It has now been two years since my cousin, the writer Damián Larrea, was found dead in my home, in the old house on Palermo Street. However, far from fading, the mystery surrounding his death has taken on a strange, almost metaphysical vitality. In the town’s taverns, among whispers that cross paths like ghost trains, the elders still speak of the only witness to that crime: my polyglot parrot named Socrates, condemned to eternally repeat a final plea.
How did the parrot come into my life? Socrates wasn’t bought or given as a gift: he came into my life the way revelations do, unexpectedly and calmly. One September afternoon, while I was wandering through a dusty market in a town forgotten by maps, I came across a rusty cage where a young parrot, skinny and sad, babbled words in Spanish. His eyes didn’t ask for pity, but for something deeper: to be recognized as an equal. I felt an inexplicable shiver—as if compelled by an inner mandate I couldn’t ignore—and without thinking, I negotiated his immediate release. The parrot, whom I later named Socrates, I brought to my house on Palermo Street not as an acquisition, but as a companion in exile.
On April 16, 2023, I arrived at the old house after an exhausting day at the office. As I pushed open the door, nothing seemed out of place. There were no broken locks or open windows. But something graver, more invisible than physical violence, floated in the air: a silence so dense it could be cut. And over that silence, the agonizing voice of my feathered companion: “Don’t kill me, Claudio, don’t kill me.” My cousin’s body lay on the wooden floor, motionless, with an expression of resigned disbelief. He had fallen in my own house, the refuge where he dreamed of utopian worlds, at the hands of someone he had blindly trusted. The judicial file reconstructed the scene with the precision of an entomologist. There were no signs of forced entry. The killer, Claudio Becerra, had been invited in. Claudio wasn’t a stranger: he was our bill collector, an almost mythical figure in town, famous for his obsession with collecting every last coin—even from the dead. It wasn’t uncommon to see him wandering among graves, claiming forgotten debts, or attending spiritualist sessions where he demanded, through the Ouija board, payment of accounts from the beyond.
Claudio had become infamous a year earlier for preventing the burial of a pianist and claiming that debts were immortal. It all happened one Sunday in May. Claudio, armed with a Ouija board, a black candle, and a megaphone, demanded that the deceased “respond like a man, even if ectoplasmic.”
Claudio stood in front of the coffin and recited firmly: “The body dies, but the debt remains. Thus speaks the metaphysics of collection.” He then placed the Ouija board atop the provisional gravestone and began invoking the pianist’s spirit, whom he accused of owing him 850,000 pesos—money supposedly meant to compose his final piano piece: “How to Owe Nothing to Anyone.”
“I do not come for revenge, I come for transcendental financial justice,” Claudio declared to an audience made up of mourners, two confused priests, and a gravedigger who discreetly applauded him.
The pianist’s mourners tried to proceed with the burial, but the collector Claudio chained himself to the coffin until he was removed by the police, not without first promising to visit the pianist “every Day of the Dead” and to launch an interdimensional collections agency called “Beyond Collections Inc.”
Days later, the pianist’s family decided to change his epitaph, which originally read “Here rests in peace,” to a more cautious one: “Here tries to rest in peace, but owes 850,000.”
My cousin Damián, his literary luck shattered after years of defeats in contests and competitions, begged an enraged Claudio to give him more time to pay the debt. He promised to pay him with the prize money from the poetry contest as soon as the ruling from his town’s Floral Games was announced. But Claudio, blind with impatience, said he had spent three long years waiting for Damián to win a contest to pay the debt, and he always lost. That was when he chose to commit the crime.
After the tragedy, a thin trail of blood led investigators to the butcher shop of Roberto del Solar, accomplice of Claudio Becerra. There, amid the stench of meat and the echoes of knives, they found bloodied shirts and pants. Especially a shirt with cuffs soaked in red that seemed to tell, in a language more eloquent than any statement, the horror of the past night.
During the trial that shocked the town, my parrot Socrates, prisoner of his nature as an innocent repeater, became the unexpected witness. Although Claudio’s lawyer argued that the law does not yet recognize the testimony of non-human beings, his incessant repetition of the final phrase “Don’t kill me, Claudio, don’t kill me” deeply resonated with the jury and the public. Each time Socrates uttered those words, it was as if the voice of the murdered returned from the threshold of death to point to the guilty.
The judge, before delivering the sentence against Claudio, said that contemporary philosophers teach us that the boundaries between the human and the non-human are moral fictions built on the arrogance of anthropocentrism. He said that Damián, a man sensitive to invisible wounds, had sensed this truth. Perhaps that’s why his library held books by Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze, furiously annotated with loving intensity. Perhaps he understood that all captivity—even that of the parrot who had accompanied him—was a betrayal of the deep nature of life.
Today, the old house on Palermo Street remains abandoned, besieged by the rot of memories. Neighbors claim that in the early hours, when the mist descends like a shroud over the town, a distant plea can be heard, trembling among the plane trees and cracked walls: “Don’t kill me, Claudio. Don’t kill me.”
It is not a ghost who speaks. It is memory. It is the echo of a lost freedom, demanding justice not only for Damián, but for every being torn from its right to fly.