Tender is the Flesh(26)

He comes across a sales booth. When he sticks his head through the empty door frame, he finds cans, papers, filth. Inside, he reads the list of products painted on the wall: Simba the stuffed lion, Rita the stuffed giraffe, Dumbo the stuffed elephant, animal kingdom cup, tit monkey pencil case. The white walls are covered with graffiti, sentences, drawings. Someone has written “I miss the animals” in small, restrained letters. Someone else crossed the words out and added “I hope you die for being so dumb.”

When he leaves the sales booth, he lights a cigarette. He never wanders around the zoo, but instead always goes straight to the lion’s den and sits there. He knows the zoo is large because he remembers spending hours exploring it with his father.

He steps down into some empty swimming pools. The pools are small. They could have held otters, or seals, he thinks, but can’t remember. The signs have been torn off.

As he walks, he rolls up his sleeves. He undoes the buttons on his shirt and leaves it open, loose.

In the distance, he sees huge cages, they’re tall, topped with cupolas. He remembers the aviary. The colourful birds flying, the burst of feathers, the smell both dense and fragile. When he reaches the cages, he sees it’s actually one cage, split into sections. Inside there’s a large hanging bridge covered by a glass cupola, which once allowed visitors to walk among the birds. The doors are broken. The trees that were planted inside the cage grew up and broke through the glass cupolas over the roof and bridge. He steps on leaves and shards of glass, feels them crunch beneath his boots. There’s a staircase up to the hanging bridge. He climbs it and decides to cross the bridge. He walks through branches, steps over them, pushes them out of his way. In a clearing, he looks up to the roof and sees the treetops and one of the cupolas, the one in the centre. It’s the only one made of stained glass and has an image of a man with wings flying close to the sun. He recognizes Icarus, knows of his fate. The wings are made of different colours and Icarus is flying through a sky that’s full of birds, as though they were keeping him company, as though this human were one of them. He picks up a branch with leaves on it and cleans the floor of the bridge a little so he can lie down without cutting himself on the glass. Some parts of the cupola are broken, but it’s the least damaged of them all because it’s the highest and furthest from the branches of the trees, which haven’t yet reached it.

He wishes he could spend the whole day lying there looking up at the multicoloured sky. He would have liked to show this aviary to his son, just as it is, empty, broken. A memory strikes him of his sister’s phone calls when Leo died. She only spoke to Cecilia, as though his wife were the only one who needed to be consoled. At the funeral, crying, she held on to her children as though she feared they too would die a sudden death, as though the baby in the casket had the ability to infect others with its fate. He looked at everyone as though the world had distanced itself a few metres; it was as though the people embracing him were behind frosted glass. He wasn’t able to cry, not once, not even when he saw the small white coffin being lowered into the ground. What he was thinking was that he wished the coffin were less conspicuous; he knew it was white because of the purity of the child inside, but are we really that pure when we arrive in this world, he wondered. He thought of other lives, thought that maybe in another dimension, on another planet, in another era, he might find himself with his son and watch him grow. And while he was thinking about all this and people were throwing roses onto the coffin, his sister cried as though this child were her own.

Nor did he cry later, after the simulacrum of a funeral that was still expected back then. When the guests had left and the two of them remained, the cemetery employees lifted the coffin back up, wiped away the earth and flowers that had been thrown on it and took it into a room. They removed his son’s body from the white coffin and placed it in one that was transparent. He and Cecilia had to watch their baby slowly enter the oven that would cremate him. Cecilia collapsed and was taken into another room with armchairs that was set up for this purpose. He received the ashes and signed the papers that verified that his son had been cremated and that they had witnessed it.

He leaves the aviary and walks past a kids’ playground. The slide is broken. There’s a seesaw that’s missing one of its seats. The merry-go-round shaped like a spinning top has retained its green colour, but swastikas have been painted on its wooden floor. Grass is growing in the sandbox and someone has placed a rickety chair in the middle of it and left it there to rot. Only one swing is left. He sits down on it and lights a cigarette. The chains still hold his weight. He swings by moving his legs gently, his feet touching the ground. Then he starts to pump his legs, lifting his feet into the air, and sees that in the distance, clouds are forming in the sky.

It’s a hot day. He takes off his shirt and ties it around his waist.

Not far from the playground he sees another cage. He goes over to it and reads the sign.

Sulphur-crested cockatoo

Cacatua galerita

Class: Aves

Order: Psittaciformes

Family: Psittacidae



Someone has written “I love you, Romina” in red letters over the description of the habitat.

Adaptations: The males have eyes the colour of dark coffee, while the females’ eyes are red. During courtship, the male raises his crest and moves his head in the shape of an eight while he emits vocalizations. Both parents take responsibility for incubating and feeding the chicks. The bird lives to about 40 years of age in the wild and to almost 65 in captivity (there’s a record of a cockatoo that lived to over 120).