by Pablo Medina
By then the sun had set almost completely. To the north, tall cumulus clouds on the horizon caught the light over the ocean. In Piedra Negra sunsets were gray and furtive. One moment there was light. The next moment the light was gone. But the sunsets over the Gulf Stream were wildly spectacular shows of orange, pink, and shades of violet.
“Pigeons don’t like to fly at night,” Juan said. “They will set down wherever the darkness catches them. I doubt if any will return.”
“How about parrots?” Ordóñez said.
“I know nothing of parrots,” Juan said. “That bird wasn’t supposed to fly anyway.”
He turned to Mirta and asked her when was the last time she clipped its wings.
“About three years,” she said.
“Which means,” Juan said, “that the feathers have all grown back. You’re supposed to do it at least once a year when the parrot molts.”
He shook his head and scratched his ear with his pinkie. It was an old habit of his he reverted to when facing an irreversible moment of frustration. There was a thick tuft of hair growing around the edges of the orifice.
“It’s unnatural,” Mirta said. “Birds should have plumage.”
“Birds should have brains,” Juan said. “A wild animal like a parrot won’t survive very long in the city. This is a different sort of jungle.”
The conversation went in many directions as the rum went around. Mirta said she’d received a letter from her son along with a photograph. He’d grown patillas and was wearing a tight shirt with the top buttons undone. A large religious medal lay nestled on his chest hair and behind him was a late-model automobile.
“He looks so handsome,” she said. “And the car is so beautiful.”
“He looks like a drug dealer to me,” Juan said. He always thought his son was up to no good and the photograph proved it.
“That’s the latest style in Miami,” Mirta said.
“Miami is a cesspool of vice,” Juan said, not allowing her to continue.
Ordóñez interrupted the incipient argument by telling the story of a group of raft people he’d encountered on the Malecón one early morning before dawn. The night before they had shipped out of the fishing village of Cojímar, the one made famous by Hemingway, on a raft constructed of six inner tubes and several planks of wood poorly tied together, and since they couldn’t see the contours of the city because it was still dark, they landed on the rocks of the Malecón thinking they had arrived in Key West.
“I helped them pull their raft onshore and then the six of them started embracing one another and kissing the sidewalk and marveling how quick the crossing was. A plump girl of about twenty gave me a big hug and cried out, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ in English.
“When I told them that they were not in Key West but in Havana, they thought I was joking. I pointed to my uniform and asked them if it looked American. At that moment their faces went from joy to confusion to absolute terror. The leader of the expedition was a skinny man with a scar running across his forehead that made him look like a killer of innocents. He put his arms out in front of him, waiting for me to handcuff him. I admit to you, he showed incredible resignation and courage by doing that. I realized then he couldn’t be a criminal despite the fact that leaving the island in such a manner is a serious crime, the equivalent of treason. I looked at my handcuffs then up at the group. The light of compassion illuminated me, and I said, ‘Hurry and get the raft back on the water, and this time make sure you row in the right direction.’ I stood there on the Malecón and watched as they were swallowed up by the darkness.”
“Do you think they made it to the other shore?” Mirta asked.
“I have no idea, Mirta,” Ordóñez said. “Maybe they’re at the bottom of the sea right now.”
“Or in a shark’s belly,” Juan said. “Do you remember Johnny Luna, the fellow who used to fix my car?” he said to Mirta.
“Yes,” she said excitedly. “He made it, all right. But he had a good boat.”
“A beautiful boat,” Juan said. “He built it himself from plans his father drew up. He could have sold it for a bundle.”
“He did the right thing,” Mirta said. “He took that boy.”
“Obdulio Martínez,” Juan said. “He was a little slow in the head. They say that when he got to Miami, he insisted on going to Yuma, Arizona, thinking it was the center of the United States.”
“What was the name of that movie he liked so much?” Mirta asked.
“3:10 to Yuma, with Glenn Ford,” Juan said. “He’s a good actor. Even when he plays a bad guy.”
“I like Jimmy Stewart myself,” Ordóñez said.
“He’s okay,” Mirta said. “How about Stewart Granger?”
“He’s English,” Juan said. “Remember The Prisoner of Zenda?”
“Yes, with Deborah Kerr,” Mirta said, and clasped her hands together. “I loved her in The King and I.”
Mirta turned to Elena and asked her what her favorite movie was.
Elena had never heard of these actors. Piedra Negra had one movie house and her parents disapproved of talking pictures. Only once was she able to sneak away with her best friend, Begonia Guzmán. They saw a musical comedy called The Pajama Game, which she found unrealistic and foolish.
“I’ve seen only one movie,” Elena said. “I didn’t like it.”
“Only one?” Ordóñez asked. He turned to Mirta and said, “She can’t live a modern life without the movies. You must take her.”
“The movies playing these days are Russian ones,” Juan said, “and they’re depressing.”
“There are some good Polish ones,” Ordóñez said.
“Nothing like American movies,” Mirta said. “They’re the best.”
The bottle came to Ordóñez and he took the last drink, letting the drops of liquor fall on his tongue.
There was a lull in the conversation and Elena looked around at her companions. Juan was yawning. Mirta’s head was drooping and her mouth was ajar. Ordóñez was leaning against one of the posts holding up the pergola, his police cap pulled down low over his eyes and his black hair sticking out the sides.
Her eyes drifted to the clouds that billowed up over the horizon. They were darker now and outlined by a fading yellow light. To the east she could see the light of Morro Castle coming and going at the entrance to the bay, lighting the way to incoming ships. She’d heard from Antúnez the Asturian that the capital was a festival of lights with the neon signs of bars, restaurants, cafés, and stores shining through the night, but Elena saw none of that. As the sun fully receded below the western horizon, Havana was enveloped in darkness, and the only lights visible other than the Morro’s beacon were those shining inside apartments, dim and humble. Antúnez had been wrong about a lot of things. It was darkness that predominated in the capital, much more so than in Piedra Negra, where some streetlights still functioned and the only neon illuminated the gaudy billboard advertising Piedra Negran firewater at the entrance to town.
Since it looked like her friends would not be waking for some time, she went back inside using the wall as a guide and got herself ready for bed. Lying down on the couch, she pulled the Argentinean flag up all the way to her chin so that Juan and Ordóñez wouldn’t see any part of her as they came back in, closed her eyes, and dreamed of González the Fool, who walked up and down the streets of Piedra Negra announcing the age of pandemonium.
She woke when the sun was well up in the sky. Except for the ticktock of a clock, the only sound in the apartment was a faint murmur coming from outside. She rose and went through the passage leading to the roof. Once her eyes adjusted to the morning sun, she saw pigeons everywhere: along the wall, walking on the roof tiles, and lined up on the coop. It seemed as if every pigeon in the city had come to roost on Juan and Mirta’s roof. Atop the pergola, scratching its head with one claw and stretching its wings, was Pity the parrot. Elena quickly retreated into the apartment and knocked on the bedroom door.
Juan wa
s the first to appear. His hair was disheveled and his eyelids swollen. He rubbed his face up and down and wanted to know what all the noise was about.
“The birds are back,” Elena said.
“What birds are you talking about, child?”
“The pigeons! Thousands of them. And Pity too. She brought them back!”
Juan turned and called to Mirta, who was already moving about on the bed.
“Ay,” she cried out. “My head hurts.”
The three of them made their way back out and saw the birds, not thousands as Elena had originally declared, but at least three times the number of the original flock.
Mirta forgot about her headache and was overcome with joy. “Pity,” she called out. “I knew you’d come back. The picadillo did it!”
Juan stood in the doorway and rubbed his face more stridently now. He was still in his undershorts. “This is a nightmare,” he said.
“Why?” Elena said. “You have your birds and then some.”
“That damned parrot has taken at least two other flocks,” Juan said. “I can’t even tell my birds from the foreigners.”
That’s the word he used, foreigners, as if there were countries of pigeons with their borders and parliaments and laws. The situation was not one that called for joy. Quite the contrary. Two other palomeros were missing their flocks. It was a matter of time before there were repercussions.
“What can possibly happen?” Mirta asked. “You’ve stolen birds before.”
“Not stolen, taken,” Juan corrected her. “A bird or two, four at most, but not an entire flock. This goes against all protocols of the sport.”
“You’re calling it a sport,” Mirta said. “It’s foolishness.”
“This is only the beginning of trouble,” Juan insisted as he walked among the pigeons. He’d have to find a way of returning them to whomever they belonged. “It’s that stupid parrot. If I get my hands on her, I’ll make picadillo out of her.”
“Nonsense,” Mirta said, approaching Pity and calling out its name softly so it wouldn’t fly away again. The bird cocked its head sideways and looked down at her owner, making no attempt to come down.
“I’ll put up signs around the neighborhood saying anyone who has lost a flock of pigeons can come get it.”
“How do you pick up a whole flock of birds? Do you put them in a truck and drive them home or stuff them into sacks?”
Mirta may have been mocking him, but for Juan it was an intriguing problem. Just catching the birds would present a challenge worthy of the best mind in pigeon keeping. Before the birds could be transported, the owners would have to identify them—no easy task since pigeons tend to look similar. There was a third complication: once birds were re-programmed to home in on a new location, they returned to it as soon as they were free, which meant that no matter how far away they were taken, the foreign pigeons now accepted Juan’s roof as home and would come back to it again and again. In other words, they were no longer foreigners but naturalized birds. All in all, the damned parrot had made quite a mess of things.
Mirta smacked her lips and made a dismissive gesture with her hand.
“I gave up trying to understand him years ago,” she said to Elena. “Listen to him devising the plan to return the birds to their owners! But he hasn’t said a word about getting Pity back in the house.”
No sooner had she said that than Pity stretched its wings and took flight. There was a sudden massive flapping of wings as the flock followed suit. For a moment, the birds blocked the sunlight and Elena, Mirta, and Juan were enveloped in shadow.
“Darkness at noon,” Juan said, delighted at seeing so many pigeons rise like a huge veil over them.
“It’s not noon,” Mirta said.
“I was referring to a book,” Juan said.
With Pity at its lead, the ball made one turn over the building and came to rest again on the wall. This time Pity perched on the bannister leading down the steps to the apartment. Mirta went over to it slowly, put out her hand, and the parrot hopped on. She quickly took Pity inside before it flew away again.
There was one last problem to overcome. Juan wanted to make signs to post within a ten-block radius, but in those days the capital suffered from a severe shortage of paper. Juan and Mirta kept a few sheets of good paper at home to write letters to their children in Miami or to city officials when they needed something fixed in the building. There was an old calendar in the bathroom they used as emergency toilet paper, but the sheets were too small for signs.
Elena was tempted to offer her notebook. It still had plenty of sheets, but she had heard of the paper shortage and was hesitant to part with it. She was already using a tiny script, legible only to her, in order to make the pages last as long as possible. She noticed the wooden crates on the roof that Juan used to build the pigeon coops and suggested he make the signs out of wood, a suggestion he quickly adopted.
Five people responded to Juan’s signs. One was a woman in the neighborhood who believed pigeons were angels in disguise and she was coming to rescue them. Another was a former political prisoner who wanted to start a clandestine restaurant in the neighborhood specializing in fowl. A fourteen-year-old boy named Edmundo came on the third day. He lived two doors down in a tenement and wanted to learn the sport of keeping pigeons. “I like pigeons,” he said. “They fly like bullets.” The other two were the real birdmen, the palomeros who had lost their flocks. They showed up with lead pipes ready to smash Juan’s head in. Juan appeased them by promising that they would soon have their flocks back and led them to the roof with a bottle of rum in order to explain his plan and mollify their anger.
The boy Edmundo returned several times, eager to take a look at all the birds before they were taken away by their owners. Mirta wanted nothing to do with him, claiming the boys’ parents were immoral drug addicts who had orgies in their apartment.
The boy intrigued Elena. He was soft-spoken and respectful and had intelligent green eyes. She asked Mirta what harm it would do to let Edmundo come up to the roof, and Mirta insisted that he came from a bad family, lazy actors and musicians.
“Just look at him,” Mirta said. “It’s evident he’s up to no good. I don’t want him in my house.”
His clothes were old and faded. He wore an old leather belt that was too big for him so that the tongue hung down below his zipper. His tennis shoes were kept together with electrical tape.
As she was only a guest in their apartment, Elena dropped the subject of Edmundo. From then on, whenever she saw the boy on the street playing marbles or baseball or simply standing with older boys in front of the empty lot across the street, she said hello and gave him a coin.
The streets of the city awoke early. Many of the men wore sleeveless T-shirts and shorts; the older women wore housedresses, the younger ones spandex pants and tank tops; some smoked cigarettes, stretched, scratched, walked to the corner and back. They talked about the baseball game on the television the night before or what store in the district had eggs or what buses were running that day. A few spoke of the weather—that conversation was always the same—hot, with or without rain, unless a hurricane threatened the city, in which case they scurried excitedly about trying to find enough rum and beer so they could have a party while the winds blew and the rains fell and the ocean crashed over the seawall.
Those who had running water threw bucketfuls on the sidewalk and scrubbed away the soot with brooms. Others yelled up to the balconies asking for a friend to come down or whizzed by on bicycles or sat in the shade of buildings looking up and down the street at nothing in particular. There was gossip and news from the Neighborhood Defense Committee, rumors of an accident or someone’s illness or some infraction committed. The chatter was constant and increased as the day grew. Music blasted down from boom boxes brought as gifts by relatives visiting from the United States. At some point a domino table would appear and the players threw the pieces loudly at the table, a snaky figure forming as the pieces joined toget
her until the hand was done. The winners boasted and the losers complained to their partners that they’d played poorly and hadn’t opened a line of play when they needed one; then they shuffled the pieces with the numbers down to begin another hand. The clacking resumed with the same intensity, the same practiced passion of people whose neighborhood reputation rested solely on their ability at the table. The street became a carnival, unlike anything she’d experienced in Piedra Negra, where daily life was led behind drawn jalousies and the only carnival happened on the Tuesday before Lent.
To escape the noise Elena went to the roof with Daniel’s poetry book, the one he had given her when they met in Piedra Negra. There she was pacified by the cooing of Juan’s pigeons, no matter that it was hotter than on the street and that a sudden squall came in from the ocean and she had to hide under the pergola to keep from being drenched. The sun reappeared, stronger than before, and burned off the puddles that had gathered on the tile surface. She sat next to the pigeon coop and drank ladles of rainwater to cool herself. Then she came upon a poem titled “Rain in the City”:
Day it rains,
day it thunders,
sky breaks and beats down.
The rain moves, taps, squeals
from the street to the avenue,
from a childhood memory
to the hay of a cane field.
Puddles become streams,
streams run to the sea.
A woman with umbrella passes by,
dogs pass with their masters,
hunger passes, the eyes of fear.
Day it rains, a fire dies inside,
the water clears the way
to the forest of forever.
She liked the poem all right, though several of the lines confused her. Was the poet looking to the past, which offered some sort of cure to his condition—“from a childhood memory / to the hay of a cane field”? Or was he looking to the future—“the forest of forever”? What most intrigued her was that the poem seemed both tragic and triumphant at the same time. Rain leads to memory and brings the poet to an engagement with the past. Rains also builds, grows, douses the inner fire (fire of passion, fire of pain?). Water cleanses and cools and opens the way to eternity. Eternity, however, is a forest, peaceful and troubling at once. The poet is either a devout believer or a hopeless atheist. You don’t have to believe in God to believe in eternity or a semblance of such—the eternity of the present, for example, which Daniel evoked in at least three other poems in the book. It occurred to her that the moment you start explaining a poem, you have to break it open, like a clock. The impossible task is to put it together again so that it recovers its movement, its ticktock. Poetry works in mysterious ways and raises more questions than it answers. Once you tinker with the mechanism of a poem, the mystery is gone, the questions flattened into statements.
