Next to the hotel was a desiccated park and across from it a shop that sold Bibles, Virgins, and crucifixes plus it had a life-sized Christ made of clear glass standing in the window. Next to this shop was a bakery. One morning Cyril went in and bought a box of pan dulces then sat in the park feeding them to the birds whose flit and murmur diverted him from thoughts of Connie. Two nuns stopped before the window of the religious shop and admired the glass Christ. They leaned close, stepped back, put their heads together and nodded in agreement as if to say yes this was the Saviour for them. Cyril had a pencil but had left his sketchbook so drew the nuns on the lid of the pan dulce box. He found himself coordinating each line with either an exhalation or an inhalation, and was cautiously pleased with the results. Usually he held his breath when he drew.
Gilbert joined him, a bottle of Fanta in one hand and a Styrofoam container of tripe and salsa in the other. He held it tantalizingly under Cyril’s nose.
“No.”
Leaning to admire the sketch of the nuns, Gilbert nodded his approval and then told Cyril, not for the first time, that he should go into forgery.
“You think so?’
“You’re never going to make any money selling nuns. Unless they’re fucking. Let me show you something.”
Cyril accompanied him down the cobbled street to a shop that sold birds. There were parrots, minahs, and macaws. “They’d cost a fortune back in Vancouver.”
Cyril did not debate this because for one thing he assumed it was obvious and for another he didn’t really care; he was more interested in the way the wire converged in such perfect lines at the tops of the cages.
“I could ship them home and sell them,” said Gilbert.
Cyril did not debate that either, because he was busy admiring the lines of the feathers, arranged in perfectly tapering patterns, thinking that if you were looking for proof of a divine Being—a Being with an artistic eye—you’d do better to consider those feathers than stories of guardian angels.
“Birds,” said Gilbert, nodding slowly, nodding knowingly, as if it had been clear all along.
Lines, thought Cyril.
They bussed down to the coast and found a fishing village by a river where flamingos strutted and flocks of small green parrots burst from the jungle on one bank and disappeared into the jungle on the other bank. During the afternoon heat everything went quiet; even the sunlight on the water settled into a molten slumber. By evening the mosquitos swarmed and the bats tumbled, and at night the jungle woke with whoops and shrieks and the ringing of cicadas; by dawn they were replaced by the yelps and trills of warblers and gulls along with the dry-throated squawk of grackles. All morning, pelicans glided silently along the line of the breaking surf.
They rented a house with a corrugated metal roof, mud walls, and a packed sand floor. A bare bulb dangled from a wire, there was a hotplate, and when they were thirsty they drank boiled river water cooled in a stone cistern with a wooden lid. Nearby stood a thatch outhouse twitchy with rats.
One evening as they swayed in their hammocks Cyril asked, “Can we change?” He’d voiced the question as much to the night as to Gilbert and expected no answer from either.
“No, but we can become more deeply ourselves.”
Gilbert’s response had come so quickly, with such assurance, that Cyril set his bare feet on the ground on either side of the hammock and sat up to look at him. It was too dark but he could hear Gilbert’s hammock rope strain against the post like ship’s rigging.
“What?” asked Gilbert, sensing Cyril’s gaze.
“Is that a quote?”
“What’s-her-nuts used to say it.”
Cyril lay back in the dark and contemplated Gilbert’s grandmother buried with that pistol. “Was she deeply herself?”
For a long time Gilbert said nothing and Cyril assumed he’d fallen asleep until his voice came out of the black. “After grandpa offed himself she was.”
“How do you know?”
“She said so.”
Cyril tried to imagine such a conversation with his own mother. “Did she ever say why he did it?”
“Battle fatigue. Shell shock.”
“But it was so long ago.”
“What the fuck, Cyril I don’t know. Anyway, why do you want to change?” He yawned and scratched his chest luxuriously with both hands.
“Don’t you want to make money?” asked Cyril.
“I don’t have to change to do that.”
“You’re broke.”
“Wheels are turning,” he said contentedly.
Cyril wondered if Gilbert was profound or an idiot. Where did such easy confidence come from? Was it like hair colour or height, something you were simply born with? There seemed no logic to who had it and who didn’t.
Gilbert took a boat trip up the river—financed by Cyril—and returned with a parrot in a cage made of saplings. The bird’s eyes were red and wrinkled as if it had been weeping. Soon there were two more parrots, then a toucan with a beak as long and sharp as shears, and Gilbert had to hire a carpenter—with money borrowed from Cyril—to build a bigger cage.
“It’s cruel,” said Cyril.
“It’s commerce,” said Gilbert, as if Cyril was committing the all too common error of confusing categories and getting moral where morality had no business.
Cyril drew the birds. He also drew the fishing boats, the row boats, the wharf, the canoes and the palm trees and the crab shells and the huts and the sleeping dogs and the church as well as the red ’53 Buick of Don Antonio Martin Smolenski, whose grandfather came from Krakow. He drew Don Antonio’s antique Spanish rifle with the trumpet-shaped barrel, and drew the dusty iguanas that sat as still as baked clay. He sharpened his pencils with a knife and soon he was working with nothing but a nub on butcher paper. They bussed up the coast to Puerta Vallarta where Gilbert looked into shipping rates for sending the birds north and Cyril bought paper, pencils, and a box of charcoal sticks from a charcoal burner who lived amid sacks of briquets and whose face and knuckles were seamed with soot. They spent the night in a hotel five blocks from the beach and in the morning, before catching their bus, strolled through the town feeling superior to the tourists.
Five months they stayed in San Vicente del Mar, Gilbert acquiring more birds and Cyril drawing more than he had in years. He experimented at using no lines at all, only shades of grey. He went through his own cubist phase, rendering everything in blocks and cylinders. For a while he gave up on representation altogether, devoting all his attention to the character of the line, wide and bold, light and tenuous, thin and sinister, tightly coiled, gently looping.
The local kids came every day to see the birds and to watch Cyril work. Sometimes he drew them and off they’d go, holding their portrait in both hands as if reading a scroll. Don Antonio Martin Smolenski commissioned a portrait, and Cyril devoted two weeks to improving the proud old man’s looks by straightening his nose and ignoring the smallpox scars that dented his complexion. He earned twenty us dollars, a slab of tuna, and a bottle of locally distilled mescal plugged with a twist of rag. His first sale.
Don Antonio held Cyril by the shoulders. “To have talent like yours,” he said wistfully. The richest man in the village, Don Antonio’s bookshelf held works by Albert Camus, José Marti, and Cervantes. He was sixty and had pale blue eyes in a sun-leathered face, and while he’d been to Mexico City and to Vera Cruz he preferred San Vicente.