“His standards are high,” Pierre said.
“I’m glad I don’t go to church,” Emmanuel said. “That’s all I have to say.”
Yes, Isla was famous for its birds, especially its talking birds. All the talkers in the town were familiar species: African gray parrots, mynah birds, Amazons, cockatiels, conures, monk parakeets, macaws.
But Isla was also famous for something else, something that had never been proven. For many years rumors had persisted that Isla might once have been home to, or perhaps a stopping point for, a certain kind of bird whose existence had never been verified.
The name of this bird was the Seafaring Parrot, which also went by the nickname of Seafarer. Legend had it that Seafaring Parrots possessed special abilities known to no other parrot, or any other bird, for that matter. They lived on the ocean and spent nearly all their time on the wing, soaring high above the waves on the strong ocean winds. Reported sightings of Seafarers were very rare, and only when the winds of change were blowing: straight onshore or straight offshore, which happened only once every ten years or so. There was an old fisherman’s saying, familiar to every islander: The winds of change mean fortune lost or fortune gained.
But the most unusual trait of the Seafaring Parrots, according to legend, had to do with sound. Sound exists in vibrations. As those vibrations grow slower and slower, the frequency becomes inaudible to nearly all creatures. Humans, with their unexceptional ears, could hear a sound at the moment it was made, and thereafter only in memory. But not the remarkable ears of a Seafaring Parrot. For them, all sound lived on for all eternity. Their ears were so finely tuned that supposedly, at any given moment in time, a Seafarer could hear and reproduce all the sounds ever made:
The laughter of everyone who ever lived.
The cries of everyone who ever lived.
The scuffle of feet and paws, human and animal. The sigh of a summer breeze, the freight-train howl of an oncoming tornado. The lapping of waves at the southern shore, the groan of an iceberg calving in the Arctic Ocean. The shriek of pain from a child who’d stubbed his toe. The sigh of a mother at the first sight of her newborn baby. The angry shouts of a couple in the heat of an argument. The song of a father singing his child to sleep.
Pablo had tried to comprehend the hugeness of this.
“Every sound?” he had said, the night long ago when Emmanuel first explained the legend of the Seafarer.
“Every sound.”
“In the entire world?”
Emmanuel nodded. “Every single sound, every single voice. They can bring them all back. According to the legend, anyway.”
Tonight they were sitting in the kitchen, playing cards again and talking about Seafarers. Cards and conversation was their routine. Emmanuel would put the Buena Vista Social Club on his old record player and Pablo would make his famous cheese quesadillas, which was what Emmanuel called them even though they were famous only between the two of them. They would play rummy while Birdy hopped back and forth from one to the other, pushing her beak at the cards she wanted them to play or discard.
It was Pablo’s turn to draw, but he was distracted. The legend was fascinating, and it always made him wonder about something. Birdy was a parrot, but no one—not even Dr. Maria, who would certainly know, because she was a veterinarian—could say for sure what kind of parrot she was. Was it possible, even remotely possible, that Birdy was a Seafarer? Pablo and Birdy had washed up onshore during the winds of change, after all.
But wait. Seafarers were capable of flying tremendous distances. And no one had ever seen Birdy fly. The most she could manage was that awkward flutter of hers, from the bike basket to his forearm, say, or from his forearm to his shoulder. And what about sound? Seafarers could reproduce every sound that had ever existed, and Birdy was the quietest bird in all of Isla. No, Birdy couldn’t be a Seafarer. Which was fine with Pablo, because he loved her just the way she was.
Sometimes, between rounds of rummy, Pablo would airplane Birdy around the kitchen and living room. She would grip his forearm tight and he would sail her through the air, around and around. It was the evening, indoor version of their almost-flying on the beach.
“No one knows if the legend’s true, of course,” Emmanuel said, putting down his cards. “I’ve been hearing about Seafarers my whole life, and I’m a grown man who’s never seen one. People have claimed to see them out at sea, but who knows if they’re real or not.”
“But the part about sound vibrations is real?”
Emmanuel nodded, as if Pablo had asked an excellent question. “Some say sound never entirely disappears. It just vibrates at lower and lower frequencies, so that our poor ears can’t hear it even the moment after it happens.”
That was usually where conversation about Seafarers stopped, with a sad look on Emmanuel’s face at how inferior human ears were to Seafarer ears. But tonight Pablo kept going.
“If the legend is true,” he said, “and somewhere out there is a bird who can still hear the voices of everyone who ever lived, that means she could even hear . . .”
“Everything,” Emmanuel said, finishing Pablo’s sentence for him. “Yes, mi Pablito, everything.”
That hadn’t been what Pablo was going to say, though. Pablo was thinking about his original family, whoever they might have been. Maybe he had once had a father. Brothers and sisters. A mother. Was it possible that he, Pablo, had once had a mother? But Emmanuel never brought it up, so Pablo didn’t either. He didn’t like the thought of hurting Emmanuel’s feelings, after all, because Emmanuel had always been a father to him. So he confided only in Birdy.
Sometimes he wished he had never heard the legend of the Seafaring Parrot. It made his head hurt to think about.
FIVE
EMMANUEL WASN’T THE only one who liked to speculate about the Seafaring Parrot. The existence of the bird had long been debated, both in Isla and far beyond its borders. There were those who said the Seafaring Parrot, like the dodo, had once existed but was now extinct. There were those who said that the Seafaring Parrot had never existed. Then there were those who insisted that yes, the Seafaring Parrot did exist, had always existed, and was just extremely rare and extremely reclusive.
Reported sightings of Seafarers usually came in from offshore fishermen. In fact, there had been several such sightings the day before Pablo and Birdy washed up to shore. Those sightings had been reported by television’s most zealous Seafaring Parrot reporter, Elmira Toledo, who always wore a trench coat and purple glasses. Elmira had for years made Seafarer sightings her pet project. But no one had been able to follow up the ocean sightings.
Even in school, which was a haphazard sort of affair on Isla, given that there weren’t many island children and most learned at the side of their parents, the Seafaring Parrot was the subject of reports and plays and songs. Every year, in fact, the schoolchildren went on a two-week marine expedition in search of the elusive Seafarer. That was the excuse, anyway. If pressed, everyone admitted that they just liked being out on the sea, fishing and diving and practicing their sailing skills.
Everyone but Pablo, that is, who was deeply afraid of storms. Besides, no animals, including birds, were allowed onboard, and what good was that? The yearly expedition had set sail a few days ago, but he had stayed behind with Birdy.
“One of us should be here to search from shore,” he had told his friend Oswaldo, who agreed.
A major complicating factor when it came to the Seafaring Parrot was that no one was exactly sure what they were supposed to look like. There were no photographs, and eyewitness accounts varied. That didn’t stop anyone from having an opinion, however.
“Seafaring Parrots look like African grays,” claimed the flower lady. “My grandmother swore to it. Which makes sense, because no other parrot has the talking capabilities of the African gray.”
It was true that African grays were renowned for their ability to mimic human voices. Take Peaches, for example. A single “Hey! Watch what you’re sayi
ng!” could make anyone snap to attention.
“No, no,” said the coconut man, who walked the beach lopping the tops off coconuts with his machete, sticking straws into them, and selling them to beachgoers. “When it comes to looks, Seafaring Parrots are a close cousin to the macaw. Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone does not know that,” said Maria. “In fact, legend does not specify what the Seafaring Parrot is supposed to look like, other than a parrot.”
Maria was descended from a long line of island veterinarians. Her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother had all, at some point, presided over the Critter Clinic. Maria always told the truth as she saw it, which was one of the reasons why Pablo sometimes went to the clinic to talk to her. She would give him the straight scoop.
Today was one of those days.
“Scram, Committee,” he said. “Birdy and I have an appointment with Dr. Maria.”
This wasn’t strictly true, but Maria and Pablo had an unspoken agreement that he was welcome in the clinic anytime. The Committee clustered around him. They didn’t like to be left out of anything.
“Hey! Watch what you’re saying!”
“Nice threads!”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
“What day is it?” Sugar Baby said, in her small voice.
“It’s a day when I want to see Maria without you all eavesdropping,” said Pablo. “That’s what day it is. You’re always butting in on other people’s business. Now go bug someone else.”
The Committee grumbled off down the street. Maria was in the clinic alone, which meant that Pablo wouldn’t have to wait until she was finished examining an alpaca this time. The alpaca owner was something of a hypochondriac, who brought one or more of his three alpacas into the clinic at least once a week.
“Pablo,” Maria said. “Birdy.”
Maria greeted both humans and animals the same way, which was another thing Pablo liked about her. He also appreciated that she kept their conversations private. She called it “doctor-critter confidentiality,” and even though Pablo wasn’t a critter and Maria wasn’t his doctor, it was close enough.
“Maria, have you decided what kind of parrot you think Birdy is?”
He had been asking Maria this question for years now, but each time he asked, she considered it carefully. He set Birdy on Maria’s desk, where she stood, shifting from one foot to the other. Then she ducked her head into her feathers. Maria might not be sick of the question, but it seemed as if Birdy was.
“Well,” said Maria, “I’ve never seen a parrot with her kind of lavender coloring. It’s very unusual. My best guess remains the same, which is that Birdy is a parrot, but an unfamiliar one, not native to Isla.”
Maria held out her arm, crooked at the elbow, as if she were inviting Birdy to do-si-do with her. Birdy untucked her head from her feathers, met the doctor’s brown eyes with her own, and jumped up to her arm. It was hard to resist Maria.
“She doesn’t talk, though,” said Pablo.
“Not all parrots talk.”
“She doesn’t fly, either.”
“She has flown, though. She’s traveled far. Her wings and feathers tell the story of long, hard voyages by air.”
At that, Birdy bent nearly in half and tucked her head into her feathers as far as she could. Maria stroked her feathers with a light but firm touch.
“Sometimes a seabird will be caught up in a strong current and fly halfway around the world,” she said. “It’s been known to happen.”
“Maria, can I ask you another question?” Pablo said.
“You may, Pablo.”
Pablo looked around the waiting room, to make sure they were alone and that the alpacas and their anxious owner hadn’t shown up unexpectedly.
“Do you think it’s possible,” he whispered, “that Birdy could be a Seafaring Parrot?”
This was a question he had never asked outright, fearing that Maria would just roll her eyes and tell him that legends were legends, not facts, and that she was a woman of science. He’d seen her do that more than once, when townspeople got going on the legend of the Seafaring Parrot. But he was almost ten now, and this question had been on his mind for a while. Maria didn’t laugh or roll her eyes, thank goodness. She sat down on the chair next to his and regarded him thoughtfully.
“If the legend of the Seafaring Parrot is true,” she said, “then Seafarers can’t live without flight. Flying is in their souls. A Seafarer who can’t fly would be like a fisherman without the sea.”
This was something that Pablo could understand. Isla, nestled just off the southern shore of the US, was a town of fisherfolk and boats and sea, the sea with its salt water and its waves, curling and unfurling on the sand.
“No one’s ever seen Birdy fly, have they?” the doctor said now. “And she seems to have survived so far.”
They both looked at Birdy, who was most definitely alive. So it must be as Maria said: that Birdy was an unfamiliar kind of non-talking parrot. No one knew more about parrots than Maria, after all, just like her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before her.
“She loves it when I almost-fly her down the beach, though. I wish—” but Pablo stopped midsentence. Birdy was slowly, ever so slowly, lifting her wings to their full extent. She looked from Pablo to the doctor, and she jumped down from Maria’s arm and took a step forward, and then another and another, until she was at the very edge of the desk. As if she were about to step right off it into thin air.
“Birdy,” said the doctor, “what are you doing?” and she and Pablo leaned forward to catch her in case she fell. The three of them stayed frozen for a minute, until Birdy—with what sounded almost like a sigh—lowered her wings and ducked her head. The doctor placed a hand on her talons, as if to reassure her.
“That was strange,” she said. “Birdy hasn’t been plucking out any of her feathers lately, has she?”
“No.”
“Because that would be a sign of distress. A sign that something needed to change.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Maria said. “Look, Pablo. Seafaring Parrots are supposed to be magical birds. But their endless flying, and their ability to reproduce every sound ever made, is what makes them magic. And in all the time she’s lived here, Birdy has never flown, has she?”
“No.”
“Nor has she talked. Has she?”
“No,” Pablo said. “The only noise she makes, once in a while, is when she’s asleep.”
“Anything understandable?”
“No. It’s more like a whisper.”
The doctor slowly, with just one finger, stroked Birdy’s feathers from neck to end of wing. Over and over she drew her finger down the length of Birdy’s wings, first one wing and then the other, as if she could mend by touch alone whatever invisible thing was broken.
SIX
THAT NIGHT SOMETHING changed.
Pablo was used to the sound of Birdy’s sleeping sigh. When it happened, she was always sound asleep next to his hammock on the upended old suitcase that had come with Emmanuel when he left Cuba as a little boy with his family. Birdy slept on it with one foot pulled up into her feathers. Was she dreaming? Maybe, because she would twitch and sometimes shudder.
Birdy’s sigh was more of a whisper than anything else, but it sounded like a woman’s whisper. And not Maria or Lula or the flower lady or anyone else that Pablo knew. If many months went by without a sound, Pablo wondered if he himself had dreamed it up—if his memories of Birdy’s sleeping sigh were something that happened only in his own mind.
But that night, when the moon was high and round and making a flickering path on the sea beyond the window, he startled awake to the sound of an actual voice, a woman’s voice.
“Pablo. Pobrecito Pablo.”
Pablo. Poor little Pablo.
Pablo lifted his head from the pillow and half sat up in the hammock. “Birdy? Did you just say something?”
But there was no answer.
She was sound asleep. Pablo lay awake for a while, then decided that he must have been dreaming. If Birdy could talk, she would surely have done so before now. Look at all the times he had tried to teach her to say even a single word, but she had never tried to mimic a human voice. Unlike the other parrots.
Visitors to Isla loved the parrots who roamed the streets and called down from the trees they hung out in. And the parrots, especially the Committee, liked that kind of attention. Why else were they usually found at the double-decker bus stop? Loud Mr. Chuckles and squawky Peaches liked to perch directly on the bus stop sign and startle the tourists as they got off.
“HAHAHAHAHA!”
“Hey! Watch what you’re saying!”
Sugar Baby would follow up in her soft voice. “What day is it?” she would sigh. “What day is it?”
Sugar Baby melted hearts with that question. She was small and adorable and more successful at getting treats from diners at the Parrot Café than either Mr. Chuckles or Peaches, which annoyed them both. Peaches had taken to hanging upside down from the strings of little white lights—as an African gray, she had that ability—just for the attention it got her. And Mr. Chuckles’s laugh was infectious. Both of them did well enough for themselves in terms of treats and attention, if not as well as Sugar Baby.
Rhody, poor Rhody, who could only cluck and scratch and crow but still persisted in thinking of himself as a parrot, had long ago had to resort to snatching lettuce leaves and ears of corn right off the plates.
Emmanuel was of the opinion that Birdy did talk, in a way.
“Maybe not in words,” he said. “But that bird knows how to get her point across.”
He was referring to the Birdy swat, which everyone in Isla was familiar with. When Birdy felt that someone wasn’t treating Pablo right, or if, God forbid, she felt that Pablo was in danger, she would leap to her feet, raise her wing, and swat whoever was at fault. Pablo had never felt her wrath, but then again, he was her beloved.
Emmanuel also believed that Birdy, even if she didn’t talk herself, understood at least some speech. One night, when they were playing rummy and listening to the Buena Vista Social Club, Birdy fluttering between the two of them and peering at their cards, Emmanuel had told Pablo a secret.
Pablo and Birdy Page 2