Mirkwood

It is impossible to read a García Márquez novel with equanimity and it was no different with Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In this short novel, Santiago Nassar is accused of defiling the honor of Angela Vicario, a young girl who is engaged to be married to a charismatic outsider. When the novel starts, Santiago Nassar has already been murdered for revenge by the brothers of Angela Vicario. The story recounts the events leading up to the murder, and shows how, in spite of the fact that the crime was clearly and publicly advertized by the would-be murderers, it cannot be prevented. Most of the people in the town are guilty of complacency, and the few who tried to stop the murder are thwarted by unlucky coincidences.

The murder itself is described in graphic brutality. I still don’t know what the symbolism was intended, if any, in the portion where Santiago, stabbed and disembowelled, walks around to the back of the house, enters it and drops dead in the kitchen. It does serve to accentuate the brutality of insular traditions which insist on reciprocal violence to preserve a family’s honor.

Somehow, from the way that the story is written, it does not seem chilling that individuals in the town are so complacent about the announcement by the Vicario brothers. I won’t spoil the book by describing the details, but everyone seems to have their reasonably valid reasons for doubting that the Vicario brothers would carry out their preposterous claim. It is chilling however, that the cumulative effect of little harmless complacencies is to precipitate such a ghastly event. The book’s bitterness about the absurdity of the human condition becomes apparent upon reading about the future of the maligned bride. Santiago Nassar, whether he despoiled her honor or not, turns out to be worse than a scapegoat: In the long term, he is an inconsequential scapegoat, and his death makes no difference at all.

As in most of García Márquez’s other books, the principle characters are personifications of the tragedy of Latin America. I do not wish to be insensitive in writing this, but it appears that most of his characters have irreversibly, hereditarily, almost genetically, been altered by the social upheavals of Latin America, the revolutions, the poverty, the crime. Everyone seems to have developed a singular, eccentric way of dealing with, or not dealing with, his or her own private hell - whether it is Aureliano Buendia’s little gold fishes, or Florentino Ariza’s life of the flesh and the love poem, or the old protagonist’s periodic trips to whorehouses in Memories of My Melancholy Whores, or Angela Vicario’s drive to write passionate letters to an imagined lover for seventeen years . Terrifyingly, it also appears that they might not be able to deal with happiness. I don’t know exactly why it appears that way to me, but it does. Someone who has lived or been brought up in South America can shed some light on this. It pervades my reading of his novels, as strongly and vividly as the smell of Santiago Nassar that pervaded the town on the day after his death.

When winter sends a day of unexpected brightness, of unseasonable warmth, then a great tit finds his juices stirring, and instead of giving his usual contact calls and alarm calls, he will burst into a song. It is not a great song as these things go, but it is bright, strident and optimistic, and it comes wonderfully early in the year. It is winter’s death knell: and though winter takes a long time in dying, its fate is sealed from the moment the great tit sings. - Simon Barnes, How to be a (Bad) Birdwatcher.

If you read the Times of London, chances are that you have come across the name of Simon Barnes. He was once referred to as England’s “most colorful” sportswriter. When the Times solicited a thoroughly idiotic tennis article from a writer I do not want to name, Peter Bodo of Tennis Magazine castigated them for looking elsewhere when they had the services of “Simon friggin’ Barnes”. Barnes is a great sportswriter: one who writes with a genuine passion for sport, and one who values, like few others in the machofied universe of sports writing, the aethetic appeal of a sportsman on song. I have enjoyed reading his work without having the slightest idea that he is a writer of books on nature. So, it was with surprise and delight that I purchased How to be a (Bad) Birdwatcher at the bookstore inside the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. I could not have found a better memento of my short visit to the little sister’s city.

Partly autobiographical and partly instructional, it is an ode to birds and birdwatching that put me immediately at ease. Barnes quickly and summarily dispenses with paraphernalia such as field guides (”the more local the better”) and binoculars (”Ah, shut up - any old pair, cheapest you can find..”). No harping about whether a 7 x 35 is better than a 8 x 20. What he is really interested in, is the great pleasure of birdwatching. And by birdwatching, he does not mean the obsessive compulsive habit of keeping lists, shushing your fellow birdwatchers in the field, and such. Birdwatching, according to Barnes, is simply the act of opening oneself to the ordinary, day-to-day lives of birds. He writes enthusiastically of a couple of his great and eccentric birdwatching mentors, has witty descriptions of the best places to watch birds (landfills and garbage dumps get an honorable mention) and talks about the relevance of understanding the rhythms of birds, of trying to see how their lives are bound by time and place.

Rubbish tips and landfill sites are also honeypots: you see gulls in fantastic numbers; one thing that always stirs the heart is lots and lots of birds. The sight fills you with the feeling that humans haven’t, after all, buggered up the entire planet quite yet. And if you can feel that sort of emotion at a rubbish tip, what might you feel at a seabird nesting colony?

Needless to say, I loved the little book and read it everywhere - in the airplane, in bed, in the Subway line. It was funny, it was calming, and I felt lighter and happier for it. It was extremely gratifying to find out that I, less than a novice among birdwatchers, have had some experiences that Barnes considers valuable and attractive enough to include in this book. I have seen avocets in their dozens on the California shoreline and was surprised to read that their European cousins once faced extinction. In March 2005, shortly after seeing a change in the color of house finches that frequented my dorm balcony, I went to the southern tip of San Francisco Bay and discovered that the avocets changed color too! - abandoning their ashy grey to a more ostentatious orange-brown for the mating season. That visit, probably because of its timing, changed everything. Since then, I have seen pelicans, willets, sandpipers, skimmers, great egrets and snowy egrets one of which stood still long enough to give a decent photograph (below).

I have seen Forster’s terns hover over shallow water around mealtime and then suddenly, dive vertically into the water and emerge with a little fish in their beaks; Barnes reckons that watching this is one of the great experiences of bad birdwatching. Its not all that rare either. If you live in the Bay Area, you can head over to Shoreline Lake in Mountain View an hour before sunset and be treated to dozens of spectacular dives in less than five minutes.

As an immediate consequence of the book, I took Mr. Barnes’s advice and called up the local Audubon Society chapter. Astonishingly enough, the person I talked to not only told me which birds I should expect to see, she also offered to fax a comprehensive list of species that frequent the area. It so happens that there is a field trip at Charleston Slough on Sunday and I might get to meet the avocets again.