by Bea Gonzalez
Later he will ask himself, how did I know, how did I sense what was happening, deep in the gut? It is true, there is much science cannot account for, much science cannot easily explain. But for now he has only one thought: I must get to Don Victor’s hacienda as quickly as I can.
Roberto Duarte emerges from his house, summoned by a servant. Tousle-haired and bleary-eyed, he is disoriented by the insistence with which Nelson has been pounding on his door.
“Edward?” he asks, eyebrows raised high.
“I am sorry for the commotion, dear friend, but it is of great importance that you allow me the use of your horse and carriage.”
“Yes, of course, but why?”
Nelson provides him with the barest of explanations before insisting he must be on his way.
“But what would Very Useful and Diego be doing at Don Victor’s estate?” Roberto calls after his friend, who has already started walking quickly towards the stables with one of Roberto’s servants by his side.
“Pigeons,” Nelson calls out.
“Pigeons?” Roberto repeats, tone incredulous, eyes perplexed, but before the good man can enquire further, Nelson has already disappeared from sight.
In the stables, a figure emerges from the shadows.
“Sofia?” Nelson asks, his heart in his throat.
“Take me with you,” she says, not so much a question as an insistent demand. She has heard the exchange between Nelson and her father, is determined to accompany this man to the ends of the earth to find Diego if that is what is required.
“Sofia, this is sheer lunacy,” Nelson responds. He is about to argue that this is no place for women, that what lies before them is a territory of a most dangerous kind, but he sees immediately that it will be impossible to dissuade her from the idea, and, knowing that time is of the essence, consents grudgingly to her request with pursed lips and a warning that she must do exactly as he says.
“I will, Mr. Nelson, I will,” she promises, climbing into the coach quickly, excitement and concern coursing equally through her veins.
They travel to the hacienda, each immersed in their private thoughts—his suffused with foreboding as he considers what may be awaiting them there, hers full of questions she is too frightened to ask.
He thinks: Can it be possible that my own obsessions have led Diego to this madness? Has he been infected with my tortures, my longing to set the impossible to rights? He looks quickly at Sofia, thinks fleetingly of the pigeons, curses the moment he drew the map of Don Victor’s hacienda with a stick on the ground.
And she thinks: What mystery lies at the heart of this? What could Diego be doing at Don Victor’s hacienda so early in the day? And why? For weeks she has been trying to unravel the tangled threads left behind since Don Victor’s ball, but no matter how hard she tries, things resist coming free.
And what could Mr. Nelson have to do with all of this? She looks over at him now, sees his ashen face, attempts to glean the thoughts that lie behind his clouded eyes. A thought strikes her then. This man, the man she has admired all of her life, the man she had once dreamed of following to the very ends of the earth in search of a specimen, a theory, a skin, the man who has taught her more than anyone else in the world—this man is a complete enigma to her, as impenetrable as a stone wall. And how have I not seen this before? she asks herself. What levels, what depths lie in this man’s soul?
He looks at her now, meets her curious eyes with his. “Sofia,” he says and then he pauses as if measuring what he is about to say next.
“Sofia,” he repeats sighing.
And then: It is about two birds …
*
Inside the aviary at Don Victor’s estate, Diego has been trying to find a way to carry the pigeons out. The birds are housed in a cage that is much too large to be picked up. He opens the doors and holds his hands out to the two of them, which are chattering and kecking loudly as they circle frantically about.
“Venga, venga,” he whispers, “come to me, my friends.” He puts some seeds and berries in his hands. “Venga, venga,” he says, more frantically this time. The time is running out, he tells himself. The smoke is getting denser, the cries in the distance are growing fainter as if the estate has now been emptied of all but those who are trying to raze it to the ground. No matter what he does, however, the birds will not come to his side.
It is then that Diego has a thought. What is more beautiful a song, he thinks, than the one that lures a lover close to one’s breast? A siren song, the one with the promise of the present and the future fused in a single note, in a single breath—the mating song that accompanies the fluffing of feathers, the squealing, the fanning of a tail, the bobbing of a head and the raising of a leg.
So it is that Diego begins to coo and cluck and keck, just as Mr. Nelson had once shown him, making a song from tinkling sounds that resemble the distant ringing of bells, trying to attract the pigeons to his side with their own mating call. And after some time, an eternity in Diego’s mind, the birds do come to perch on his arm, first the female, and then the male follows closely behind.
Holding the birds tightly to his chest, Diego stumbles out of the aviary and heads back to meet Very Useful, who has now been joined near the entrance of the hacienda by his frantic patrón and la Señorita Sofia no less, both demanding explanations, both trying to make sense of the conflagration before them, the sight of a wounded Don Victor being attended to by a servant nearby and their fear for Diego, making the situation seem all the worse.
Now, from outside the aviary, one of the insurrectionists, a short stout man dressed entirely in black, watches as a figure emerges from the building with something underneath each arm. The son, the man thinks, there before me must be none other than Don Victor Blanco’s only son. Carrying out something of value, no doubt, hoping to escape unperceived, his body shrouded by the smoke, a fleeing figure that seems already ghost. The man picks up his gun, aims it at Diego, shoots once, twice, three times.
Diego feels something burn into his side. He tries to focus all of his attention on walking, on holding onto the birds. Concentrate, Diego, he tells himself as he makes his way to the gates, his eyes failing him, his hands growing weaker with every passing step. I must keep walking, he tells himself, get the birds out. He is moments away, he knows, from escaping what seems now to be the very pit of hell. He starts to turn around then, suddenly confused, no longer sure of which direction he is walking, which way is down, which way up.
From beyond the grounds, Nelson spots Diego as he attempts to make his way across the path. Why is he tottering around like that? he asks himself. The smoke, it must be the smoke. He begins to run towards him and it is just then that Diego stumbles, wading in a sea of delirium, forgetting suddenly what he is doing, where he is.
Is it ever really possible to leave the past behind? Because in the confusion of that moment his mind has catapulted him back to another place in time. Seville. He thinks then he can hear the music, see the women with the roses in their hair, that he can smell the oranges and the jasmine, the faint scent of olive from the distant groves, that he can feel the cobblestones as he tries to take one step and another and another one yet, each more difficult than the one before it, a mountain to be scaled. He thinks of Emilio then, his beloved father hiding beneath the counter of the Librería Alfonso, lost in one of his books of poetry, reciting those hallowed English words to himself. And he thinks of Mónica, poor Mónica, condemned to live in the half-light of failed promises, failed dreams; a woman made old by all that she desired and that lay forever beyond her reach.
Is this how it all ends? he hears his Uncle Alfonso say, outrage in his voice. Are we merely the playthings of the gods?
The birds, Diego says to himself now, the birds. He thinks then of the way Mr. Nelson had once described the beauty of the pigeons in flight, how swift they were, how graceful they appeared as they ascended into the open sky. He raises his arms up and releases the pigeons into the air, watches mesmerized as
the birds rise up, flapping their wings, now slowly, now powerfully, until they have flown over the main arch and into the forest that surrounds the hacienda, vigorous, elegant, a most wondrous sight to feast the eyes upon in such a maelstrom of confusion and despair. He sighs in contentment, watching as the birds disappear into the forest canopy for good. Free, he whispers, the birds are free. It is then that Nelson appears before him, in time to catch Diego just as he topples onto the ground.
“Did you see them?” Diego asks, wonder in his eyes. “Did you see the birds fly out?” And in that moment, with everything shrouded in smoke, his mind delirious from his wounds, he thinks it is Emilio who has picked him up and is now holding him in his arms.
“Ay, I did, Diego, they were indeed a spectacular sight,” Nelson replies, cradling the young man’s head in his hands, trying frantically to stem the blood that is escaping from his side, watching horrified as Diego’s smile fades and his eyes slowly close.
Madness, Mr. Nelson will say later, agony in his voice, trying with all his might to console a young girl who will not be consoled. It is madness all, he will repeat, over and over again, to himself, to her, to the world. The smoke, the rage, the futility of one man’s quest and no bird spectacular enough on earth to make the matter less unbearable, to bring his wounded soul comfort or relief.
Ah, but at least the music remains—the scratchy krrrk of a Keele-Billed Toucan, the thin whistle of a Rose-Throated Becard, the coo coo of a Mourning Dove that sings its sadness to the world at large.
THE CURTAIN CALL
Another five years would pass before the Revolution fully arrived in the Yucatán. In 1915 General Alvarado entered Mérida leading his troops in their Stetson hats, rifles in hand, ammunition belts criss-crossing their chests, a norteño mariachi band at their beck and call, a band that would park itself in the courtyard of the governor’s palace and play “La Cucaracha” over and over again every day from dawn until dusk. Alvarado would end slavery in the Yucatán, he would outlaw pimps, eliminate bordellos, deprive the Yucatecans of their wicked pleasures—cantinas, bullfighting, their raffles and their lotteries—would even bring in the American big guns under the guise of the Boy Scouts. He would transform churches into schools, empower the rural maestro, would start a “great books” program. He would punish the abuses he found perpetuated freely by the hacendados, would even go so far as to publicly humiliate the daughters of a prominent planter found guilty of coercing their former slaves to kiss their hands, which had been strictly prohibited by then.
He would not, in the immediate future, however, be able to keep the henequeros from continuing to amass their enormous wealth. Politics was one thing, revolution another thing yet, but economics ruled the world and in this realm the luck was still running high for those who cultivated henequen. The First World War was on and the Americans wanted their bread, needed rope to bind the sheaves for their wheat. The Yucatán was their only possible source now that the Philippines and other markets had been closed to them. So it was that the henequeros made their final stand, reaping the last of their outrageous fortunes, for the War would soon end, synthetic fibres were waiting in the wings and the slave labour that had once made their product cheap to produce was no longer an option available to them.
Using primitive glass plate and early cut-film cameras, hundreds of photographers descended upon Mexico, risking life and limb to record the images that were transforming the nation for all time. Their negatives were printed on postcard stock and distributed far and wide, visual testaments to the revolution that had been unleashed and that would continue raging for years—its aims in many ways still unmet today, almost a century after the guns were fired for the very first time.
*
Stuffed in one of our grandmother’s many boxes were dozens of these postcards, grainy and weathered by time. Among them, there were a few that we especially prized. One depicted perfectly the divide across the Rio Grande with some Americans standing on the northern shore—the women in pristine dresses, the men in dark suits—while across the river, facing them wearily, stood a group of Mexican insurgents, rifles in hand, sombreros on their heads. Another featured none other than Pancho Villa himself, riding a horse furiously into the camera lens. Our favourite though, was the picture of a young boy, no more than eight, sword in one hand, gun strapped to his waist, an ammunition belt wrapped around his arms and chest, all the fervor of a true revolutionary in his gaze.
Our grandmother gave the last performance of her grand opera when the oldest of us was only ten. A stroke felled her soon after and she was confined to a bed for a year until her death. By that time her hearing had grown weak, her English and Spanish had become all mixed up so that a woman who had once prided herself on her verbal acuity could no longer remember when it was appropriate to speak one language and when the other was called for. In that last year it was the music that consoled her, the arias, the bulerías, the rancheras that told of another place and time.
Our Abuela died peacefully in her sleep but not before asking to hear one more song. We prepared ourselves for her beloved “Liebestod” from Tristand und Isolde but instead she requested the song she had once played for our grandfather when he too had stood upon the threshold of death:
Y todo aquello pasó,
Todo quedo en olvido
(And all of that is behind us
Everything is but a memory now)
The years passed and the opera faded into the recesses of our minds like Mozart’s Idomeneo, waiting in the wings to be rediscovered by the opera cognoscenti and performed once again to cheers and applause.
In the end, it was not the music that brought us back to the opera but a discovery made by our cousin Lily while researching Mexican birds. Edward William Nelson, we were astounded to find out, had been no creation of our grandmother’s fertile mind—he had indeed travelled the length of Mexico in the late-nineteenth century and, together with his assistant, Edward Goldman, had classified countless mammals and birds. Later, he would take a leading role in spearheading the many measures that would aid in the conservation and the general administration of wildlife in his own country. He would be instrumental in the negotiation of the Migratory Bird Treaty with Great Britain and Canada, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act and the Alaska Game Law of 1925.
Nelson died in 1934 at the age of seventy-nine, never married and with no known descendants, resigned like Absalom to leave the earth with no son to keep his name in remembrance. Nevertheless, he did leave his mark in many other ways. A man who had never been trained in proper laboratory techniques, who had never finished an official course of study at a university, a naturalist in the old style, self-motivated, self-taught, has today over one hundred mammals, birds and plants named after him as well as a number of geographic features in the states of Alaska and California.
Of Diego Clemente nothing remains except the recipes for Bautista’s stews, the map and a yellowed photograph, which are still in our hands today. Did he really exist, we ask ourselves, or had he been our grandmother’s invention, her alter ego, her unlived masculine self?
As for the fate of the Passenger Pigeon—that, alas, is all too well known. In 1896 the last significant chapter for these birds was written in the state of Ohio. By then, only a quarter of a million remained of the billions that had once filled the sky. In April of that year they came together in one last great nesting flock in the forest on Green River near Mammoth Cave. Recently installed telegraph lines were used to notify the hunters of the appearance of this flock and they arrived by railway from far and wide. The result was catastrophic—two hundred thousand carcasses were taken, another forty thousand were mutilated and wasted, one hundred thousand newborn chicks were destroyed or abandoned to predators in their nests. Only five thousand were thought to have escaped.
The hunters’ efforts were wasted in the end. The birds—packaged for shipment to markets in the East—rotted under a scorching sun when a der
ailment prevented them from being shipped as planned. The putrefied carcasses of the two hundred thousand birds were disposed of in a nearby ravine.
The last bird of its kind, Martha, died alone at the age of twenty-nine inside the Cincinnati Zoo at about one o’clock on September 1, 1914. There were few then who understood the significance of what had just come to pass. A bird that had once thundered across open skies had been vanquished for good—driven to extinction by man’s ignorance and greed.
But there are the other two still left unaccounted for, the two pigeons freed by Diego Clemente in the early hours of a late December day in 1910. In our minds we can see them flying majestically over the imposing arch of Don Victor Blanco’s hacienda, their wings flapping now slowly, now powerfully, up, up until they have disappeared into the forest and into a new life in the wild. They are our very own Adam and Eve, the founders of a new line that remains hidden in the forests somewhere in North America, biding their time until the terrain has been made safe for their return.
Years after our grandmother’s death we still perform the opera, are thankful for what life leaves behind—a corrido, an aria, a soléa, the early-morning song of a cardinal that announces itself to the world.
On the chair where our Abuela once sat, weaving her story note by note, silencing our titters with the wave of her hand, on that chair we sit and take turns now, relating the tales of our ancestors, the good and the bad, to our own children, who scoff and cheer and laugh.
