Dear Spirit,
Isabel says you are not dead. She says everything in the movies is fake, it’s all a trick, but she has seen you alive. She says you are a spirit and you live near here and I can find you if I close my eyes and say my name.
Soy Ana. Soy Ana.
I am writing to you because I have questions. I saw you in the town hall when the truck came with the film projector and everyone in the village sat on chairs and watched. I saw you find the little girl by the water. She was throwing flowers and they were floating. You liked the flowers. You liked the girl. You picked her up and threw her in because you thought she would float too.
She did not float.
Why did you do that? You were not angry. Your face was not angry. You looked like you did not understand what would happen. Like you did not know that people do not float. Like nobody told you the rules.
And then the people came and they were angry and they hurt you and they killed you. But Isabel says you are not dead. Isabel says you are a spirit.
So where are you?
Dear Spirit,
I went to look for you. Isabel took me to the farmhouse with no roof and no door. The one past the railroad tracks at the edge of the village where nobody goes. She said you live there. We looked in every room. You were not there. The walls were broken. The light came through the holes in the ceiling and made shapes on the floor.
Isabel said you only come at night. So I went back at night. I went alone. The farmhouse was dark and I was afraid but I went inside and I said my name.
Soy Ana.
You did not come. The house was empty. But it did not feel empty. It felt like something was there that I could not see, the way the air feels before it rains, the way a room feels after someone has just left it.
I think you were there. I think you were watching me the way you watched the girl with the flowers. But you did not come out because you remembered what happened with the flowers and you were afraid of doing something wrong again.
I would not have been afraid of you. I am afraid of a lot of things but I would not have been afraid of you.
Dear Spirit,
My father keeps bees. He has boxes and boxes of bees and he puts on a big suit and a mask over his face and he blows smoke into the boxes and the bees become quiet. He looks like a monster when he wears the suit. He is big and his face is hidden and the bees cannot see who he is.
He writes things at his desk at night. I do not know what he writes. He writes about the bees, I think. He talks to them more than he talks to us.
My mother writes letters too. She writes them at the table and puts them in envelopes and I do not know who she writes to. She does not mail them to my father. My father is here. She writes to someone who is not here, someone far away, someone she misses.
Everyone in this house writes to people who are not here. I am writing to you.
Dear Spirit,
Something happened today. Isabel was playing with the cat. She put her hands around the cat’s neck and squeezed and the cat went still and I thought the cat was dead and I was so frightened. Then Isabel let go and the cat ran away and it was fine and Isabel looked at me and smiled.
Later she put blood on her lips. She bit her own finger and put the blood on her lips like it was paint and she looked at herself in a mirror and she looked beautiful and terrible and she fell down and pretended to be dead and I screamed and ran to her and she was not dead. She was pretending.
Isabel pretends a lot. She pretends things are dead when they are not dead. She pretends things are alive when they are not alive. She told me you are a spirit. I believe her. But I also know she likes to pretend.
Are you real? You felt real when you picked up the girl with the flowers. You were gentle. You did not understand. That is the saddest thing I have ever seen, someone being gentle and not understanding and hurting someone because they did not know the difference between a flower and a girl.
Dear Spirit,
My father took us to the field today. He showed us a mushroom. He said some mushrooms you can eat and some mushrooms are poison and they look the same. He said you have to learn the difference because if you make a mistake you can die.
I think about this a lot. Things that look the same but are different. Things that are good and things that are poison and they look the same. In the village everything looks the same. The houses are the same color. The sky is the same color. But something happened here that nobody talks about. A war. There was a war and people died and now the war is over and everyone is quiet.
I think the quiet is the poison mushroom. It looks like the quiet after the war but it is not the same as peace. It is something else. Something that makes everyone walk slowly and talk softly and write letters to people who are not here and blow smoke into boxes of bees to keep them from moving.
I do not know what a war is. I am six. But I know what quiet sounds like when it is the wrong kind of quiet, and this village is full of the wrong kind of quiet.
Dear Spirit,
I found someone.
Not you. A man. In the farmhouse. He was lying on the floor and he was hurt and he was afraid. He had a coat that was torn and he was bleeding and he looked at me the way you looked at the girl with the flowers.
I brought him food. An apple. I brought him water. I brought him my father’s coat.
He was hiding. I understood that. He was hiding the way you were hiding, because people wanted to hurt him, because he was different, because he was something the village did not want.
I think he was your spirit. I think you sent him to me because I asked for you. I said my name and you heard me and you sent him.
Dear Spirit,
They killed him.
The men came and they found him in the farmhouse and they killed him. I do not know how I know this but I know it. My father went to see the body. He went to the same room where I watched your film, the town hall, and the man was lying there, and my father looked at his face the way I looked at your face on the screen.
My father came home and he looked at me and he knew. He knew I had been to the farmhouse. He knew I had helped the man. He knew.
He did not say anything. Nobody says anything in this house. We all know things and nobody says anything.
Dear Spirit,
I ran away. I went into the fields at night. I walked until I could not walk anymore. The fields are so big. The sky was dark and the fields were dark and I was small and I was alone and I kept walking.
I found the water. The lake. I knelt beside it the way the girl knelt beside the water in your film. The water was dark and still and I looked into it and I waited.
You came.
You came out of the trees. You were tall and your face was the face I saw on the screen and you knelt beside me the way you knelt beside the girl with the flowers. You were there. I could see you. I could feel you.
I closed my eyes because I was afraid. I was afraid you would pick me up and throw me into the water because you still do not know the difference between a flower and a girl.
When I opened my eyes you were gone.
Dear Spirit,
They found me the next day. They brought me home. The doctor came and said I would be fine. He said I had suffered a trauma. He said I would gradually recover.
I will not gradually recover. I know what I saw. I know what I found in the farmhouse and I know what happened to him and I know that you came to me by the water and I know that you are real. They can say everything in the movies is fake. They can say it’s all a trick. But I was there and you were there and the man in the farmhouse was there and they killed him and they killed the girl with the flowers and they killed you and none of you are dead. None of you are dead because I remember you.
I stand at my window now. The window has glass that is shaped like the inside of a beehive. The light comes through in hexagons. I open the window and I look out at the dark and I say my name.
Soy Ana.
I will keep saying it. Every night. Until you come back. Because that is what Isabel told me to do and Isabel lies about a lot of things but I do not think she was lying about this.
Soy Ana.
I am six years old and I live in a village on the Castilian plain and a war has just ended and nobody speaks and my father keeps bees and my mother writes letters and my sister pretends to die and I saw a film about a monster who did not understand and I went looking for him and I found something else and they killed it and I will never stop looking.
Soy Ana.
Soy Ana.
The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena) Director: Víctor Erice Country: Spain Year: 1973 Runtime: 97 minutes
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