On the other side of love

Marco Polo always looked at me in his particular way: fixed and steady in his upright posture, elegant and delicate. When I met him it was nighttime; at first I only saw him at those hours. It troubled me to know I was waking him, disturbing him late at night for no apparent reason. I always believed that animals called exotic had no place in homes in the urban world — the whole landscape of illegal wildlife trade had always struck me as terrifying, inhuman, and absurd in every dimension.

I preferred to act as if he didn't exist; I deliberately ignored him during visits to a house that today exists only in memory and fantasy.

— I feel like he's watching me.
I said to her during a quieter moment between us in her kitchen. I held his gaze for a few minutes, in silence, under several effects that were, in the end, hallucinatory: the greatest love in the world still taking root; the open curiosity of someone seeing something new for the first time; and states bordering on the lysergic, which from somewhere deep inside me whispered: "Go closer, look at him. Either way, he's already here."

I opened the latch on his cage and let him out. Within minutes he was already moving along the metal mesh where, to compound his bad luck, he lived — at least during the most unavoidable moments, as I later discovered.

She and I exchanged a few words, but both our attentions were fixed on the little creature, who was walking slowly toward me: head-on at first, then sideways, and step by step he climbed my leg, gripping my trousers until he reached my knee and settled there — just to be, simply to exist.

And so, little by little, I began to learn that parrots existed. And, strangely enough, I felt their colors seep into me.

— Look at that little body — she said, sucking her finger in concentration.

It was exactly as her words described: his round little head and his strong beak; that eye that constantly shifted its pupil size as he watched me, revealing a vivid orange when it narrowed to its smallest, and sometimes disappearing entirely. His tiny nostrils and the way he opened his beak for anything — so subtle and so precise at the same time.

His chest was round and full, while the rest of his body carried the delicate shape that belongs to winged creatures — graceful and coquettish by nature. His rump and his little legs, which looked like a model's, need no further description. Most striking of all were his colors: bright greens in many shades, royal blue, yellow, a little red and even less pink. He was a spectacle for the senses. His hues filled me with admiration in that instant — the feeling that comes from discovering a beauty previously ignored, now suddenly full of meaning.

Something changed in me that day.

My heart turned a vivid, joyful yellow; it was as though Marco shared something of his being through his unexpected beauty and his silent walking, infecting me with his colors and sensations I had never felt before.

Besides that, something unusual had happened to me: I was falling in love for the second time in the span of two months. Though both loves were, by nature, different.

It was no longer Marco Polo who watched me constantly — it was no longer Marco Polo, it was my boy, my little chest, the baby parrot, the king of the house, the most princely of all Castile. Now the two of us held each other's gaze every time I came to visit her, the keeper of my love. It was as though both loves grew inside me, branching apart, each taking root in its own way, feeding into my heart — the three of us lodged in the deepest part of my existence. So him, so her, so the three of us: so much love, so much warmth, so much brightness and heat, that it was no longer possible to uproot them from my spirit.

Later I asked her about her particular love story with him — he had surely had his own peculiar episode with her, too.

— I took him from a house where I used to live. I rented the ground floor, and he spent day and night in a cage. It hurt me to always see him there. He was clearly still young, and I felt that leaving him would condemn him to a long life in the most absolute captivity. I've always felt a passion for birds, and he wouldn't be the first one to live with me — though he would be the first parrot.

I learned that parrots can live for several decades, that they are monogamous, that they have an omnivorous diet though they prefer certain fruits and seeds — and in Marco's case, scrambled egg with tomato and onion, no salt.

I could see that this woman had informed herself, as much as she could, to give our baby a balanced and nutritious diet. It showed in the parrot's plumage — always bright, full, and if not perfectly clean, then in a state of permanent well-being.

Gradually I learned from both of them, coming to know one through the other and vice versa. Days passed, then weeks, months, and finally years. I learned everything about him and about her. I learned to read his sounds, his gestures, his nonverbal language, his hysterical morning screams; I watched his yawns a thousand nights and the way his little tongue stretched when he opened his beak wide; they taught me to stroke his body gently — beneath his ears, under his beak, along his little chest and his small legs.

I always wanted to smother him with kisses, but I was never able to surrender to so atrocious an instinct.

— Hola, mi amorrrrrrrr — Marco would say left and right.
— Hola, mi pechuguita — she would say.
— Hola, mi requete rey — I would say.

We let him out of his cage as soon as the day began, or when we got home from work. He always preferred my lap. God help her if she tried to come near me while Marco and I were together — snap! — his bite, partner, so she'd show some respect.

Over time the baby no longer wanted to share me: from the moment I walked through the front door of that home, he demanded me with his cries and complaints — whether fighting over his breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or simply wanting company (sometimes in silence, sometimes full of sounds and words I said to him with intensity, fantasizing that one day he'd learn them).

— That parrot traded me in for you, you pair of so-and-sos; I introduce you and now you prefer each other. Next time, just come visit him directly.

Sometimes, in fact, I did visit him first. I'd arrive before her at her own home to devote our time together to the king and prince of all Castile and its surroundings. We spent hours together; I read many books with him on my knees: In Praise of Folly, Women, The Magic Mountain, The Name of the Rose, and others I've surely forgotten by now. It became almost a ritual: she would arrive around one in the morning and I at eight or nine at night. I'd take him out of the cage — which I think we both always hated — and let him walk wherever he wanted, knowing that sooner or later he'd come to find me.

And so it went for hours: he preened constantly, interrupted my reading with little bites, walked across my legs, moved from one to the other and from legs to chairs, beds, or sofas. We sought each other out, I scratched him gently, he bit me affectionately. Many times I left him on a play gym I bought him while I made dinner — for her and for me.

For him, a feast: banana, guava, tree tomato, carrot, and sunflower seeds.

He listened to music with us, and if he saw us singing along, he joined in too; his favorite was "Lost on You" by LP. He knew how to sleep curled up if the moment called for it. He really was the prince of the house.

And so I slowly forgot that I had once hated the idea of a parrot — a product of illegal wildlife trade — living in my beloved's home.

As time passed naturally, our love held steady and calm. By then I was a student at the Universidad de Antioquia, and on a field trip toward the Montes de María a good friend said to me:

— Man, have you heard the lyrics to "El Mochuelo"?
— The vallenato song?
— That's the one. Put it on, put it on — I want us to really listen to the words.

Ágil vuela, busca la ocasión
Ágil vuela, busca la ocasión
de salir de esa cárcel protectora,
y bello es el furor, no más,
de aquella ave canora
…
Él perdió su libertad
para darnos alegría
…
Es que para el animal
no hay un dios que lo bendiga
…
Tu cantar, tu lírica canción
es nostálgica como la mía,
porque mochuelo soy también
de mi negra querida
…
Esclavo negro, cantá,
entoná tu melodía,
canta con seguridad
como anteriormente hacías
cuando tenías libertad
en los Montes de María

(El Mochuelo, Otto Serge, Rafael Ricardo, 1983)
Hay partes recortadas para enfatizar lo más importante al relato.

The song never sounded the same again.

Out of that experience I realized that Marco Polo was, in the end, another mochuelo. Singing him that song with tears in my eyes — moved by the feeling only art can produce, and accompanied by a certain guilt — I asked myself: what lies on the other side of love?

I understood that perhaps, on the other side of love, there was a world still waiting to be discovered: freedom, far from that prison that confined him to just centimeters, when his biology equipped him to cover infinite distances he would never see if he stayed with me, with her, with us. I understood that, despite giving him the best life we could, we would never give him what nature had called him to be — and that, at this rate, he would never spread those wings I so admired for their detailed and intricate form.

Accepting that our ethereal prince would have to leave our lives sooner or later, to live his own, brought us a kind of certainty. He had already fulfilled his role in our lives, and we, more than fully, had fulfilled ours in his. Perhaps, on this side of love, each of us had committed in our own time and in our own way to adoring him and contemplating him from a position far too comfortable — without ever questioning whether it was truly the best thing for him.

In the end, a short time later we decided to find a place where Marco Polo could live up to his name and travel the routes a thousand times over that he had never dreamed of seeing, growing up as he had behind those walls, amid those noises and urban confines.

Even so, several months passed before we found somewhere to rehabilitate Marquito. In that time I had the chance to talk with him at length — steadily and in silence. I thanked him, as much as I thanked her, for the chance to love a species I had never, not even out of curiosity, considered before: birds — iridescent, sensual, graceful, delicate, strong, and undeniably tender to the bone.

I was grateful for our time together and for having been saturated in his mystical and nuanced essence. I also felt fortunate to have been born in Colombia, a country filled with fauna and flora like few others in the world.

To my misfortune, my love story with her ended before we could fulfill our desire to set that small feathered devotion — who carried a name and was learning some of our everyday expressions — truly free. She always used to tell me:

— He only says beautiful things: "¡Ay, tan goorrditoooo!"; "¡Ay, tan papasitoooo!"; "Mi pechuguitaaaaa"; "¡Mi amoooorrrrr, amigoooo! ¿Quiere cacao?"; "¡Griseeeeeeeeel, mamiiiiiii!"

And it was true. I confirmed it over nearly five years.

Today, despite the deep grief of being without both of them, I find comfort in knowing that she carries on with one of our last shared dreams: bringing Marco together with distant cousins — little by little — who will help him rehabilitate, guided by professionals who will love him as much as we did; who have the means, the knowledge, and the techniques to make our baby not a mochuelo, much less a Marco Polo, but a real Amazonian parrot — a being who should never have known any geography other than the mountains, the endless air, the countless trees, and distances previously unimaginable to his tiny gaze, so accustomed to smooth flat walls and a set of damned bars even smaller.

I don't know — perhaps he too will find his own Grisel sooner or later: a little female parrot who shows him how vast the world is, who makes his wings lift one day and never fold back again; who covers him in kisses with her yellow beak and scratches with care the hidden spots on his bright green little body. So that he no longer sings like a slave — as he once did — but sounds all his notes in full freedom, surrounded by his own kind, by those he never knew existed, but who, without knowing it, were calling to him from such distant horizons.

To live, at last, on the other side of love — the other side of our love.

Analysis and reflections from Fundación Loros