I threw myself into the streets of the world with a bee in my hair. A bee that buzzed among my tresses, beat its wings convulsively, and buzzed, buzzed, buzzed. I didn’t brush it away, I let it build its hive in my head, and everyone who met me said, “You’ve got hair like honey,” and didn’t know that there was a bee in my head, rolling around playfully among my thoughts with its soft, bicolored body. And it kept me company, my bee did; it became an indispensable if not very trustworthy companion: sometimes it gave me little bites on the back of my neck that should have hurt. But my bee was too small to hurt me; it left honey in me but never poison.
One day the bee whispered something in my ear, but it was too faint a murmur for me to hear. I never asked what it had tried to say to me and now it’s too late. My bee flew away from my hair, all of a sudden, and a passerby killed it. It was squashed. On the white marble I can see a liquid gleaming, a substance: I pick it up with a little spatula and take it to an analytic laboratory.
“Poison,” the biologist tells me.
“Poison…,” I repeat.
My bee died of poisoning; it wasn’t squashed. A few hours before, it had bitten me.
Who’s going to keep my silences company? I miss the bee’s buzzing; I need its soft whisper. When the morning sun shines, I find my teeth clenched and a sound coming from my mouth: zzzzzzzzzzzzz…