Fallen birds

Until my three years I lived in the city of Santa Fe, where my father studied engineering. Neither he nor my mother had a family there, so they raised me with the help of neighbors, study partners, friends. They always took me for a walk to the plaza de las palomas. His name is Christopher Columbus, but nobody says it like that in Santa Fe. Although there was a fountain with orange fish, I liked the cage: a huge cylindrical loft with a conical roof. I have no memories of my three years, but I do remember when, some time later, we would return to visit and go to that plaza. I did the same thing that I had done to both or all three: enter the loft with a can full of food, let the pigeons swoop down on my head, shoulders, hands: food. I do not know at what moment the winged beings began to be the embodiment of hell. But by the time I reached adolescence, the pigeons had long ago given me uncontrolled dread (just like locusts and dragonflies and everything that flies and caws and has a rigid and floating skeleton and crashes blindly against the walls, although no presence it is more dreadful than that of a bat, the philosophy of dread, the spur of the devil. I once tried to cure this dread by ecstatically exposing myself to the element and entered a cave of bats in Indonesia. I stood with my eyes closed, feeling the breeze displaced by the frenetic wing of all those living dead, until at one point I thought that fear was going to drive me crazy).

Something is happening with the pigeons in Buenos Aires. Today I saw the fourth die. I was on the windowsill, at home: I saw his head on one side, his eyes as if behind a fog, and I knew there was nothing to do. He had already seen three die in the same way. The first came in a box. The man I live with had found her in a park at the foot of a tree, nodding, and picked her up. All the horror of the birds condenses on the wings — touching the ribs is like touching a screeching power, something that can grow and annihilate me like a crazed blade — but I reached into the box and stroked it. The pigeon was exhausted and there was something soft that reminded me of the tender resistance of the cats belly. Something docile, fragile and beautiful. It was the power to fly, which was lost. We wrapped her up, gave her water with a syringe. He died the next day. Three followed, over the course of a week, all collected from the street, all dead at home. Then I saw others dying in the city: on the sidewalk, under the trees. Apparently they are affected by something called paramyxovirosis, which has no cure. I spend my days imagining a rain of bitter birds dying in flight, falling on the wild, impious city.

Have you ever contemplated death: the exact moment that something living is plunged into darkness? It is a sacred moment. I try to watch these pigeons as they die. The slightest of me — something full of compassion — accompanies them. However, I avoided being at the exact moment of my mother's death. Seeing that reverse miracle, that backwards lighting, seemed monstrous to me. So during her agony I shied away from being alone in her room. She died in the hospital at midnight a few hours after I came to see her. My father called me on the phone. During the wake I stared at her for a while. The man I live with came up to me and said, “Don't look at her. It's not her anymore. ” Oh yeah! Of course it was her. She was my mother. Dead. He had to look at her a lot because he wasn't going to have as much time to contemplate her in his death as he had had to contemplate her in life. When the coffin was closed I helped carry it - the only female daughter, the only female granddaughter, the only female niece of a male caste - to the family vault. Days before, he had filed her nails. I think the last thing he said to me was something about bread: to add more salt to the dough so that the crumb would come out aerated, to lower the oven temperature. They are legacies from a world that no longer exists. Sometimes I forget his voice. In my memory it sounds terrifying: it sounds like mine, it has my face.