Mass was interrupted by the calls of birds that filled the atrium and the floor of the church, some calls resembling those of frogs, others harsh and heartbreaking, repeated cla-acks, or nonstop cacklings or a chatter of castanets that froze your soul. Or flick-a, flick-a, or wick-wick, or a deep uchrrrrr followed by a sharp pi, or a gruff chifti-chifti, or sometimes a slow, piglike grunting, an oink, or two or three sadder, more desolate sighings that died away gradually in intensity and rhythm. Or a switsit or was it a psiit or a siist with a rising inflection? Then a hooy-see, a peetsee-oh, sharp and explosive, a tee-dee-day, a chur-wee, a musical troolee, but since there wasn’t a single specimen of the gray musketeer whose song resembles the priest’s “Joseph’n Mary, Joseph’n Mary” around to help him, he couldn’t concentrate on the ceremony.
The breakfast likewise was disrupted by the same hullabaloo. Wordlessly the sisters gazed at their caged birds, till one of them said, “Well, if it’s up to me, they can fly away.” Another then opened the cages, but only one sparrow tried to escape and it crashed down onto the floor of the terrace, like a small bag of dried corn, and severely injured its beak. From the priest’s garden a rare black and white owl stared at us with its enormous eyes. Its back and face were black and it never once took its eyes off us, continually going hooey-oo-oo, a dolorous song that hardly went well with the morning light. Now and then our talk was interrupted by a monotonous, grating k-rrrk or g-rrrk, like a giant grasshopper’s, but actually coming from a toucan. That morning there was no chatter about the state of the tablecloth; the vegetation embroidered on it was allowed to remain undisturbed. The nuns quickly cleared the table, and the priest, visibly shaken, mounted his horse and trotted off as fast as he could, picking his way through feathery obstacles, and we didn’t see him again for the next three days.
The picoleznas that often hang head-down from branches were shattered unmercifully on the ground because they had landed on their unprotected, soft heads as they tried to change position. The odd zacua or tanager had avoided destruction, because they shared the huge, socklike nests hanging from the kapok trees. But as evening came on, we heard them fighting among themselves with such violence that when children put their hands in the nest to rescue them, they pulled out birds without eyes, savagely pecked, already dead. They had fought to the death over these tiny areas of safety.
For many children these were glory days. They made more noise than the birds, jumping and scurrying up and down the town, as if the falling of the birds were some kind of fun party, a holiday of beaks and blood that excited them beyond the limits of self-control. Youngsters, even the young teacher at the secondary school, strutted around the streets with the air of heroes, displaying their most recent rescues from the rivers and giving first aid to the wounded birds on the town streets.
The next morning, as simply as they had fallen to earth, the birds soared upward again, as if nothing had happened, as if they knew nothing of the thousands of corpses littering the streets and highways. We were obliged to give the town a thorough cleanup, before it started to stink. Grandma suggested we stew some of the birds that were still lukewarm. She proposed we all make a mole sauce to get rid of the bad taste that Sunday had left in our mouths, claiming that it was an outrageous waste to throw the birds away, that it was really a sin to be so unthrifty, because among the corpses there were dozens of blue-footed ducks, whose flesh tasted even better than a turtle’s. The priest wasn’t around to say either way, lost on God knows what road. But the doctor said that the behavior of the birds might be indicative of some sickness that could be passed on to humans, and that the best thing was to get rid of the corpses as hygienically as possible, by cremating them in a huge bonfire on the outskirts of town. So those who had earlier been the saviors of the birds were transformed by this medical edict into inquisitorial lowlifes, burning the victims they had once hoped to save. All we kids attended the bonfire, from start to finish, even though the stink was disgusting. When the fire was extinguished, we were left without a single lovely, showy feather; only the longer sorts of beaks and bones remained. The sole trace of that vanished beauty was a pile of dark ashes.
Throughout the week, the town heard a mild rumor, gossip that the jungle was being cleared on a ranch recently purchased by the governor. They were ripping out trees with cranes and excavators to clear a space for pastureland. They said the roads were jammed with trucks loaded with timber and that the area had been stripped bare, as if a single tree had never grown there. “That’s why the birds fell to the ground” was the whisper.
On Saturday, at the market, there appeared stalls with feathers for sale and large plates of clay and plaster trimmed with feathers. Instead of using paints, the Indians had decided to color them with feathers, somehow sticking them onto the plates. I wanted to buy some reddish ones and some with almost metallic colors, but Grandma scolded me. “Didn’t you hear what the doctor said? Are you really in a rush to die? You’re a dimwit, you know that?”
8 The Volcano
The following Sunday the volcano that had been dormant for centuries sent out prolonged, dense columns of smoke. It was impossible to leave home because the air was thick with corrosive material that hurt our eyes and throats. If people were obliged to leave the house, they had to cover their mouths with a handkerchief, which was soon darkened with soot, as if they’d put it near smoke escaping from an oil fire.
We all stayed steadfastly indoors, with the balconies and doors tight shut, suffocating in the heat, with the ceiling fans whirring, because nobody could stand the burning air outside. Mass was canceled, said the rumor going from house to house. The Indians didn’t come down from the hills to attend it. The market was dead, the streets fit only for ghosts. Agustini had lost its identity, had turned into a vacuum.
We did not go to the priest’s breakfast. No doubt the nuns stuffed their bellies all day long with tamales, while I, stretched in my hammock, indifferent to the town’s boredom, was devouring Robin Hood. I finished the book in a single day.
But for everybody else the day meant only discomfort and suffocation. Our houses were designed to be left open. The rooms were built individually, giving onto open-air patios and passageways, ways, so some families spent the whole day in the kitchen, to avoid movement, while others darted from one room to another, with blackened handkerchiefs over their noses.
The teacher at the secondary school printed out on the school’s stencil machine a series of instructions to be followed in case the activity of the volcano increased. He advised us to leave Agustini at the first sounding of the alarm; the church bells would ring out three-two, three-two fives times over, and he explained how to sew face masks which would allow us to leave home, if it came to that, and listed the things we should take with us: containers of water, packets of crackers, flashlights, candles, and, if possible, a radio, with batteries included.