Only The Blasphemies of Sailors [Garcia Marquez]

From Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Trans. Edith Grossman.

"Nothing that does not speak will come into this house," he said.

He said it to put an end to the specious arguments of his wife, who was once again determined to buy a dog, and he never imagined that his hasty generalization was to cost him his life. Fermina Daza, whose straightfoward character had become more subtle with the years, seized upon her husband's casual words, and months after the robbery she returned to the ships from Curaçao and bought a royal Paramaribo parrot, who knew only the blasphemies of sailors but said them in a voice so human that he was well worth the extravagant price of twelve centavos.

He was a fine parrot, lighter than he seemed, with a yellow head and a black tongue, the only way to distinguish him from mangrove parrots who did not learn to speak even with turpentine suppositories. Dr. Urbino, a good loser, bowed to the ingenuity of his wife and was even surprised at how amused he was by the advances the parrot made when he was excited by the servant girls. On rainy afternoons, his tongue loosened by the pleasure of having his feathers drenched, he uttered phrases from another time, which he could not have learned in the house and which led one to think that he was much older than he appeared. The Doctor's final doubts collapsed one night when the thieves tried to get in again through a skylight in the attic, and the parrot frightened them with a mastiff's barking that could not have been more realistic if it had been real, and with shouts of stop thief stop thief stop thief, two saving graces he had not learned in the house. It was then that Dr. Urbino took charge of him and ordered the construction of a perch under the mango tree with a container for water, another for ripe bananas, and a trapeze for acrobatics. From December through March, when the nights were cold and the north winds made living outdoors unbearable, he was taken inside to sleep in the bedrooms in a cage covered by a blanket, although Dr. Urbino suspected that his chronic swollen glands might be a threat to the healthy respiration of humans. For many years they clipped his wing feathers and let him wander wherever he chose to walk with his hulking old horseman's gait. But one day he began to do acrobatic tricks on the beams in the kitchen and fell into the pot of stew with a sailor's shout of every man for himself, and with such good luck that the cook managed to scoop him out with the ladle, scalded and deplumed but still alive. From then on he was kept in the cage even during the daytime, in defiance of the vulgar belief that caged parrots forget everything they have learned, and let out only in the four o'clock coolness for his classes with Dr. Urbino on the terrace in the patio. No one realized in time that his wings were too long, and they were about to clip them that morning when he escaped to the top of the mango tree.