A Silent Beating Heart

On a day not too long ago, I was opening a glass door to leave an art museum. I had a little humming in the back of my head, a sense that I should open the door slowly and look down. On the stoop in front of me lay a tiny green bird. The bird’s dark brown wings were splayed on either side of its white body.

Dismayed that the bird might be dead, I bent down and carefully picked up the tiny body. It was a hummingbird. I slowly turned the body back and forth see if it was alive. The bird was so delicate and light, almost ethereal, and although it was still warm, I couldn’t tell if it was breathing. It must have just struck a window and fallen to the ground right before I opened the door.

I felt honored to hold this bird. I can probably count on my hand the number of times I’ve ever even seen a hummingbird, and I’d never come close to touching one. I’m from Guatemala and hummingbirds are still worshipped by many of the indigenous Mayan tribes there. Some indigenous Guatemalans, especially the older men, to this day eat hummingbird bone powder as an aphrodisiac, or to add longevity and vitality, but those adjectives seemed at odds with the tiny bird in my hands. The impression I got when looking at the hummingbird was of impermanence and debility, and I worried that the slightest pressure from my hands would finish it off.

The fragile hummingbird in my hand had iridescent green feathers from its head to its tail. It made me think that the ancient Mayan myth of their creation must be true. The Mayan gods were said to have carved the first hummingbird from a precious stone of green jade, in the shape of an arrow. When they finished carving the arrowhead shaped bird, they blew the stone dust from the jade, but they blew the stone so hard that the bird flew into the air, as fast as an arrow. Seeing the speed of this creature they decided to make it their messenger. Holy Mayan day keepers, still practice augury and watch for the portents hummingbirds will deliver from the gods.

I looked around to see if anyone was watching and held the hummingbird up to my ear. Maybe it had a message for me? I heard nothing, not even the thrum of its furious heartbeat, but maybe its mere presence was a message in and of itself.

According to the day keepers, a dead hummingbird in your path means that you will soon experience death or a difficult loss. I immediately thought of my elderly father. He’s so old, nearly 88. I shuddered.

Maybe my hands trembled a bit when I shuddered. Whatever the reason, the hummingbird stirred. I quickly cupped my right hand over my left making a cage for the hummingbird from my hands. I lifted it up close to my ear again, some part of me still hoping to hear it whisper me a message.

This time, while I didn’t hear anything, a curious feeling settled over me, an inkling of trouble on the horizon. I had sensed that I should visit my father. Thinking that it wasn’t likely that my parents had ever seen a hummingbird up close, I took it with me, gently wrapping it in my shirt for the brief car trip.

When I arrived at their house, Papito was wearing a white shirt and a green cardigan, hunched forward with his cellphone to his ear. He was flitting to and fro, walking around like he always does, talking to my sister Lily in Guatemala. He was talking about one of his new hobbies – varnishing dried flowers, and he stopped in front of several delicate f lowers and lifted them up to the phone, even though the camera wasn’t on.

I walked up to him with the beautiful hummingbird in my hands and proudly showed it to him. He glanced down quickly, nodded his head a couple times, gave a me a weak smile, then turned around and walked away, much more interested in the conversation he was having with my sister about flying back to his home in Guatemala. He picked up a cup of hot té de jamaica, made from hibiscus flowers, and stuck in the tip of his tongue tentatively to test if it was cool enough, before sipping from the cup.

I got more of a reaction from Mamita. As I held up the bird close to her, she said,

“Ay, que no me toque!” She didn’t want me to let the bird touch her, afraid that it was sick. I took a picture of her and the hummingbird, but she wouldn’t even glance at it, as if she could get avian flu from just looking at it. The picture was so disappointing, I deleted it from my phone.

By that time, the hummingbird was moving around and trying to flap its wings, so I took the bird outside to let it go in the backyard.

It buzzed off from my cupped hands and perched halfway up the stone wall in my father’s backyard. It didn’t move, and when I approached the bird, it looked like it was struggling for breath. I again picked it up, and it rested for a few minutes in my hand, maybe gaining strength from my warm skin.

After a few minutes, I lifted it to a tree branch, and it stepped from my finger to perch on the branch. It rested for another minute before flying over the wall. I heard some rustling, like the bird had landed in the mulch under a neighbor’s pine tree, but by the time I had walked over to their house, the bird had disappeared.

I went back inside. Papito was off the phone. I asked him what he thought of the hummingbird. He gave me a kind of condescending smile and told me that there were hundreds of types of colibrí in Guatemala. He said he had seen tens of thousands of them in his life.

“¿De veras?” I asked, in disbelief. I had grown up in Guatemala City, and had rarely seen hummingbirds, even though I would often play in the forested hills behind our home.

“¡Sí!” he replied, in a slightly patronizing voice. “¡Los colibrí son muy comunes en Guatemala!” I wondered if they were so common in Guatemala why I had rarely seen one, but I didn’t want to interrupt his stream of thought.

“When I was young, maybe 6 or 7 years old” he said, “I would hunt hummingbirds with a slingshot. My grandfather Amadeo’s coffee plantation was surrounded by jungle and had many flowers that the hummingbirds would pollinate. I was so skilled at killing hummingbirds that my grandmother complained, and grandpa Amadeo said I could only kill animals that I could eat.”

“Entonces,” I asked hopefully, “did you stop killing them?”

“No,” he replied, with a chuckle, “I just started to eat the hummingbirds. I would pluck their feathers, and carefully clean them, then eat what little meat they had on their bones. Los colibrí eat so much sugar, that they taste almost like sweet chicken.”

I was kind of in shock, and a little disgusted thinking of Papito killing the pretty birds and gnawing on tiny hummingbird bones.

“I ate so many hummingbirds,” he continued, “that I started getting faster.” I’m not sure if he was joking, but I decided not to interrupt his thought.

“By the time I was nine, I was so fast that one time, I chased a hummingbird for an hour, and I caught it with my bare hands while it rested on a branch. But I let that hummingbird go.”

I imagined my dad running in a blur after the hummingbird, like the Flash.

My dad kept on talking.

“You know that I was the boxing champion at military school, right?”

I nodded. He had told me that so many times that I’ve lost count.

“Well,” he said, “I always won my fights because I was as fast as a hummingbird – faster than my opponents. Mohammad Ali would always say, ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, the hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see,’ but hummingbirds are faster than butterflies and more dangerous than a bee. If you grab them, they can stab you with their sharp beaks, and their stabs hurt a lot worse than a bee sting.”

He held up his hands and pointed to his palms as if to prove his point, although I couldn’t see any scars. “I know, I’ve been stabbed by hummingbirds many times. That hummingbird you were holding was either sick or stunned. That’s probably why it didn’t try to stab you.”

I was starting to understand why Papito wasn’t as enamored with my hummingbird as me. La convivencia genera desprecio. Familiarity breeds contempt.