Some nights the pigeons made noises, and Mitsuo—an imaginative man, always willing to see things in a favorable light—wondered, as he got out of his bed, if it wasn’t the cold that ruffled them up, if that wasn’t their way, by nature, of keeping warm, rubbing their chins against their gizzards, searching for the winding sound that curled their craw and let them escape, all at once, whenever he approached them, through the window bars. Because as soon as he moved across the bed, the flapping of their wings began to make a mess of his clutter; and he, with his own involuntary movements, alarmed them, and they flew away.
Once, even, a porcelain cup had fallen onto the floor, creating a small catastrophe.
Perhaps because of his modest habits—or his vacant, sedentary desires—those things, while mortifying to him, all the same reminded him of a dainty and violent reader. A book that, for no reason at all, used its pages to fan out a synchronized crossing from the hard spine that opened to the hard spine that closed itself behind them. A book that that violent reader would have liked, and that later, in a fit of sincerity, he would have thrown out of the window or sold off at a street vendor’s stall, with luck one on the banks of the Seine; without luck, in a cardboard box, hung for a short time outside any of the used bookstores in the Latin Quarter. If you think about it, that was just a whole manifesto about reading. The secret relationships that could be established between the beating of a pigeon’s wings and books and readers! All of that provided Mitsuo with an extreme satisfaction. Sometimes he would get out of bed with only three or four thoughts, which, in particular, didn’t seem to bother or trouble him. Those days were, rather, of a considerably happy output.
But the fact that the pigeons grew more mites in their feathers than rats did, according to what Mitsuo had heard, and that they grew more mites than any other city animal, did also seem to worry him. Thinking about it sometimes kept him in bed for hours. It surprised him, especially, to see how the pigeons found refuge in the city squares, where they always had breadcrumbs, and the admiration of all the people who put up with them, even fattening them with their indolent and irresponsible traffic of friendliness, a kind of poorly directed and even more poorly interpreted sense of guilt. That’s why Mitsuo hated Notre Dame Square. And he always tried, whenever he could, to avoid it. But living on the Île Saint-Louis, avoiding the bridge of locks every day was not always possible. It was, rather, impossible to avoid, and he hated the pigeons; but he hated most the lovers of the pigeons; and especially the lovers of the pigeons of Notre Dame.
Nara once saw one of the pigeons with its neck bare, and that piece of skin stripped of feathers had made him look too human, she confessed to him later, as if some guy had put on a pigeon costume and that damage were the evidence that exposed his humanity, the undone zipper that revealed the lie of a supposedly authentic or natural identity. She had felt like a woman cornered in an alleyway about to be forced, she told him. And what’s more, she’d added, there was this: the gallantry. The male puffed up his feathers, surrounded the female, trilled, moved his neck. And if she accepted, the male mounted her flapping its wings, giraffing out his bare neck to achieve a sad balance on which to copulate. Then they rubbed against each other. Shook out their wings. They made a sad sound that resembled a long yawn that they tried to avoid and then, in spite of everything, fell into.
For years, his wife Nara had kept a pigeon. She told him only after they had been married a long time, and it filled him with a superstitious sort of shock because, according to what he had heard as a child, raising pigeons brought on, unavoidably, loneliness. Clearly, Nara had joked, that wasn’t her case. Superstitions were stupid and she had married not only once, but twice, the second time with Mitsuo, whom she had cheated on two or three times. (She had been very discreet and, of course she had never told him.) She never did tell him. Her laugh had floated around that afternoon with the clatter of a slight and weightless thing; it had balanced itself on its infertile feet and, with the fleetingness of her good humor, had also flown away.
But Mitsuo thought that it was possible to free himself from the unavoidable weight of pigeons. And yet, every morning, though he should have been getting out of bed, making the necessary rounds to carry out said activity, he carried his easel on his shoulders to the small squares on the Rue du Figuier, and once there, under a kind of spell, or with a superstitious compulsion to defend true beauty, he tried to attract them in a way that would reveal their real nature. In his oil paintings, the pigeons were always monsters dressed as pigeons, farcical pigeons who shook themselves as if their wings wanted to snatch up the whole world, steal its splendor, uncover everything that had been kept buried below its barren stage. In his delirious state, he filled the canvas with flapping wings that looked more like the stiff hairs of his paintbrushes and, at times, even like Nara’s eyelashes when she laughed.
One of Nara’s lovers, Monsieur Petain, saw the oils hanging on their frames with the thick linen cloth, and sometimes leaning against the wall of the house, and thought that the paintings must be representing the same internal image over and over again. He remembered then Kofler: L’art doit détruire la réalité. Indeed, whenever he looked at them he also found himself caressing the white and smooth back of his lover, as if he were ironing one of his shirts, with the hot pulse that passed through his fingers in the afternoon. He imagined them, flat and untouched, placed against the back of a chair, ready to be worn, with the necks stiff from the starch and the pressure of his fingers. Sometimes he thought he kept Nara as a lover only to enjoy those afternoons observing the paintings, though it was only a way to have careless thoughts or dreams so light that they barely gave the impression of being seen.
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Read “El peso inevitable de las palomas” in the original Spanish here.
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Carlos Yushimito is a Peruvian writer, born in Lima in 1977. He has published several books of short stories: El mago (2004), Las islas (2006), Equis (2009), Lecciones para un niño que llega tarde (2011), and Los bosques tienen sus propias puertas (2013). In 2008 he was selected by Casa de las Américas and the Centro Onelio Cardoso in Cuba as one of the the most promising young Latin American fiction writers, and in 2010 was chosen by Granta as one of the 22 best fiction writers under 35 in the Spanish language.
Sarah Foster studied at Brown University and now lives in Quito, Ecuador, where she works as an editor-at-large for Asymptote.
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photo via ABC