Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  PART FOUR Fool of Love Chapter 25

  PART FIVE Night Letters Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  PART SIX Road to Zermano Chapter 42

  PART SEVEN The Key Chapter 43

  PART EIGHT Last Letters Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  PART ONE

  Discovery

  FRANCISCO ZERMANO IS a great painter, one of the most innovative artists of all time. Among the volumes written about his vast body of work, and I have contributed two modest books myself, there is never a hint that he achieved anything less than defining our sense of the modern. Zermano’s vision prefigured the future, conjured its shape and purpose, translated it to the human. From the singular moment of a baby’s first cry to the monolithic skyscraping cities created between two world wars, Zermano captured it all; yet mysteries regarding his private life remain. Most of these mysteries can be explained or rationalized by theories of art, of psychology, even theology. One mystery has defied all interpretation, shimmered as a prize beyond the reach of scholars and biographers—that of Zermano’s relationship with Louise Collard. After all these years the truth can now be revealed. The story is something of an adventure, one in which I myself played a role, for it was I who made the discovery that changed everything.

  I discovered the truth quite by accident. Had it not been for a serendipitous bump in the road this story would have been lost forever, as half a century has passed since the brief time Zermano and Louise spent together. Zermano, now in his old age, has retreated from the public. Experts the world over have searched high and low for what he left behind, the fact and artifact of his epoch. On the other hand, Louise’s life, after she disappeared from the spotlight surrounding Zermano, was deemed nothing more than an intriguing footnote. For was she not merely his mistress? How wrong the world has been, how extraordinary the real truth is.

  The world thought Zermano had long ago finished with his beautiful cast-off Louise, the muse whose flesh and spirit once fired his inspiration. Historians recorded that Zermano threw Louise from the heights of her womanly powers to be devoured by the wolves of time. Historians know nothing. What can now be revealed is a private universe where mortals existed at their most vulnerable. But it wasn’t Zermano who showed me the truth, and even though I had
walked in Zermano’s shoes while pursuing my research of his life, I too was unaware. It was Louise in the end who left the legacy. Louise led the way.

  I was drawn to Louise through Zermano’s paintings of her. She radiated a lunar force, yet her pose always remained natural. Those who studied Zermano’s life or claimed to have associated with him could never fathom why he walked away from such a woman. All other women, wives and lovers, were mere appetite to Zermano; Louise was the feast. This was confirmed recently by a scholar at another university, who proved through the use of infrared photography that the compositions of Zermano’s later paintings all began with the figure of one woman. The figure was then transformed, either to the abstract or rudimentarily figurative, never betraying the identity of the original source. Zermano had been so masterful in his ruse, so exquisitely duplicitous in his execution, that no one but he knew of this figure, the passionate memory from which all else flowed. The number of paintings shown by infrared light to have been composed this way now number two hundred, including the monumental canvas painted in Paris in 1941 depicting the horror of modern war, Archangel Gabriel Flames Down the Sky.

  Until now Louise has been perceived in a purely romantic light, a tragic woman broken by the love of a great man. She was considered to be one of those women who, when at a crossroads in life, meets the right man at the wrong time and in her heart’s confusion turns away. Such women, common knowledge holds, discover their mistake years later when they awaken in a hollow marriage, step from a bed of broken promises, and think back to what might have been had they not turned away from the right man. Such conventional wisdom has no basis in fact here. Louise’s story has more in common with that of an eccentric English bride now famous in modern folklore.

  The English bride waited one sunny day at the chapel with family and friends for the expected arrival of her husband-to-be. She waited for hours, refusing to believe the truth. She waited until the sun had gone down and her family and friends departed, knowing the groom would never come. The bride returned to her parents’ home, but did not go inside the house. She went into the garden behind, and in her bridal gown she built a shelter from branches and twigs, sleeping that night on fresh-cut boughs. She never set foot in her parents’ house again. As the years passed her parents died and she inherited the house, but the garden shelter had become her home, furnished with torn car seats and buttressed by colorful old umbrellas lashed together. The bride waited in that garden for thirty-five years, until the groom of death took her away with him to spend eternity. There is something of Louise in that woman, for Louise too chose to live in the garden of her spirit, cultivating her aloneness and discovering herself. What grew in Louise’s garden is every bit as astonishing and enduring as the paintings by Zermano hanging in the world’s great museums.

  Had it not been for my chance discovery, the truth of Louise’s garden might never have bloomed. Scholars and biographers have always believed that Zermano took Louise to Provence during the calamitous events at the beginning of World War II. It was thought, and never disproved until now, that after their last week together Zermano drove Louise from Nice and left her in Ville Rouge. It came as a surprise to learn upon her death that Louise had lived out her life unrecognized in the medieval hilltop village of Reigne, far across the valley from Ville Rouge. The media went into a frenzy, luridly recounting Zermano’s period with Louise, depicting her as history’s most famous reclusive muse. Zermano’s paintings of her were used to illustrate the sensational story. Wherever one turned, visions of Louise rose like angelic ghosts from television screens, magazine covers, and newspaper front pages. It became clear that more than one incongruity needed to be resolved, so I flew to France.

  I rented a car in Nice and journeyed through the countryside that Zermano and Louise loved so much. I could not help but wonder what it must have been like the night they made that very trip fifty years earlier. What happened between them that last summer? Why did Zermano abandon her? Was it raining the night they made their final drive? Did the mistral sweep the sky clear of clouds to expose stars above the landscape of Provence?

  I drove to Ville Rouge through hills that for a thousand years had been quarried for their ochre rock. Ville Rouge clung to the highest hill, above a cut-away cliff with exposed veins of yellow and orange earth melding into vivid red. This was the red Zermano used so prominently in his palette, a color that carried its own legend. Ville Rouge is written about in French schoolbooks. A powerful nobleman once ruled there from a castle overlooking the valley below. One day a troubadour appeared at the castle and was invited to stay and sing for the nobleman’s court. The troubadour performed to the delight of all and eventually became the favorite of the nobleman’s wife. When the nobleman discovered this he confronted the velvet-voiced troubadour. The troubadour denied any wrongdoing but the nobleman brandished his sword. The troubadour, with nothing to defend himself with but a song, began to sing. The nobleman ran the troubadour’s throat through with his blade. That night after dinner, seated at the head of the banquet table, the nobleman inquired if the finely cooked morsel served to his wife had pleased her. She replied it was the sweetest morsel ever to pass her lips. The laughing nobleman informed her she had just tasted the heart of her beloved troubadour. The wife gagged and vomited, declaring she would never eat again. Indeed she did not. At dawn she hurled herself from the high cliff down to the valley below. Her blood spread across the fields, soaking the soil, staining it crimson for all time.

  Thus Ville Rouge is legendary in its own right, and now even more so since we know Zermano left Louise there, then later returned and tried to find her. It is the only recorded time in the mature life of this prolific painter that he did not paint. We do know that he spent many days at the café in front of the Roman fountain on the city square, hoping to see Louise pass by, all the while drinking the local pastis, which added to the storm already blowing in his head. We do know that shortly thereafter he entered a prodigious period of painting, which in terms of quality and variety remains the centerpiece of his life’s work.

  Beyond Ville Rouge on the road to the village of Reigne, the landscape is still dominated by vineyards and orchards. From the manicured rows of vines and trees rise the imposing edifices of old stone farmhouses, now restored by those enamored of rustic architecture. When Zermano and Louise arrived here it was a forgotten land. The hilltops were dotted with nearly deserted villages, decaying stone mausoleums visited mostly by the wind and the ghosts of the turbulent Wars of Religion that raged through the countryside in the sixteenth century. During the Second World War a different population took up residence. The villages became strongholds for Resistance fighters, sprang into action with combat and intrigue, with terror and execution, with neighbor warring against neighbor. This too would play its part in the lives of Louise and Zermano—but I am getting ahead of myself.

  Of all the medieval villages flung across the crests of the Provençal countryside, Reigne is the most inspirational. It is a wreath of stone buildings crowning a mountain’s brow. Lower mountains of purple and green wrap their arms around the bottom of the village, evoking nature’s embrace. Reigne is architecture dictated from the window of a warrior’s soul, a fortified place designed for death, and when the final fall comes it will be a fall into maternal arms. How exquisite of Louise to choose this place.

  Driving up the road to Reigne I saw Château-Colline in the distant summer haze, another place that I was soon to discover held a buried mystery for Zermano and Louise. Even though Château-Colline is one of Provence’s most photographed sights, attracting tour buses from across Europe, it still has not surrendered its delinquent beauty. Its towers of scabrous stone lean in defiance of gravity against the horizon. The castle was once home to an illustrious writer, a predator whose outlawed pleasures made his tortured pen flow. The blood of victims was his ink. This man, the “divine Marquis,” hoodwinked history by reinventing his own. Château-Colline stands as a perversion in this otherwise buco
lic scene, its empty shell looming on the landscape, its secrets still haunting those who come too close. Certainly Louise and Zermano came under its spell.

  When finally I drove into Reigne through the stone columns of the old Roman gate at the village entrance, I was amazed by the numbers of cars lining the narrow streets. These were not the cars of humble villagers, but shiny limousines from Paris, Zurich, London, and Madrid. Men in silk suits and women in stylish dresses crowded the village, for this was the day of the important auction. A venerable New York art gallery was to liquidate paintings and drawings by Zermano found in Louise’s small cottage. All the art had Louise as its subject. The New York gallery had sent a catalog of the works to prestigious institutions and collectors around the world. Depending on one’s point of view, the catalog documented a treasure of lost art, a country’s pride, a tax collector’s dream, or prizes for a wealthy few. My university had received a copy of this expensively printed item, entitled Louise Collard: The Muse Exposed. Since the university owns two rare early drawings by Zermano we were placed on the list of potential bidders at today’s affair. Of course the university was without funds to sit in on such a high-stakes international poker game, and it certainly had no intention of sending me to the auction to display its shallow pockets. I had come to Reigne on my own.

  I did not plan to attend the auction. I wished the art could remain where it had been for a half-century, in Louise’s humble home. She could have become very rich had she chosen to sell. She sold not one item, not the smallest scrap of paper that might have borne the charcoal image of her in youth, drawn by Zermano’s swift hand as he gazed at her sleeping, or after making love by the fire, or after taking the first sip of wine before a dinner she prepared. Even in a black-and-white drawing Louise’s cheeks burned with promise. I couldn’t tolerate seeing what was hers in life denied her in death. I wanted to miss the auction, even though as a scholar it meant I was somewhat derelict in my obligations. What I did not want to miss was the opportunity to gain entrance to her home, to see with my own eyes where Louise had lived for so many years with her secrets.