The Bird

To the boy, the man seemed an angel. His wings, long and white, captured the boy’s attention, who hid himself behind an anvil, just outside the workshop’s large entrance. The craftsman raised each arm, testing each wing independently. He had built the thinnest of metal lattices that now corseted his abdomen and stretched along each arm. The metal structure weighed no more than a leather jacket. It stretched down to his ankles and held each feather in place with wax and string.

The boy watched in in amazement. The craftsman flexed his arms, pumping them as a bird would, and in that moment seemed to raise himself aloft, if only for a moment, levitating and leaving the earth. The boy couldn’t contain his excitement. The moment so enthused him, he squeaked in shrill eagerness. The man they called “El Pájaro” could fly.

The craftsman shot a look toward the boy, who froze from fear. His mind cried out to run, but his feet had rooted to the ground. “Hello,” the man said, unfastening the corset around his middle.

The boy’s mouth opened, but no words came. Instead, his saucer eyes peered onto the unshaven and long-haired Pájaro. “What are you doing in my shop?” He asked.

The boy put his hands on the top of the anvil and leaned forward as the man undid the last of the metal clasps. “You,” the boy said. “You can fly.”

The man called Pájaro laughed. He lifted the wings from his arms and turned to two metal hooks on his shop’s wall. “I do not know,” he said. “I will learn soon.”

“But I just saw it,” the boy said, his intimidation giving way to exuberance.

“That? Just a simple,” he snapped his fingers. “Tomorrow I will take the wings to the cliffs.”

“And do what?” The boy asked.

“Why, I will jump.”

The boy pictured it vividly. The Pájaro lifting off and gliding across the chasm, soaring up above the cathedral’s bell tower, over the market, and toward the sleepy municipal buildings. Men and women would rush outside to see him. All would shout in ecstasy and point to the sky. After he landed, the townspeople would line up in the dusty road outside his workshop. They’d come to marvel him, to touch his wings, to lift him above their shoulders and carry him down the street as a hero.

“You’ll jump from the cliffs?” The boy asked, disbelief at the images of his own imagination.

“Yes,” the man replied, a smile coming across his lips.

“But you could fall,” the boy said.

“True, I could,” the man said. “But I have the opportunity for flight. And I resolved long ago not to allow my fears to interrupt my dreams.”

The boy went home that night feeling light. He hardly slept. After he received the Pájaro’s promise that the winged craftsman would wait until the boy arrived to take his leap, the boy tossed and turned until the sun rose and he could sprint breakfastless from his home, against his harried mother’s protests.

He arrived as the red sun hung as a low orb, half obscured by the orange cliffs. The boy gazed on the Pájaro in wonder. The morning light set the craftsman’s wings ablaze in color. He flexed, testing their motion. With a casual glance over his shoulder, the Pájaro winked. No one in the world except them. And then, he leapt.

The boy rushed to the edge of the cliff. There, the Pájaro soared, just as he had imagined, careening over hillsides and farmhouses, riverbeds and dykes, rows of olives and grapes. And that might have forever remained the boy’s memory, as he wished it could have, but when the Pájaro flapped his wings and banked away from the cliffs, one of the metal screws came undone, and he lost half his right wing. The boy, years later, would find the moment in his memory graceful, almost serene, and he would promise himself that he could make out a smile across the craftsman’s face. Even later, when he had his own children, would he understand the wisdom in the craftsman’s taking his jump.

But in the moment, the boy could only weep. An uncontrollable tear for every hope that those wings had promised him.