He does not understand why the white heron, that dream-like thing, is there wherever he walks in the canyon, walking because he does not know what else to do, wondering about his daughter—those dark eyes, which he has always loved, and the dark skin, which came from him—and what will be decided by her mother in a city by the border. It cannot be the same heron, and yet it is because the message is the same, the starkness and the beauty the same: the incredible, blinding whiteness against a field, in the bottom of a creek, by a railroad track, on a cliff whose face tells the history of ten thousand years in pebbles worn a thousand different ways in soil laid down by torrential rains, there before he was born and there ever after.
Perhaps afraid, perhaps not, the heron looks back at him as if to say, “I am here. That is all. There is nothing else to understand.”
He does not believe it—that this is all the heron would say. If nothing else, it would tell him why it is white, why a bird would be made to stand out against everything, white as a ghost, so that coyote or eagle could see it so easily. Is the white a warning? “If you try to take me, my beak will blind you, and what use will you be then—blind eagle or coyote starving in the canyon or in a tree, unable to run or fly. Am I worth it? Besides, I will hear you coming. I am so white that, like God, I see and hear everything. Were God a bird, He would be me. You cannot try to take God without losing something.”
At times, he has stared so long at the white heron wherever he finds it, looking for more than it is willing to give, that he has indeed grown blind, seen the white and only that. He knows that what is around it is not white, but he sees nothing else. He knows that the white is more than what it claims to be—than what he thinks it must be—but the more he looks, the less he sees and the less he sees, the whiter it is, and he grows blind. He thinks: When I take a step to see more of it, to see something else, something other than the white, it startles. Even one step. It then takes flight and with its long black legs trailing and its snake of a head coiled back, it leaves him there alone. Once it simply turned its back on him, there by the railroad track, and by turning disappeared, the whiteness gone, only ties and steel left. Sometimes, stranger still, its neck begins to move; and mesmerized like a bird before a snake, he sees only its yellow eye and in a moment has been devoured, lies there in its stomach as it sleeps, one leg up, until he is no longer.
Is this what the God he grew up with, the God of the light, of truth, wants, he wonders—that we question until we disappear, that we look at His face and ask to understand what cannot be understood by those who need faces? Should he be looking to the right or left of the bird, as if it were a star and he his daughter one night long ago when she and her mother were with him, together, to see it more clearly; or is it that his need to see it clearly is the mistake, the one we all make? That God or love or anything that really matters cannot possibly be seen clearly? Is it, he wonders, the whiteness itself that confuses, making him think that God is not like the rest, that He is different, when He is the same: The railroad track, the field, the creek, the canyon, the cliff with its pebbles and rivers long past, and the white bird a lie to test him: Here is beauty, Armando—perfect whiteness—so that you will think I prefer it to the stinking water of that pond or skin too dark to love, which her mother claims yours is, or your own stained teeth or the oil leaking from car to driveway or a child’s bird dead in a cage, needing, as she put it that bright morning, to “grow wings again, Papaito,” or darkness itself, or even what you call sin when it may be simply blindness. I give this bird to make you think that in this world some things are better, more beautiful, than others, when it is not true, and the only hell is thinking it so. What must I do to convince you? What can I do but give you the lie, and another, and another?
If this is what He wants—if this is why the God of his childhood puts the white heron everywhere he goes thinking of things beyond his body, his work, his child and the two women (her mother and the one he went to later at night, in secret) who hate him—which is only fair—then it is up to him.
It is up to him to do it.
Perhaps a year from now, or five, or ten, when his daughter is old enough to phone him or write to him from her mother’s city, or at the end of his life as he looks through the window by the bed—his teeth even more stained, his skin lighter somehow from time, but not light enough, his muscles loose on their bones—he will see the bird again and do it.
He will take it and turn its whiteness to darkness, and at this turning he will feel fear, not the comfort of beauty, of God’s breath or words or gaze. He will fall into the night of this new bird and, as he does, feel its bill again tearing at his eyes. As it tears and he goes blind, as he did walking years ago, the darkness will not be the darkness of the bird, but his own—in his hunger and self-loathing—and it will be up to him:
To turn it white again.
Only he can do it; and if he has learned anything from the bird, he will see, as he holds the phone or letter or moment of death, no yellow eye, no black legs trailing, no neck or whiteness so startling that it must be God’s face, but instead the wingless, scared and falling bird he has been for so long; and in that falling (as a child might say) grow wings again.
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