by Pablo Medina
“Rainwater. Purest there is,” Juan said. “I macerate it with grape leaves.”
He pointed to a separate cage next to the large one and said, “Those five birds are the dominant ones. The rest of the flock follows them and turns when they turn. I usually let one out at a time; otherwise, the flock will split up and become confused.”
Juan pulled out a bird, handling it with great delicacy, and held it out to Elena.
“Beautiful, no?”
“Yes,” she said, but in truth she was disgusted. In Piedra Negra pigeons were considered the devil’s birds. Filthy and disease-ridden, they brought misfortune to any house on which they landed. Holding a pigeon was like holding a rat with wings. She held her breath and kept the bird at arm’s length.
Juan explained that it was not easy to tell any one bird’s sex. The males usually mount the females when they mate, but some very dominant females will exhibit that behavior to assert their dominance.
“The one you’re holding is a female, I think,” he said. “In Japan, I hear, there are specialists who study a long time to be able to tell the difference between male and female birds by simply looking at them.”
After taking the bird from Elena’s hands, he opened the door to the other cages and threw the bird he was holding up in the air. The pigeon fluttered a few times, and the rest followed. The flock flew around the building twice, getting in a tighter formation until it became a fluid ball five meters across, moving at great speed several blocks to the north, where it became a barely visible smudge against the blue sky. The birds returned in an arc that led them deep over the city roofs away from the sea. The ball changed shape constantly in midair, governed by a cohesive force that kept them from dispersing. They approached the building again, and with two or three birds vying for the lead, the flock came to rest along the wall and on top of the pergola. After a few minutes the pigeons were back in their cages, except the lead pigeon, who waited for Juan to pick her up.
“Pigeons are social animals,” Juan said. “And they’re smarter than you think. They follow the lead bird and the weaker ones align themselves behind it. Other birds on the far edges of the ball will try to control it, but the leader dominates. The flock is constantly involved in a power struggle to determine which bird ultimately decides the direction of the flight.”
Elena nodded and waited for Juan to get her another cup of water.
“They’re like people. They like to follow. Those with strong personalities prefer to be in front. Once in a while a very strong female makes her presence felt in the coop. She pecks away at the weaker ones. Some birds won’t join a flock. They refuse to be controlled. We call them loners.”
“What do you do with them?”
“These days we eat them.”
With all the pigeons back inside Juan closed the cage doors and led Elena back down to the apartment, where Mirta had dinner ready, a soup with some unrecognizable meat in it along with yuca and potatoes. Elena ate the vegetables and broth, but she picked around the meat, afraid it was pigeon. Afterward, she was so tired she had barely enough energy to change her clothes and get ready for bed. Her blanket was a large Argentinean flag the tango band sent back when they finally reached their country.
The following afternoon Mirta took Elena to the Writers’ Union’s central office, which was located in a large house that had belonged to an oligarch from the days of the republic. Mirta weaseled her way past the reluctant receptionist into an inner office, where they met a young man who recognized Elena’s name. He led them into an elaborate salon furnished with period pieces the former owner had brought from Europe. The chair Elena sat in had a tear in the seat through which the stuffing showed.
The young man offered them coffee, which they both accepted eagerly, good coffee being a rare commodity in the capital. He promised to return in a moment, but the moment stretched to almost an hour. Finally, they heard the voices of several people approaching. Among them, clearly dominant, was Daniel Arcilla’s smoky baritone.
The poet entered the room by himself as the other voices diminished down the outer corridor and disappeared. He was smoking a large cigar they call a Churchill, named after the English prime minister, and he spewed mouthfuls of smoke that clouded his face. In a tone of voice that was neither satiric nor sincere, or was both those things at once, he said to Elena, “What beauty!”
Quickly she concluded he was praising her poetry, not her physical attributes, which she’d always thought unworthy of superlatives, and said thank you, offering him a shy, eager smile.
Arcilla asked about her trip and inquired where she was staying. Before Elena had a chance to answer, Mirta broke in and said she was with her and her husband. He nodded without taking his eyes off Elena.
“The presentation of the award is next week,” he said. “Stop by tomorrow. I’ll gather a group and we’ll have a luncheon in your honor. We can talk then about your work and how we can promote it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Arcilla,” Elena said.
“Call me Daniel. Let nobility have its titles.”
Later, as they were walking out of the building, Mirta turned to Elena and said, “Careful with Arcilla. He’s interested only in himself. And he’s married, with three children!”
“He’s a great poet,” Elena said. “He hides behind his cigar. Without that implement he’d be vulnerable.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Besides, I wasn’t about to let you stay in an official hotel. Then you’d feel obligated to him. I tell you, that man is capable of anything. I could smell alcohol on him, besides that awful cigar.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Elena was thinking about how Piedra Negrans consumed firewater as if it were mother’s milk.
“In the middle of the afternoon?” Mirta replied. “That says a lot.”
They headed down a street of solidly built houses that were now, like most of the city, in various states of decay. Mirta pointed to one and said that it had belonged to Fernando León, the sugar magnate. Elena didn’t recognize the name.
“Where have you been all your life?” Mirta asked.
“In Piedra Negra,” Elena said. She had never had to think about where she was from or found it a lesser place than any other. Until the poets came, the town was the center of her universe, where no celebrity from the capital ever counted for much unless he invested his money in the impoverished town, and that happened rarely.
Mirta shook her head and said, “People here will eat you alive if you don’t wise up.” She went on to explain that Fernando León had been one of the richest men on the island.
“One less rich man as far as I’m concerned,” Elena said. She’d been infected with the anticapitalist fervor of the new order. “What happened to him?”
“After the Revolution took his fortune, he went into exile, like so many others, and there was a changing of the guard: new money, new ways, new people telling us how to behave, what to believe.”
It was the kind of comment that marked her as a counterrevolutionary and could get Mirta in trouble.
“Has your life changed that much?” Elena asked. She was convinced the Revolution was a good thing. Her brothers had died for the cause.
“Honestly, no. Except that now we look over our shoulders more often.”
The luncheon honoring Elena the following day was attended by several writers who had an official association with the Writers’ Union. Roberto Ferrante, the vice president, was the first person to greet her. Gaunt and pale, he had the look of someone who practiced levitation. Ferrante was a poet of some note and wrote a daily column for a government-sanctioned literary weekly. He praised Elena’s poetry with grandiose statements that he punctuated with waves of his arms, but once at the table, he ignored her and directed his attention to Daniel, who sat at the head. She sat next to him on his right and hid her bad hand under the table. She didn’t want to be known as La Manquita in the capital. To the left of Daniel was the second vice president, Víctor Li, wh
om they called El Sapo because he had the face of a belligerent toad. He said very little during the meal and shifted constantly in his seat. He’d been director of propaganda during the first year of the Revolution and was rewarded with a permanent post at the union, a sinecure that allowed him to attend all the union’s events. Despite the heat, he wore a long-sleeved shirt that he kept buttoned to the neck. A few months later he was found dead in his apartment, tied to a chair with electric wire, one of his eyes gouged out and his body covered with cigarette burns.
Also at the table was Yanis Martínez, the secretary, who wore flowing silk robes to cover her rotundity, and next to her was the treasurer, a sharp-eyed grandmotherly type by the name of Lourdes Franco, whose title was honorific since the budget for the Writers’ Union was controlled by the Ministry of Culture. At the foot of the table was a man dressed in a white guayabera that accentuated his dark skin. He smiled much of the time and kept a notebook and pencil next to his water glass. Eventually Elena would learn that he was the party ideologue, sent from the Ministry to ensure the proceedings didn’t deviate from official norms. Everyone made fun of him behind his back, though he could, with a quick signature, ruin a career, or what passed for a career in those days. He had a weakness for rum, which the other officials encouraged. Halfway through the meal he was asleep and softly snoring, the rum having achieved its desired effect.
In front of Daniel Arcilla was a bottle of Russian vodka, which he poured freely for himself, while the others drank rum, straight or with lime, until the food arrived. Elena, who had sworn off alcohol after her experience with her father’s firewater, drank orange juice. It was bitter, but she forced it down so as not to seem ungrateful. The first course was a warm lobster salad in a light vinaigrette, accompanied by Spanish cava, several cases of which, according to Roberto Ferrante, had been presented to the Writers’ Union by the Spanish ambassador. Ferrante tried to get Elena to drink some of it, but she resisted, inventing for herself a virulent allergy to alcoholic drinks. “What a tragedy,” he said to her, and raised the glass, scrutinizing the liquid, sipping it, and sighing deeply. The second course was a garlic soup, which was so good it erased the discomfort Elena had felt to that point. She wanted to stop the conversation and comment on the broth, the likes of which she had never tasted in Piedra Negra, where food was intended to fill one’s belly, not excite one’s palate. The soup course was accompanied by a white wine from Catalonia, and there were comments about its excellence.
The third course was a gritty, metallic spinach salad. It was the first time she had tasted spinach in her life, and she knew of it only because she’d read Popeye comics as a girl and had seen him eat it out of the can to make himself strong. The salad was followed by medallions of veal tenderloin in an almost imperceptible Madeira sauce, served with a red Bordeaux, a rare vintage of Cheval Blanc that Ferrante claimed was the best wine ever produced, yet another gift to the union, this time from the French cultural attaché. The delicacy of the veal dish was not lost on Elena, however, and Piedra Negra faded with every bite. The next course was a cheese board with honey from the western part of the island, and the dessert was a chocolate soufflé, along with an oloroso sherry that, Ferrante said with a grand flourish of his arm, complemented it perfectly.
The chef, it turned out, was a mulatto trained in Paris who had worked in the household of an army colonel from the previous government. Now in the employ of the Writers’ Union, he sensed perhaps that the European largesse would end soon, and he was taking advantage of all the gifts of food and drink to prepare for these writer-soldiers of the Revolution the most decadent dishes they would ever taste, on or off the island. A few years later, when the mulatto had disappeared into the comfortable anonymity of life in the United Sates, the writers, then subsisting on canned Russian meat and watery split pea soup, waxed nostalgically about the glory days when they had an embarrassment of riches at their disposal and a cook who knew what to do with it.
Elena was inebriated not from the alcohol but from the rich food and the conversation: the references to writers she hadn’t read; the gossip about who was having sex with whom, who’d betrayed the Revolution, who’d been arrested for a crime called “improper conduct,” and many other things she didn’t understand. After the party ideologue left the room and they were having coffee and Spanish brandy, Yanis the secretary brought out a marijuana cigarette, a gift, she said with a snicker, from an American professor of Marxism who was visiting the island in support of la lucha, or “the struggle,” as he called it. A group of young poets joined them and scurried like squirrels around Daniel Arcilla, who had lit one of his large cigars and sat back blowing the smoke upward so that it blended with the marijuana, forming a pall over the table. Elena felt light-headed, and something like a worm stirred in her. She looked at Daniel, the bottle of vodka before him a third full. He stared back at her through the cigar smoke he exhaled like a dragon and smiled at her.
She could hear waves lapping an imaginary shore, the seagulls squawking overhead, the breeze blowing through a cluster of sea grape. The young poets ran around the table chiming like joyful bells. Yanis laughed like a witch. Lourdes Franco, old hand yellowed like parchment, sat on Ferrante’s pontifical lap and licked his neck. Somewhere in Elena was the conviction that she was a better person and better poet than all of them, with the exception of Daniel Arcilla. That thought emboldened her, knowing that the future was in front of her, in the figure of the arrogant, brilliant poet who was the glory of the Revolution.
When Elena returned from the luncheon, still reeling from the attention she’d received and the marijuana smoke she’d inadvertently inhaled, she came upon Mirta pacing back and forth in the living room, her face twisted by anxiety and eyes bleary with tears. In the midst of her panic she blurted out that Juan left the door to the roof open and Pity the parrot had flown away.
“Nothing like this has happened before. She’s been a faithful parrot for many years. Juan has really done it now, he’s really done it.” The tears were rolling down her cheeks, creating rivers of mascara.
Elena tried to pacify Mirta by having her sit down and bringing her tea, which did nothing for her condition except make her choke and cough till she turned red and Elena thought she would have a patatún, a collapse particular to island inhabitants, which was caused by an excess of emotion and often led to the most dire consequences.
“Where is Juan now?” Elena said. She knew nothing of feckless parrots but she could at least seek help from the person who knew best how to calm Mirta down.
“On the roof,” Mirta said, finally able to speak through a series of spasmodic breaths. “All he cares about are his filthy, rotten birds.”
Elena sat with Mirta for a time until she could breathe normally and regained a semblance of tranquility. Then the two made their way to the roof and found Juan looking up at the sky. With him was a man dressed in a policeman’s uniform. They were passing a bottle of rum back and forth.
“I swear to you, Juan, I’ve never seen anything like it,” the man in the uniform said.
All of Juan’s pigeons had flown away and the flock was now doing circles around the roof.
“There’s your parrot,” Juan said to Mirta, motioning up with his head to where the flock was turning. On the leading edge of the ball, Pity was a blur of green, swooping up then down, turning sharply left and right.
The birds passed over them and made a turn toward the west so that they disappeared into the light of the setting sun.
“Ordóñez was the first to notice,” Juan said. “He came to tell me about it.”
Ordóñez had once been a policeman, and, though he’d retired from the force several years before, he still wore his uniform, partly out of habit, partly to maintain a semblance of authority. He was famous for his method of doling out justice, using the nightstick first, asking questions later.
“Good afternoon, Mirta,” Ordóñez said, then waited until he was introduced to Elena before speaking agai
n. “A parrot leading a flock of pigeons.” Ordóñez took a swig from the bottle. “You’ve lost those birds for good. Now they want to be parrots and eat the fruit of the jungle.”
“Or picadillo of the city,” Juan said.
Mirta’s face lightened and she said, “That’s it!”
The three of them looked at her.
“I’ll get Pity back with picadillo,” she said.
“Never heard of a parrot eating beef,” Ordóñez said. He took off his cap and scratched his head, his graying black hair glistening in the sun. He was proud of his thick mane and showed it off whenever he could, especially in front of women.
Mirta went inside and came back out with a bowl of the meat hash. It was mixed with bits of tomato, as well as raisins and olives, and Ordóñez looked at it with hungry eyes. He said he hadn’t had picadillo in three years, that he could remember.
By now the men had consumed half the bottle and they were beginning to slur their words. Ordóñez said it was a good thing he wasn’t a member of the Neighborhood Defense Committee; otherwise, Mirta and Juan would have to explain how they got the ground beef, which was strictly rationed by the government. Lately people had been making picadillo out of soy granules, a poor substitute that was freely available in state stores. The tomato sauce the picadillo called for was another matter. There was no substitute for that. A six-ounce can might cost a week’s salary on the black market.
Mirta positioned several handfuls of picadillo along the roof wall. She had a small amount left over and gave it to Ordóñez, who scooped it up and ate it out of his hand.
They sat on wooden crates and passed the bottle around. When it came to her, Elena declined and drank water from the rain barrel. After two swigs Mirta became giddy and laughed loudly every time the birds flew over them, calling out, “Pity, Pity.” But Pity would not descend. It was having too much fun leading the pigeons in their crazy flight.
