Mo(u)rning birds

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Another family gathering; daughters and sons, cousins and children, grandchildren. Esperanza’s mother had been in bed all day, moody, and not feeling well from the chemotherapy she had undergone two days before. Her father was outside in the patio cleaning the barbecue with a raw onion and assembling knives and a long fork. He also had a bunch of coriander to sprinkle garlic oil on the meat as it roasted on the spit and a bottle of beer. That was his secret for the meat to be brown, moist and soft. In the kitchen, women prepared the salads and boiled potatoes whilst the cook prepared the empanadas and men drank wine by the grill. The children ran up and downstairs ignoring warnings from their mothers telling them to stop it or they would end up falling and breaking something. Esperanza had a headache and went upstairs to hide from the shouting, the smells of food and the chitchat of her siblings. She closed her eyes for a moment. She had been looking after her mother for months and months now and was tired, emotional, and sleepy.

 

It was hot and Esperanza woke up sweating; her long black hair entangled in knots. She put on her glasses but they were misty and the house was in silence. Where had everybody gone? She slowly remembered they had had a row, for a change, about the murder of Miguel Enriquez. ‘That was not murder’, everybody said, ‘that was an armed clash between those terrorists and the police’. How about the murder of Victor Jara? ‘He was a communist as well’, they all shouted at once. ‘Dad, you told me that they broke his fingers and forced him to play the guitar’, she looked to her father for reassurance, but he said he needed to go to the toilet and didn’t reply. She had left the table and stormed out of the house slamming the door, furious - so many doubts and questions her father never answered. All he would say was he saw nothing and heard nothing, until the day he died.

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A poor lonely bird chirped outside and it was only three in the morning; why was it calling in distress?  She remembered her father used to kill birds. He would take the old rifle and Esperanza shuddered knowing that he was going to come back with the tiny bodies of song thrushes and order her mother to prepare them for dinner. Esperanza secretly threw up each time she had to eat birds. Years later, her father told her that one day in the very south of Chile, when Argentineans and Chileans were having clashes in the border, he and a group of air force men were camping and barbecuing the body of a chulengo (young guanaco) when the woods nearby erupted with hundreds of green birds; shards of emerald waves of choroyes, shrilling and disturbing the serene stillness of the place. The men took to their rifles and started shooting the birds; killing them just for the sheer pleasure of murdering something. Is that what you and your brothers in arms have done with those who oppose your military government, kill just for the sheer pleasure of murdering?, thought Esperanza but without saying anything to her father who, for the first time in his life was telling her something about his life as a military man.

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‘Suddenly’, her dad sighed, ‘I realised that there were choroyes* coming back from the initial panicked flight, not minding us or our rifles. I ordered my men to stop shooting and we watched in amazement how the birds stayed by the bodies of their injured or dead friends and sang a song which made my heart ache with regret. Their singing was like a funerary laughter of pain and loss. Afterwards, when all the wounded parrots had died, a green cloud of crying birds danced a strange dance of goodbye; they circled over the dead friends, gone forever, and abruptly shot like a comet deep into the dense canopy of trees up on the mountains nearby.’

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Since that day her father never shot birds or animals again; that is what he said at least. Esperanza cleaned her glasses, as if to see more clearly in her thoughts, and cried for her mother, the murdered thrushes, Victor Jara’s hands, Miguel Enríquez’s dreams and her own torn body and soul. The tweeting outside her window suddenly stopped. It was time to wake up her mother for her medicines, but she never opened her eyes again and died peacefully later that morning, leaving Esperanza with a deep pain and anguish. It was a long time before she could sing again or hear birds singing without crying.

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A week before she died her mother had said: I want you to sing that Cuban guajira to me at my funeral. She asked for that song at all the family parties, just to annoy her husband and take revenge in her own way for so many things that only she knew and had endured from him.  This is how at her wake her daughter sang, to the displeasure of many, the Ché Guevara** song that her mother liked so much. Her father looked at her seriously, but not angry, and didn't say anything.