A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

  Later we loaded the clobber back in the van and headed off down the track. Miguelillo was still sitting beneath his fig tree at the crossroads. José pulled up and looked at him, bathing him in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  ‘I suppose you want to show us the way back now?’

  Miguelillo thought about it a bit, then, seeing me looking at him from the passenger seat, decided against it.

  ‘Gracias — but I’ve got a few things to attend to first. I’ll make my own way back.’

  A PARROT IN THE PEPPER TREE

  OUTSIDE OUR HOLIDAY COTTAGE, EL DUQUE, ISA FALSE PEPPER TREE. We planted it as a seed, a little thing encased in what looks like a red peppercorn — but isn’t. Schinus molle (the Latin name) grows at an astonishing rate. Within three years it had become a full-blown tree with a thick peppery-barked trunk and a great mass of pendulous green foliage set with little clouds of false red peppercorns. You could happily doze and while away the afternoon hours in its shade. It hangs over the cottage gate.

  One July morning, as Ana was passing beneath the pepper tree with a sack of washing in her arms, something bright green and feathery fluttered down and landed on her shoulder. It was a parrot — not a bird you see much of in Andalucia. It perched quietly and looked at her, its head on one side, and stayed there as she opened and loaded the boot of the car. ‘Hallo,’ said Ana, who is not a person to be caught off guard by an event like this. ‘Do you want to come home with me, then?’

  The parrot shuffled closer to her head and nibbled her ear in what she took to be a friendly way. ‘Well, it would be a fine thing to have our very own parrot, but let’s go and see if Antonia knows anything about you first,’ Ana suggested.

  Antonia was the obvious person to ask about parrots because she’d been looking after Yacko, her Dutch family’s pet African Grey, for the last couple of years. Yacko is ancient and, as a result of a feather-pecking habit, resembles a small plucked turkey, with a huge beak and one scarlet feather sticking out of its butt. Since moving south he has spent most of his time hiding behind the fridge, from where he surveys a thin sliver of the Alpujarran landscape with a jaundiced eye, pining no doubt for the polders and tulips and the grey skies of home.

  When Ana arrived with a stray parrot on her shoulder, Yacko couldn’t help but edge his beak around the front of the fridge to take a look. He gave an almighty squawk and scuttled backwards, jamming himself in among the pipes. Yacko does this to people, too, if less dramatically, like a suburban householder retreating behind their net curtains. Later, though, I wondered if Yacko hadn’t picked up on some deep and irremediable personality flaw in Ana’s windfall parrot.

  Antonia had heard nothing about a missing pet but promised to help spread the word around the valley and into town. Meanwhile she loaded Ana up with seeds and useful advice about the bird’s diet and general care. The parrot seemed to like the idea of going home with Ana and clung to her shoulder as she climbed into the front seat and started the engine. Then, as the car bounced across the valley to El Valero, it stepped delicately onto the back of the passenger seat, as if to survey its new home.

  Over the next fortnight we asked around if anyone had lost a parrot. No one had heard anything and the local consensus was that it was from la providencia — heaven sent. That suited us, as we had always wanted a parrot yet had not wanted to support a questionable trade by actually buying one from a pet shop.

  Domingo, ever in the know, suggested that our parrot might have been an escapee from the ornithological park of Loro Sexi (named, oddly enough, after a Phoenician admiral), down on the coast. Another engaging theory came from Rachel, who makes exquisite jewellery at her cortijo near Orgiva.

  ‘So you got the parrot, then,’ she said, with an unmistakably accusing edge to her voice.

  ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, if you want a parrot enough, and your energy is right, then a parrot will come. I was after a parrot myself, you see. I felt the time was right for me to have one, so I built a big cage and left the door open, and then started to get the energy up in order for a parrot to come…

  ‘Rachel, I think you are completely doo-lally?

  ‘No, wait, I was out for a walk last Friday — the day you got your parrot, yeah? Well, I was walking in the riverbed concentrating on the particular sort of parrot I wanted to turn up. All of a sudden there was a whoosh of wind and a puff in the dust at my feet. Of course I thought it was my parrot, but when I stooped to pick it up, it was a dead bird, tiny, like a pebble. So you see, it seems you got the parrot and I got the dead bird — it’s the story of my life..?

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, Rachel, we didn’t mean to take your parrot from you, but I don’t think there’d be any possibility of moving it now. It’s attached itself to Ana in a big way.’

  ‘Oh no, no, you go ahead. Enjoy your parrot. I’ll keep working on the energy and, who knows, maybe next time I’ll have better luck?

  In fact our parrot turned out to be not a parrot at all but a Quaker Parakeet and, as far as anyone could tell, a male. Sexing a parrot is not an easy matter, unless you happen to be a parrot, or have access to DNA testing, or catch your bird laying an egg. Telling the difference between parakeets and parrots, by contrast, is straightforward. Parakeets are a good deal smaller, midway between a budgie and a macaw. Our specimen is a luminescent green with a grey underbelly, a big orange beak and beautiful blue tips to his wings and tail.

  Initially we called him Lorca, but the great poet’s name sat ponderously on the bird — it seemed just too noble for our small feathery interloper. Then, one lunchtime, Ana was watching the parakeet nibbling a lump of ham from Chloë’s plate. Ana held up another piece: ‘Here, Porca,’ she called. There was a flutter of wings as our parrot claimed both his snack and his name.

  Porca made himself at home from the very minute he arrived. He surveyed all the dogs and cats from the eminence of Ana’s shoulder or the top of her head, and took stock of his new kingdom and its subjects. In a matter of days he had subdued the unrulier elements and established a pecking-order with himself at the top, as a sort of captain’s mate to Ana. Below them came an amorphous order of various dogs and cats and Chloë, then, somewhere round about eleven or twelve, me.

  It’s humiliating but any attempt I make to gain promotion gets firmly rebutted. If I try to pamper him, say by offering up a piece of banana skin (which Porca seems to prefer to the fruit), he will nibble away at it for a while, then show disdain for my attempt to ingratiate myself by pecking me hard on the finger.

  Porca lives free and his chosen territory is the bathroom, where he perches all night upon the shower taps, which Ana has covered indulgently with old bog-roll inners for the bird’s comfort. From there he launches ferocious attacks on anybody who for whatever reason visits the bathroom.

  Porca is particular about not only guests in his bathroom but objects. He detests above all the presence of the blue plastic toothmug on top of the washing-machine cover, so sometimes, to keep my end up, I place it carefully on that very spot. It never fails to enrage him. Incensed, he hurls himself from his shower tap at the offending mug, trying to guide it towards the gaping lavatory to score the longed-for hit and watch the loathed object float on the waters within. He can be further tormented by filling the mug up with water so he can’t move it, or shutting the lid of the lavatory. Such are my small revenges on my rival.

  During the day Porca moves about the place, fluttering along the tops of the shutters, work surfaces, people’s shoulders and heads and, in fine weather, all around the farm. His flying skills are a sight to see, particularly in the house where he has to make tight turns, sudden climbs and fast changes of direction to negotiate obstacles he finds in his path — unexpectedly closed doors, or cats and dogs with intentions inimical to his well-being.

  He can stop and turn in the air with amazing precision, and he has developed a clever strategy for getting through the fly-curtain. He used to land, walk through the cu
rtain, and take off again, but that was an opportunity for the cats to have a crack at him, so he laboriously perfected the technique of landing on the curtain, parting the strings of beads with his feet, poking his head and body through the parting, then dropping through the other side and, with a flurry of wing-beats, lifting off before he hits the mat.

  Besides his devotion to Ana, Porca’s other obsession is nesting. For a time we wondered if we had got his gender wrong, but in act it is the males who do most of the building in the parrot world. For days on end, Porca would busy himself flying about the house and garden, gathering a baffling assortment of odds and ends: chopsticks, baler-twine, bits of paper, twigs, biros and toothbrushes. It’s difficult to know how parrots get hold of these needments in the jungles of Brazil.

  Once they had been gathered, he would arrange all of these materials in a manner that defied even the most vivid imagination to see any semblance of a nest. Some of the objects would be propped up against the legs of a chair; the string would be woven among legs and chopsticks; a plastic nailbrush would take pride of place in the centre; and to maintain a delicate architectural balance, wisps of dead grass would be laid artlessly here and there.

  Porca would work on, earnestly and furiously, impervious to my sniggering over his efforts. It was cruel of me to ridicule him as his incompetence doubtless stemmed from being born in captivity, and from his having parents who either didn’t know, or were unable to pass on, the information he needed. However, I feel sure that Porca, had he been suitably equipped, would laugh uproariously at anyone else’s misfortunes and inadequacies.

  Outside the house, Porca tends to perch in the acacia tree, where he pointedly ignores the pigeons — lowly creatures — or mucks about on his bird-table, a rustic sort of a thing that I lashed up for him in the hopes that I might one day be able to perform my ablutions in the bathroom in peace.

  Sometimes, he takes great long swooping flights down over the farm and into the valley. Ana sees Porca as a sort of falcon. She stands on the edge of the terrace as he perches on her arm awaiting command. Then, with a deft flick of her wrist, she sends him hurtling and squawking down into the valley. ‘Wheee-eee!’ she cries. Porca moves like a rocket and when the sun catches his wings he flashes green like a passing emerald.

  Domingo was navigating his way up the Cádiar river one morning, mounted on his donkey, when he was astonished to see a flutter of green wings and the arrival of the parrot, whom he hardly knew. Porca stood between the donkey’s huge ears, like a pilot guiding a ship up a river, gazed at the scenery for a while, then rose with a squawk and flew away. Nowadays, he quite often flies off to perch on Domingo’s shoulder down in the river fields and watches him working. Domingo feeds him habas, broad beans, which Porca adores and takes daintily from his fingers.

  I tried this once and once only.

  Near the end of Porca’s first summer, however, he did something guaranteed to win even my sympathies. He got himself stepped on by a horse.

  Even now, I’m not quite sure how it happened. I was helping Pepe the blacksmith shoe Lola when I sensed something just a touch greener than the grass, fooling around on the ground. I’ve never understood the attraction that hoof-shavings have for animals, but the dogs go crazy for the taste, and Porca must have been vying with them for a stake. Then Pepe banged the last clinch home and I let the horse’s leg drop. A heart-rending screech rent the air. Porca was pinned beneath Lola, squawking, flapping and trying to tear himself from the monstrous hoof.

  Lola of course was quite unaware that anything was going on at all down around her hindquarters, and stood firm and square. It took me a second of two to register what had happened. I leaned heavily on her and heaved the leg up. Porca shot out in a flurry of wings and, screeching like a banshee, flew up towards the house.

  By the time I arrived panting in the kitchen, the room had become a tableau of grief. Poor damaged Porca was lying miserably on Ana’s breast, his head on her neck, while she looked down at him, stricken with worry, and stroked his ruffled back feathers. Chloë, who had suffered almost as much from the parrot as me, was desolate; we all were. I thought Porca had a chance of surviving because of the energy he put into flying away from the accident, but there was no doubt that he was a much-reduced parakeet. All his aggression and his posturing machismo had gone, as he lay limp and sad, looking with woeful adoration up at his beloved Ana’s face.

  The atmosphere at home remained subdued through most of that week. It seemed that Porca’s foot was so horribly mangled he might never be able to use it again. Now a parrot is a thing with three useful limbs: the wings are good for flying but not much else, while its beak and its feet are used for locomotion and feeding — one foot is used to hold the food, the other for balancing, and the beak for chopping it up. And then there’s cleaning, where both the beak and the feet are used for preening. With only one foot left to stand on, Porca wouldn’t be able to reach the feathers on the back of his head, and as parrots are very fastidious about grooming, he would go into a decline.

  The feeding we solved by means of a wire with a little crocodile clip on one end and the other set in a block of plastic — a name plate, apparently, for dinner parties, which had mysteriously found its way into our cutlery drawer. But Ana worried that in his debilitated state Porca would be easy prey for the cats, who would be eager to get their own back after the humiliations he had heaped upon them. Ana reckoned the night-time was when they would make their move, as Porca couldn’t fly at night and would stay put where he was as soon as the lights went out. She solved this problem by taking the parrot to bed.

  He started out in a sort of a nest on the bedpost but before long had flopped down and worked his way between the sheets, tucking himself beneath the duvet with Ana. This of course presented a serious conflict of interests, as it was where I wanted to be too, and I felt I had prior claim. However, if I were foolish enough to edge over towards Ana’s half of the bed, Porca would squawk and lay into me with his beak and peck me hard. It was about as bad as a thing can be for matrimonial harmony.

  Defying all expectations, Porca’s mangled leg started to mend and gain strength. First he began tentatively to tap it on his perch, and soon after he started to put weight upon it. Ana, as well as nourishing him with the warmth of her love — she would carry him about her waist in a sort of marsupial pouch — gave him healing balms recommended by her tomes on herbal medicine. Kate, a homeopathic doctor friend, helped us out with a course of specially customised little white pills. She seemed rather pleased to have an opportunity to add a parrot to her list of satisfied clients and suggested that we might also try to treat his aggression. You can do just about anything, she said, with homeopathy.

  Sadly, Kate’s nostrums were nothing against Porca’s inherent swinishness. As soon as his foot improved he reverted to his old tricks, flying out of nowhere to savage me or Chloë for no reason at all. Most of his malevolent energy, however, was reserved for terrifying our guests. Porca has an unerring ability to spot the one person who is the most frightened of parrots and swoops towards them, beak poised to grab at an earlobe or clump of hair. For a lorophobe — and there are plenty of them around —this sort of treatment is beyond endurance.

  The homeopathy did, however, seem to have one curious side-effect. It changed Porca’s architectural interests from wood, as his main nesting material, to metal. He became suddenly a formidably armed creature, hurtling to and fro in the air with a pair of nail scissors dangling from his beak, or a steel trussing-needle with which he bombed the cats. Off went the car-keys, a flow of small change — the twenty-five peseta piece has a hole in he middle and makes a simply marvellous addition to any nest — and most of the kitchen cutlery.

  These activities left the kitchen denuded of cutlery, and if anyone but Ana were foolish enough to stoop and borrow, say, a teaspoon, Porca would launch a ferocious attack. But the metalwork made the nests look slightly more interesting, albeit, to my untrained eye, unpromising place
s to nurture little parakeets.

  As well as being violent, aggressive and bone-headed, Porca is also insistently demanding, like a child. He can’t actually speak, which is probably a blessing, but he does a passing imitation of Que pasa? (What’s happening?) and has a quiet meep noise which for a fleeting moment makes him seem quite sweet and appealing. There’s also a special cooing sound that he uses in an attempt to entice Ana into one of his newly-created nests. Chicka-cheeoo, Chick-a-cheeo, he croons while gazing imploringly into Ana’s eyes. Now, Ana is not what you’d call a big woman but the chance of her fitting into Porca’s nest beneath the kitchen shelf is almost as remote as her laying the longed-for egg.

  Porca’s demands reach fever pitch when Ana and I take a siesta and shut him out of the room. In order to catch our attention when we’re just slipping away into sleep during the hottest hours of the day, he has hit upon the notion of perching on the utensil-rack above the cooker. The cooker is made of tin and it makes a pleasing crash when hit by, say, a heavy steel ladle, or the fish-slice or the big serving spoon. When Porca has finished nudging all the utensils off the rack — there are ten or so to get through —he flies to the bathroom door and sits on the handle squawking fit to bust. He can carry on squawking for ten whole minutes without stopping, and it’s a sound that could easily wake, and considerably annoy, the dead.

  A lie-in of a morning is not much easier to achieve, for Porca has learned how to open the bathroom door. As mentioned, he spends the night roosting on the shower tap in the bathroom, and as soon as it is light enough for him to fly, he opens the door — not quite as much of an achievement as it sounds, because I accidentally fitted the door backwards, so you only have to push it to open it, but have to operate the handle to close it. Anyway, Porca gets down on the floor and with all his tiny might, heaves and pushes until it opens. He then flies over to our bed, pecks me on whatever part of my body he finds protruding from the bedclothes, and having succeeded in driving me away, proceeds to get suggestive with Ana on the pillow. Grumbling and grunting, I shamble to the kitchen to put the kettle on. When I take Ana her morning cup of tea I get attacked again by the parrot. And thus starts another day.