THE WAKE OF THE POPULAR PIGEON
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
With no eyes (the preferred organs of sacred sacrifices). With a gag of a stick inserted in her beak (reminiscent metaphor to executions in Cuba). Crucified (historic prank that no beast except for man in a savage state would commit). Exposed on a street post like a public menace (as a feathered Christ, and no less defenseless and innocent than the original mammal).
There are moments when being Cuban leaves me with a death void in the chest. If we are capable of this against a little pigeon, what wouldn’t we do as a people against other people when Armageddon (Arma-G2) descends on Cuba?
I take a look around me. No one gives a fuck. I repeat this to scandalize the prudish censors of the Internet, like Eduardo Fontes in his lieutenant-colonelism auditorium of the Minister of the Interior. A fuck. No one gives a fuck in this humiliation of hate crime of humanity. Not one policeman in the neighborhood would have the guts to touch this spell, to show any pity for the corpse. Not one Public Health technician will protest on the basis of hygiene, nor on the psychological impact on children who will now see all this wickedness, as it rots up there.
The Cuban political police should be censuring this kind of act instead of cornering the emerging beauty of freedom of expression. I wonder what would have happened if someone had drawn an innocent graffiti with that pre-deluge word: FIDEL.
Please forgive me: I am insulted. I don’t know if this little bird was bled to death in the name of a god of hatred. I don’t know if some hominid drank its blood to save himself from cancer or to curse another hominid. I only know that our anthropology is criminal. Low-down. Abusive. With no democratic or educable future. Full of fear and—especially—full of shit. Dictatorial to death. Another half-century of vile violence still awaits us. Trust me. You will see.
I once wrote a love poem to a blonde girl. Rhymed verses, as it’s the norm when we lack the air to break the rhyme. Her little bird—a parakeet, also yellow—had just died. It dropped dead out of sorrow in its cage, a week after its adored blue bird lover died of distemper. It was 2007 and my blond girl-love was also dying of sorrow. We buried the desolated bird in a little soulless park at Alamar, the so-called Hanoi, and it was like burying ourselves alive. We had no strength to go on. We were both exhausted from rage. We would have to die to be reborn many centuries later. Or even never again. But that minimal act of posthumous pity for the little yellow bird had left an open door to hope in the midst of the sickening barbarism of the “camel” buses—also yellow—and almendrones, the fat-almond-old-cars, shared taxis for twenty pesos and people with not one pinch of love.
We were not people with not one pinch of love. We had lost even that last pinch of love, which at the moment seemed to us (but it wasn’t, at all) much worse. Sad little bird that D loved….
Today, like all the impoverished citizens of Cuba, just like you yourself without going any further, Landy arrived late to the holocaust of the pigeon. I walked through that stinking corner with dilated pupils to check on a retinal hypertension. If I did not have it yet, I caught it right there, in front of that unbelievable urban Golgotha. Motherfuckers. Blood filled my brain. I repeat, and, please, someone send this line in a comment to the blogger crew of Yohandry Fontana or Eduardo Fontes or anyone like them: Motherfuckers.
Forgive them, Pigeon, because they know very well what they are doing. And more. They know very well what they—those bastards—will do to us.
Translated by T
February 11 2011
