Giuseppe Zucco
trans. by Isabella Corletto
Birds
“I feel like the beating of wings within my breast.”
—Victor Hugo
We were so poor that every night, instead of sitting and staring down at our empty plates, my father would bang his fist on the table, yell about how I had misbehaved, and go down the endless list of bad things I’d done at home and in school. He would conclude that if there was this much evil inside of me, there was no solution other than sending me to bed without dinner.
I’d get up from the chair, stare at my father’s red face—which was infinitely better than staring down at the whiteness of the empty plates—and say I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again, even if I hadn’t done anything I needed to apologize for. Head bowed, I’d walk down the hall.
Once in my room, I’d quickly close the door and try to ignore my father and mother’s shouts, the plates crashing against the walls. I’d take my books out of my backpack, put my hair up, and keep studying natural history, at least until exhaustion made me feel like a tiny piece of algae floating under the light of the lamp.
But there was no way. I’d spend the entire night with my eyes wide open, rolling around in bed without falling asleep because of my stomach, which would sometimes emit angry growls and other times full speeches in a voice whose gender I couldn’t identify.
I’d stare at the window in the middle of the night, once the noise had stopped and the broken plates had been collected in a trash bag, and once my father and mother were asleep next to each other under the covers like a pair of knives in a drawer. I would hear my stomach, and I’d bend down to listen more closely.
My stomach told me that I needed to love my father—that our poverty was one thing and my father was another and that there was no better way to love him than by separating the two. I replied that I was hungry, always hungry, only hungry, and the voice in my stomach said that I was right, too.
Then I got up, stretched my bare feet over the tiles, and opened the window in silence. I was wearing only my pajamas in the frigid air, but I didn’t mind the cold. From the windowsill, I jumped onto one of the branches of the massive tree that rose up from the garden, spreading its leaves in every direction.
At first, I feared the emptiness below me, but I kept walking on the branch, pressing my feet against the bark and holding my arms out for balance. Once I got to the trunk, I latched on and climbed even higher, heading toward the branch where all the little birds would perch during the night.
I knew the birds were up there—I’d hear them every morning outside my window, piercing the darkness with their sharp beaks to let the sun out of its prison and greeting it with an endless chorus of chirps. In fact, there they were: one next to another on the branch.
The birds looked like countless black musical notes on the black edge of a very black staff, and what else could they be? If you shattered the birds, you’d find music inside, that same music that poured out from their beaks in the mornings. I straddled the branch they were on and approached them slowly.
The birds slept on top of each other, with only their tiny heads standing out from the jumble of feathers. When he wasn’t yelling, my father had taught me that this was how the birds stayed warm during the coldest nights. They’d huddle up next to each other so that heat would radiate between their tiny bodies. I’d responded that we had done the same thing for a while—I used to sleep between my father and mother when I was young, before poverty had forced us to stare down at empty plates.
And oh, nothing could’ve been worse at that very moment. That memory made me start trembling uncontrollably, and I had to grip the branch to keep myself from falling—all the while thinking that if I didn’t want to become as bad as my father said I was when he yelled at me, I needed to return and slip back under my covers soon.
But I wasn’t a young girl anymore. I was an empty mouth; I was uncontrolled hunger. And so, as I got closer and felt my stomach growl terribly, I caught one of the birds, plucked it from the branch, took it to my lips—and, in order to keep the still-sleeping bird from suffering, I didn’t even chew. I swallowed it whole.
Inside me, the little bird flapped its wings, flapped them hard enough that my stomach opened up, dilated, and I felt even hungrier. And so, no longer in control of myself, I plucked the birds from the branch two at a time—like cherries—put them in my mouth, and gulped them down greedily.
Feeling satisfied and almost drunk, no longer fully conscious and always on the brink of falling, I went back inside. I made my way down the trunk, jumped back into my room, closed the window, and crawled under the covers. Trembling miserably, I curled up into a ball to try to suppress the pounding of all of the birds flapping their wings madly inside me.
If I had to guess the number of birds I’ve eaten throughout all these years, I wouldn’t know what to answer.
I only know that with this diet, I grew quickly. I put on weight, gained bone mass and hair. I wasn’t hungry anymore, and when my father yelled at me for so long that his face would turn crimson, I never talked back—in fact, I did everything I could to keep him from feeling guilty about our situation. I remained meek and faithful in front of him, and one time, feeling the flapping of the wings inside of me, I confessed to my father that he was right. I was a bad and selfish girl, but in ways he couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Later on, however, my father stopped yelling. My mother didn’t yell either. Maybe because every morning when she woke me up to go to school, she’d find me in this condition, and she’d call my dad in quickly. Dismayed, they’d both stare at the bird feathers that were still glued to my lips until I’d open my eyes and see them there, my father and mother, both paper-thin and gaunt and privy to the infinite secret of my childhood. Privy to me, who continued to grow despite our poverty.
But those mornings were the sweetest because I’d stay curled up under the covers and my father and mother would slowly, warmly, and with infinite patience coax me out of bed and tell me it was late, I had to go to school, I couldn’t miss school for any reason—school was the only thing that would someday save me from absolute poverty. I’d rub my eyes with my fists, pluck the feathers from my lips, spit some out, and give my parents a tender kiss as I listened to the chirps outside my window that worshipped the sun as it rose to the highest point in the sky.
Of course, my father and mother’s screams weren’t the only thing that my bird diet silenced. My stomach also got used to this new routine and stopped growling, stopped performing its long monologues at night while I tossed and turned in bed—and, to be honest, this displeased me greatly. Because once I could no longer hear my stomach’s speeches and instead could only hear the incessant beating of the wings inside me, I felt like I no longer had access to myself. I’d grown used to that muttering voice that every so often made a remark about how my life was going, doing its best to offer advice.
It suddenly occurred to me that there might be something positive about hunger—that being this poor sharpened some of the tools that helped us with the recognition of life and of ourselves and that fullness could dull you quite a bit. And so, consumed by guilt, I stopped catching and swallowing the birds for a few days before once again surrendering to the endless hunger. I imagined that in the long run, if I kept eating so many of them, I’d run out of birds and the branches outside my window would be empty forever, and there would be no one left to worship the sun.
But like the hunger, the birds never disappeared. In fact, the more I ate, the more they seemed to multiply on the branch, filling all the spaces between the leaves and chirping at the sun so intensely that the celebration sometimes seemed to turn into the opposite, and I found myself covering my ears with my hands like I was shielding myself from an invasion by enemy planes.
* * *
And so, I ate birds and finished elementary school, middle school, and got to high school as our poverty seemed to settle down. This constrained us terribly in some ways, but in others, it seemed to crack open new doors.
My father started picking up odd jobs at a workshop; my mother washed staircases in nearby buildings. I worked at a plant store under the table after school, and the whiteness of the plates seemed to have vanished. There was always something to eat. I looked at my father and mother, so worn down and thin, and touched as little food from the table as I could, knowing where I could go to fill myself up. I was never embarrassed by our poverty, but when we walked on the street together, people noticed the differences between us—despite our similarities, we had completely different bodies and constitutions. My skin wasn’t yellowed, I hadn’t lost any teeth, and my fingernails were never stained.
With all the birds inside me, I had flourished. My hair was long, and there was nowhere I could go where I wasn’t considered beautiful despite not owning any make up and only ever wearing large hoodies, never hoping to encourage the whistles on the street and obscene comments. In fact, I did nothing but read and borrow natural history books from the library. I chose the most secluded nooks, taking advantage of certain slivers of darkness where I could sink into the pages that brought me closer to the secrets of the universe. I was so in awe of how plants reproduced or how galaxies bloomed that sometimes I felt like I was fainting.
Soon enough, I’d have to reckon with this so-called beauty. You could say that I didn’t care about it, that I didn’t know anything about it, that beauty was like poverty: it was something that happened to you, and once it stuck to you, there was nothing you could do about it. After overhearing comments about me and realizing what our peers were writing on the bathroom walls, one of my classmates who was also extremely beautiful decided that this couldn’t wait any longer. We had to determine who was the most beautiful, once and for all. To do this, we’d fight to the death behind our school.
My classmates were thrilled by this announcement. They clapped their hands and covered me in kisses—surely they’d never seen blood being drawn, surely that’s what excited them so much. I didn’t want to let them down, so I let them come get me at my house one Sunday morning, tie my hair up with an elastic, and tell me how to hit my opponent so as to cause her the most pain before they escorted me behind the school.
It all went down in the middle of a large circle of girls who were all furiously cheering to support either one of us. But unlike my rival, I didn’t bite, didn’t pull her hair, much less dug my fingers into her eyes or kneed her.
I didn’t want to win. I let myself get beaten up, but the fight was over quickly. Every time my opponent hit my stomach, I’d spit out a couple of fluttering birds, and dreadful chirps escaped my lips instead of screams. The girls were all horrified. They ran from the circle in blind terror and left me bleeding behind the school, half choking on the feathers caught in my throat. And there was no way to quiet the little birds who were flapping their wings madly inside me.
* * *
There was something that made me feel even poorer than absolute poverty. I could see how some of the boys in my classes had started to seek out some of the girls, how they whispered words into each other’s ears that made them instantly blush, how they slipped folded notes to each other during class and hid on the fire escapes outside the school, leaving me to feel so alone as they grazed each other’s lips with a sense of longing that was completely unknown to me.
In the middle of the night, after filling myself up with birds, I tossed and turned under the covers and touched my entire body, touched it tenderly, wildly, as though I was afraid I’d lost something. But after finding all of myself, I stretched out my neck and whispered unintelligible words to myself. Weary, I felt only a great desire to cry, to let myself go and sink down somewhere, unconscious, as the birds flapped their wings inside of me.
To be honest, I had been approached by a boy. He’d handed me folded scraps of paper, but after reading his ridiculous, ungrammatical phrases, I was gripped by not only fear, but pure terror. So I called the boy over to the empty school gym and hit him, hard. The slap rang out in the gym and I yelled at him, telling him to stop coming up to me and to not even think of trying this again for any reason. Him and his stupid little notes.
I was afraid that if I gave into his request and went with him, even though I didn’t like him at all—if only to experience that thing called love at least once, to press my lips against his just one time—I’d open the door to an unknown tunnel and the birds would fly up from my chest into his, killing him instantly. He’d never eaten a bird, so he wouldn’t be used to their frenzied fluttering.
That year, like every year, our class organized a trip. But I still didn’t let myself ask my father and mother for money or allow myself to set aside the necessary amount from what I made at the plant store. Instead, I poured my meager wages into my parents’ hands as always and cried. I read tirelessly while my classmates were away marveling at the golden domes of who knows what city—even though in reality, they were just waiting for that time of night when they could escape the teachers’ surveillance and use the hotel balconies to all end up in the same room, going from couple to couple and from mouth to mouth. I shut myself in the library and read not only natural history books, but anything that seemed to speak directly to me. This is how I was able to experience the world and calm the birds that were whirling inside of me, even if only partially.
That’s how I found this verse in a book of poetry: “Water is taught by thirst.” And those words were so true and so terrible that after a while, I lost my breath and thought I’d never get it back. I had learned about everything I knew in life from the wrong side—from the side of hunger, thirst, poverty, complete absence. It was as if in reality, I’d never had anything to do with the real world, but rather with its hollow reflection, always shaping and filling that void with my imagination.
But one of those days, a new boy I’d never seen before started showing up at the library. He had curly hair, high cheekbones, and a droopy right eyelid. I noticed how the eye below that half-suspended eyelid seemed to follow and search for me everywhere, even when he dodged my gaze.
* * *
I started seeing this boy at the library, but I never let him catch me in a place where he could come up to talk to me or ask for my name. I sat on the most secluded bench in the library and spent my time reading, my face buried under my hood.
I gained access to the library’s records by taking advantage of the tenderness that the librarian, a retired teacher who let me keep books past their due date, felt for me. With the wings fluttering inside of me, I took note of all the books the boy checked out. And without fail, every time he returned one I would check it out myself. I’d hold the books tight against my chest, as if they were the most precious things in the world.
I don’t really know why, but I read them all with the same greed that came over me when I swallowed the birds. I’d never said a word to him, but I wanted to get inside his head and learn what he was learning, feel what he was feeling, have adventures like the ones he was having, share every inch of those strange mental landscapes where life seems to exist in its purest form. Where there is no distinction between life and death, enjoyment and suffering, kingdoms and species.
And yet, for the first time in my life, the more I read those books the less I understood them. It was as if the words were rebelling against me, the limbs of every letter of the alphabet tangled up in thorny brambles. One afternoon, I cried and sprinted out of the library, breathless, before the librarian could stop me to ask what was wrong. But as soon as I found a bench to sit on, I saw the boy. He’d seen how upset I was and followed to ask if I needed anything. And because I was crying and trembling inside my sweatshirt, he pulled out a book from his shoulder bag and handed it to me like it was a handkerchief. He told me it was a gift, and that no matter what, this book would wipe away any pain or loss.
I took the book from him and threw it to the ground, furious. This book is useless to me, I yelled at him, I don’t know how to read anymore. And when I saw how he was looking at me, how he stared at me from behind that droopy eyelid, I felt terrified. I ran from there too, feeling his gaze on me long after I had turned a corner and put countless trees and buildings between us.
* * *
When I got home, I threw my arms around my mother’s neck in desperation. I’d never done this before, and she looked panicked beyond measure. She quickly tore my arms away from her and looked me over with wide eyes. She asked if anyone had taken advantage of me and laid their hands on me.
But I was too shaken up to speak, and I tried to do so only once something inside of me gave way. I stopped sobbing suddenly, like I’d used up all the tears I had at my disposal. My lips steadied, and my face loosened up against my will.
I looked at my mother, but not like I’d looked at her all those other times. I looked at her woman to woman, despite the fact that my mother was so thin, so gaunt, missing some teeth, and despite the fact that it was impossible to look at her for too long without feeling some guilt for how our life had gone so far. I asked her how she had managed to talk to my father the first time she saw him, how she’d been able to touch her lips to his.
My mother let out a long sigh, as though she was releasing a great pain. With the newfound knowledge that I was safe and sound, at least this time, she started to caress me—forcefully at first, with the strength of a slap, but then sweetly, maternally, so much so that I felt embarrassed because I wasn’t used to this. I tried to move away from her hands, but my mother pulled me close, brushing my hair from my sweaty forehead.
By then, I no longer wanted to hear about how my mother and father had kissed. I was disgusted by the thought, as though when it came to my parents, it was better to associate them with the yelling and the broken plates they threw at each other when I was young and not with kisses. But my mother placed her hands on my cheeks and talked to me absentmindedly, as if she was recalling some distant memory.
The only thing my mother said to me was that poverty had helped them find each other, that it was what had bound them together with the same noose. That poverty was what had kept them together all these years—and every time my mother said the word poverty, in my mind I pictured a sort of earthly landscape. That strange, invisible, gaseous enclosure in which all life had come about and been allowed to develop. An atmosphere so frightening and benign without which I never would’ve existed, and neither would have my father, my mother, the boy with the droopy eyelid, or all those little birds that flapped their wings inside of me and out, constantly piercing the sky and dazzling the sun with their high-pitched chirps.
* * *
Whatever my mother was trying to tell me, I didn’t get it. If the ancient Greeks had their oracles and the masses in the deserts had their prophets, I had my mother. And instead of helping me understand how to live, her words hovered around me like a cloud of birds.
I kept running into the boy with the droopy eyelid. I saw him at school, in the hallways between classes, at the gym, in the library, in coffee shops, on the street, to the point that I didn’t know anymore whether I was the one following him or he was the one materializing wherever I went.
One afternoon, I even saw him at the Museum of Natural History. I didn’t blush, didn’t sweat, didn’t feel that inexhaustible fluttering of the birds. It was as though the little creatures inside of me had died. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I sprinted away, stumbling and half falling, and I couldn’t even tell what had rattled me more—all of the neatly-arranged stuffed birds along one of the walls of the museum or the dark-haired girl holding the boy with the droopy eyelid’s hand as she walked beside him, laughing uncontrollably.
So this is how it all ended before it really began. I told myself that I’d waited too long, cursed my own name as I tore down the busy sidewalks. I had been too scared to kiss him, to kill him with all of the birds that would have gone from my mouth into his. And by not kissing him, I hadn’t allowed the possibility of that future to spread its wings.
I made it to the park and ran past the first trees I came across. I didn’t seek consolation on a bench, but rather sped down the gravel paths that split off haphazardly before leading to the central clearing—where it was silent and calm, where there were no excuses or salvation, where the emptiness of the sky touched the tips of the grass.
Once I made it to the center of the clearing, I fell to my knees and clenched my hands into fists. I began punching myself. I punched my stomach, punched myself furiously. Nothing happened at first, but then I felt that feathered mass loosen up inside of me, spreading its wings and traveling up my insides, scratching the walls of my throat.
And that’s how all those birds finally flew out of my mouth, flew out from inside of me, every single one I had swallowed. And the sky above me darkened suddenly, filled with infinite chirps and a boundless tangle of feathers.
I watched the cloud of birds hover above me in terror before it dissolved and dispersed to the four winds. And when the sky went back to normal, I stood up with my legs trembling, feeling even emptier.
I coughed and spat out some more feathers, dried the tears that were pouring down my cheeks relentlessly. Who would I have been without all those birds? What would have become of me without them?
I didn’t know, I couldn’t know. I got lost in the park and made it out by sheer luck. I took my usual street past the school. I got home and sat with my back pressed against the trunk of the tree I used to climb when I was younger. And all of a sudden, surrounded by the chirping of the little birds hiding among the branches, I felt so poor, so hungry, and all the more free—as if for me, there was no other way to start over. As if this was the only way that life could guarantee that I would have a fresh start, a way to carry that feeling of fullness from one moment to the next.
Giuseppe Zucco (1981) works at Rai. His first publication was a short story in the anthology L'età della febbre (minimum fax, 2015). He has since published a short story collection, Tutti bambini (Egg, 2016), and the novel Il cuore è un cane senza nome (minimum fax, 2017). His latest short story collection, I poteri forti (NNE, 2021), won the 2022 Ceppo Biennale Story Prize.
Isabella Corletto was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, graduated from Wesleyan University, and has a literary translation MA from the University of Rochester. She translated Amalia Andrade’s Things You Think About When You Bite Your Nails (Penguin Books, 2020) and has published translations in Latin American Literature Today, the Cincinnati Review, and ESP Cultural Magazine.