“On both sides of the stairway there were banisters of quarried stone which ended in a veranda with a pair of low stone columns. It was on one of these that he asked Florinda to stand.
“‘Now, you sir,’ he said to Papa, ‘are going to give no orders to your men. I swear to you that I’m going to show no disrespect to your daughter or do her any harm. I’m only going to give you a chance to recover your honor as a gentleman. Will you pass me one of your matches?’
“Papa passed him a match, and the box to light it, signaling to Florinda to do as the man said. She was dressed in a lovely white dress with a sort of apron of tulle in front. The guy took hold of the edge of the apron and set fire to it and let it fall against the dress. Immediately the dress caught fire from contact with the flames. Mama screamed. My grandmother, María del Mar, screamed even louder. My other sisters squealed like animals in pain. But I did something quite embarrassing: I started to laugh. The redheaded chief and I couldn’t contain our guffaws. Then he took the bishop’s stole from his chest and put out the flames on the dress with it, stifling them with the gilded embroidery.
“‘I’m afraid, dear sir, that I’ve had to take from your daughter what you sent up in flames. If I’m not mistaken, you burnt a quarter of the ransom you were offering. By your reckoning, that was the price of this girl’s safety, because right from the start you said you were paying me just for your daughters. Respect for the mother and the grandmother was a generous bonus my men and I were throwing in free.’ My father was deathly pale, scared out of his wits. ‘Forgive me if I contradict you, but I suspect that your lovely Florinda is worth a lot more than you were offering for her. By my reckoning what you were giving only covered a corner of her dress. And that’s what I burnt. Not one piece more. Do you agree with my calculations?’ Papa nodded his head. ‘So the next time I come through here, you’d better pay me the full price, because if you don’t I’ll only respect what you’re paying for. Let that be our gentlemen’s agreement, eh? Okay?’
“The mob had watched the burning of Florinda’s dress without uttering a sound. But the minute their chief stopped speaking, they started to shout, bellowing at the top of their lungs, and dashed into the house, while their musicians played drums and guitars as loud as they could from the garden. We remained on the terrace. Inside the house, a wild party was soon in progress. Night fell and they were still inside. Finally they came stumbling out, lighting their way with candles.
“‘You’re not going to stay and sleep here?’ asked my idiot of a grandmother.
“‘We wouldn’t sleep in this pigsty, madam, thanks very much all the same,’ said the chief sarcastically, now wearing bits and pieces of my mother’s and grandmother’s clothes over my father’s best pair of trousers. Then he climbed on his horse and disappeared, followed by his drunken gang.
“The next day we moved here. We never went back to the farm, because Mama got sick again and died a short while after. Died just as she’d lived, without ever cutting her hair even once. When she let it down, it reached to her ankles, you know. Papa followed her to the grave in next to no time, and Grandma María del Mar did the same a few weeks later. So the four of us were left to fend for ourselves, though we did have the help of Papa’s brother, who managed our inheritance with absolute honesty. Though only because we didn’t give him time to steal it from us. Then, as fast as we could, each of us found a husband. My three sisters had first-rate luck, because, I suppose, they were the only ones from the upper classes still around here at that time. Three good husbands they picked out for themselves. And me? Well, I got what I got, a complete good-for-nothing. The only memorable thing he ever did was die early. That’s what happens when you’re the last one. You get the leftovers.”
7 The Birds
The following Sunday we didn’t join the priest on his rural jaunt, because that morning, around eight o’clock, all the birds, regardless of their mode of flight, whether they moved in wide circles or just enormous curves before gliding slowly onward, or rocked to and fro and leaned to one side in mid-flight, or floated low over field and swamp, their wings slightly above the horizontal plane, or executed a variety of short, rapid flutterings or flew by alternating fluttering with gliding or made a habit of hanging suspended in the air, beating their wings and coming down feet-first to fish, or soared upward in great circles — one and all came tumbling beakfirst to the ground, unable to get airborne again. One after another, they opened their wings to fly but all came back down to earth, walking on their feet like defenseless creatures in need of shoes. The roadrunners didn’t notice the change, nor did the ducks which lived hidden among the rushes of the swamp, stuck in the mud, scratching the backs of the fishes. But tick-eaters couldn’t get off the ground and back onto the necks of the cows, and the American tree-climber, which winds its way up the trunks of trees and then drops to the base of the next tree, couldn’t even flutter a short distance to help itself climb to safety. All around, the birds made efforts to take off, but they ended up falling back to earth, sometimes beating their wings but not always, as if some heavy air were suddenly circulating through their bones, an air laden with water or weighted with earth, almost sandy.
Before our eyes, the cats and dogs launched into a gory butchery, glutting themselves on this luxurious banquet, till they were sated and smeared with the blood of the birds. Before long we saw even eagles harassed by quadrupeds. Hummingbirds, beating their wings a thousand times a minute, couldn’t get off the ground, buffeting their attackers with their wings before dying in a mixture of saliva and blood. We dashed to defend the birds, while others stashed the rarer specimens in cages or what they could improvise as cages, bundling in this repugnant treasure before my eyes.
The hourly bus had not yet come into town, but when it did, sounding the horn to get the birds to move aside and give it some space, its luggage rack was packed with a multitude of exotic birds I’d never seen before. The highways were infested with creatures that should have been flying. It was one thing to crush common zanates and guitos under your wheels but a far different thing to run down a green-billed toucan or a white-horned owl or an immense scarlet guayacama, a parrot, a scissor-bird, a lily-galloper, an owl from the bell tower with its white, heart-shaped face, a handsome quetzal with its long tail, an eagle or a kingfisher. The passengers unloaded their luggage from the bus, but it wasn’t easy to find a place to put it, for the birds on the roof joined the already thronged sidewalk, cluttered with love-birds and pigeons, trogons and cuclillos, cezontles and tanagers and red cardinals. The patios of houses were also thronged with various birds, terraces and rooftops likewise, and if the tiles were sloping, the birds eventually fell off them down onto the ground with a distressing gracelessness, for by now they had lost even the capacity to flutter. They were walking along the sidewalks and the paths of the park in a stately fashion, and just as they had previously formed flocks in the sky, so now they formed them down on the earth, strutting around in serried ranks of feathers, which made it awkward for people to get around the town, as the birds closed ranks impenetrably, and the people had to take other routes where other birds, less given to parading about, left spaces on the ground.
We chained up the dogs, we shut the cats in the house as best we could. Mothers spanked some children for tormenting the defenseless birds and shooed away the more aggressive birds from other, more peace-loving children. Traffic was brought to a standstill, whether motor-driven or horse-drawn. We tried not to worry about what had happened, as if it were quite normal to live in a town where there were more feathers than dust and mud. The teacher from the secondary school borrowed nets from the fishermen and organized his students to rescue the birds that were drowning after falling into the river.