Where the Bird Sings Best (2 page)

They sold the little they had and went to live in Odessa. There they were taken in by Fiera Seca, Teresa’s sister, who was two years younger. Their father, my great-grandfather, had been married and widowed three times. His three previous wives had died giving birth the first time, and the children in turn had never lasted more than three days in the cradle. According to the old gossips, Death was in love with him and out of jealousy snatched away the wives and their fruit.

Abraham Groismann was a strong, tall man with a curly red beard and big green eyes. He made a living through apiculture. And while all that business about Death’s love for him was just an old wives’ tale,the love of his bees, on the other hand, was a clear fact. Whenever he harvested the honey from the hundred or so little multicolored hives, the bees would cover him from head to foot, without ever stinging. Then they would follow him like a docile cloud to the shed where he bottled the delicious honey. Many nights, especially during the glacial winters, they would gather on his bed to form a dark, warm, and vibrant blanket.

Teresa’s mother, Raquel, was thirteen when she gave birth in the cemetery. The old crones put her in a grave and wrapped her in seven sheets so Death wouldn’t see. There, in the cool earth, surrounded by dark bones, my grandmother bore her first child, whose mouth was filled quickly with a fragrant nipple to maintain the silence that was essential: Death had a thousand ears! Abraham, convinced that once again he was going to lose mother and child, prepared his heart for the tragedy by repressing any feelings. Their survival wouldn’t generate either heat or cold. He just went on submerged in his sea of bees, speaking with them in an inaccessible universe. But when Raquel, now fifteen, became pregnant once again, hope blazed in his soul.

Though he’d been warned that the Black Lady, as faithful and loving as the bees, would follow him anywhere, he went to the cemetery, pushed aside the ladies who were holding up the seven sheets, and looked into the deep grave. He saw exit the bloody temple the most beautiful of girls. A strange wind whipped the white cloth and carried the sheets toward the mountains as if they were immense doves.

The mother was now dying. “Fool!” the women shouted. “Why did you come? You’ve brought your ferocious lover. She’s already devouring the mother. The daughter is next.” They poured salt and vinegar over the child’s head and baptized her with a name that would shock and disgust Death: Fiera Seca. Then they put her in a basket, swaddling her in clusters of grapes, and carried her off to a secret place the father could never know, to hide her from the Enemy. Fiera Seca had to live as a prisoner in a barn until she was thirteen, when her menstruation began. When childhood came to an end, the danger disappeared. Death was looking for a girl, not a woman. Fiera Seca was led home by one of the old gossips. As she walked along the streets, the terrified townspeople closed doors and windows. To scare off Death, in case she discovered the child’s hiding place, they’d taught Fiera Seca to make horrible faces, one after another. Her face, like a soft mask, passed from one ugliness to another. If you looked at her for more than ten seconds, your head would ache.

When Fiera Seca entered the room, which was simultaneously kitchen, dining room, and bedroom, Teresa ran out to the garden along with the dogs, which began to howl, and the cats, which began to hiss. Fiera Seca was all alone. She heard footsteps. It had to be Death! Out of her hiding place she felt more vulnerable than ever. Besides contorting her face, she’d also begun to deform her body. She bowed her legs, twisted her spine, and made her hands look like claws. She drooled and foamed at the mouth, tinting that wretched mess with blood she sucked from her gums. The door opened with an insect-like screech. Abraham saw a monster, a kind of giant spider, but he did not run because he was covered with bees. To Fiera Seca, the buzzing of that dark mass seemed like the song of the Black Lady.

There they stood, face to face, sweating in terror. Perhaps the only beings that understood the situation were the bees. They began to fly in a circle that became larger and larger until it surrounded father and daughter. Within that living cordon, the girl saw the most beautiful man she could have imagined. In the depth of his green eyes, she found an ocean of goodness. That sublime spirit became a world where, if she could make herself small, she would have wanted to live. Little by little, she stopped making faces and stretched out her body, revealing herself as she was—a beautiful woman. Abraham realized that all the others, those who died giving birth, had been nothing more than sketches of the thing that, without knowing it, he’d sought forever: standing erect before him, like a tremendous miracle, his own soul was calling him. They submerged one into the other, they spoke words of love to each other, they wept, laughed, sang, and fell into the bed. The bees formed a curtain that separated them from the world, and there they remained, two bodies transformed into a single bonfire, not thinking of the consequences.

Teresa felt superfluous. Her father and sister disappeared forever, transformed into lovers. She put what little she had in a sack and went to live with her aunts. Two years later, she received news from her sister, a letter:

Forgive me, Teresa, for having forgotten you all this time. Dad is dead. You are the only one who knew our secret. I hope you’ll understand. It was stronger than we were, a passion we couldn’t control. No one in the neighborhood dared to imagine anything like that. Whenever I went out to shop, I made my faces and contortions so that no one would speak to me. My father, my lover, only showed himself covered with bees. Our real bodies were a miracle we only enjoyed in the intimacy of the house. To ward off spies, Abraham taught the insects to rest on the roof and exterior walls of the house until they covered it with a thick quilt. We made love inside a gigantic honeycomb, drunk on pleasure, unable to stop, again and again, wishing we could fuse and become one single being. That insatiable quest, that impossible dissolution; mixed in with the pleasure was a constant pain, a dagger piercing our string of orgasms. A short time ago, I became pregnant. We thought we were angels, beings from another world, unaffected by human phenomena: we had to return to reality. After five months, my stomach began to bulge. In dreams, Abraham received a visit from the Black Lady. She was insane with fury and jealousy. When he awoke, he said, “I am going to cause your death. She will not listen to my pleas. Her cruelty knows no limits. You will never be able to give birth and survive. Understand me, my daughter, my wife, I must sacrifice myself, hand myself over to Death, let her carry me off to her palace of ice. That way her love will be satisfied, and she will not devour you.”

I wept for days, but I could not convince him that it was I who should disappear. He filled a bathtub with honey and submerged in the golden syrup. He died looking at me. He never closed his eyes. A tranquil suicide—he was smiling, and the bees flew, forming a crown that slowly circled over the yellow surface. Under the mattress, I found a note: “I shall never stop loving you. Please look after the bees. Don’t abandon them. They are my memory.”

I fell into the bed. I spread my legs, and as my stomach shrank I expelled an interminable sigh from my sex. Nothing remained of our child. It turned into air.

Teresa never answered that letter and hadn’t returned to her paternal home until the day she went to live in Odessa with Alejandro and the four children. An obscure shape came out to meet them. When they walked into the room, the bees separated from Fiera Seca and went to suck at little plates filled with sugared juices. Crying out, Fiera Seca threw herself into Teresa’s muscular arms. She did not seem to notice the presence of my grandfather and the children.

“Oh, sister! No one knows about Abraham’s death. I still make the atrocious faces when I go shopping, and I receive those who come here to buy honey covered with insects, so they go on thinking it’s Abraham. I never buried our father.”

As the family was moving in, she led Teresa to the barn. Among the honeycombs, from which came a buzzing similar to a requiem, was the bathtub filled with honey with the smiling corpse beneath its yellow surface.

“Honey is sacred, sister. It preserves flesh eternally. He never wanted to leave. I feel him stuck to me. He’s waiting for me.”

As she said that, Fiera Seca took off her clothes. She revealed her naked body, a delicate structure with a skin so fine that the pattern of her veins, like those of a leaf, could be seen. A thick, animal-like pubis contrasted with that angelic delicacy: it was so black it emitted blue sparkles and covered her belly up to her navel.

“I shouldn’t abandon the bees. They are the reason I remained in this world. That’s what he asked me to do. But now you’ve come, and I can leave. I’m leaving these wise animals in your care. If you look after them carefully, they will feed your whole family.”

And with no further explanations, she leapt into the tub, embraced her father, and allowed the honey to cover her. She made no signs of drowning and seemed neither to suffer nor to die. She simply became forever immobile, her eyes wide open, staring into the open eyes of the other cadaver.

Teresa felt as dead as her father or her sister. Only her obligation to her family kept her alive. And hate as well. Especially hate. It was a source of energy that allowed her to tolerate the world only so she could curse it. In all things she saw the presence of a cruel, despicable God. There was nothing that didn’t seem absurd, impermanent, or unnecessary to her. The plot line of life was pain. She could detect the incessant fear hidden in laughter, in moments of pleasure, in the stupid innocence of children.

For her the world was a prison, a charnel house, the sick dream of the monstrous Creator. But what infuriated her most (a rage that made her curse from the moment she awoke until the moment she fell asleep) was knowing, without wanting to admit it to herself, that this hate disguised an excess of love. In her childhood she learned to adore God above all things, and now, in her absolute disillusionment, she had no idea what to do with that immense feeling. She could not channel those fervent oceans toward her husband or children because they were condemned to die prematurely.

Just as the Dnieper flooded its bank and carried José away, some accident or other would exterminate them. Security was fragile. Nothing lasted. Everything shrank to nothing. Unthinkable evils were possible. A rock could fall from the sky and smash her family; an ant could lay eggs inside their ears, where armies of tiny beasts would be born that would devour their brains; a sea of fetid mud from down the mountainside could cover the city; mad hens could become carnivorous and peck out the eyes of the children; anything could happen.

What was to be done with that unclaimed love building up in her bosom, shaking her heart so violently that its pounding could be heard up and down the street at night, drowning out the chorus of snores? Suddenly, without being able to understand why, she discovered the only thing deserving of her love in this world: fleas! She remembered a circus act she’d seen in her childhood and decided to train those insects. She always carried out her tasks as wife and mother. She provided her family with a clean home, she cooked and ironed, all the while delivering insults. Before her four children went to bed, she made them get down on their knees and recite: “God does not exist, God is not good. All that awaits us is the cat who will urinate on our grave.” And when they slept under the huge eiderdown next to the brick stove, she, hidden in the cold basement, dedicated herself to domesticating her fleas.

When she fled her father’s house, Teresa stole his pocket watch, the only souvenir she wanted to keep. Now she emptied it of its movements, removed the white dial with its Roman numerals and hands like a woman’s legs, and pierced its cover with holes so that her pupils could get the required oxygen. There were seven of them. To each she gave a different territory to suck blood: her wrists, behind her knees, her breasts, and her navel. She bought a magnifying glass and other necessary instruments and made them costumes, decorations, tiny objects, furniture, and vehicles. She reduced her sleep time and spent entire nights teaching them to jump through hoops, to fire a miniature cannon, to play drums, to swing, to play ball. Little by little she got to know them. They had different personalities, subtly different bodies, individual forms of intelligence. She named them. She communicated better with them than she had with dogs. The link was profound. After a long while, she could speak and plot with the fleas against God.

She compared the affection of fleas with what she got from the Jews, and her revulsion against them intensified. She wanted to change her race, to go off and live with the goyim. But her last name, Levi, was like a six-pointed star carved into her forehead. My grandfather—who was still seeing the Rabbi from the Caucasus, though he never admitted this to Teresa, wishing to forestall those flights of rage that were so strong they shifted the furniture—found some nobles of Polish origin who did not want their only son to do his military service with peasants. The family supplied him with official papers bought from a venal functionary so he could join the army in the place of the delicate heir. It happened his name was Jodorowsky. With that Polish last name, he and his family could move to another country, cross borders without major problems, dissolve among the non-chosen races in just five years, when his enlistment was over.

While waiting for her husband to return, Teresa supported her family by selling honey and sweet rolls shaped like moons, towers, and crabs. At night, she relieved her solitude by working with the seven fleas to create—by reading the lines they traced while dancing on a dusting of flour—a method that would allow her to read the future.