He looked at his and considered this possibility. Appendage soup. “I don’t think it’s a finger. I think it’s an organ.”
“Lucia!” Lucia came running to the table from the kitchen. “Que sabor de sopa sirviste hoy?” What flavor soup are we having today?
“De pollo.”
“Y que es esto?” What’s this, I asked as I lifted my spoon to show her the tip of the thumb.
She leaned over and stared at my spoon for a moment. “Corazon.”
“Heart,” I translated for Marty.
Lucia returned to the kitchen, since we had no more questions. Marty and I both slurped around the organ meat and ate only the carrot cubes, the squash bits, the cut-up potatoes. We dipped our bread in the salty broth, focusing only on our bowls, working our way through the rest of the ingredients. Marty reached the bottom before I did.
“I’m going to try it,” he said, and he bit into his heart.
So I gave him mine.
The next day I stopped to pay a visit at the rabbit cemetery. I found the rocks scattered and the gravesites in shambles.
“Julio,” Mom said, referencing the gardener who had exiled my tortoises to the neighbor’s garden, “decided the graves were too shallow. He said he put everything back the way it was.”
“No, he didn’t,” I informed her. “I had made the cemetery very organized and pretty. Now it’s just a rock pile.”
“You can fix it, can’t you?”
That wasn’t the point. Too much tidying was going on. Didn’t Mom see that? Julio wanted a perfect garden, and to get it he murdered my pets. Did Mom prefer the idea of perfect zinnias too? I was so mad, but no one would listen to me. There was nothing I could do, so I began realigning the rocks in rows.
All I knew of Julio was the look of his stooped-over back as he deadheaded the zinnias and geraniums that bordered the house. It was him or the tortoises, he had told Mom. My father had brought home a set of tortoises from the Chapare jungle too. One so big I could straddle its back and lumber around the yard. But after the tortoises’ shovel feet dug divots through the grass lawn, Julio’d given his ultimatum. The tortoises went to live with the neighbors down the road.
Had he taken my rabbits’ fate into his own hands too? Mom had hinted at possible poisoning. “The snail bait he scatters around, it can’t be good for them.”
I let Charlie and Blanki run free in the yard. They hopped along the edge of the flowerbeds, chomping on the orange and red zinnias. I never picked them up by their long ears as I’d seen in the movies. I ran my hand under their bellies then scooped their yellow-stained feet with my other hand. The top of their lush pelt would rub the underside of my chin, while the tender pads on their paws thumped in my hand. The rabbits never liked to be held long. They wanted to hop around, to chew on Julio’s zinnias.
The only pets that Julio didn’t despise, at least not to my knowledge, were the parrots. Maybe he figured they had their own murderous intent, and he didn’t need to interfere.
After Marty went back to school, I thought about what he said. It was true. Pretty Bird was my buddy. And I should stand by him. Pretty Bird was quite a handsome parrot in his green feathers, with yellow and blue that peeked out around the edge of his wings. He appeared pleased to be told that he was pretty throughout the day. The way he cocked his head at me when I said “Pretty Bird” gave the impression he recognized the sounds. When he whistled and tweeted, it sounded as though he were saying his own name. Say it fast: Pretty Bird.
In the backyard, my father had built Pretty Bird and the Karamazov Brothers a bigger cage he covered in chicken wire. He propped sawed-off tree branches against the corners and balanced small limbs diagonally across the cage. Pretty Bird had plenty of room to climb and hop around and still ignore the other birds, so the tiny yellow cage was thrown away. But I still preferred to let him out as I had in Peru. “So he doesn’t fly away, we have to keep his wings clipped,” my father said. I certainly didn’t want him to escape again, so I watched as Dad wrapped his hand gently around Pretty Bird’s body, encasing the parrot’s wings as he pulled him out the door. Pretty Bird’s expression was perplexed. He was used to coming out of the cage on my finger, not inside the grip of a thick, albeit gentle, hand.
Outside the kitchen door sat a concrete chopping block that Lucia used to pound Bolivian beefsteak, silpancho, as thin as a magazine. My father laid Pretty Bird on his back, holding him down with one hand, then with the fingertips of the other hand, he unfolded a green wing, revealing the azure underfeathers. “Hold this,” he said, as he took my little hand in his big hand and placed it on the top of Pretty Bird’s splayed wing. The span of my hand equaled half the span of the wing. The vibration of the tiny body radiated up my arm. The concrete chopping block felt cold, but I knew it wasn’t the cold that made Pretty Bird shudder. My father picked up a long, thick-bladed butcher knife, and I cried out, “NO!”
“Hold him still. You don’t want Pretty Bird to fly away again, do you?”
“But it will hurt!” I couldn’t breathe I was so afraid of what he would do with that knife.
My father could sense things from me at times. He put the blade behind his back. “I’m only going to trim the edges of his feathers. Just a tiny bit.”
“But it will hurt,” I said, looking at Pretty Bird, who stared at me from the one eye on my side. His pupils pinned open and closed as they did when he worried.
“It won’t hurt at all,” my dad said. “Does it hurt when you trim your fingernails?”
I bit my nails down to the nubbins; they bled and hurt all the time. But I wasn’t sure it would be the same. Pretty Bird was made of all feathers, while my fingernails were just tiny little white moons.
“We will be very careful. If we trim too much it will be like cutting the quick on your nails, so you have to hold very still.” Pretty Bird squirmed. “We should get it over with,” he explained.
“Are you sure?”
“I promise, it won’t hurt.”
I watched as my father took the sharp edge of the knife, like a cleaver, and severed the bottom pieces of Pretty Bird’s wings. The blade made small snaps as the feathers were blunted. I didn’t move. Not even to breathe.
“Now the other side,” my father said, and we folded the first wing in and pulled the other wing out, snapping the bottom edges off it as well. Snips of blue and green feathers scattered on the cutting board, then fluttered to the ground. We let Pretty Bird go, and he righted himself.
“Now we’ll see if it worked,” my father said, and he brushed his hand behind Pretty Bird’s tail feathers. My parrot hopped along for a moment, then opened his newly clipped wings and floated the few feet to the ground. He flopped for a moment on the back patio concrete, unable to take flight for more than a few inches.
“We should do that regularly, so he doesn’t leave again,” my dad explained. I nodded. Pretty Bird must never leave. Wasn’t he the one thing I loved that I could make stay?
I watched for any signs of hurt, but Pretty Bird fluttered his wings, poked around for a bit with his beak. Then he waddled off.
“Don’t tell me when you do it,” I said, picking a piece of green feather off my sleeve.
“You don’t like it?” my father asked.
With his wings clipped, Pretty Bird could be let out of the cage to wander around the backyard, hopping and fluttering his wings in an attempt to fly. This made him like a chicken rather than the jungle parrot that he was. The wing-clipping procedure scared me, but I was glad he couldn’t leave me. I was conflicted about my ability to care for him. Could I have a friend without clipping their wings?
“I just don’t want to see it,” I said.
Fig. 5. Mom, Amy, and Dad on hilltop over Cochabamba, Bolivia. Courtesy of the author.
What I Do See
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
—Jonathan Swift
Many years ago I thought a house I lived in was haunted. I went to th
e library and did research on ghosts. I learned that the noisy ghosts are officially “poltergeists” and are spirits stuck on this earthly plane because of a traumatic death. They don’t know they are dead, so they are trying to reach out to get someone to notice them. If a spirit is encountered, this book on paranormal activity instructed, help the spirit by telling it to call to a dead family member to come help them to the other side.
The idea of being trapped in between worlds, of not being fully able to participate in either, sounds like banging on a glass window and no one on the other side paying any attention to you. I understand that feeling of looking out and tap, tap, tapping on the glass, seeing others just beyond my grasp, but not being able to get their attention. I wave frantically. Nothing. I scream, and no one hears me. I wonder, do the Chancay look for their belongings, their nice set of pottery dishes with the monkey handles that aren’t in the grave where they’d been left, but are instead in my parents’ living room? Maybe they are tapping on the glass of the other world wanting to know when we are going to give them back. Or are they watching us silently, curious how we live the way we do? Is the headless prince looking for his body? Surely he is banging on the glass. He should be the one screaming. I understand this searching, scanning for what isn’t there. Looking in vain for what can’t be. Wondering who we are.
Maybe I’m the noisy ghost. The poltergeist.
I have a memory of a benign, ordinary weekend day, another weekend excursion, including a picnic that really isn’t so ordinary at all. But I suppose none of our outings were as ordinary as I had once thought they were. I have begun to see that my family is extraordinary in its quirky denial, selective photographic memory, and provincial inattention. We are only ordinary in our origins.
My small family, Mom and Dad and I, had left for the day. We packed a picnic and drove to the countryside, up farther into the Andes, until we found a spot we liked, preferably a clearing with a view of the verdant, steep peaks and scenic plateaus. In the Bolivian mountains the brisk clouds moved in and out around us, often hiding our picnic spot at such high altitude, then burning off just as quickly with the sharp sun. We laid out a blanket and set out our sandwiches, a thermos of hot coffee, and the wax-paper-wrapped brownies Lucia had made from ground cacao beans Dad brought from the jungle. With rocks we weighted down the corners of the wool blanket to keep the wind from gathering it up with our belongings and tossing it over the side of the steep mountain. I liked to watch the misty air with its dampness and flecks of moisture that gathered on our alpaca sweaters like tiny reflectors.
We ate our sandwiches and brownies with abandon because the cloudy atmosphere moored the chill and kept us shivering. The landscape moved in and out like a camera lens adjusting to zoom and distance, as the nebula shifted and rearranged its position. At twelve or thirteen thousand feet above sea level, the sun warmed only the first layer of skin and couldn’t seep down to our nearer-to-sea-level bones. I wrapped my arms around my shins and hugged myself to stay warm. I wouldn’t dare say I was bored, as that would make me sound unappreciative of the Andean landscape.
For a moment the cloud cover broke open like an egg revealing the yolk of sun. And in that moment the jagged peaks across the valley from where we picnicked revealed to me what the line “purple mountains majesty” meant—that it wasn’t just a place far, far away or a line in an anthem. I walked to the edge of the cliff to look closer, to see what it was that made those mountains really purple. I became conscious that the optical illusion worked like colored film over the distant vision. Purple mountains were a mirage. I observed how the clouds sat lower than the mountaintops, and when I paid attention, I saw how the mist closing in on me was the same cloud that sat below the peak across the valley. I’d been picnicking inside a cloud. That didn’t sound boring at all. I pointed it out to my mom and dad, but they said they already knew that. The mist thickened and the clouds enveloped all of us overhead and all around.
A pack of vicuñas passed by in the brume. My small family hadn’t even known the skittish descendants of the llama clambered just a few feet away. So rare to see the timid high-altitude vicuña. The fog ascended when a breeze rushing up the mountainside collided with the sun, and the tiny, long-necked camelids paused with surprise where they grazed within a few feet of us. With expedience, the vicuñas darted off the cliff. To us, it appeared as though they dove off, plummeting to their death, but their soft, padded ungulate feet helped them down the steep, rocky surface below the clouds. We, just three of us, had frightened them. Or had they frightened us?
The mist grew thicker and lower, and soon it seemed we were inside our own Styrofoam container. “It’s too cold,” my mom said, already wrapped in ruanas and ponchos. Across the road, the Land Rover began to disappear. With no view and the dense air now more wet than fog, we packed up our picnic and loaded it and ourselves into the vehicle. I was relieved to be inside the dry automobile, but wished we could have stayed on the mountaintop longer. I liked being inside my own cloud. I imagined it was how birds felt. Like inside my head, I played in the clouds.
This is what that day on the mountain revealed: my family was there when they were there. Then gone, just like that. Like the Andes behind the clouds, when they showed up, when they were in the room with me, I knew my family as whole. Then they’d be gone, poof, just like that. Gone until the next time they chose to make an appearance. Gone until the sun shone and burned away the cloud. I couldn’t conjure my family members on my own; I had to wait until they wanted to show themselves. Like ghosts, like apparitions that I had only to believe in, but could never sustain. I could never know when they would appear and when they would disappear. I never knew if they would show themselves again. The joy I felt when they were there, the elation, the unbelievable happiness, was fleeting. And I came to know that it was fleeting, that the apparition, be it mother, father, sister, or brother, would be present only for an instant, and then they would leave again. So I learned to make every moment count, every memory. When no one was around, when I was waiting, I was alone. I waited not knowing whether they, one of them, all of them, might show up again. Always, always in the back of my mind was the possibility that what I had seen before was just a figment of my imagination.
Back down the mountain, my father pulled the Land Rover up to the white gates of our house. I knew my role, whether pouring rain or sun; I hopped out of the rear door of the vehicle and ran to unlock the gate padlock. In the pouring rain, I pushed half of the gate to the side of the driveway, then ran the other half back to the opposite side. I stood against the gate, holding it open, but looked down at the driveway’s concrete cracks. Toads liked to hide in the cracks, but in a downpour they ventured out. One especially fat one squeezed itself out of the concrete and hopped in the soggy grass.
The Land Rover pulled past me, but I was entranced by the toads and the rain.
Lucia waited at the front door. I could hear my mom over my shoulder as I pulled the gate closed and replaced the padlock. “It’s your day off, Lucia, what are you doing here?”
“Lo siento, Señora,” she said.
Lucia handed me a cylindrical cardboard container. I recognized it as the box for a sixty-watt lightbulb. I could see the light green feathers poking through the bottom opening.
The birds from the same nest, Lucia told the story, rushed the one that was not their brother, pecked, batted their wings, lunged, dive-bombed and mobbed him. She had heard the squawking, the screeching, but was back at her apartment (where the electric showerhead was, I thought) and had arrived too late.
In the big cage on the back porch the Brothers Karamazov hopped from branch to branch, unremorseful of their murderous tendencies. My dad stood behind me as I looked at their dark green feathers, the way they groomed each other, nudged their beaks on the other.
“They came from the same nest,” my dad said. “They weren’t accepting of another bird that wasn’t like them. Birds of a feather . . .”
Pretty Bird had
been my flock, and I had not looked out for him.
I buried Pretty Bird in his sixty-watt coffin next to Charlie and Blanki in the cemetery, just past Lucia’s electrocution showerhead.
Soon after, Dad announced we’d been transferred again. When we moved back to the States, Lucia said she would find a new home for the Karamazov Brothers. The cages were dismantled and thrown away.
Bolivia is still my favorite country. I think if that song is correct, that we really can leave our heart somewhere, mine is in Cochabamba. I recall sitting in our courtyard with Mom, eating the brownies Lucia made from the cacao beans Dad brought from the jungle, Pretty Bird climbing the wrought iron chairs to get a peck of brownie from our fingers, opera music wafting over the fence that separated us from God’s house.
When I was in my thirties and still searching for what I wanted to do in my life, I worked in Bolivia for an American nonprofit helping to build gardens for the families in Cochabamba and Potosí, a mountain town. One of my favorite moments in that job was when the families who owned the gardens threw me a party to thank me and my organization for the gift of fresh vegetables. I stepped outside to find long tables sitting slanted on the mountain slope, covered in white table cloths. Twenty folding chairs sat at the table as they were serving all of us dinner, sirloin steak with fresh salad, of course. These steaks, I knew, were a month’s salary for them. The catch: I was a California vegetarian. But how could I not eat the steak they had prepared for me? How could I be so unaccepting? I knew Bolivians would not understand my vegetarianism.
I ate the steak. And I haven’t been a vegetarian since.
Part 4
ReEntry
If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been to a family reunion.
—Ashleigh Brilliant
Helter Skelter
Look out helter skelter
When We Were Ghouls Page 25
