an exotic bird

Those born in the nineties or this century —may a lightning strike me, you are so young!— won’t understand what it meant to go hungry. Real hunger, nothing like those little stomach grumbles that bother you half an hour before lunch at the office or on the ride home from school. Hunger in its full sense. Having nothing to put in your mouth. Extreme thinness, looking like a shabby monkey-man, and a string of beers obtained by the old method of intimidation.

That’s how the first half of the seventies treated Miguelito and me. We both left home when we reached adulthood. We both dropped out of school because we had to bend our backs to earn a few lentils. And both of us took more than one beating for something that seems so accepted today, with what you call “social networks” —I laugh—, namely saying plainly what you think.

Miguelito was hungry. Not only biologically; that was obvious. He was a poor sack of bones with a tangled mane, patches of baldness in his beard and that perpetual whiff of alcohol that follows chronic drunks. No. Miguelito’s eyes shone. When you’ve busted your spine in construction, carrying sacks of cement in the middle of an Andalusian summer, you know that look. It’s the greed of those who endure the routine because something, a little voice on the flip side of their conscience, whispers that it’s temporary. And they believe it. And they put up with it.

We drifted across the Iberian Peninsula surviving as best we could. The Dictatorship clung to power mechanisms with a Franco increasingly ailing. The air felt leaden. If you still occasionally enjoy the outdoors —which I doubt, given how the screens have you abducted— you’ll know that feeling. Identical to the static that precedes a summer storm. The old ghosts of the Civil War popped up in tavern conversations, and more than one person lost teeth for voicing the wrong opinion. The Basque terrorist group had begun its killings. What a state of affairs.

We avoided Madrid for prudence. Moving north meant getting used to the whispers. Nobody knew where the next explosive would be planted or who would have the honor of receiving the next bullet in the neck. That made us suspicious. Northerners are naturally distrustful after certain historical tribulations that aren’t relevant to this account, and Miguelito and I were too, to the extent that hunger was cannibalizing our insides.

We spoke little, showered when we had the chance, and worked jobs as varied as cobbler, worker in a soap factory, furrier, or refrigeration technician. The last one was curious. We did that for six months in Burgos, during which we learned the basics of repair that we later applied to other appliances. Miguelito wasn’t handy, but he had Andalusian charm —what he called his “southern spark”— that made him smile at you while he lifted your wallet. That’s how easily he set things up. He’d leave you cleaned out like a fine-restaurant kitchen and you’d still thank him for the kindness with which he’d done it.

I had accompanied him on several occasions. Miguelito’s skills were an alternative source of income. Sometimes more lucrative than legitimate work. So when we reached the northern tip of the Peninsula and Miguelito proposed “a big job, mate, as easy as peeling a muffin,” I didn’t hesitate. Because of our nomadic life, we had never faced the consequences of our actions. Our ears buzzed, though. I suppose there’s always a first time.

At that time we were gutting fish at a cannery in Santoña. I know the place became sadly famous years later for a murder. A tragedy about that boy. In the seventies those things didn’t happen, and if they did, those above made sure they didn’t get out.

Santoña is a coastal town in Cantabria. I say it in case you’ve never been there. The streets smell of fish from five to seven and of carnival… I’m sure you know that. Miguelito and I chose it for the privacy the wetlands offered. Almost seven thousand hectares of mud, birds and runoff. A natural paradise for two Andalusian outlaws like us.

Miguelito learned of the fortune through a fling he met at the BB2, a discotheque we’d go to on Saturdays after the afternoon shift. At the BB2 you could have a few drinks to disco music, with strobes and acid filling the corners. The girl, a divorcee with a worse reputation than ours, told him about one of the local businessmen, the former General Jesús Mola, relative of the one who died in a strange accident.

“Mate, really,” she told me while I cleaned hake guts with a short knife. “Ángeles worked there looking after the baby. She saw it with her own eyes and that’s why they sacked her.”

“She might have seen anything,” I said.

“You’re so suspicious.”

“Ángeles likes horse more than I like salmorejo. I repeat: she might have seen anything.”

Miguelito gave me one of those smiles loaded with “southern spark” and returned to work. Once our station was done, the next team did the scaling. Production went on until the tin was canned. I think, of all the jobs I did that year, the mix of the stench of death and disinfectant, the damp, and Cantabria’s constant rains pushed me to want to believe my partner —and therefore Ángeles— who lost her two children after they drank gasoline. How the situation came about, I don’t know. Santoña was —and is— close enough to the Basque Country for accidents to remain accidents.

That the Guardia Civil had other matters of greater urgency to attend to helped. Miguelito and I had agreed to operate in the north for that reason. ETA’s constant threat provided a cloak of invisibility for small-timers like us, who, after all, only wanted to poke our heads out of the pit we were born into.

Miguelito and I shared a room in a boarding house. The following Sunday, as I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I saw him unrolling a worn map on the desk. He placed the ashtray at one corner, our bottles in two others, and the book he carried everywhere —a pocket edition of Don Quixote, although he couldn’t read fluently— at the remaining corner.

“Where did you get that?”

He turned to me with that greedy shine in his eyes. The same one I knew well.

“From the library.”

He allowed a tempting silence to spread that dragged me to reluctantly push the blanket aside and come closer.

“What the hell…?”

The map showed Santoña and its surrounds in black and white. I’ve never been good at reading them and I don’t want to invent facts to prettify this account; what I did understand, without need for explanations, was that the moment had come.

“Trucks that take the lumber from the sawmill to Mola’s company go this way,” he pointed to a black line that could have been a road or anything else, “and these,” he indicated another line ending at the National Road, “are the ones carrying the furniture, ready for sale.”

“He must have made his fortune selling school desks,” I muttered, laughing without joy.

Miguelito slapped my shoulder.

“Mate, the pigeon lives here.” This time he tapped with the tip of a pencil on a white area near “Maderas Mola.” “Ángeles told me he sleeps in the office on Fridays. That way he makes sure Monday’s trucks leave on time.”

It didn’t take me long to see where he was going. I straightened up, adopting a circumspect pose and furrowing my brow. A brow that, back then, formed a hairy seagull on my pockmarked forehead.

“He doesn’t keep diamonds in the bedroom.”

“That’s the best part! He doesn’t!”

He quickly erased the two grey dots the pencil had placed on the map with a delicacy uncharacteristic of him. From experience I knew Miguelito had a snake’s pulse and the same patience. If he was proposing the job it could only mean he was sure.

“He keeps them in the ostrich zoo,” he said, with the same inflection as someone stating an obvious truth, like the sky being blue.

That zoo’s existence wasn’t unknown to me. It wasn’t a matter of trusting Miguelito’s fling —a nymphomaniac with psychopathic tendencies— but of popular wisdom. In Santoña it was as true that the sea sustained the economy as that Jesús Mola had brought exotic souvenirs from his trips to Africa. Diamonds from the Congo… and ostriches, although no one, except a keeper living in town, had ever seen them.

Where did the rumors come from? Mola favored Franco’s regime. On one of the Caudillo’s visits to the town, the businessman gifted him with an oval egg the size of an adult turkey. The most striking thing was the green speckles. Nobody could know it was an ostrich egg, but, to be honest, no inhabitant of Santoña had ever seen an ostrich, so they tacitly agreed to close the matter. Simple. And life went on.

If Miguelito staged a presentation with the map and some flair, it was also because the Colonel, a sixty-something with a reputation for politeness and fewer teeth than fingers, had passed away the previous night. I never knew whether Miguelito had anything to do with it or if Death gave us that little nudge with the mischievous sense of humor it has.

The Colonel, a nest of wrinkles who did odd jobs in Mola’s town —without access to the zoo, according to rumors— and at the factory, had appeared at the BB2 at around eleven-thirty and left, the press wrote, fifteen minutes later cursing in Hebrew. The autopsy revealed a cerebral hemorrhage “and, almost certainly, I would dare say, prior mini-strokes,” Dr. Insua noted in a footnote.

That same afternoon, Miguelito and I applied for the vacancy. Mola had us called in on Tuesday. A middle-aged man, slightly older than us, with a German-style little moustache and anvil-like forearms, came to the cannery.

“You and you,” he said, curt. “With me.”

The boss didn’t say anything as we hung up our gloves, removed our hairnets and left our boots in the locker. He just looked at us with the face of an angry chihuahua. And rightly so.

The factory was a concrete building with an asbestos roof and an assembly line, surrounded by a fence of moldy planks. As you see, humidity took no prisoners. The mustachioed man drove us in a car of the era, took the detour that connected to the Mola estate and, after a quick tour of the mansion —three floors, paintings, vases, a library in every room—, took us to the office where Jesús Mola awaited, wrapped in a dark blue suit.

Mr. Mola surprised me; not in a good way. In the photo with Franco he looked like a tall man with broad shoulders, stretched wrinkles towards the nape and good humor. But the man sitting behind the ebony desk was plump and squat like a toad, with an ugly pinkish scar slitting his double chin and coarse features.

Miguelito’s “southern spark” got us the job. We split duties in alternating shifts between the factory and the villa. We filled sacks with sawdust, kept the garden free of vermin, scrubbed oil stains left by the trucks, and complied, without much enthusiasm, with Mrs. Mola’s whims and caprices —an elegant aristocrat descended from an influential German family fallen on hard times after World War II. She was around forty and liked to be alone with the staff.

This, of course, without going near the zoo. The only access was through the back gardens, where the keeper’s hut and the greenhouse-shaped enclosure where, according to Mrs. Mola, they kept the ostriches were located.

“How do they feed them?” I asked Miguelito one day while I disinfected the wounds the rose bush had made on my arm. Or that my clumsiness had caused. The same clumsiness that would save my life.

“Do I look like a Rodríguez de la Fuente? Ask Pedro.”

He shrugged, as he usually did, and left with his new fling. Ángeles had died of an overdose, though they hadn’t seen each other in weeks. I stayed alone, drinking a beer while I glanced at Santoña’s rainy streets dotted with puddles.

It took us half a year to find an opportunity to bypass Pedro. The initial idea wasn’t to get the diamonds then and there, but to have a look and, on a second attempt, pull the job off. But Miguelito’s greed precipitated everything.

Pedro had a limp since polio. He didn’t speak to anyone and had no known family. On a sunny Tuesday —one of the best days I remember from that overcast time— he tripped during his routine mid-morning stroll. Pedro left the hut for ten minutes to have an espresso, go to the toilet and smoke a cigarette. His leg failed and he cracked his noggin on the edging of the hedge, under a rabbit topiary carved from a cypress. Miguelito saw it.

He ran over, alerted the housekeeper and, between them, carried him to the guest room. They called Mola and Dr. Insua.

Once the doctor arrived, Miguelito walked the two kilometers between the villa and the factory on foot. I was shooing away a rat, big and fat as itself, greasy-furred, that had decided to nest by the varnishing unit. Miguelito stopped a couple of seconds in front of Mola’s office door, looking at me. The conspiratorial sign didn’t escape me: a few scratches on the wall and one in each armpit. Miguelito and Mola returned to the villa in the boss’s Dodge —a little yellow car that months later would become terribly famous for the attack on Carrero Blanco— and I, seeing them drive away, told the foreman Miguelito needed my help to cover Pedro’s tasks now that he was incapacitated. He didn’t question me.

I reached the gate with a film of sweat glued to my torso and my smoker’s breath faltering, about to fail me too. At that moment it would have cost me nothing but a few explanations. “I was scared and wanted to help, Mr. Mola, you know me…” Or a defense like that. It would have been the best.

I skulked around the front garden. A southern wind began to rise. Miguelito crouched behind the hedges at a prudent distance from the hut.

“Mate, next time I’ll put you on a diet. Let’s move our asses.”

He showed me a thick bronze key I recognized at once. Pedro always carried it, hanging from his belt. Miguelito had appropriated it before raising the alarm.

We sprinted to the greenhouse door. Miguelito inserted the key. At first it was hard to turn and I had a bad feeling, but I kept it to myself. Miguelito wasn’t always right. He was skillful and suave, which didn’t spare him mistakes, though he was lucky. If our criminal run had lasted a few years it was thanks to our ability to leg it. After a couple of tries the door opened without the hinges protesting.

“Change of plans,” he announced, lowering his voice to what for a Gaditano might be considered “a confidential tone”; that is, a couple of octaves below his usual voice. “If we see those diamonds we stuff a handful in our pants and throw what we can in the sack.”

He ran his thumb across his lips. Miguelito believed it brought him luck. Then he returned the key to his pocket and looked at me with a kind of crafty yearning that reminded me of how my mother looked at me when my father came home in a bad mood and she didn’t want to be the first to take it.

“Did you make that up on the spot?”

“Mate, if only Pedro has access to the birds, don’t you think Mola will take measures if the injury is bad or if he ends up disabled?”

“You mean move the diamonds.”

It wasn’t a question, and Miguelito didn’t take it as one. He put an arm around my back —his were as thin as umbrella ribs, but hard as oak beams— and pushed me with a blend of camaraderie and impatience.

“Come on, move, move, we’ll still be standing here like scarecrows.”

Unlike usual greenhouses —I don’t know how many you’ve been in, but ever since then I’ve tried to avoid being locked in one at all costs; a kind of panic seizes me at the chance and my legs and hands shake, I break out in cold sweats, and I get nauseous— Mola’s was compartmentalized. We entered a narrow vestibule of a couple of square meters surrounded by translucent panes. A yellow sign on the wall read in black letters: “danger. do not enter.”

“You have to have balls. What does he think, this is Area 51?”

If Miguelito and I understood each other at anything, it was cinema. Each time we arrived at what I used to call “a new home,” the first thing we did was identify three points of interest: the hospital, the church and the projection room. In Santoña we didn’t go to a proper cinema. In a hall near the Aqua they screened American films about martians, cowboys and demons. The latter were the ones the regime had the most trouble with. Showing that something unholy can rival the Savior calls into question any ideology based on concepts like “homeland” or “religion.”

Miguelito pushed the door next to the sign. It led to a glazed corridor, six or seven meters long. Through the transparent roof panels a heat filtered in that reminded me of Andalusian summers, springlike compared to today. Miguelito sniffed like a dog, and I imitated him. An acrid scent filled the space. It reminded me of the guano that coated the walls of an old lighthouse where Miguelito and I had hid years ago, in that longed-for south.

To our right there was a machine the size and shape of a slot machine, with three speckled eggs like the one in the photograph. A black cable connected it to an extension cord. The rest of the wiring left the greenhouse through a hole in the glass. I assumed it linked to an independent generator apart from the villa’s main grid.

A dreadful squeal sounded, like two metal objects being scraped together. Miguelito and I froze. It’s not the most literary expression, but it’s accurate. We had not considered the possibility of another security system. Dogs were unnecessary; ostriches bray —according to Natural History books—. And an acoustic alarm system could have given the birds a heart attack. Logic gave way to a new explanation: the squeal hadn’t been produced by accident; it had been produced. It was deliberate. A warning.

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” I murmured.

“Are you going to tell me you want to run for it?”

“Probably,” I answered.

Saying it, in a way, relaxed me.

“Fuck off,” Miguelito spat with a bray. “We’ve cleaned Mr. Mola’s boots all these months, and for what?”

“The job pays better than gutting fish. And it’s good for the nose in comparison.” I tried to reason; we still had time to back out, but I knew it was impossible.

“Let’s leave it at that. Come on, come on. I’ll tell you something, my friend. I’ve left the Dodge keys ready to fly. I’ve studied the road to Bilbao. When we pass Castro Urdiales we ditch it at a halt. It’ll be an unpleasant afternoon picking our way through those steep mountains, but once we set foot in the city and find a buyer, we can say goodbye to this country.”

“Is there no turning back?”

“Mate, that’s the key to success. There never was.”

Miguelito always knew how to drag me along with his words, even when I saw the precipice before our eyes and he took me by the hand and we ran in a straight line with no parachute.

We advanced down the corridor. The squeal repeated, or another similar one, deeper. It wasn’t in the category of “shriek,” although it was “territorial.”

“The bird’s in a foul mood,” Miguelito said mockingly.

We searched the earth floor for signs of anything buried. The diamonds could be in a sack, a chest… even a suitcase. Mola didn’t seem a creative man. Yet when money’s involved you’d be surprised what even the dullest are capable of.

We found nothing except a door leading to the birds’ enclosure. Again, a little yellow sign: “do not enter. mortal danger. authorized personnel only.”

“Let’s hope it’s not a nuclear plant instead of ostriches,” I joked.

Miguelito simply pushed the leaf, which turned silently on the hinge.

What we saw is something I will never forget. Miguelito, had he survived that day, wouldn’t have either.

I felt an icy blow at the base of my neck. He had to grab the door to stop himself from collapsing. Barely half a meter away, on the other side of a steel cage built to fit the space, we came face to face with four impossible creatures. Chimeras from a madman’s nightmare.

Their resemblance to ostriches was limited to the body and, to a lesser extent, the legs, covered in feathers. The tail was like a peacock’s. Instead of wings they had two short limbs with three digits each and curved talons of, by my rough estimate, half a meter. They looked at us with curiosity from their small heads —in comparison with the breadth of their hips, which seemed like bathtubs— reptilian heads set at the end of long necks. The largest specimen had a mop of red feathers at the nape. Like an Indian. Or like a rooster.

“I think something’s happened to these ostriches,” Miguelito said. “The mother had kids with Godzilla.”

“I…” my knees gave way, I confess. “These are what Mola cherishes with such care. Dinosaurs.”

“Dinosaurs? My ass. Have you ever seen a map of Africa? These are exotic birds, that’s all. Hey, hey!” He shouted at them, shaking his arms in a warlike posture, far from his body, while approaching the bars. The creatures backed away cautiously. “See? They know who’s boss. If not, how could Mola hide the diamonds there?”

His eyes flashed. I tried to warn him to step back, that he was too close to the railing, that maybe Mola had buried them before putting the animals in or that maybe the diamonds didn’t exist. I didn’t. No matter how I tried, words refused to come. The impression they made on me was such that while Miguelito tried to figure out a way past the obstacle —there was no apparent access to the enclosure, but somehow Pedrito or Mola himself had to feed the beasts— I pressed myself more and more against the pane, as if wanting to pass through it, which, unfortunately, I did not. In my mind settled the thought that those animals suffered from the greenhouse’s extreme heat and should be set free.

The red-crested one tilted its head like birds do. It had a reptilian eye fixed on Miguelito. It began to hiss, barely parting its lips, if those scaly folds could be called lips.

“Calm down, little bird. Be good. Tell me where the old man hid it…”

Miguelito had grabbed the bars and was pushing them, searching for a camouflaged door. The red-crested one must have interpreted it as an attack. It let out a guttural bellow, a noise like glass shattering, and charged my friend. Miguelito froze —this time truly—. I think he felt nothing when the feathered mass hit the barrier. It couldn’t knock it down, and for that I owe being able to tell you this, which I swear by Miguelito’s soul is what happened.

The talons impaled him like spears. I saw three points tear his shirt at the lung, the kidney and the neck. The metallic echo muffled the crunch of bones breaking. Miguelito didn’t even groan or stammer. I think he didn’t realize he was dead. He simply crossed the grey curtain and said goodbye to this country (and to the others).

The red-crested one didn’t devour him, although I think it could have stuck its head through the bars. It pulled him toward itself. A crimson stream welled forth, staining Miguelito’s clothes as he collapsed limp on the dry earth. A spray splashed the leg of my trouser.

You may judge me a coward, but I would have liked you to be there, with Miguelito’s body still warm and his mouth drawn into a hint of “southern charm,” burst inside, with little threads of blood at his lips and ears. Yes, I’m saying I ran. Diamonds be damned. I could only think of that membranous, intelligent eye that, alert to any slip I might make, waited to gut me like my friend. I crawled with my back against the pane like a disc on a wet glass. As soon as I crossed the threshold, the creature retreated to join the others, who I now understand were females. Couldn’t Mr. Mola be content with a chicken coop? Where had he gotten those… exotic birds?

Step by step I regained momentum, and my limping, hesitant steps became a desperate sprint. I left the greenhouse, destroyed the rabbit topiary with a tackle, and didn’t stop until I sat behind the wheel of the boss’s Dodge. The keys were there, as Miguelito had foreseen. I turned the ignition and the spark awakened the engine. Instantly Mr. Mola appeared gesticulating. He came down the porch steps and ran after me.

“What the hell…? Bastard! Stop right now!”

Had I stopped, I suspect he would have thrown himself into the bird enclosure. I sped away and left the estate. The southern wind blew in intermittent gusts, like the voice of conscience nagging me about my cowardice.

Coward, yes, though not stupid.

A shot shattered the right rearview mirror. Mola was shooting at me with a hunting rifle from the front flowerbed. I gritted my teeth and within seconds I was so far away that no bullet could have reached me. I could only drive somewhere.

When the south calms, storms intensify. A relentless downpour flooded the road. I wasn’t a great driver; I never was. Back then I didn’t even have a license. You learn to drive as a teenager and Miguelito had taught me, anticipating situations like this. I reached Castro Urdiales, took some exit and abandoned the car. For safety I kept the key. My scant possessions remained in Santoña. My denim jacket —patched more times than a band’s outfits—, my Nino Bravo and Los Españoles records…

I flung myself into a grove of birches running parallel to the road. Bilbao was on the other side of those mountain ranges. It wasn’t the city you know now, but it was already an important center.

During the trek I stumbled several times. Runoff washed mud down my face. All the time I had the cold feeling that the reptilian eye watched me, that at any moment it would push aside the brush with clubs and tear me apart.

I reached Bilbao at dusk. I don’t know if I wandered or simply dragged myself like a slug over the cobbles until I found a church. On the second knock, an elderly priest with a hooked nose and downy grey whiskers opened.

“My son…” he murmured, hesitant.

He looked me up and down. My shirt was a wet rag. My shoes had lost their soles along a ledge halfway. The image of a beggar, without doubt.

“Father,” I gasped, breathless, “could you tell me where the nearest hospital is?”

The cinema could wait.