Of sparrows and scars

 

 

 

 

Lucila had been fuming all day because her younger brother José Ignacio and Choche, a neighbour, had killed the sparrow she was nursing. Some days earlier, she had found the little bird lying with a broken wing in the school fountain and taken it home. She found a shoebox —still smelling of shoeshine—, lined it with white fluffy cotton and tucked in the tiny body. José Ignacio told her she was silly; the stupid bird was doomed anyway. She didn’t care; she was determined to nurse the sparrow until she could get to the vets on Monday when the long national independence holiday had finished. She had never liked those festivities; she could not understand why people celebrated independence from the Spanish when the country had been in a brutal military dictatorship for years now.

‘What independence are you going on about?’ Lucila would ask her teachers, when they reprimanded her for refusing to sing the national anthem after the educational authorities added a verse praising the “brave soldiers” of the country. ‘Can’t you see we are not free, that we cannot even breathe without being punished for it?’  ‘Be careful, Lucila’, Miss Dominguez warned her, ‘one of these days something very bad can happen to you. Don’t defy the authorities in public’. Years later, Miss Dominguez’s tortured body was found in the Atacama desert together with hundreds of other dead people, all covered with lime; their white bones a mute testimony of the brutality of the regime. The teacher had not followed her own advice and had publicly denounced the dictator’s atrocities.
 

One Sunday, Lucila’s mother sent her to get some flour to make empanadas and when she came back, a group of children were laughing and pointing at something she couldn’t distinguish. She approached the excited group as they hushed and opened the circle; her heart throbbing in her throat. Her little sparrow lay on the clay soil, its eyes a cloudy veil, its thin purple tongue sticking out as if pulling a face. ‘Who did this?’ asked Lucila, quietly turning around. There was sand in her throat now and a volcano waiting to erupt any minute.  ‘Your brother and Choche started it. They threw the shoebox from the fourth floor; afterwards they pelted it with stones’, said Laura, her best friend.

Lucila bent down, picked the cold body of the sparrow, placed it carefully in the shoebox and walked to her house, with the box tucked under her right arm and the packet of flour in the left hand, not a single tear in her eyes. She put the flour in the kitchen, ignored her mother calling her, locked herself in the bedroom and sobbed for a long time, oblivious to anything else but her pain and rage.
 

Later, when all the children were playing in the summer evening and gazania daisies were beginning to close their petals, she went to her brother’s room, locked the door and began a systematic breaking of his precious collection of robots, the many trophies he had won playing table tennis for the school, and all the knickknacks he possessed. The room smelled of her wrath and of her brother’s strong sweat mixed with that horrible spicy English cologne he liked. She was turning to open the door and leave when she spotted his collection of LPs that went from Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and The Carr Twins to The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The records were all tucked neatly on a shelf by the narrow window. She smashed Sinatra’s face with the robot she had decapitated seconds before, and continued with all the other singers and bands until only a black mound of vinyl bones were left scattered around the room.

Lucila closed the door, tiptoed to the bathroom cabinet, took out one of her dad’s razor blades and went out to join the children playing outside. Choche and her brother were watching her with a smirk on their faces. She approached Choche and in a quick movement slashed his left cheek; then returned to the house and hid in the wardrobe. The adolescent knew her parents would punish her but didn’t care. Her mother found her two hours later with the shoebox and the sparrow in her hands, staring at her in defiance. She lifted Lucila, gave her a hug and sobbed with her for the souls of those birds that would never fly in freedom or unscarred again.

Trans. Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes