Cages

by Sylvia Torti

  “Hard for me to see how Mussolini applies. We’re talking about a bird laboratory and a boss who doesn’t much notice me, not international history.”

  “Very relevant.” He popped an olive into his mouth, talking around the pit. “Question of scale.”

  “Scale?”

  “In Tuscany, there is a village called San Gimignano up on a hill and surrounded by a stone wall. When you go there, you see towers.” He spit the seed into his fist. “There are maybe twenty towers today, but one time this village had one hundred towers. Each family showed their riches by building towers taller than their neighbors, and sometimes they had fights tower to tower. Everybody who goes to this village today laughs at those people, their small view and all that money put into building pointless towers, but I think nothing has changed.” He took a sip of wine. “Every man likes a tower.”

  She rolled her eyes. Anton went into the living room, came back and handed her a book. She looked at the title. Theory of Sexual Selection. “What’s this?”

  “Everything you need to know about men, and it will tell you why male California quail have the curled feathers on their foreheads, which you like.”

  “Great. A guide book to birds and men.”

  Anton left her at the table with the book while he began chopping an onion for dinner. “It’s what I’m telling you about San Gimignano. A biological explanation for men and towers. Why we should not say anything to David.”

  She opened the book and glanced at the pictures of birds.

  “Besides,” Anton continued, “American men are even more childlike than Europeans.”

  “How so?”

  “They play games. In the laboratory where I did my first post-doc they had this small basketball hoop stuck to the door. The students and the professor had competitions every day tossing a ball into the basket. They hooted and clapped and slapped each other.”

  “Did you play?”

  “In the beginning, yes. Later, I made excuses.” American men didn’t know how to sit and talk, share a story, a cup of olives and a beer. They passed one another quietly in the hallways, only coming verbally alive with their hoots during games, needing these physical activities to break tension, bond and reestablish dominance. He had always secretly chided them for their adolescent manners, but lately, he’d begun to think there might be advantages to their stunted maturity. A certain freedom. He’d written to his mother:

  I like the Americans. They’re curiously free, almost childlike, not hemmed in by a sense of cultural history or historical responsibility. I wouldn’t want to live here forever, but there is a certain creativity that can come with this naiveté, this release from history. The food, by the way, is only good when I cook.

  “Don’t you ever have the urge to let them go?” Rebecca asked.

  Anton had lost himself in the memory of the letter to his mother. “Who? The Americans?”

  She laughed. “No. The birds: zebra finches, sparrows, canaries, let them go.”

  There was a sudden sting in his eyes so he stopped mincing the pungent onions and turned toward her. “Of course not. These are domesticated birds. They haven’t been free for generations. They would fly straight for the windows and break their necks.”

  “Right, but maybe they shouldn’t be subjected to experiments and small cages.”

  He turned back to the stove. “A cage is a cage.” He scraped the onions from the cutting board into the oil. There was a loud sputtering and then a low sizzle.

  “What does that mean?”

  “To some extent, aren’t we all in a cage?”

  “I’m not talking metaphorically,” she said.

  “Suffering is relative.”

  “Relative to what?” she asked.

  “You’re questioning whether we have the…right?”

  “Yes, I guess I am.”

  He was silent for a moment. It seemed impossible to say it well in English, but really, it was simple. “Humans are a species, one of millions on the earth. We just happen to have unique technological and intellectual abilities. Big brains, opposable thumbs, curiosity and consciousness. We have the right to appropriate these abilities and skills just as any other animal does, just as any other animal would be expected to do.”

  She took a sip of wine and was quiet for a few moments. “I don’t think that’s right.”

  “What is right?” He added garlic to the pan, stirred and waited for her to answer, and when she didn’t, he turned down the stove, went over to her, lifted her chin and kissed her. “This is right, no?”

  She smiled. He went back and added chopped tomatoes and basil to the sauce. A few moments later she asked.

  “Do you think they’re saying anything to each other?”

  “The birds?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean saying something? Like humans? Talking?”

  She nodded.

  “No, I don’t think so. But you know, everyone wants to think they do. Aesopus, Democritus, Anaximander and Tiresias were all supposed to have understood the singing of birds. Francis of Assisi quieted loud birds. In the Talmud, Solomon is wise because God lets him understand bird language. There is the same idea in folk stories, the hero is given a gift so that he can understand birds, and the birds, like magic, save him from danger or lead him to treasure.” He poured the pasta into the boiling water. “There is something sacred about language, I think. We need to communicate. People hope that birds, because they sing and fly up to the heavens, will bring us closer to god. And god will help us understand.”

  She cocked her head as she thought. “I don’t know. I think there is something more to them.”

  “You’re not alone. In Sufism, the language of birds is magical.” He went to the living room, came back with the book his mother had sent and flipped through the first pages. “First the birds decide they need a king, but they don’t know how to find one. The hoopoe bird…”

  “Hoopoe? Seriously, that’s the name of a bird?”

  “Yes, a funny bird. Later I’ll show you a picture. You find it in Africa, and in summer, in Europe. This hoopoe wants to be leader, and he tells the birds that they must go on a long trip to get to their god. The birds agree that the hoopoe should be the leader, but then they all get scared and say they cannot go on the trip. The finch is frightened. The heron loves the sea. The nightingale can’t leave his love. On and on. The hoopoe says no, no, they must go. It’s funny. He tells the duck: Your life is passed/In vague, aquatic dreams which cannot last. Finally, after all the bird species have complained and the hoopoe has told them they must go, they agree to the trip.”

  The poem could just as well be talking about doing science as finding the way to god.

  How featureless the view before their eyes,

  An emptiness where they could recognize

  No makers of good or ill—a silence where

  The soul knew neither hope nor blank despair.

  As he read to Rebecca, Anton thought about the fact that he had no idea whether the zebra finches would tell him anything about memory. He had no assurance that the muting would be the tool he needed to demonstrate that engrams existed. He just hoped that it would be. He saw nothing of the emptiness ahead. Nor how that emptiness would obscure his ability to recognize the makers of good or ill in his life.

  Rebecca crouched down and peered into the bird’s cage. She’d been checking on “Blue 27” every few hours for a couple of days and each time he seemed increasingly pathetic. He acknowledged her presence by hopping left and right and then sometimes by opening his beak to try to sing. Was he protesting what had been done to him? Or singing to her? What was he saying?

  “Anthropomorphizing,” is what Anton and David called it but she didn’t care what they said. She knew the bird wasn’t human but that didn’t change anything. He was trying to communicate and she was trying to listen. It was much the same between people. Anton was trying to communicate and she was trying to listen, and in turn, he was lis
tening to her and she was regaining her courage to speak. She wasn’t sure what to do with all these thoughts because on the one hand, she was thrilled. They’d done it together, and in the doing they’d become a team, spending every hour of every day together, and when she was with him she felt new and confident, the Chicago photographer far away. On the other hand, what they’d done together was in front of her with a backpack wired up and out the top of a cage, hopping and turning around on himself, perhaps struggling as much as she to understand. What they’d done together had made a bird mute.

  Chicago. Sometimes she wondered whether she might have grown to like the city. She might have learned to withstand the biting wind that blew off the lake in winter, picking at her face and freezing her nose. Or the wet that chilled her even in bed. She would have accustomed herself to the skyscrapers, reticent soldiers along the lake, if it weren’t for that one night.

  She had grown up with persistent feelings of constraint, spending her teenage years arguing loudly with her parents about vegetarianism, politics and the proper vocation for herself while making quiet plans to escape. During the summer, when the population in town tripled, she worked as a waitress. She listened to the tourists, the cadence of their German, French, Spanish, Japanese and other languages she couldn’t identify, and wondered what they were saying. She noticed how slowly they ate, how much they conversed, the way the women seemed to inhabit as much space as the men. She saved her money, and to her parents’ dismay and parting words of discouragement, she left to study photography at the university in the capitol city. Before long, though, she discovered that the city was really only a large town, and the art department had just two photography professors who happened to detest one another. Until the Chicago photographer arrived as visiting professor, she’d felt isolated.

  He was famous, had showings in San Francisco, Chicago, Europe. He commented on her work and encouraged her in a way that no one ever had. She listened carefully and then spent days trying to do what he’d suggested before running back to ask for a new opinion. Her world opened into something different. She expanded in his presence to fit her own, secret belief in herself. Around him she believed she could be out in the world and become a photographer and she might take pictures that mattered. Two weeks after he left, she agreed to follow him to Chicago.

  When she first arrived in the city, they spent days touring the Art Institute where he gave her tutorials in room after room. He saw the paintings in a way that was entirely foreign to her, stepping in close, peering at the work and then talking as if he was talking not only to her but to the artist as well. She pointed to one painting after another, and for each one, he told her about the painter, the technique, the reason it was special. He would slip his hand from the nape of her neck to her back and whisper lovingly in her ear. And then in the next moment, he’d turn to look at another piece of work, gone into a world of understanding that she hoped, with his influence, she might gain access to.

  In those first weeks, they zipped around town in taxis from one reception to another, arriving late when the rooms were already full of happy, brilliant people. Artists and intellectuals. Gray-haired men with green eyeglasses, young students with ripped jeans and tattoos. He introduced her as his “muse,” which at first, flattered her but as the weeks went on, she noticed that people glazed over at her name, nodded their heads, but didn’t make eye contact. One night, she corrected him. “Not muse, nor concubine.”

  She moved away from his side and situated herself within the younger group. She engaged a painter whose freckles matched her own. The photographer noticed her absence and raised his eyebrows to her from across the room. On the way home in the taxi, he laughed. “Concubine.”

  The next night he went out without her, suggesting she take the time to use the dark room at the house to work on her pictures. What she didn’t know at first, was that he’d locked the door, but later when she’d tried to leave and realized she couldn’t, she became flush with anger and fear. Her only response, she realized, was to focus on her work. He would return, she told herself, and then she would get out and then they would talk. She focused on her negatives and their development, but then he came home drunk, not stumbling, but changed, vibrating, buzzing. He swung open the door of the dark room and flipped on the light switch. “How’s my concubine?”

  There was a voracity about him as though he were expanding like bees spreading out from a hive and she instinctually backed away. He came toward her and reached for her face, taking her chin in his hand and raising it. “You’re so pretty.” He smelled of whisky.

  She swatted his hand away. “You just ruined my pictures!”

  He bent to kiss her and she tried to turn her head but he forced his lips to hers and pushed her mouth open, his fingers pulling hard against the corner of her mouth. He rubbed his unshaven chin against her chin. She pushed at his chest, tasting blood at the corner of her mouth. He stopped for a moment.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I want you.”

  His breath was bitter. She tried to get away, but he kept her against the countertop.

  “Please,” she said. “You’re drunk.”

  “I want you.”

  “Okay, not here. Let’s go to the bed.” She thought in appeasing him she was making a choice but the bed didn’t soften his touch. She tried to call out but his hands clasped around her neck. She gasped. Her tongue flapped around inside her mouth. He clamped down on her throat, and then she didn’t think anymore. Denied air, choking on her tongue, she struggled to breathe. Finally, with a long low grunt, he stopped, and collapsed next to her, panting.

  She took a series of shallow breaths. Too afraid to move, she lay motionless until she heard the congested breaths of his sleep. When she stood her legs shook and so she steadied herself against the wall. Liquid ran down her leg. She was raw inside and out. She wanted to scream, to muster tears and cry, but she couldn’t make a sound. She crept out of the bedroom, wrapped herself in a velour shawl on the couch and slept. When she woke a few hours later, she dressed and went out into the summer morning, walking for hours downtown. At midday she sat on a bench in Millennium Park and cried. How could this have happened? He had been charming and attentive and caring. She had never considered the possibility of him being cruel as well.

  A male bird presented with a female, sings automatically, a hard-wired response, biology-speak for how the genetic code can govern behavior. In the experimentation room, Anton hooked up “Blue 93” by plugging wires from his transducer into a battery and a voltage meter and then he checked to see that the bird’s respiration was being recorded. He hoped “Blue 93” was a good singer. If he were, he would record his song now, mute him next week, and if he was lucky, the data would come fast. The muting was going extremely well. One more bird and he would be able to share it with David and then David would have to see how muting and auditory feedback could be used to find engrams.

  He hummed as he turned on the microphone and recorder, and then whistled into the microphone to test that everything was connected properly. Satisfied, he went to collect a female zebra finch. When he slipped her into the box, she perched next to the male and gave him a peck on the head. The male made a single mee-mee call, hopped right and left. Anton stood back. Short calls were useless. He needed long songs. The female bird hopped to the male’s side again. He ruffled his feathers preparing for the dance that zebra finches often did right before they sang. The female ignored him and hopped away. The male responded to her withdrawal, as if automatically, with a long song bout, singing the same motifs over and over, his wings fluttering as he danced left and right. Yes! This one was a ready singer. The horizon might include the Alps after all. Switzerland, Austria, France or Italy. He had his preference, but he wasn’t going to be picky.

  David returned from the symposium in Miami excited not about the prototypes for cochlear implants, but because a research group had revealed their findings on the FoxP2 gene. Known to be impo
rtant, in some still undetermined way for human speech, FoxP2 had just been found in birds. Sitting in the auditorium at the conference, he’d experienced the tingling in his fingers and arms, an excitement he’d often felt as a graduate student and a post-doc, but one that had been absent for the past year, especially since Sarah had left. He in no way thought FoxP2 was “the” grammar gene in humans as the newspapers had reported it, distorting and exaggerating findings as they usually did, but its having been found in birds meant that the world of song and genetics was opening up. There was a new frontier to be explored. The “Decade of the Brain,” he realized, could be followed by one specifically for language. Soon, he thought, they might begin to understand the evolution of communication itself.

  He heard Rebecca out in the main laboratory busy with the morning routine. His first inclination was to get up and say hello, but they were always a bit awkward around one another when they were alone. He would wait until Anton arrived.

  While he’d been gone, the laboratory had been organized and cleaned as if they were preparing for an inspection. Research equipment had been put away in neatly labeled drawers, the black counters had been wiped clean, and the seeds swept up from the floor. The birds had never been cared for so well, the cages cleaned and lined with newspaper folded neatly into perfect squares at the bottom of the trays. The birds looked fit, their feathers healthy, colors lustrous, and they sang. He would make a point to tell her this.

  An hour later, hearing Anton’s whistling, David came out of his office. “Do I hear that it’s coffee time?”

  “Yes, sir. How was Miami?” Anton took down two mugs.

  “Tropical breezes, girls in bikinis, mangos on the beach.”

  “Like I thought,” Anton said, “you never left the hotel.”

  David laughed. As it turned out, he hadn’t needed to leave the hotel. “What about here? You’re looking particularly happy and healthy.”