The dark swallows will return
Gabriela Jirau Delgado
Antonio de Cervantes observed birds as if he had never seen them raise their flight a day of his life. Each feather resembled a long lost memory, a soft pelage that titillated his inner ear and shivered down his spine, deep into remembrance. Antonio gasped when a blue jay chirped, shed a clandestine tear when a wood duck laid an egg in his backyard, and always found himself dreaming of seagulls and sparrows. Life felt like a continuous deja vu, a turmoil of recollection, nostalgia mixed with his coffee morning milk, tangled in his gray coat (an antiquity that had belonged to his grandfather when he had done his military service in Biarritz). Tedium had imposed on his routine like the inevitable arrival of a gray cloud’s muddy rain. He would wake up with the sun and doze uncomfortably here and there throughout the night, lashed by the unbearable heat that reached all the corners of the poorly ventilated summer cabin that he and his wife now called home. Even though he had assured his wife that moving to a recondite hacienda in the middle of Tennessee would finally grant him the literary je ne sais quoi that he desperately yearned for to write his best oeuvre, Antonio had found himself unable to scrawl more than two consonants without panic pinching his neck. Existence seemed paralyzed ever since they had arrived there. What had they done before entering the crooked door of the lodge? What were they prior to secluding themselves to a rather monastic life, so far away, so eventless? They did not know anymore, for they now only existed within the walls of the house, dragging their feet on the wooden floor, rummaging for the meaning of it all in their brains as if in a continuous inquiry. Why did we come here? Why did we come here?
And so, life felt like an eternal lethargy where Antonio was a lukewarm specter only awoken by the flutter of birds. Then, his eyes lit up, enamored, thinking of a homeland that he could only identify blurrily, distantly, but as bright as the chest of a new world warbler, so inviting and warm. The simplest tweet was like an apparition. The beak of a mallard reminded him of the burning sun in Spain, the tiles of his grandmother’s patio, and the lemons that accompanied her best crockery, the white one, which was only ever used to serve fresh fish. Then, the rare moments when Antonio conceded his wife’s desire to explore the mountain (as if it was no longer acceptable to enjoy life) and they laid a checkered tablecloth over the fresh grass where they would silently eat flavorless sandwiches, he could not resist comparing the pathetic view of Lake Dimmick to a ridiculous pond that was far from the splendor of the Mediterranean sea.
When invited to any dinner soiree where guests were merely curious about what had been of the son of Sergio de Cervantes (perhaps the first, last, and only remarkable ornithologist from Tennessee) and not about his own literary path, Antonio would assure his hosts that he would still tear up eating mascarpone —he would mistake the Italian formaggio for manchego cheese, a Spanish delish— and understood all of Paco Bandeira’s songs. “But was he from Spain?,” any intellectual or Western aficionado would ask naively, “Bandeira was indeed in Madrid, but only sang in Portuguese… how odd.” And he would try to change the topic again to diminish the blush on his cheeks… Oh yes, the weather… ¡El tiempo! So nice, so warm…, he would say. And then, the epitome of awkwardness arrived, the one that his wife had been expecting since they had taken seats around the luxurious table, and that made her study every reflection of the silver spoons and forks as if they contained a secret escape out of that embarrassing situation.
“How often do you go to Spain?” the host would inquire innocently, offering some more wine to his exotic guest.
“Pardon?” Always the same, always the same titubation.
“Ya know, how often do you visit your homeland for inspiration? You seem so fond of it…”
The secret would be unveiled: he was a fraud. He knew. No uncomfortable cough or livid joke could downplay the fact that he had never been to the Sevilla where his beloved Bécquer had been born, nor the white coasts that Rafael Alberti yearned for while in Chile or Argentina. His beloved Lorca, what would he think of him after attempting to try to write such ridiculous poems about the oriental and exotic Granada?
Perhaps that is why his dreams were so daunting, like flashlights that lacerated his eyelids and provoked him into a twilight sleep. A dream… a shadow from the past that whispered him calamities before entering cloudy dreams where the sun had been covered by a dark dove and quivering crow eyes transformed into stars, moonlight fused with his own reflection, obtaining the image of a big owl that navigated the sea and landed in the south of Cádiz.
Melancholy hit the hardest during autumn. As the leaves turned reddish and the world became arid and naked, Antonio’s wife observed her husband reminiscing about the days when red had a different meaning. Maple trees, his mother’s red lips on the day they would expect his father’s return, in May, with the arrival of the sun. Red, like a swallow’s chin. Sitting on the veranda on his first autumn at the house after his childhood, Antonio contemplated as the sky turned into a nebulous navy blackbird, as he thought he could still hear the sound of a hundred breeds coming out of his father’s studio (the same one where he now read Garcia Lorca and Unamuno, as he could actually visualize the burning yellow and yellow wheat that clashed in the Spanish fields in perfect harmony.) Oh, that clamor… A tweet and a chirp so loud it would not let him sleep at night when he was younger, but that felt like the sweetest lullaby when his father was away, on the coast of Spain, perhaps following a seagull to its den. There, on the same shore where he had met his mother, Antonio’s father would spend hours collecting wrinkled shells to bring to his wife as a present on his return to Tennessee. There, where his mother had encountered a man who could not look at the sky without referring to feathers, beaks, and claws… That same shore, so beautiful, where she had decided to follow him back to a land he himself did not want to return to, just to wait, just for her to eternally be waiting for childish presents that compensated absence: letters from her Spanish family members, small jars with golden sand captured in them, drops of salty water, algae the color of green. In autumn… In autumn his father promised to come back in the spring. First, he had to chase his beautiful birds, watch them go to South America, or even travel to Spain to see their breeds cross the strait of Gibraltar and go south, farther, farther.
Cherry blossom trees, flame azalea, wild orchids. In spring his father returned to breed swallows and determine his next departure. He would let Antonio enter his studio (cautiously locked in his absence) and he would retell his adventures to his astonished son. Red had a different meaning then. Red like the fresh tomatoes his father would spread on his morning toast, like the crabs he would recollect while swimming in marismas, and like the color of his burned skin after a full day of traveling under the infernal sun. White could only mean a swallow’s belly for Antonio for that same reason, a vibrant mother of pearl; just like blue, which flew like a swallow’s feather too.
Antonio saw his father flee their house with every falling of the leaves. Autumn meant the end, finito, adios, nos vemos pronto. The rest of the year he limited himself to aiming his gaze at the window, uselessly wishing to see an early swallow’s flight. But birds never change their flight, he knew. That did not prevent him from looking hopefully at the sky anyway, pressing fallen azure and scarlet feathers against his pockets as if, the more he collected, the faster they would turn into wings that could take him across the Atlantic sky. Oh, beautiful swallow, cradle me into the sea, take me there, to that bright and beautiful land… In the same veranda where he wished all that, he now read fellow emigré poets, exiled from Andalucía into international water —Luis Cernuda and Rafael Alberti gave him solace those autumn nights, refuged under the candlelight, but no one beat the divine essence of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer who talked about swallows the same way his father did and in a way he could only imagine to feel:
Volverán las oscuras golondrinas
en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,
y otra vez con el ala a sus cristales
jugando llamarán.
(The dark swallows will return /to your balcony to hang their nests /and, once again, with a wing to its glass /playing, they’ll call).