That the Green Parrot was from Brazil, and the Grey Parrot from Angola, was one of the first axioms of biology that I learned. It was always repeated, categorically and sacramentally by my father or mother, when the merits of each bird were debated at family dinners. There was always an uncle of mine there to remind us of the dangers of parrot fever and condemn the ownership of such exotic species, which for all we knew might carry some strange, deadly disease. As a boy waiting endlessly for the roast meat, I imagined this disease as the chronic appearance, in the adult organism, of that tendency of theirs to needlessly repeat nonsense they’d heard before, something parrots rarely did. But that was how it was: greens and parrots, only in Brazil; parrots and greys, only in Africa; and even today I don’t know if the saying has any truth to it. Another axiom was that parrots ate corn, from which I concluded (and I think my subconscious still does) that eating corn was an infallible way of telling parrots and humans apart.
In my earliest childhood memories, the Green Parrot was a fabulous creature who greeted me rowdily as he spun around in his cage, hopping from foot to foot and looking down at me with a supercilious eye, his beak half open. When I began to see him, it was only every now and then, living as he did on the “kitchen balcony”, from which I was banished because of the taps, just as I was from the kitchen itself because of the stove. When I managed to sneak in and cross the cordon sanitaire, the two of us stood there, lost in contemplation; I, with my hands in the pockets of my apron (which was my prison uniform), and he high up in his cage, opening his wings for a slightly menacing flight, before cocking his head to the side and letting off a growl of sorts, which culminated in a shiver that ruffled his feathers from head to toe. I knew he was Brazilian and had been brought from Brazil. But before being placed on the balcony, where in the midst of that sad and dreary house he cast an extraordinary, raucous stain, he had travelled the world. He’d lived aboard ships and taken in the sea air—not just the coastal breeze, but the gales of the high seas, stormy and pregnant with spray. Something of these maritime days had stayed with him, like the way he used to perch on his pole without lifting either of his feet, without hopping from one to the other like the Grey Parrot did. And also a discerning, selfish, sarcastic bonhomie beneath the haughty instincts of his yellow neck and blue crest. In addition, he’d retained a rude, thuggish, metaphorically expressive lexicon, which was the chief reason for his discreet confinement to the kitchen balcony. Little by little, he began to forget the obscenities that my mother didn’t want me to hear and only recalled them in sudden outbursts, such as in his dreamier moments of boredom, when he uttered them halfheartedly, or in his moments of furious irritability when, towering like an eagle (or so I thought at the time), he spewed profanities that scandalized the neighbourhood and had the servants doubled over with laughter—all of which irritated him even more. And so I didn’t learn the noble swear words—so essential for survival, of course—at school or on the street, even though I hadn’t quite yet grasped what they meant. In fact, I began to fathom much of their meaning from the quarrels that took place behind closed doors at home, between my mother and father, when he would bellow them at her with plenty of elucidative phrases to explain them.
My father was a mythical figure whom I rarely saw except at dinner, for fifteen days every three months. His arrival was announced by the whiff of polish and settling dust that wafted through the house, and by the windows that were left ajar as though to preserve, in good grace and heavenly peace, that ominous aura of silence and darkness. It was never known exactly when he would arrive. He only wrote once in a while, and to calculate how long he would take, my mother would sometimes go to the gates of the shipping company, with me in hand, to look at the noticeboard where they recorded the movements of the ships and see which African port my father’s had last set sail from. Once I knew how to read, she sent me in on my own and waited inconspicuously on the street corner, I suppose so that the staff who knew her weren’t aware she hadn’t the slightest idea where her husband was. Making a phone call, and in any case we didn’t have a telephone, didn’t occur to him; making his presence known, wherever he was in the world, was against his principles. In all likelihood, the staff would hardly have thought it odd that she went to look at the board, even if she’d received regular letters in those days before aeroplanes. As for me, banished from most rooms in the house already, I was completely locked away during and after the flurry of housekeeping, deprived of anything that might make a mess, or make a mess of me. And I hated the air of expectation, at the same time as I waited with interest for what my father might bring: crates of Madeira wine, bunches of bananas, all kinds of fruits in baskets, and sometimes idols made by the blacks, which I was given to play with. Then one day there would be a commotion on the stairwell, and several men, led by my father’s valet in a white jacket that befitted his role as commander, would heave themselves up the stairs, getting stuck in doorways and panting under the weight of the enormous crates and baskets that had inundated the entrance hall. The smell of polish and vinegar was thus replaced with that of exotic fruits, wicker baskets, and the musty smell of the suitcases, which despite being the same as ever, I wanted to open, touch and watch. They never let me open, touch or watch anything, and so I peered from behind the door, looking at the mounting pile of straw in which the various fruits were buried and from which cockroaches would jump out, scuttling off down the landing, pursued by screams from my mother and the servants, who hopelessly brandished mops and dusters and swatted at them wildly. In general, to my satisfaction, the cockroaches got away. And then it was a case of waiting anxiously as everyone parroted “Daddy’s coming!” and looked down onto the street to see if he would appear around the corner. Until finally, with its waddling gait, his corpulent figure would be spotted crossing the street, complete with his felt hat, turned backwards and brimmed with silk, his silver-plated walking stick, and a Cuban cigar hanging from his lips. My mother, without waiting to greet him from the balcony, would dash downstairs to open the door to the street, pulling (and I always wanted to pull it myself) the crude metal lever that lifted the latch. And she stood there erect, preventing me from slumping on the bannister in indifference, and letting go of me only when my father reached the top of the stairs. Then, intimidated all of a sudden, I climbed down a stair or two; my father—“So how’s our man?”—rubbed his cold lips on my forehead, and I remember feeling his bushy, yellowed moustache, which he twisted to a point on each side. He came to a halt by my mother, not knowing whether to embrace her. They stood there opposite one another, looking at each other, as I looked up at them, until my father took her by the waist, the space between them vanished, and my mother rested her head on his shoulder. Then they stole a furtive kiss—“Mind the little one,” my mother would say—and went inside, both of them embarrassed, without looking at each other or at me. The servants would appear at the kitchen door, all smiles and panting in excitement, my father would humour them with a vacant “hello”, and in we went to the living room, where the sofa was and those armchairs filled with little balls, which were gradually being removed by each successive Tibbles. I would always stand in the middle of the room, shifting from one leg to the other, desperate for a wee. My father would perch on the edge of the sofa and my mother on the edge of one of the armchairs. Then they would catch up a little: who had been seen this time in Luanda or Lobito; advice on cleaning white suits, which all needed to be washed and starched; how much they owed the man who’d brought the crates, the fruits and the bunches of bananas. Without elaborating, my mother would then quickly go through what had gone on in the family, the various things I’d been taken ill with, and she would complain about how hard she’d found it this time, how lovesick she’d been. He pretended to listen to her, as though it were a cursory visit, still wearing his hat and clutching his walking stick. Sometimes one of his hands rose to stroke and twist the edges of his moustache. My mother then stood up as if to bid him goodbye, only to take off his hat and relieve him of his walking stick. His jagged bald patch shone in the light. He stood up as well, and they went over to the hallway to look at the bounty. Again my father went over the curiosities he’d brought and took the opportunity to tell her about all the favours he’d done for my mother’s family in Africa, such as a free journey from one port to another, or how they’d met him aboard for lunch. The hesitancy in their speech and gestures prolonged the underlying sense of unease. My father, taking hold of my mother, attempted to drag her off to their room. My mother tried to get away; he took his hat and walking stick off her, hung them up in the closet, and went to the bedroom to make himself comfortable. She went into the kitchen, deeply embarrassed, more and more so as he called for her insistently from the bedroom, over and over and again, while she repeated for the hundredth time what needed to be done for dinner. My aunts and uncles arrived as always, and the finest cutlery and glassware were removed from the sideboards and piled high on the marble tops, which was another of those ritualistic decisions that was taken every three months. My father’s voice could be heard growing louder and louder. Keeping her head down, my mother abandoned her oversight of the preparations for a moment and went down the hallway towards the bedroom. My father waited at the door in his striped long johns and had to pull her inside. The key turned in the lock and it snapped shut. The servants exchanged glances and took me onto the balcony, where I saw the Green Parrot in his cage, jumping restlessly on and off his perch, and holding onto the side with his beak as he lifted up his right leg. He made it clear that he would never offer his foot to anyone, except perhaps to teeter on the end of the wooden broom that I liked to hold out for him. Looking at me over his shoulder, he deigned to lower his tremulous foot onto the end of the broom, as I repeated, “Parrot in the palace, who goes there?”—for him to grace me with a reply: “There goes King . . . There goes King . . .”, as though he didn’t know the rest. And then suddenly he burst into laughter, shook himself all over, and belted out a song that was popular at the time. As soon as the servants came over laughing and singing along, he immediately went quiet and perched there calm and serious, observing them with his beak half open.
It was around that time that we became friends. My parents’ amorous reunions were always short-lived, heralding the end of that fleeting aura of peace in the house, with its shuttered windows and doors in spite of the blazing sunshine, and when all that could be heard were the soft footfalls of the servants. I would briefly be forgotten about, or at least left to my own devices a little; if ever my mother emerged from the bedroom it was to go off and whimper in the corners of the house, and only rarely would she pay me any attention. I would then be given a degree of freedom, the servants being distracted by their petty eavesdropping, or idling about their unfinished chores. But as I say, it would last no more than a few days, after which, without warning almost, they would erupt into violence like caged beasts and the doors of the house were closed once more, slammed shut this time, as they vied for possession of the keys, screaming at each other in the bedroom, hurling insults through gritted teeth. My mother could be heard crying and sobbing, until all of a sudden the door would open to let in the servants, who went over with rosewater to the bed where my mother was stretched out, ghastly pale and moaning with her hand on her chest. I tiptoed around the feuds so as not to be noticed, and in general it was my mother who eventually did notice me, sighing as she opened her eyes and theatrically holding out her trembling hand as though to beg for my connivance and support—all of which made me recoil in disgust. But it was my father who would then try to push me over to her as if I were his mediator, enlisted with the task of negotiating a ceasefire in a war that I didn’t understand, and in the midst of which I felt like a peasant helplessly watching rival armies destroy his crops, his orchard, or his beloved garden. In fact, I suppose it was more like being a hostage than a mediator, having to act innocent all the time and with my allegiances constantly called into question. No one ever asked me, or taught me to ask, what I wanted or what I thought, and both of them ignored me, along with all their allies, the pacifists, and the special forces of the “Red Cross” that were often recruited—or hauled in—as neutral parties. Just as quickly as I was delivered into their quivering arms, I was whisked away and put to one side, behind the door, like a white flag of surrender, which having been raised to serve its purpose, is then cast away to lie on the ground amongst the dead bodies, amongst the bullet capsules, and all the other rubble that a modest and localized war leaves in its wake.
I would wander off to the balcony to speak with the Green Parrot—not to gripe about the atrocities that he clearly hadn’t been able to see, but to bond with him in our mutual, caged solitude. I would seldom leave the house; I was not allowed on the street, although my cousins would come and play with me from time to time. Our games were invariably brought to a halt by my mother, whom we had to ask just to go into the “dark room” to fetch the box of toys (the “dark room” was also the mysterious hideaway where the servants slept, whose intimacy was itself an odd mystery). None of the games were remotely fun or enthusiastic; they always ended in silly fights, because my cousins objected to my suggestion of sharing out the toys, preferring instead to hoard one to themselves—whichever one they didn’t have, or seduced them most. As soon as a fight broke out, my mother would send them all home and I would spend days brooding over the upset, hoping (confidently, but without being too insistent lest my mother immediately said no) that they would be allowed back. As a result, little by little and without meaning to, I began winning over the Green Parrot and the legendary respect he commanded from his cage. Never leaving his perch, looking wryly at my finger, he would poke out his foot, sing a song with me, and even snatch a few of the things I held up to him, such as the white stem of a cabbage, which was a favourite of his. At least so I thought, until gradually I realised that he wasn’t in fact very fond of the cabbage stems that I offered him pleadingly at his feet. He accepted the gifts more for the sake of politeness than anything else, and perhaps also to take advantage of the opportunity to tear an object thoroughly into shreds, which his metal cage and perch, not to mention his positioning well away from anything that might be chewed, prevented him from doing. He didn’t eat them; instead, bit by bit, and, glancing at me with each bow of his head, he pecked them into tiny little pieces that fell down into the cage or on the floor. After this first ritual, he came down from his perch to begin the second, which was to patrol the perimeter of the cage and identify, amongst all the pieces that had fallen, any candidates suitable for being pecked down to a smaller size. After that, looking serious all of a sudden, he stood contemplating the devastation he had wrought. Then he spread his wings, craned his neck, ruffled his feathers, picked out a louse from his blue crest (which he reached by lowering his head and sliding one of his claws delicately through his feathers), shook himself once more, climbed onto his perch, buried his head in his shoulders and closed his eyes. It was his way of saying it was time for me to go, that my visit was over. Once his breathing had slowed, which I could see from the rise and fall of his plump green chest, I would give him a poke. He pretended he hadn’t noticed, and I had to poke him several times under his wings with the tip of the broom, until the same rehearsed scene would take place between us. Whilst he feigned indifference, as if lost in his own world, I would keep prodding him with the end of the broom, until suddenly, he would take off in flight around the cage, land precariously on the upturned broom, with his wings half open as though pretending to balance, and burst into song, cackling and clicking his tongue.
The servants resented that understanding between us, which he’d never shared with any of them, displaying on the contrary such a degree of ennobled disdain towards them that it became a challenge for them just to clean his cage after taking it down for that very purpose, or even to change the food and water bowls that were placed on either side of his perch. And in their anger towards him they treated him with no respect, poking his tail with the broom on the pretext of sweeping a dusty corner or tipping pails of dirty water directly over him and claiming it had been an accident. Enraged, he would clamber to the apex of his cage where, bellicose though still in control, he would lunge at them wildly. Sometimes he would lose it completely, and in the blink of an eye would stick his leg out, heave the entire cage across the balcony floor, and pounce upon the end of a sandal, squawking and clinging onto it with his claws and beak. Once, he became so angry that he would only let go after weathering several buckets of water, when finally he keeled over and nearly fainted, trembling with nervous exhaustion and the cold, and murmuring an old, mournful song, which he embellished with some befitting swear words. On that occasion he let me rally to his aid with a towel to pat him dry, and I straightened out his shamefully bedraggled feathers, which had lost their sheen in the punishing shower. From then on, our loyal companionship became official, without hesitation or reserve.
One morning when I got up, there was a tremendous racket coming from the kitchen; the servants were yelling and there was evidently some cause for panic. I suppose it was this that roused me from my sleep. I went over to look. The Green Parrot had escaped from his cage! Pacing up and down outside, dragging on the end of his chain, he was warding off the servants’ attempts to open the balcony doors, taking to the air and swooping threateningly into the gap that in vain they were trying to widen. I wanted to go outside; my mother, who had just arrived at the scene, held me back, while the Parrot kept on shouting and the servants repeated that he had escaped—he’d escaped! I remember thinking that if he’d truly managed to escape, he would have flown well away into the trees next door. And so I proved them wrong. Battling my way through them on all fours, I opened the doors to the balcony. Retreating into the hallway, the others peered through the kitchen door as if I was about to be dealt a mortal wound (“He’ll peck your eyes out!” my mother declared in horror), only for the Parrot to come striding in and march straight over to me, a spring in his step. Swayed a little by the panicked response of those chickens behind me, I flinched for a moment, but he walked right up to my feet and lovingly stroked my shoe with the side of his beak, like he sometimes used to do from the edge of his cage. I knelt down to pick him up. He let me hold him before perching on the end of my finger, and I remember thinking how heavy he was.
What a triumphant morning! My father had already left, this time keeping a low profile amid the barrage of cases and trunks, leaving the valet in the white jacket to oversee the removal of his luggage. There were the usual goodbyes, which ended with my father taking a white envelope from his pocket and leaving it on top of the dressing table: money to cover his three months’ absence. My mother counted the money as always, and they debated whether or not it would be enough. Then came the hugs and kisses, the final wave from the living-room balcony. After that, I was free to start my evening piano lessons again with Miss Antoinette, which everyone in the family, with my father at the helm, thought was a ladies’ pursuit that I ought to be ashamed of, and which was the only thing my mother ever put her foot down about. To me, Miss Antoinette’s only interest was the fact that she hadn’t lost her head in the French Revolution after all, and the piano lessons were a convenient excuse to do the opposite of what my honorary tutors told me: enter the forbidden, dark living room—where the piano was sounding ever more wooden in its damp solitude—and dreamily compose a song or two, hunched over the yellowed keys, losing myself in the music, and for a moment tasting freedom, far away from everything and anyone.
With the Parrot perched on my finger, I went down the hallway towards the living room, leaving the frightened rabble behind me. Not one of them dared stop me as he lunged and snapped his enormous beak at them. I opened the door, went inside and prised open the shutters to let in the daylight. To undo the latches I had to put the Parrot down on the floor, whereupon he flew over to the door to fend off the advancing enemy troops. I shut the door and sat down in front of the piano, removing its Indian throw, the tassels of which would always get caught in the lid. Finding my concentration, I thundered wild and dissonant chords that progressed through tremolos in the lower octaves and glissandos in the treble. The Parrot, bewildered, hopped on to the back of the nearest chair, ruffled his feathers, and started singing and dancing along to my directionless music, his voice shrill and out of tune. Every now and then, to my delight, he emptied his bowels onto the cushion of the chair, which became more and more soiled by his grey droppings.
There was no stopping him after that. I myself would take him in and out of his cage, and he’d wait patiently until I would come and move him into the living room. My mother and the servants never found the courage to intervene, and sometimes I heard whispers about plots of theirs to murder the Parrot, or to exile him in some faraway land. But whenever I set him free and he followed me around the house, we were left to ourselves: my mother would shut herself in the bedroom while the servants hid in the kitchen. One of our amusements was a small trapeze that I made for him, and which hung from the doorframe of the “dark room”. The Parrot, at my instruction, would leap from the swinging trapeze to the broom that I held out in front, brimming with delight whenever he performed a polished landing. Sometimes, we went together to the dining room balcony to visit the Grey Parrot, who looked at us in shock, performing an idiotic dance as though he’d just opened his eyes to the world for the first time. The Green Parrot, perched on my shoulder, taunted him by doting on me and gently caressing my ear, leaving the other bird so scandalized and humiliated that he sought revenge by nibbling boastfully—though with no appetite—on his exquisite showcase of parrot gastronomy, which owing to my mother and the servants was never in short supply in his cage. One afternoon, all I had to do was raise my arm slightly. The Green Parrot leapt on top of the Grey Parrot, and in the blink of an eye, dealt him such a blow that he was sent flying into the corner of his cage, which the victor then looted in its entirety, overturning the food and water bowls to empty their contents, and then sweeping everything from the bottom of the cage onto the balcony below with his beak, wings, and claws. The other parrot, watching from the sidelines, didn’t dare lift a claw, until the Green Parrot hopped back onto my shoulder without eating a single morsel of the Grey’s vaunted corn.
On my way to school, to make sure I didn’t lose my way or brush up against the local rascals, I was chaperoned by one of the maids right up to the corner, where my mother could no longer see us from her lookout at the window, and immediately ran away from the poor girl, to spare myself the humiliation of my schoolmates seeing that the servant had brought me there. (This practice of running away from watchful servants was tacitly established amongst many of the boys, and when it was home time, the servants would stand chatting together on distant street corners, shielded from the stones that would come flying their way if they pushed the agreed boundaries of their non-existence.) Anyway, on my way out, the Parrot would come and say goodbye to me from the front door, and did the same whenever I left for my piano lesson with the lady whose neck was remarkably intact. These goodbyes were a favourite trick of mine, happening only when I got away with leaving the bird out of his cage, in a clear breach of the house rules. I remember being delighted on hearing that they would shut themselves away until the Parrot, walking gravely down the hallway and dragging his chain along the vinyl floor, willingly hopped back into his cage, where he awaited my return with the door left open.
And then my father would be back again. My parents’ brief honeymoons had become even shorter and fierier than they were before. My mother would be heard screaming in the bedroom, calling my father a pig and a monster. Sometimes, the fragile peace would be shattered before the first family dinner was over, with my father storming off and throwing his chair behind him, or with my mother in tears, buried in a pillow wedged between a full plate of food and another, empty one. Venomous remarks were exchanged; my uncles would get up as well, assuming the moral high ground to compensate for their subjection to so many dinners and appeals for help from my father. Indeed, they were his relations, not my mother’s, although their interventions in domestic disputes grew more forceful as the latter became more violent: several times over the course of those sporadic fifteen days, one of the servants would have to go out at night and fetch my uncle, who lived close by and would show up half asleep, with a pair of trousers pulled over his pyjamas and a hastily fastened overcoat, to talk patiently with my parents: first with my mother in her nightgown, sighing on a chair in the dining room, and then with my father, who, stomping up and down the hallway until the neighbours came upstairs to complain about the noise, would boast that he had no need for us, that on board he had all the comforts in the world, so we could go to hell.
I would listen to it all in bed—that is, if I wasn’t expressly invited to take part, either by my mother waking me up “to escape together”, or by my father, shaking me and yelling that my mother was crazy, that she hated him, and that she was teaching me to hate him, too. Lying there awake, sick and tired of the same old scene, the script of which I knew by heart, I despised both of them for the fear they instilled in me, each of them demanding that I denounce the other. One time, my mother came into my room in her coat and shoes and hurriedly got me ready to leave, while my father stalked in the corridor holding a kitchen knife and the servants peered behind the doors of the “dark room”. I was told that we were going to jump into the river and drown together. Hearing my father howl with laughter at the door, I flatly refused to leave the house, saying it was too cold. And my father, brandishing the knife—which was either to kill himself, my mother, or me, depending on how the pantomime developed—walked towards my mother. I kicked him in the stomach, winding him and releasing the knife from his grasp, which I quickly took hold of myself. The servants, aided by my mother, stood firmly between the two of us, until one of them opened the door to the outside, pulled me away, and disarmed me, taking me out onto the street, where morning was breaking and the oxen were passing by, drawing carts filled with neatly arranged vegetables, lowing on their way to the market. The servant spoke with me calmly, saying that what I’d done was wrong, a very bad thing, a lack of respect. I bent down and bit her hand. And then the two of us walked up and down the street, she following me in pain and at a loss, because she cared for me, and I in front, kicking rubbish down the pavements, pushing over the bins outside people’s houses, and urinating against the trees like the dogs did.
From then on, whenever my uncle arrived in his dark overcoat in the middle of the night to persuade either my mother not to sleep in my bed (the bedding of which I used to remove and guard) or my father not to wield kitchen knives, they would never fail to argue about me as well—two against one, depending on the question, as though I, who’d “raised my hand against my own father”, were the criminal, the one to blame for it all. Sometimes I would get out of bed and lean against the entrance to the dining room, where through the crack in the door I could see them seated around the table, each one finding motives for my behaviour that I’d never dreamed of, or complaining about things that I had no memory of having done, or devising ways to contain my instincts. I remember feeling terrified, shaking as they spoke about boarding school, confiscating my toys, stopping my piano lessons, or worse.
The next morning, numbed with tiredness and worry, I would make my way to school, where I was no happier than at home. Kept well away from my house, which they had never visited (just as I had never visited theirs), my peers hated my awkwardness and my studious, vaguely withdrawn air that sought neither allies nor confidants. I was less well off than the majority of them, and I dressed with a scruffy tidiness that didn’t quite match the expectations of the tidiest among them, nor the camaraderie of the scruffiest. They would go for me far more than the boys from more distinguished families, throwing me into the dirt and goading me into fits of rage that would leave me flinging myself at them with murderous intentions.
In the evening, I would go home and shut myself in the living room with the piano and the Green Parrot until the moment when my father (if he was at home) would knock on the door. I would play the Parrot’s favourite pieces, or compose tunes that blended all the sad songs I’d ever heard. The Parrot no longer observed from the back of the chair, preferring instead to perch on the very edge of the keyboard, where he followed the movement of my hands, and sometimes hopped onto the keys himself to test out a few notes, which I let reverberate by holding down the pedal. This amused him greatly, and he pretended to be shocked, looking from side to side, gasping in awe and standing on one leg, the other hovering theatrically above the next key as though in fear of the sound it might make. Then I would put him back on the edge of the piano and play some studies and scales. The Parrot dozed off in boredom. Suddenly, I struck two or three chords from one of his most cherished songs. Immediately he opened his eyes, shook himself in expectation and sang and danced until the end, spreading his wings. When I ended with a flourish of extra chords, his shouts of approval would only be silenced with an encore, and I would repeat the song two or three times until I was too weary to play on. Then my fingers would seize up, my head would droop down to rest on the keys, and I waited for him to come up to me, step by step, to pluck a louse from my hair.
I hadn’t yet reached adolescence when the Green Parrot fell ill, almost imperceptibly at first, with just a tiny cold sore on his beak that was evidently causing him some discomfort. Only my presence, my voice and my caresses would draw him out from the corner of his cage, where he whimpered quietly in his sleep. Little by little, the sore spread like roots and branches down the sides of his beak, heading straight towards his blue crest and delicate eyelids, which he kept half-shut in pain. Before long, he could hardly open his beak to eat, let alone use it to clamber up and down his cage like he used to. He began to have fits and convulsions that terrified him and took him completely by surprise, so much so that he ended up avoiding his perch for fear he might fall off it. His cage had to be kept on the floor at all times. The same Parrot that used to leap audaciously onto the balcony railings to glare at the garden below could now only rarely muster the courage to gaze out wistfully from near the edge. Even then, he would soon drag himself off back into the corner of his cage. My mother and I—at my insistence—would clean his wound with balls of cotton wool soaked in antiseptic, although it wasn’t really a wound, and instead looked more like a small lump of lava, dried and shrivelled. The Green Parrot wouldn’t let my mother treat him unless I was at his side. Patiently, speaking to him in soft tones and breaking his food up into little pieces, I would coax him into eating something. As if to humour me more than anything else, he would struggle his way through a morsel or two. When I offered him water, it would dribble down the sides of his beak. And as he lay there in my lap, much to my mother’s shock and dismay, he would daringly recall words from his seafaring days, murmuring all kinds of naval orders and manoeuvres, obscenities, and words in languages I hadn’t heard before. Like he used to do in his dreams, though this time nestled in my arms and shivering from time to time, he tirelessly went through everything he’d committed to memory over the course of his long life, along with everything he hadn’t, and everything he’d heard on the decks of ships, in ports the world over, amongst sailors and seamen of all races, colours and creeds. His green feathers, now faded and thinning from old age, though still bearing something of their former lustre, ruffled and rippled like ocean waves, dramatizing his commands to raise the mast and open the sails, which he bellowed with all the might and flamboyance of the sumptuous tropics and the deep blue sea. I could hear the instinctive urgency in his voice as I huddled over him, and in my mind I pictured old paintings of Indians with feathers in their hair, beholding enormous ships anchored in glassy, tranquil waters. But he also showed the trust he had placed in me, clasping my finger tightly during his more violent outbursts, as though clinging onto life to deliver a final message to an old friend. This stage in his illness lasted many weeks, during which I would miss lessons and pay little attention to anyone, engrossed in listening to and absorbing the story of his fading life. I would run home from school—which I had lost all interest in attending—fearing I would not find him alive. But there he would be, slumped in his cage, waiting to hold onto my finger. His suffering must have been immense, so great that despite the tameness with which he bore my vain attempts at curing him, I no longer had the heart to administer the antiseptic, which evidently only tormented him further. However, it wasn’t merely his wound, if it was indeed a wound, that caused him pain: he was equally hurt by the loss of his charm, his haughtiness, and the elegance of his shiny feathers. I lost count of how many times he tried to stand on his feet, flexing his enfeebled muscles to raise his head, shake himself a little, and attempt the opening to a song, looking at me with his endearing sense of superiority, his right eye now buried within the growing malignancy. He would keel over in exhaustion after just a few notes, resuming his fitful murmuring and shivering slightly before grasping my finger with his claws. I would take him over to the piano, resting him on a cushion on the nearby chair, and play through his favourite songs. He would sway from side to side with the distant contentment of one who was losing his hearing and slowly saying goodbye to the world, propping his little head up against the cushion and mumbling a croaky word or two, which was now his only conversation, garbled and barely intelligible, more like a death rattle than speech.
One such day, I came home from school, panting as usual, and went out onto the balcony to find the Green Parrot inert in the corner of his cage, his beak resting flat on the floor. I picked him up, sprinkled some water over him, shook him slightly and tried to feel his pulse. He was still alive. I took him into the living room, laid him down on the cushions, pulled the chair up next to the piano and, as I held onto his foot with my left hand, played his favourite song with my right. My eyes welled up with tears and I could hardly make out the keys. I could feel his fingers grasping mine. I knelt down in front of his chair, bent over him, and felt his claws digging into my hand. He stirred a little, opened a bewildered eye, and halfheartedly muttered a syllable or two before falling back motionless, his chest trembling occasionally as he gasped for breath. Then he tried to open his limp wings to turn himself around. I helped him and he raised his beak towards me. I held him up on the arm of the chair, which his claws no longer had the strength to grasp. He wanted to stand up straight but couldn’t, not even with me holding him there. And so I set him back down on the cushions and he clutched my finger tightly. Then suddenly, in an unmistakably clear voice, just like in the good old days when he would bellow at the street vendors from his cage, he cried, “sons of bitches!” I gently pressed on his neck, weeping, and felt his foot let go of life in my fingers. He was the first person I ever witnessed pass away. I managed to get the neighbours from the flat below to agree to my burying him at the end of their garden. I wrapped him in a cloth, looked desperately for a suitable box to inter him in, walked solemnly through the house of my ceremonious neighbours, went down into the garden with the box under my arm, dug a hole that was more than deep enough, laid the tiny coffin to rest inside, covered it with earth, and marked the spot with a pile of stones and some flowers, cut furtively from the border and arranged loosely in a wreath. And in the days that followed, standing on the balcony, I contemplated the little grave, dwarfed by the nearby gable wall, which the agreement reached with our neighbours forbade me from tending to. The rains came, the gardener came, and the grave slowly faded away. But I could still tell, from the blotches on the adjacent wall, where his final resting place was, and beneath the brightly coloured flower bed I would picture my beloved Green Parrot.
My loneliness was now complete. My father came and went; not even his luggage would inspire me to acknowledge his mythical presence. And in the bitterness I was slowly developing towards everything and everyone, in the air of superiority I assumed to express my disdain for a domestic sphere that was souring with each successive trip overseas, I felt the spiritual inheritance of the bird’s impertinent pecks. I even began to torture the Grey Parrot.
One evening at the dinner table, an argument erupted between my parents, on the very night of my father’s homecoming, which as usual my aunt and uncle had come to celebrate. I declared categorically that I despised them all, and throwing aside my chair in a display of violence, I went out onto the balcony, pursued by my uncle’s punches. I fought against him as he held onto me, and against my father who was holding him back, and against my mother who was holding my father back, and against my aunt who was fighting all of them. As I looked at that tangled mess of human bodies, squabbling over who would get to punish me first, the only words I could find came out choked and tearful: “Nobody is my friend, nobody is my friend . . . Only the Green Parrot is my friend.”
The dogfight gave way to a stupid fit of laughter, which ended with them dribbling all over their napkins. I stood there on the balcony with my back turned to them, looking at the garden down below and trying to make out where the Parrot lay in his eternal slumber. And I could distinctly hear his shrill, piercing voice, imposing and virile, sarcastic and scornful, enraged and full of character, delivering, amidst a magnanimous flutter of green, the damning last judgement he’d uttered upon his death.
They weren’t. In fact, they weren’t even deserving of those words, whose meaning I didn’t really understand at the time. Life has never made much sense to me since then. But this much I do know: if there are such things as guardian angels, mine has green wings, and, to console me in my darkest hours, knows all the rudest swear words of the Seven Seas.
