by Diana Cachey
Matteo’s quick surmise of the drawing, and eagerness to join her on the dive, while fortuitous was suspect. She knew that Matteo was up to something and had offered to help her because he hoped to plunder the wreck. Yet, more than that, she also sensed Matteo’s eagerness to protect her like the ghost expert had predicted. It suggested more was at stake than relics on a sunken ship. What?
The click of the seagull’s beak clapped again. It startled her, interrupted her deliberations. This time, she didn’t care if it was a ghost or a real bird.
Since the appearance of the talking bird on her terrace, she’d taken to observing the seagulls about Venice. In her mind’s eye, she saw them sitting on the fondamenta staring across the beautiful water at a stunning view of Guidecca Island before sunset. She pictured one of the seagulls sitting on the marble railings, boats in the background sailing the canal.
Now every time she saw another seagull, she thought, “go for a swim, go for a swim.”
While taking an afternoon coffee in the sun, or sitting at one of her favorite spots on the shore abutting the Guidecca Canal, these birds amused her with antics she never noticed before. She would wait for their wail but heard none as they’d soared above her and past the other seagulls, some of them perched on the marble, others hunkered down, braced by fluttering greenery. Like she’d often done during her stay in Venice, the birds shored up against the cold.
She’d never seen a seagull yawn before, but now that she started watching them, she saw that they all seemed to be yawning, constantly. Big yawns. They must be tired from all the cold and windy ways of winter? Sometimes when they yawned, she heard it. A high pitched “aah” of an opera singer.
The gulls might stretch out their legs like cats. Does a gull even have legs? The gulls seemed to be practicing scales before show time, singing away. When she expected a squawk, she sometimes got one, but not from the gull, from a flying duck, or goose. Never before had she seen a goose fly over Venice but once she started observing the gulls, she saw these extraordinary events every day -- the yawn of the gull and the flight of the goose.
From under her covers, she heard a gull call out again, this time not a memory of one, but right outside her window. Was it calling for a lost friend? Hoping to alert a child? Beckoning to her? Louisa’s thoughts bounced from Vittorina to Matteo to seagulls to geese to the thoughts of an idea for her next carnival outfit.
Lady Gaga, gone all mermaid?
Her mind drifted away from carnival costumes and back to the seagulls. She got out of bed and looked out her window. She saw nothing but pigeons.
What about pigeons? Did they reveal clues like the gondoliers possibly did in their songs? Pigeons don’t sound anything like parrots anymore than seagulls do. Pigeons coo.
She didn’t know the answer to these questions but could only watch and reflect. Imagine. Have I imagined these events?
Perception was deceptive. She’d watched in awe and found certainty where there was none. She swallowed hard.
She realized she’d developed a sore throat in the night. She hoped it wasn’t a cold. She’d ruined her hearing from forcefully dropping down during scuba dives and moving through pressure changes too fast. Her stuffy head ached. She felt pain in her sinuses and winced. A cold after diving would soon feel like an ice-pick plunged into her ear drums.
Perhaps it wasn’t humid this morning. Right, a dry day in Venice? Hardly. She decided to sleep it off.
While she slept, her birds sent another dreamy message: when seagulls squeal, they sound like dolphins.
Few people know this, but Venetians kill pigeons. Not all Venetians, of course, although all Venetians likely want to kill them at one time or another in their lives. What many wish, others do.
It’s an overpopulation problem the killers solve. It’s a poop problem the executioners control. It’s a well-known fact in Venice that pigeons do nothing their entire lives except “eat, fuck, shit.” While they used to serve many valuable purposes, like delivery of mail and were even used as a food source, today they are of no real value to the Venetians. They waste resources (like eating the food), reproduce at alarming rates (sex addicts) and crap like babies nursed by mommies who drink too much coffee.
All around Venice is proof of this dilemma. Besides the obvious -- flocks of them flying frantic to follow feeding fans that fill San Marco Square -- it’s also impossible to sit at a cafe and enjoy a meal without hearing a male coo in the ear of a willing female or chase a more reticent one under foot from table to table. While dining al fresco, they’ll steal everything off the table, not just bread crumbs.
Scores of spiked wires line gutters, balconies and chimneys in attempts to prevent the ubiquitous birds from sitting and shitting all over the gardens or front steps below. Endless efforts to stop the flow of droppings onto stoops and sidewalks prove futile and eventually evidence the need for local assassins. The annoying birds say, “Thank you,” to the spike-wires for helping them find new and improved warm spots on which to perch, such as heating vents or tiny eaves, and they continue to splatter Venetian walkways. Strict enforcement is in order.
It takes a death sentence to stop determined pigeons from doing those three things, eat, fuck, shit, their only lot in life.
Louisa looked up and she saw three offenders crammed into a tight space next to where yesterday she had observed a man and his two sons spend all day placing wire spikes to discourage pigeons from sitting there. The birds easily found another spot, which looked to be a cozier one, where they could coo, eat and defecate on the building owner’s sons, spouse, tenants, visitors. No one dared try to enjoy a cigarette outside that home.
Yet, when she first heard about the pigeon killers, Louisa took horrible offense and set out to abolish the practice. Later she came to the understanding to which all Venetians and tourists who stayed long enough must relent -- some of those birds must go and it takes too long to wait for them to die a natural death. Execution is mandated.
She knew where the fabled and prolific pigeon terminator lived and his home was said to be haunted. His grandmother smoked at least a pack of cigarettes a day until she died at the age of ninety-one from infected lungs. All who loved her blamed the pigeons. To those who said it was the cigarettes that killed her, the naysayers were offered the following story to convince them otherwise:
Her ghost, a regular apparition seen often in the evening on top of the roof of the building, held a small gun with which to pelt the sitting birds as they attempted to crap on her former smoking stoop. Pigeons fell from the sky during the day here too. Live ones hit the pavement suddenly in large numbers and dead ones lay there the next day after Annie Nonna shot them down all night. Annie’s bird executioner grandson did not help her kill them. If he did, he was clever enough not to get caught doing it, unlike his dead grandmother’s ghostly shadow.
Louisa knocked on his door hoping for a warm welcome but not expecting one. She’d last seen him when he was killing pigeons, by scooping them up in a net and drowning them. Not a pleasant thought to have while standing at this door.
She knocked harder when she heard what sounded like a gunshot. She then saw a pigeon fall from the sky. She glared down at the stiff bird and the door swung open.
“Cazzo fai oggi?” (What the fuck do you want today?) She heard a gruff voice yell.
Using as much Venetian as she dared, Louisa said she had some ideas about how to get rid of pigeons. She included vulgar swear words. It seemed to mellow him.
“Si, dimme.” (Tell me about it.)
She wasn’t sure if his mood changed because she used profanity or because the subject of pigeon killing intrigued him.
“Interessante, no?” She looked down at the stiff pigeon lying at her feet.
“Si. Certo.” He grabbed her shoulders with both hands then gave her two kisses on the cheeks.
“Si?” She waited for him to ask her inside.
He shook his head affirmative then waited for her to say more. Standing
on the stoop, Louisa explained that she’d heard rumors about pigeons dying faster than before, seemingly of natural causes. She hoped he might know why.
“Si si, avanti,” the man answered. He waved Louisa inside with an offer of grappa and caffe.
She wasn’t sure if he had agreed that the pigeons were dying faster, or that he knew something about it, or if he was asking her to tell him more about what she knew. Louisa also didn’t know if the increased rate of pigeon deaths pleased the man. It didn’t appear to please him. He seemed concerned.
He listened to her story about the increase in pigeon and seagull deaths. Regular reports to the police were being made by concerned citizens that there might be poison in the pigeons’ food source that could also affect humans.
“No. Impossibile.” He repeated the phrase. He fidgeted with papers on the coffee table, moved the grappa around, realigned the espresso cups he’d placed before her.
“No?” Louis wanted to know how he could be certain that that a poisonous food source was impossible.
“Impossibile.” He wouldn’t say more and waited for Louisa to provide details. With eyes squinted and brow crumbled, he tapped his right foot up and down in rapid succession.
In a mix of Venetian dialect and Italian, Louisa did her best to explain that she suspected the food source had been contaminated with a toxin of some sort.
The man seemed confused when she finished. She wasn’t sure if her foreign language skills baffled him. He could’ve been mulling over the idea that a toxic food source wasn’t impossible, that pigeons were being poisoned and he hadn’t heard about it.
As he listened, he looked back at a picture on the wall of an old woman. He shook his head at the picture.
“What do you know about seagulls?” Louisa asked and waited.
The look of horror, the pouring and downing of two consecutive shots of grappa, answered her question. He knew seagulls were dying too. He didn’t know why. It frightened him.
Yet he said nothing. He rifled through some papers on the table, threw up his arms in frustration and swore at his grandmother’s photo. Next he rummaged through a desk drawer and continued to swear with increasing vulgarity. He found a photo and brought it over to her, a picture of a sandy beach covered with seagulls. Dead ones.
“I don’t care about the fucking pigeons,” she thought she heard him say.
“No?”
“No. Seagulls? Not much more,” she thought he said. Then he spit.
Often referred as “rats of the sea,” seagulls held little more respect than did pigeons in Italian beach towns. But Louisa sensed that the pigeon killer was concerned about the situation. He seemed uncertain and stared into the eyes of the his grandmother, or rather, her photo’s eyes. Louisa waited for him to continue.
“Ma . . . pericoloso.” But it’s dangerous, she thought he said. “Why you come here, to me?”
“To ask what you think is happening?”
He shook his head back and forth then poured three more grappas, Two for him, one for her. He motioned for her to drink.
After they both drank, he poured three more but Louisa waved hers off. One grappa a day was already excessive.
“You need. YOU need.” He insisted. She began to sip it as he watched her. “The fish,” he decided.
“The fish?”
“Si, i pesci.”
“Fish? If the fish are poisoned then fish should be dying too. Everywhere. They’re not dying.” Louisa told him.
This brought a joyful gleam into the man’s eyes. He grinned and walked over to the black and white picture of the old woman, his grandmother, to which he had been nodding, frowning and mouthing words.
Louisa could see the photo. It featured a beautiful woman, who was probably dead, based on the age of the photo.
“Thank you for this woman.” The man said as he stood in front of this photo. He said it in formal Italian like a church boy to whom the “Body of Christ” had just been offered. His hands folded in prayer position and he shook them at the picture. The picture seemed to smile.
He turned to Louisa. “You have work. You must go. Work.”
She didn’t understand why the man was instructing her to leave or what work he meant for her to do. It seemed likely it had something to do with dead birds, dead fish, and, maybe, dead glassmakers.
He picked up the empty espresso cups, ran to the kitchen, returned, scooped all the papers off the table and threw them in a plastic grocery bag filled with other trash. He waved Louisa to the door.
“What work must I do?” She hurried to the door.
“Find out why,” he said.
“Why they are dying?”
He nodded. “Wait,” he said.
He went over to a walnut cabinet full of gaudy trinkets, glass and silver figurines, crucifixes, envelopes, postcards and stuffed with every kind of junk you can imagine. He pulled out a locked case, no bigger than a cigar box. He had to rummage in the same cluttered cabinet to find the key to open it. The case held a tiny gun. Holding the pistol with both hands, he bowed and presented it to Louisa.
“My grandmother. It is her gun. She wants you to have it.”
Louisa looked down at what surely was a woman’s handgun. Delicate and crafted with ivory inlay and brass, it was no bigger than the palm of her hand. It fit there as if it were made from a mold for Louisa.
“You are giving me a gun?”
“Si, si, e vero, e tuo,” (Yes it’s true, it’s yours) the man said.
“What?”
“It was made for you.”
“Why?”
“Why made for you?”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
He thought for a minute. Perhaps he paused because he didn’t understand her English tenses. Maybe he paused because he was thinking of a way to respond in English. Or he simply didn’t know the answer to her question.
“I give to you because it is yours,” he said after the long pause. “You can kill a pigeon with it, maybe not a man. Try.”
Then he used a modified version of a typical Venetian slang phrase.
“You can scare the shit so bad out of a man that he will have to wipe his ass on the shore.” The shore being the side of a canal.
He didn’t laugh at his joke because it wasn’t a joke. When Venetians used the phrase, they meant it as an insult.
“Pieces of shit,” he next said in dialect. He spit a fake spit to whomever he was referring. She was sure it wasn’t the pigeons he had spit at. He spit at anyone responsible for a possible poisoned food source.
He stood with his ear cocked at the black and white photo of his grandmother.
“My grandmother say you must go now. Work,” he told Louisa after he nodded affirmatively to the woman in the picture.
“I don’t know where to go?”
“You must find,” he said. “Nonna says you must find.”
“How?”
“How? No capito.”
“Where? Where do I go to find dead fish?”
“Dottoressa Mangotti, dead fish is not what you must find,” he said.
At first flattered that he remembered her name, she realized it was likely because she’d been such a pain in his ass years ago during her short-lived, “Save the Pigeons” campaign. “The dead fish are not important,” Louisa said.
“No, dead fish not important. The problem is we have no dead fish.”
“No dead fish?”
“Si. No dead fish,” he said.
“If there are no dead fish then why are the pigeons and seagulls dying?” Louisa still didn’t understand the man’s point or what she was to find.
“It is not the fish because the fish would die too, no? It must be something else the birds eat.”
Louisa turned to the photo. “What are the birds eating?” She’d asked the woman in the photo, his dead grandmother.
“If fish are not dead then what do the birds eat. To kill them?” The man rephrased the question and translated it into
Venetian dialect for the picture.
“I don’t know,” Louisa thought she heard a woman say in Italian, “you must work. Find.”
The pigeon killer poured himself one more shot of grappa. Before he drank, he placed the gun back in the case and locked it.
“The gun. I thought were giving it to me,” said Louisa.
He nodded then plucked a plastic grocery bag out a huge pile of them. He shook his head then put the plastic bag down and retrieved a Gucci shopping bag for the gun instead. He unlocked the case, pulled out the gun, placed it in a Gucci felt bag, placed the felt bag inside the Gucci shopping bag and handed the bag to Louisa. He then gestured for her to drink the grappa and leave, but then he remembered he hadn’t finished his sentence or his grappa. He picked up his shot glass, put his arm around Louisa and he escorted her to the door. He raised his glass. “Dis you work to find. What dey eat? What birds eat to kill them? Salute.”
He drank it as if it were water, not the equivalent of very strong cough syrup mixed with jalapeno peppers and gasoline.
Louisa drank the one he handed her like it was catsup mixed with hot sauce mixed with turpentine mixed with piss.
She didn’t know what disturbed her more -- the eyes of the woman in the photo, which followed her around the room like the Mona Lisa or the little gun that fit perfectly in her hand. What was worse -- the man’s gift of the gun or the idea that birds were being poisoned by eating something other than fish? It all made her feel sick. And what made her really ill was that last shot of grappa. She wanted to vomit.
Outside on the street in the damp, cold air, she heard the door latch at least three times behind her. She felt the grappa rise not only in her belly but her throat, head and blood. She sat down on the stoop to reflect on what had occurred.
A pigeon dropping hit her arm, the one that held the bag with the gun. She glared up at the rooftop ghost.
“Nonna, I got it. You are here,” said Louisa, “I promise to take care of your gun.”
The nearby church bells rang once.
