TWENTY-SIX
As a child, Elena’s mother told her about the condor that lived deep in the cordillera, so lonely that he flew down to the valley in search of a wife. He found a girl tending to goats in her garden and asked if she would be his wife. The girl said she loved her home too much, she never wanted to leave it, and for this reason she knew she would never marry, but she didn’t mind because she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her parents behind. The condor said he understood because he’d once had parents he loved until they left him alone in their nest and flew away. The next day, the condor returned and again asked the girl to be his wife. Again, she refused. This time the condor said he would leave but asked the girl if she would please first scratch a painful itch for him. He lowered himself so the girl could reach his shoulders to scratch beneath his feathers, but as she did so, he took flight with the girl still holding his back and flew to his cave in the mountains. Once there, he pulled out some of his own feathers, decorating the girl to make her his bride. At home, the girl’s parents cried with worry over their missing child. A green parrot that lived nearby heard their wails, approached, and told them: “If I am able to bring your daughter home, do you promise you will always let me eat fruit from your trees and take shelter in your garden?” The parents agreed, so the parrot left to search for the girl. He found her atop a sharp peak living with the condor. By now, she’d grown her own feathers and birthed half-avian chicks that died. She was no longer human but something else. As the condor slept, the parrot took the girl back to her family. Upon her return, her feathers fell out and soon she was the girl she’d once been, happy and at peace in her home. The condor was furious and came looking for her. But the parrot was waiting in the garden where he’d been permitted to live, and when the condor tried to eat him, the parrot gathered all his might and pushed straight through the other end of the condor’s body. The condor tried to eat the parrot again and again, but the parrot escaped each time out the other end, until the condor decided to tear the parrot apart with the force of its beak and crescent talons, swallowing the meaty bits, but each morsel swept through the condor’s body, emerging in the form of smaller, brightly colored birds. And this was how the land came to be populated by parrots from the scarlet macaws to the tiny golden parakeets people like to keep in cages in their homes.
* * *
When they lived together in Perla’s house, Mauro sometimes crept out of bed, careful not to wake Elena, and went to the roof to smoke cigarettes. He thought she never noticed, but Elena always woke to the void he left in their bed. When she followed, she’d find him staring past the veined mountain lights. Sometimes she watched and let him think he was still alone. When she did say his name, he met her with an indecipherable expression.
One night when Mauro left the bed, Karina sleeping in a crib at its foot, Elena lay still in the room thinking of her own father, a man she never knew beyond photographs Perla removed from their frames and placed in a chest that was never to be opened. In the same chest, she kept the deed to the house, bank papers, and a letter from a woman who claimed to be her husband’s new wife. Elena discovered it in a closet one day, though she never told her mother. When she had her own children, Elena understood a mother is entitled to her secrets.
She heard Mauro’s footsteps flat and rushed. Not his usual nocturnal choreography to avoid waking her and the baby. He came to her side and found her already awake. “Elena, I saw it. With these eyes. I saw it!”
“Saw what?” She expected he’d witnessed a car wreck or robbery on the street below. It wouldn’t be the first time. Or even that he’d spotted a UFO, since the news had reported more sightings of orbs like fireballs above the Nazca lines.
“A condor flying over our barrio, and when it came to our house the wind held it above me and—” He lost his breath, dropping his face in his palms. When he pulled them away, Elena saw his eyes glossed with tears and asked him to show her.
They ran together to the roof, but there was no great bird. Not even stars. Only clouds blotting the sky.
“There are no condors in the city, Mauro.”
“I saw one. I need you to believe me.”
She wanted to offer some logic to make the apparition more plausible, said it might have escaped from the zoo or been blown off course from the páramo of Chingaza. Mauro had spoken before about condors. He once told Elena he’d gone with a friend up to Ciudad Bolívar and saw boys shooting a condor as it glided over the escarpment but the bird had escaped their bullets. Elena didn’t believe his story, even if as a child she’d pretended Bogotá was not a city but a jungle thick as the manigua of Caquetá, the brick skins of buildings were tree bark, and police sirens were the calls of monkeys and birds.