The Day of the Bees Read online

  “A church wedding?” The expression in your eyes was one I’d never seen before, a disfigured cynicism, as if you were peering at me from the phantasmic depths in one of Goya’s night paintings. “A church wedding!” You put your head down, a bull ready to charge. “Louise, you don’t understand anything. I know what they are going to do. I saw it all in Spain where they practiced for this war. Starving men covered with lice sleeping naked on the frozen ground. Men having to squat from a log over a pit of shit to relieve themselves—if they slipped they would drown in excrement. All of Europe is drowning in its own shit.”

  “Then why do you want to marry me, if it’s all shit?”

  You fell to your knees before me, you said nothing for a long time. You held both my hands in yours. I felt the calluses of your palms, the strength of your fingers, and I heard your voice.

  “Because you are the only thing between me and them. Without you, I know in my soul, I would cross the line and join them. Every man has in him an ancient blood feud that drums in his ears, that makes him want to tear off his mask of civility and just take what he wants—not work for it, nor earn it, just take it and kill any other man that stands in his way. Only a thin veil of light keeps me anchored on this side of the line, and you are that light. Otherwise there is too much pain, even when I’m painting. The only thing that makes it tolerable, keeps me living on this earth, is your light.”

  “Where’s the wedding ring?”

  “Then you’ll do it?” You jumped up, alive with joy. You opened a drawer in your big mahogany dresser and pulled a velvet box from beneath a jumble of clothes. You popped the lid of the box and a gold ring glowed inside. I held out my hand.

  “No.” You took my hand and kissed my wedding-ring finger. “This is not where you will wear it. No one can know we are married. It’s too dangerous now. We have to wait to tell the world.”

  “I won’t wait. I’ve been waiting too long. I’ll be your wife, but I won’t remain a mistress.”

  “Yes, I am going to marry you. Only the ring is not going on your finger.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we can’t trust the future. We can only trust what is between us.”

  “Then we should get married in a church, if this is only between us and God.”

  “No, a church is not strong enough. They will burn all the churches down. They will burn everything to the ground before this war is over.” You held the ring up delicately between your thumb and forefinger. “But this they will not get. This will remain hidden. Only you and I will know of its existence. Only you and I will know, every time we make love, it will be there—our ring for eternity.”

  “What do you mean? Every time we make love?”

  You pushed on the ring with your fingers and it unclasped, exposing an arrow-sharp prong that held it together.

  “Lie back, Louise. It’s the only way. One day you will understand why it must be this way. On that, I give you my solemn word.”

  “And what about you? Where are you going to be pierced with your gold ring?”

  “It’s too dangerous for me to have a ring. It will mean there’s a wife, and if there’s a wife, they might come looking.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to understand. You just have to believe in our love.”

  I lay back on the bed. I did trust you, with my heart, with my body.

  I heard the sound of water filling a tin bowl, then the smell of gas from the stove, a striking match, a burning flame. I heard the ring being dropped into boiling water. You pushed my thighs open, and tenderly, you rubbed at my very center with cotton soaked in alcohol. The scent of alcohol filled the room, alcohol burned my skin. You got up and came back with the ring, holding it up to the light bulb over my head. I could see the sharp prong intended to cut through my skin and into the clasp, piercing through me to complete a perfect golden circle. The prong was no bigger than the beak of a hummingbird. This would not hurt, and we would be married. I was lying to myself.

  You reached between my legs.

  “This is going to hurt, Louise. Think of something beautiful.”

  “Why are you doing this? Who are we really hiding from?”

  “Something beautiful. Think …”

  “I think I’m mutilating myself for you.”

  “Love is always a mutilation of the self.”

  “My God, it hurts.”

  “Think beautiful.”

  “Francisco it’s hurting!”

  You kissed me. I bit your lip. You kept your mouth on mine. My cry was muffled. The pain did not go away. Not there. Not in the center of my vulnerability. I thought of something beautiful. Provence in the winter. The singularity of it, the harsh, abrupt season dying such a public death so that all would know the price that was being paid for something to be born. I saw the winter grapevines, rows and rows, marching over hills and across broad valleys, stitching the earth together so that it holds against the bold mistral wind that would blow it to hell. They say that when Christ was dying on the cross it was a windy day too, that each tear he shed was whipped in the fury and carried over the Mediterranean Sea to fall like a translucent purple pearl on the barren earth of Provence. Each pearl turned to a seed, and the seed to a vine, and the vine to grapes. They say that is why wine is the blood of Christ, and each autumn raisin is sweet, because Christ’s tears were not from his pain, but from his joy.

  As blood trickled down my thighs onto the sheet I heard your voice. “Don’t cry, darling. We’re married now. I will always love you.”

  “We’re not married.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who do you belong to?”

  “Why you, of course.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  I looked over at the sink. Your pearl-handled straight razor gleamed on the porcelain.

  “Bring that to me.”

  You didn’t say a word. Your eyes followed mine to the razor.

  “Bring it.”

  You got up and went to the sink. You picked up the razor, a quizzical look on your face.

  I raised myself painfully on the bed.

  “Take your shirt off.”

  You pulled your shirt over your head and let it drop.

  “Come to me.”

  You stepped up next to the bed.

  “Kneel down. Kneel the way you would before a priest, as if you were taking Holy Communion at your own wedding mass.”

  You knelt, confused.

  I took the razor from you and flicked its blade out.

  “Think of something beautiful.”

  You looked at me even more confused.

  “Think of something really beautiful.” I touched the edge of the razor to your skin. There was a guarded look of fear in your eyes. I pricked your skin with the blade. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking … thinking of you on the first trip to Provence, about the field of flowers we drove past, and you wanted me to stop the car. I knew what you were going to do. I had seen you do it so often. Wherever you went flowers appeared and you gathered them in bundled bouquets. I think it is something in your Provençal touch. If you went walking in the Sinai Desert you would come back across the parched sands with a miraculous bouquet.”

  I drew the blade swiftly down on your chest, cutting a straight line.

  “God, that hurts!”

  “Keep thinking beautiful.”

  “I stopped the car. You got out. You went into the field and excitedly picked flowers. Some you broke off with your fingers; others, with stems too thick to break, you bit off. One broke your tooth, but you were so intoxicated you didn’t feel the pain. You kept gathering flowers and filled the whole back seat of the Bearcat with them. A perfume engulfed us as we drove along, and I thought to myself, where does God make women like this, whose nature is to be surrounded by flowers? Does he have a special little room in heaven
where he creates them? Oh Jesus that hurts!”

  I pulled the blade deeply through your skin at a right angle. You winced, but did not cry out again. I folded the blade of the razor into its handle.

  “Now, my darling, we are married.”

  I pressed my lips to your chest, tenderly kissing the blood from your wound. It would heal perfectly, and until your dying day there would always be, carved above your heart, a perfect L.

  PART FOUR

  Fool of Love

  CERTAIN THINGS OCCUR in life and one keeps circling back to them. When fate brought Louise and Zermano to the cherry orchard in Provence on the Day of the Bees was such an event. From that day forward they would never again be free of each other—not through war or peace, fame or obscurity, even exile or death. My accidental discovery of their letters pried loose an enigma concealed for half a century. These personal writings, raw and unadorned, were never intended for other eyes. Sometimes as I read I was shocked out of an exquisitely shaped insight into naked revelation, where desire’s anarchy overruled rhetoric. Peering at these private pages was a distinctly voyeuristic act. Often I placed my hand across a passage that appeared too explicit, asking myself: Do I have the right to know this? Eventually I would lift my hand and continue reading, but not without guilt. As I read further I questioned the ethics of exposing these letters to others. Should they be locked away? Should they be made available only to scholars researching Francisco Zermano’s art? And then the ultimate question: Should they be destroyed?

  There are other compelling questions. Zermano is still alive and does not know what happened to Louise. Do I not have an obligation to give her letters to Zermano and set his tortured mind at rest? These issues take on a power of their own, and I must confess there have been times when I wished I had never discovered the letters. I have become an unwilling player in the drama, unable to resist making an erotic identification with the two lovers. I have to be honest and ask: Am I obsessed with their story? The answer is yes. But if Louise had not intended for the letters to be found she would have destroyed them. She would not have left such a complete map unless she wanted someone to chart the course to her heart. So I decided I must follow the route she set down. The letters existed. It was my obligation to take them to Zermano, to make certain their message was delivered.

  This decision was more easily made than carried out, for Zermano has not been seen in public since that day in 1969 when the American astronauts landed in the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity. Around the world people watched that extraordinary event on television, unaware that at the same time one of the twentieth century’s most important figures was disappearing. It was as if Zermano had departed for the dark side of the moon. He could not have become more “disappeared” if he had been one of those political dissidents in Latin America who are suddenly snatched from their daily lives and lost in oblivion.

  Oblivion was not to be Zermano’s fate. The world eventually demanded to know his whereabouts, or whether he was still alive. But his family and the Spanish government refused to give any information about him. No hospital records existed, no death certificate. Only his paintings remained; and as with all great artists after their passing, an inevitable aura of semi-divinity surrounded them. His art seemed not to have been constructed by human hands, invention, or force of will, but conjured up—no more to be questioned than the shape of a cloud.

  The debate about Zermano’s disappearance continues, entertaining the public and fueling endless books and biographical television broadcasts constructed on speculation and outright deception. There are those who say he is dead, or assassinated as a collaborator in World War II. Some posit that the Spanish government executed him, since his fame for exposing war’s demonic proportions in his paintings could make him an embarrassing political liability.

  Before my discovery of the letters I had my own theory about Zermano’s disappearance. I deduced that Louise had resurfaced after decades and Zermano had abandoned his family for her. In order to avoid the shame and hysterical scrutiny such an action would provoke, the family denied any knowledge of Zermano after he disappeared. My belief in this theory was what took me to Provence after Louise died. I needed to determine if her death had been faked to mislead everyone. Now I know there is another story.

  After Zermano completed his antiwar mural, Archangel Gabriel Flames Down the Sky, he quickly departed Paris. A dangerous voyage by fishing boat took him from a small harbor south of Cassis into the Mediterranean Sea, where patrolling warships were intent on sinking any vessel not flying their country’s flag. That he survived an eight-day journey, eventually making it to the Balearic Islands, is something of a miracle. The other miracle is that the Gabriel Flames mural survived. Twenty-two feet long and eight feet high, it had been painted on a canvas bolted by its stretcher boards to a wall in Zermano’s Paris atelier.

  Once the mural was finished he built another wall in front to hide it. On this second wall he painted a mural depicting the industrial area along the Seine by night. In the painting, illuminated by malevolent energy, a dusty pall of ash is cast over the Seine as it flows past dilapidated factories. Fires burn on the banks of the river, spotlighting garish women who advertise their naked bodies with provocative thrusts, while behind them a conveyor belt transports an endless line of shadowy men to hell.

  This work, unlike any other Zermano painting, bears an improbable title, Nude Walking Her Man on a Leash. Much has been written about it, and all the usual interpretations and condemnations have been applied. Some think it is a sexual metaphor for war; others that Zermano is a misogynist declaring war between the sexes. The painting remained in Zermano’s atelier after the war because the city of Paris commandeered the space as part of its effort to relieve the housing shortage. The family living there prudishly placed large storage closets before the mural. Also, at this time many, from those in government to those in the arts, including Zermano, were being accused of collaboration with the enemy, so the embarrassing mural was better off forgotten.

  And forgotten it was, until the atelier was removed from the public domain and sold as a private residence. The new buyer knew Zermano’s work was being favorably reevaluated in America. He had the mural detached from the wall to be shipped to New York and discovered the masterpiece behind it, Gabriel Flames; he sent that off too. The French government, citing an obscure Napoleonic law, seized both pieces of art when they were declared at customs. The Spanish government also claimed ownership, asserting that Zermano, a Spanish citizen, had been forced to abandon his art due to “inhumane and incomprehensible duress during times of intense international conflict.” A vicious court battle ensued. The ultimate disposition of the art did little to enhance the pride of either nation. The court ruled that both works belonged to the atelier’s owner, so the art finally went to the highest bidder in New York.

  I believe the explanation for Zermano’s abandonment of Paris was simple. The loss of Louise was too painful; to him, she was France. He saw her in the color of the changing sky, in the sun setting on the Seine. He needed to escape. He did not want to be a painter who recorded only the devastation of the heart and the war—for that there were poets and photographers. He did not flee to America, as had so many other artists with the fire of Europe at their backs. He was not seeking to rebuild himself, he was already solid. He sought rootedness in simplicity. He returned to where he had begun, the island of Mallorca. The music, the stars, the light on the sea would again be his companions, and they would not speak to him of Louise. Zermano needed to survive; he cannot be condemned, as he has been by many agenda-driven socio-art critics, for returning to a country that was fascist at the time. If he had to live in a brutal world, then he would choose Spain, for there war had its origins in family battles, brother against brother, before it became religious dogma against secular ideology. He understood that; he could paint the psychology of that.

  Zermano’s return to Mallorca during the war attracted no attention, for the world st
age was crowded with far more compelling characters. But when the war ended, and making money from making art could be tolerated and talked about by former combatants gazing at each other across the rubble of Europe, then Zermano was rediscovered. When Europe became prosperous again a parade of media appeared in Mallorca, waiting in cities, beach towns, and cafés to ambush Zermano with microphones and cameras. It was logical that one day he would disappear from Mallorca as quickly as he had disappeared from Paris. When his Spanish wife died and his children were grown, he vanished.

  I spent an entire year of my life trying to contact Zermano. After going through the obvious channels like gallery owners, museum curators, and French and Spanish cultural officials, it became clear that the only way to Zermano was through his adult children. I repeatedly sent copies of my books on Zermano to the lawyer who represented the children, with the urgent message that I had something of importance to deliver to their father. I received no response, and the packages came back unopened. What I could not do was to inform anyone that I had the letters, for my ownership of them would be challenged by private and public entities; I could lose the letters in court and never know if they reached Zermano. Also, the furor they would create in the press, given their political context and erotic content, would make Zermano distance himself further from me. The last thing he wanted, I knew, was to have the most dramatic and intimate events of his life revealed at a time when his seclusion was paramount and his life growing short. There was only one recourse: I had to go to Mallorca and see where his footsteps led.

  I applied for a sabbatical from my university and left the moment it came through. I wanted to see Mallorca as Zermano had fifty years earlier, arriving by sea, so I took the overnight ferry from Barcelona. On the deck of the ferry at dawn I was startled by the light. It was not the lavender light of Provence, nor the eye-splitting brilliance of North Africa so close by; it was a healing hue of gold, as if I were observing the world from within a glass bowl smeared with honey. Mountains rose up to form a vision of a jagged coastline that seemed to have been torn from a brochure advertising a timeless Mediterranean tableau. Quickly this vision faded. The ferry steamed closer to the island, and white concrete collars of high-rise tourist hotels choked once-paradisiacal coves.