Two
versions of the recent hecatomb of the birds are offered: the first,
mass suicide; the second, a sudden thinning of the atmosphere.
The
first version is indefensible: For all the birds, from condor to hummingbird,
to take flight (with the consequent variations in altitude) at the same
time
(high noon) would require one of two possibilities: either they were
all obeying
some command, or they had made up their minds to soar in the air in
order
to dash themselves to the ground. The most basic logic tells us that
man is
incapable of executing such commands. As for the birds, to endow them
with
reason is to make folly of reason itself. The second version must likewise
be
rejected: If the atmosphere had been thinned, only the birds that flew
at that
moment would have died.
There
remains a third version, so fallacious that it cannot withstand analysis:
an epidemic virus, of unknown origin, made the birds heavier than air.
Any
version is ineffable, and any act is tangible. In the scholiast resides
something
that forever aspires to the demiurge. His pride is punished with tautology.
The only
way to escape the ineluctable fact of the mass death of the birds would
be to imagine
that we had conjured up the hecatomb in a dream. But in that case it
could not be
interpreted, since it would not be a true dream. All that remains is
the established
fact. With our eyes we see them strewn over the earth. More than the
terror the
slaughter itself produces in us, we are filled with fright by the impossibility
of
discovering an explanation for such a monstrous fact. Our feet tangle
among the
wretched plumage of so many millions of birds. Suddenly, like a crackling
flame,
they all rise up in flight. The fiction of the writer, erasing the deed,
returns them to
life. And only with the death of literature will they fall again wretched
onto the earth.
By Virgilio Piñera,
from Cold Tales, copyright © 1987 by Estela Piñera
Translation copyright © 1987 by Thomas Christensen
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