Her neighbor knocked on the window.
“Mademoiselle Beauvert?”
“Coming! Coming!”
She adjusted her pleated skirt, made sure there wasn’t anything lying around, and opened the door, with Copernicus against her cheek.
“So, shall I leave them with you?”
The neighbor, who had rings under her eyes, indicated seven eight-year-old children gathered behind her.
“Of course! You got them all together? Shall we do as arranged?”
“The mothers all agree, Mademoiselle Beauvert.”
“Come in, my darlings.”
Casting wary looks at the bird, the children rushed into the apartment, sat down around the table, and laid out their books and exercise books on the oilcloth.
The neighbor put two trays and a pan on the sink. “Here we are: yufka-based börecks as a starter, some lamb skewers to be warmed up, and sütlaç for dessert.”
“Rice pudding? I love that. And Copernicus does even more.”
Mademoiselle Beauvert thanked her neighbor, who left, and turned to the little ones. “What do you have to do for homework this evening?”
The children reported their teacher’s demands, and Mademoiselle Beauvert helped them with their exercises. When she had moved here, she had, quite by chance, explained to a schoolboy from the building how to do his subtractions. Delighted with her kindly manner and the clarity of her explanations, the child had returned the following day with his little cousin, who had subsequently told her neighbors in the building. And so, in an almost natural manner, Mademoiselle had arranged an exchange: in return for helping out with schoolwork she would get meals. These mothers were already feeding large families, so an extra helping was no big deal, whereas it was very important for them that a real, French-speaking Belgian, so refined and educated, should ensure the success of their offspring. They had accepted enthusiastically.
Mademoiselle Beauvert had used this exchange as an excuse to justify her task, but the fact was that day by day she was getting more and more pleasure from looking after the children of immigrants. She was discovering not only how useful the information she had learned by heart was, but also how precious. Her excellent French and her accurate arithmetic had become a treasure she was able to transmit and impart. The attentive, eager, even admiring looks in the children’s eyes gave her an unexpected thrill.
When a little girl asked her about Copernicus, she told her that she used to live in a wonderful square where parrots flew, all kinds of parrots, as well as green parakeets. People lived in the houses, parrots lived in the trees, and they all watched each other. The little girl giggled, and none of the children believed her. She insisted, saying it was in right here in Brussels, not much more than a mile away. They obstinately shook their heads. They believed—just as she had done previously—that there was more than a border, more than a mountain, more than a desert between Madou and Uccle, and that they belonged to two separate worlds. No resident from here ever went there, or vice versa. What did people want? she thought. Reality or dreams? Whatever they found most convenient.
They started on revision. As she spoke to the group, Copernicus, still perched on her, also listened alertly. Every so often, like a schoolboy taking notes, he would repeat a word enthusiastically—“Subjunctive!” or “Rule of three!”—and the children would burst out laughing. Mademoiselle Beauvert was proud of him because he followed the lesson and entertained the kids. On the other hand, she was surprised to observe that, whenever she started talking to a single child, he would shuffle to express his annoyance.
It happened when she leaned over plump, frizzy-haired Abdul and made him revise his irregular verbs. In spite of her attentive, gentle manner, the boy kept hesitating and making mistakes.
“Brrr! Brrr!” Copernicus screeched after the tenth mistake.
Even as she stroked the dunce’s head, Mademoiselle Beauvert profited from this intervention to say, “You see, Abdul, even Copernicus can tell you’re not concentrating.”
“He doesn’t like me,” the boy grunted, frowning at the bird.
“He doesn’t like it when you make mistakes. If this carries on, he’s going to give you the answers.”
“I dare him to!” Abdul cried, throwing back his head.
Copernicus didn’t like the child’s sudden, aggressive move. He spread his wings, rose an inch or two in the air, and went straight for the boy with his beak.
Abdul screamed, which excited Copernicus even more, making him peck more and faster.
The seven children all started yelling. Suppressing her astonishment, Mademoiselle Beauvert tried to control the commotion. “Quiet! You’re making him even more annoyed! Quiet! Copernicus, stop it! I said, stop it! Copernicus! Copernicus!”
The more she called the bird, the more he attacked Abdul.
Scared of becoming the next victims, the girls jumped up from their seats, pushed open the door, and ran out into the courtyard.
Abdul’s cousin grabbed his ruler and tried to hit the bird. Angrily, Mademoiselle Beauvert stopped him. “I forbid you!”
“But Mademoiselle—”
“Copernicus will stop of his own accord. Copernicus! Copernicus!”
But the bird wouldn’t let go of his prey. By now, Abdul was moaning instead of defending himself. Mademoiselle Beauvert decided to throw herself into the fray and, without breaking the bird’s wings, try to separate him from the child. “Copernicus!”
Suddenly, the parrot let go of his prey, gave Mademoiselle Beauvert a fierce look, and, with a burst of energy, went out through the open door into the courtyard and flew away.
Panic-stricken, she rushed after him.
“Copernicus!”
By the time she got out into the courtyard, all she could see was a flash of color quickly rising to the gutters and the roofs. The bird vanished into the blue.
“Copernicus!”
Her voice faded into the empty sky.
Mademoiselle Beauvert’s eyes filled with tears. The sound of crying behind her brought her back down to earth. She went back inside and saw the scratches, bites, and bruises on the boy’s face.
“My God!”
She let out this cry not so much because she felt sorry for the child—he’d recover soon enough—as because her pet had gone and she suspected that this advantageous exchange was at an end.
In the hours that followed, Mademoiselle Beauvert was partly able to salvage the situation: the mothers didn’t break off the deal—firstly because Abdul had a terrible reputation, and secondly because the source of the danger, the parrot, had disappeared.
But after these negotiations, when she found herself alone, at midnight, in her tiny apartment, she felt completely helpless. In losing Copernicus, she had lost both her old life and her new one; nothing seemed bearable to her anymore—neither the fact that she had disposed of everything she owned in order to pay off her absurd gambling debts nor the fact that she was stuck forever in a few square feet at the far end of a courtyard that stank of doner kebab. Her loneliness struck her as pathetic, and her poverty permanent . . .
For the first time in her life, Mademoiselle Beauvert felt sorry for herself. She had failed at everything. That night, not only did she not sleep a wink, but she experienced every second of every minute of every hour, as if she were attached to some kind of lethal drip. On the dark, dirty walls with their old grease stains, she saw her future, and it was an abyss. She was condemned to a dungeon. A dungeon? If she were in prison, she would still have the hope that she might be released. But there was no release, no commuted sentence possible here. All she could do was endure it until she died.
At about four o’clock in the morning, she rebelled against the despair that was crushing her. Why was she thinking her life was over just because a bird no longer occupied a cage at the foot of her bed? Ridiculous! A wild an
imal she had bought for next to nothing five years earlier wasn’t her salvation! Goodbye, you stupid bird! Just stop thinking about that macaw! That’s an order!
But when despair comes crashing down on someone, it doesn’t do things by halves, it completely suffocates that person. Mademoiselle Beauvert was shaking, hoping with each breath that she could just die, convinced that day would never break.
In the morning, light came in shyly from the courtyard through her tinted windows. For a moment, a pink glow cast a soft aura over a sprig of lily of the valley that one of the children had left for her. Mademoiselle Beauvert sat up, slapped her thighs, and made up her mind to find Copernicus.
From seven o’clock onward, she tramped the streets of the neighborhood, calling the bird, listening twenty times at every tree, beating the sparse bushes, looking at every window, every gutter, every gable, every eave.
Hearing her call out that name, the neighbors asked her the reason for her panic, and she told them. Some helped her, for a while anyway, while others asked her to be quiet. Then some shopkeepers, growing tired of her constant yelling, started to insult her. Never mind! She persisted. No complaints or gibes could stop her. As for being ridiculed, she couldn’t care less.
By noon, she had to face facts: there was no trace of Copernicus.
Queasy, exhausted, upset, she couldn’t have swallowed a thing even though her stomach was knotted with hunger. If she ate, she would be betraying Copernicus for a second time. Because there could be no doubt now, she was guilty! The day before, by taking Abdul’s side, she had offended the bird. In trying to detach the parrot from the child, it had been Copernicus she had attacked, and, unable to bear her betrayal, brokenhearted, he had fled.
There was nothing accidental about that terrible episode: she had behaved badly toward an animal who had put his trust in her. She deserved the sadness she was feeling. When she thought of the sadness he must be feeling . . . She cursed herself: how could she have given the bird so much pain! If he was sulking, shivering with cold, risking his life by becoming the prey of cats or aggressive humans, then it was all her fault. What was he going through now? Was he getting anything to eat?
At about two in the afternoon, she suddenly had an idea: she should speak to a specialist in order to analyze Copernicus’s behavior.
She checked how much money she had left in her wallet. Five euros? Not enough to pay for a visit to a vet . . . Maybe she could get around him by explaining that . . . No, it was impossible! She didn’t know any vets, and she couldn’t take the risk of having to pay for a consultation, especially as she looked like a wealthy dowager.
Suddenly she stood up, determined. She would go to a pet shop that sold parrots and ask the staff for information.
She remembered seeing, during one of her streetcar journeys, a shop devoted to exotic animals—snakes, birds, spiders, lizards, iguanas—so she worked out the route and set off.
On Quai de Mariemont, by the gray, meager canal, she passed warehouses that had been turned into studios and boutiques. Worried she might not find the shop, she walked for twenty minutes until she saw Le Monde Perdu written in Gothic lettering.
In the dark shop, she walked past glass cages that she avoided looking at, letting herself be guided by the smell of bird droppings to the section dedicated to parakeets and parrots.
No sooner had she entered the room than the sounds gave her a familiar feeling. The cries and the shuffling and the swishing of wings took her back to Place d’Arezzo and close to Copernicus.
She spotted a sales assistant in a dark T-shirt, complete with tongue piercing, as skinny as a heron. She fed him the story she had concocted: she wanted to buy a macaw, but before going ahead she wanted to find out about their personality. The young man gave her some commonsense advice, then suggested she look at the animals in the cages. In the very first one, she saw a parrot regurgitating his food and remembered that Copernicus had been doing that lately.
“This one’s vomiting. Is he in poor health?”
“No, madame. He’s bringing up his food for the female in the next cage. He’s courting her. He’s giving her what belongs to him to show her that he likes her.”
“Oh!” Mademoiselle Beauvert exclaimed, disconcerted. “Could he ever do that with a human?”
“Not usually. If he did, it’d mean that he considered the human as his mate, as the person he loved and wanted to make love to.”
Mademoiselle Beauvert swallowed with difficulty: the assistant was shedding an unexpected light on Copernicus’s behavior. “My God . . . That’s serious.”
“Yes and no,” the young man said nonchalantly. “On the one hand, it establishes a strong bond between the parrot and his owner. On the other hand, the human can prevent confusion by refusing to behave in a certain way, especially by avoiding certain kinds of contact.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can look away when the bird dances about. Turn your back on him when he talks.”
“Oh . . . And what else?”
“You especially mustn’t touch the parrot’s intimate parts, even if he asks you to.”
“Intimate parts?”
“His belly, his tail.”
Mademoiselle Beauvert choked when she thought of the thousands of times she had stroked Copernicus’s belly and tail with her finger. “What about his beak?” she asked anxiously, aware that Copernicus was particularly responsive to being touched there.
“The beak too, of course. It’s a very erogenous zone.”
Mademoiselle Beauvert shuddered from top to toe. She had thought she was leading as chaste a life as possible, and now she suddenly discovered that not only had she been sharing her apartment with a parrot in love, but that her stroking him encouraged him and even constituted a kind of sex life for him. She swallowed painfully. “Tell me . . . a parrot doesn’t always behave like that, does he? . . . I mean . . . before.”
“It starts in adolescence.”
“And when does adolescence start?”
“It depends on the size. In small species, at eighteen months. In the case of large macaws, for example, hormones don’t start to kick in until the age of five or thereabouts.”
Mademoiselle Beauvert closed her eyes: five years old, Copernicus’s age!
“It’s natural,” the young man said, “because they live longer. Up to the age of fifty, or even eighty in captivity. So what have you decided, Madame?”
“Mademoiselle,” she replied automatically. “One more question: is there a mating season?”
“It’s now, as you saw with the vomiting cockatoo. Males and females are trying to reproduce. Well?”
“I’m very tempted,” she replied, turning red. “I’ll give it some thought and call you.”
“As you wish.”
Mademoiselle Beauvert continued to play the part of an undecided customer, pretending to be interested in various specimens, then, taking advantage of another customer coming in, brushed past the cages and discreetly fled.
As soon as she was back out on the Quai, exposed to the scorching sun, she rubbed her forehead. She suddenly had a thought: what if Copernicus had gone back to Place d’Arezzo in search of a female?
She didn’t know quite what to make of the idea. On the one hand, the theory offered a solution—and thus, a glimmer of hope—and removed all misunderstanding between herself and Copernicus. On the other hand, it suggested that Copernicus no longer loved her and was looking for a female of his own species.
As she thought this through, Mademoiselle Beauvert lectured herself. Of course he must look for a female. I’m not his female, I’m his mistress.
Immediately, she realized the ambiguity of the word “mistress.”
No, I’m his . . . his owner.
This word sounded equally inappropriate and unpleasant, for a different reason this time. Owner! Could you own
a living creature? By what obscene logic could she consider Copernicus, a jungle bird that had been born free, as her property? Besides, the bailiffs had left him to her precisely because he was a companion as opposed to a belonging. Otherwise, those vultures wouldn’t have thought twice. She shuddered at the thought of their selling Copernicus in an auction. That made her wonder about their behavior. Had they shown kindness, unexpected pity, in leaving him to her? But pity for whom? Her or the bird?
She shrugged. A parrot like Copernicus was invaluable, beyond price.
Back in her apartment, she quickly worked out a plan. Since this time she couldn’t hide on Place d’Arezzo, she would have to look very elegant. Not for Copernicus, but for her former neighbors.
She got to Place d’Arezzo at four o’clock, looking quite dapper and concealing the fact that she was out of breath from getting off the bus a stop early and walking the rest of the way.
Head high, she first looked up at her old windows, then at the roof, then at the neighboring balconies. No Copernicus.
As she was continuing with her search, the one person she wanted to avoid appeared: Marcelle. Even more broad-backed than before, her head sunk in her shoulders, arms glued to her body, she was rubbing her eyes uncertainly. “But . . . but . . . ”
Mademoiselle Beauvert forced a laugh. “Yes, Marcelle, I’m passing through Brussels. I had a few things to sort out with my lawyer and at the bank. Well, you know what it’s like.”
Marcelle nodded, her jaw clenched: no, she didn’t know what it was like for rich people, and she’d never met a lawyer in her life.
“How are you, Marcelle?”
“Have you come to see me?”
“Of course. I’d like to hear your news.”
“My news? I don’t have any. At least not any good news. You know my Afghan left, don’t you?”
“Yes, Marcelle, I was on the continent when it happened.” She mentally congratulated herself for having unearthed that term, “the continent.”