The Spirit of the Parrots

It travels with the wind.

It crosses a courtyard at five in the morning and a curtain billows in a room where the windows are locked shut.

It comes into a living room and the fan stops. Not switches off: stops, for an instant, as if someone had laid a hand on it, and then starts up again on its own.

It goes up the shaft of a building and on the ninth floor, in a kitchen where there are no mangoes and never have been, it smells of ripe mango. Someone opens the fridge to check. There's nothing. They close the fridge and get on with their day.

What is essential is invisible to the eye, wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

When a parrot doesn't fly —any parrot, one of the millions that haven't flown since there have been cages— it feels it. Not the way a grown man feels it, who knows the drill by now and knows where to put the thing. It feels it the way a seven-year-old feels it the night he understands, lying in bed, with nobody having told him and nothing at all having happened, that his mother is going to die one day.

That floor that opens up under the bed.

It has been through this millions of times.

Every time is the first.

And it doesn't speak. Worth being clear about that early, because it is what separates it from everything it resembles: it doesn't ask, doesn't reproach, doesn't threaten, doesn't promise. It doesn't appear to anyone with a message. It doesn't come carrying a list of things it wants us to do.

It does one thing only, and it does it in passing, without stopping.

When it brushes past a person, that person feels what the bird kept in front of them feels.

One second.

There is no vision. No forests, no flocks, no voice saying anything. It is simpler than that, and worse: for one second that person's body knows what it is to have been born to cross an entire valley before breakfast and to have spent five years on a perch sixteen inches wide.

Then it's over and the living room is just the living room again.

But there are things you can't unknow once you know them.

«Between wires and sky your emerald flight fell.»

«Rina escaped, Rina escaped! the farmhands were shouting.»

«Marco Polo always looked at me in his own way: steady and still.»

«Today is April 7, 2025, my thirty-first birthday.»

«From the time I was a girl, parrots were always my favorite animal.»

«Azul was left alone. Nobody said it, but he knew.»

«In January 2024 I landed in Vichada to work as a rural teacher.»

«We lived in a small apartment, the four of us.»

«From as far back as I can remember, I always wanted a parrot as a companion.»

«My dad is just a farmer from Santander who was once captured and caged.»

These ten stories were written separately. People who have never met, in different years, each one certain that what had happened was a private matter between her and a bird.

They don't all end well, if well means what we want it to mean. Rina never got the forest back. Paco was left with a broken wing.

But the same thing happens in all ten, and it is the only thing that happens in all ten: someone lets go.

That is all it takes. You don't have to understand anything, or sign anything, or become another person. The hand only has to open.

Where each of those birds went afterwards, the stories don't say.

Some of them, perhaps, came here. The ones that were seized, or the ones somebody handed over to the authorities: that is the door, and it isn't yours to open. An environmental authority opens it, and it is the authority that decides where the animal goes.

The ones that arrive stay for months. They eat fruit they don't recognize. They learn again that a branch moves.

And one day the carrier opens and nothing happens. And a while later it does.

The ones that stay up there find someone who was already there.

The first of all of them. The first to arrive, and among the last to leave.

Not because he wasn't ready. He may have been ready from the first day. The one who wasn't ready was the one who had to open the door.

Here, too, we had to learn to let go. And you don't learn it by loving hard: loving hard is how never letting go gets justified. You learn it by measuring. How many meters he flies without resting. Whether he recognizes a fruit nobody taught him. What he does when a large shadow passes overhead.

Until the numbers say what the affection didn't dare to.

His name is Beethoven. In the foundation's records he is number fifteen, because when he arrived there were no records.

He arrived on Tuesday 5 March 2019, in a cardboard box, as a gift.

A green and yellow chick from the Bazurto market, one of those offered to whoever walks past. They gave him to Alejandro, an Argentine who had been living in the city for a while, who knew nothing about parrots and didn't even know that keeping one was illegal.

At the exact moment the box was opened, the wind came in.

Not a breeze. Wind. Furious, like a storm, in an apartment in the El Cabrero neighbourhood.

That was the beginning of Fundación Loros.

But that story is for the second season.