Before the boy and before the pelican, the trouble had always been the Wretched Thing: curse and grand-papi, both. The imbroglio began at the apartment in Bogotá where the boy, Natán, had been visiting his mami in anticipation of his twenty-fifth birthday. The trouble with the pelican was, of course, his being Natán’s father, named Horacio during his forty-odd years as human; after plunging to his death, Horacio sprouted grey-white feathers from rigor-mortised shoulder blades and spread into the sky While the Wretched Thing was a curse, the pelican was a matter of fact. And in the twenty-five years that followed Horacio’s death, Natán and his mother Irina had cobbled themselves a new life away from her own father, the Wretched Thing, only to find themselves in his fold once more.
Think of a cosmic brazo de reina: how a single sheet of sponge cake whorls and appears as many; how under expert violence the center collapses and sponge, chantilly, and berries lose discreteness; how its making is for its unmaking; how cake is pleasure that turns to shit.
Natán’s mother was hovering over cake batter when the young man spotted a pair of rubber-gray feet along the window ledge in the kitchen. Natán inched closer.
“Un pelícano, Mamá,” Natán said, standing close to the hearth, to the red brick mouth of the oldest fire in Bogotá.
The pelican snapped its narrow bill and turned its head entirely around.
Irina stopped her stirring.
“¿Has he eyes like rain and wings the color of dust?”
Its webbed feet waddled sideways, closer to the open window.
“Si,” he said.
Irina inhaled sharply and placed a hand over her chest.
The chatter of the hungry people lining up alongside their buzzer downstairs drew Natán’s gaze to the sidewalk. Natán’s mother was a baker. Provided flour, water, and yeast, she restored the people of Bogotá pieces of themselves with her panes de bono and her roscónes. She lived in a four-story walk-up near El Andino, having boomeranged to her homeland after the foundations of her second marriage eroded upon the shores of Miami Beach, along with their condo. Kaput into the ground it had all gone. Natán had anchored himself to the Florida city in which he’d lived since age twelve for no reason but habit, that ghost tugging at the obvious. It had been a long half-year without each other.
The pelican stared at him. The two were so close they could touch. Natán could see himself reflected in the pelican’s deep-set eyes: eyes, bulbous; forehead, strange.
“¿Mamá?”
In the kitchen Natán watched Irina’s eyeballs roll up inside their sockets. He recoiled at the possibility that she might be praying (to eat up so many lies; embarrassing).
Natán opened the window and poked at the pelican’s webbed feet. He removed from them wet hay. The bird smelled distinctly of shit.
Irina walked to Natán’s side. Shoulder-to-shoulder they faced the pelican, crouched down to meet its eyes.
“I knew it,” she said, the fire beside her licking the brick hearth. “It is your father.”
His father. Natán had heard of this curse in passing from his aunt Eulalia –– that the Nuñez men, those on his father’s side, met their pelican afterlife if their death transpired over water. Eulalia relayed her claims with the lightness of a fairy tale and Natán had thus presumed this was his Tía having fun at his expense. Like the time she told him in fact all birds held the spirits of their relatives, and he imagined their kinfolk tucked into branches, in wait for them –– that, or shitting on the sidewalks or on the bouncing veils of brides. It left him dizzy about the hierarchy of afterlife: where did birds end, and ghosts begin?
His father. In Florida he had been overcome with the creeping feeling of being watched and thought he saw a pelican in their suburbs more than once. Ojo, he could imagine Eulalia saying, shaking her head before exploding with laughter. Natán had trouble walking beneath trees. If there was anything he liked about South Florida it was the scarcity of hiking and the high fronds of palms.
Irina had returned, out of duty, to her post as keeper of the oldest fire in Bogotá––a flame lit before Bogotá settled on its name; before the Spaniards, with their spears and their fleets and their thirst; before the Muiscas jumped over the falls, choosing death over conquest, transformed mid-air into eagles by defiance over that Bogotá Savannah once cracked open by Bochica. In her stead, Irina’s twin sister Eulalia had kept the flame alive, and their twin aunts before that, and their twin greats, &etc, &etc, &etc, but the woman had grown ill. In the first few moments of his life, Natán’s birth had been met with disappointment, being both male and singleton. The fire needed a keeper after Irina and Eulalia.
Irina searched her pockets and the undercarriage of the small stone island at their kitchen. “¿Do you still smoke?”
Natán went quiet. Couldn’t blame his mother for needing a cigarette at a time like this. But he did not have in his possession a cigarette to soothe frayed nerves––hers or his.
“¿And your abuelo?” she said. Natán had been avoiding the Wretched Thing. But seeing how his mami’s hands shook, he relented.
While Irina cared for him, her father, the Wretched Thing, her sister Eulalia travelled the oceans. They believed him to be their downfall––part of it, anyway. The rest Irina did not say. But Eulalia, mouth loosened by time and drink, wanted, of late, to talk only of that. And so, Irina had sent her sister away, to span the Caribbean with an open buffet and a windowless cot, to make sense of herself, she had said to Eulalia. Lest you mess up the boy. Natán cannot handle such truths, hermana.
Outside, the pelican lifted and waved its wings. Inched closer to the opening at the window. Irina closed the cast-iron grille with the knobby end of a broomstick.
Perhaps we can end the curse –– Irina had pleaded with Eulalia before deciding on the seven-night package –– if its wounds die with us.
Irina’s heart could not have handled another birth like Natán’s. And, so, she didn’t. And then, Horacio died.
And by the end of that day, the day his mother baked for him, his father long dead, Natán would murder the Wretched Thing.
Natán steeled himself in the long hallway. Against the sunlight the Wretched Thing’s silhouette arched over a wheelchair. With a too-thin finger, Natán prodded the sleeping form. Permanent dents marked the carpet. The Wretched Thing had sat here, this way, for several decades––before the idea of Natán even came to be. You are not a boy, the Wretched Thing would say to Natán on school breaks overseas in Bogotá, but a punishment.
“Mami wants a smoke,” Natán said, knowing the man safekept the cigarettes in a back pocket and inventoried his stash, however flattened by the weight of his ass.
Natán pushed against the memory of one Noche Buena in which the Wretched Thing sat beside him and whispered into Natán’s ear, You ate your twin in utero. Forking the fileted goose on his plate, Natán could not help obsessing over which part of his twin he had eaten first. Had it been the finger? The mouth, the neck? His eyes lingered on the spatchcocked fowl at the center of the table. Had he savored it? Had he gulped it down? He had never worked up the nerve to ask his mother if these claims held any truth but that of cruelty.
Natán pondered the girth of the man’s neck and then his hands. Were they brute enough to impart the force of death?
Outside the pelican squawked closer, tapped the glass with its beak. Why hadn’t his twin shadowed him in the afterlife? Had it been him on that yuletide table?
The Wretched Thing fished out a Marlboro. Natán was certain he heard the old man hiss after he’d muttered out a “Gracias” on his way to the living room.
Irina tore open the paper wrapping and let loose the tobacco. She arranged this into a mound, topped it with salt, and scraped it all into a mortar and pestle, which she tonged into the mouth of the fire. Once ignited, she raced to the window, wafting the smoke at Horacio’s face.
“Virgen del Agarradero,” she whispered. “We wish for peace.” The woman wanted to be left alone; she knew her late husband’s presence proclaimed trouble.
Horacio blinked, flapped his wings. He tipped and shook his head sideways until oceanwater––Natán could smell the brine––sloshed free. It seemed he shook his head No but they couldn’t be sure.
Irina sniffed the air. Past the smell of brine, the almojabanas were done. The oceanwater put the tobacco out and splattered into the fire. Some flames sizzled down to embers. She wept into her hands until the tears puddled at her feet.
That morning had been the first time Natán saw his father knowing it was his father. That was also the day he learned of the Wretched Thing’s depravities during his Mami and Tía Elena’s childhood. Following the shock of Horacio’s appearance, Irina needed her mantilla to visit with the priest. It was then Natán found the photos –– girls bodies in women’s poses –– drained of color and sharpness by time. The whole city shook. His Tía’s favorite vase flew off the shelf and shattered. Even the hungry patrons below vamoosed in fear. He had hoped the quake had overturned the wheelchair, but sometimes nature does not help things along.
And so, while Mami was out, Natán wheeled the Wretched Thing––haggard, gray, frail thing––through slopes, across garbage dregs, past potholes and street performers, and rolled him off the Salto de Tequendama, a waterfall at the southern end of Bogotá, with all the drama of Niagara, but thick with the spirits of the Muiscas. At its once-sacred shoulder, an abandoned hotel teemed with ghosts. Beneath it, eventually, the Rio Bogotá and the Magdalena united westward near Girardot in a jagged frown.
At Tequendama the stench alerted you before your eyes could distinguish: raw sewage cascaded down its 132 meters. Bogotá’s asshole. Down Grand-papi went, choking on liquid shit.
It is not just, but it comes close.
Horacio followed his son there, losing sight of him only once in the dredges of fumes from hora pico over the northern part of the city. He tried with all his might to peck, and to prod, and to sabotage Natán. This is not the way, Horacio thought. There is justice in the after.
Murder committed, the thing he was there to stop, what was Horacio to do but aid his son’s getaway? After watching the boy slide down bluff stairs and thunder along the shoulders of the Rio, Horacio led him to a boat, which Natán promptly stole.
Natán glided west then north along the Magdalena before he was spat out into the belly of the ocean, where he bopped and creaked and parched on a dinghy with no exit, no paddle, no land in sight. On the boat, his father circled above.
“In Bogotá they will jail me for murder,” Natán said. “In Miami? Illegal entry. If home here means jail, and home there means jail, am I not a prisoner everywhere? I will myself to sleep under the stars, who do nothing for me but wink.”
Idiot stars, Natán thought. All beauty, no use.
But before that––before swatting away Horacio, before getting hooked onto the Wretched Thing’s wheel spoke as the old man clung to Natán’s shirtsleeves, before the fall, before kicking life with a broken foot, before being lodged up into the Magdalena, shooting out of Bocas de Ceniza into the Caribbean, before all that, and before the epic murder––he had at last discovered the source of the family wound. He hoped the quaking of the earth had opened the mouth of the fire. That it would swallow the city but leave Irina perched on its ashes.
Natán did not know where he was except at sea. He had to hide himself. Sleep. How should he sleep? Sleep is for the faith-hearted, his mother had said to him growing up, and burned his mattresses.
They had no use for beds at Irina’s house. She’d attempted sleeping a few times, she had confided in her only son, to see what it was like, but would awaken to a woman in a mantilla, or a man in chainmail and gambeson, clutching at her feet. In her Florida days she would walk the ocean shore until the sun pushed off her shoulders and into the sky. Collected seashells and the aftermath of jellyfish. Discovered an empty raft one sunrise. Another, Bill Clinton and his entourage mid-jog.
So, no beds––at her father’s in Bogotá, or in Miami. This had been part of the kaput with the second husband. This had also prepared Natán for the rocky edges of the dinghy.
Even before he knew of the violence the Wretched Thing had inflicted on his beloveds –– his mother and his aunt, leaving her heart weak and her womb barren –– Natán would awaken as a child, scuddled into a corner of the only mattress his mother allowed him then, to the Wretched Thing burrowing his tongue inside Natán’s ear.
The Wretched Thing now floated in shit and that was all that mattered to Natán, to the balance of the universe. And he had saved his mami.
Laughter trickled out of a giant stupid cruise ship beyond and pricked his skin.
The gods had cursed Natán and that was a fact. And yet, he must eat.
Natán’s scalp felt like a torch was being held against it. If he closed his eyes, the sun shaped itself into a human face against the curtains of his lids. It was the Wretched’s face. It was his own. It stared into the core of him. Fire can only do so much. Memory sticks. Memory kills. He did not believe in the afterlife. It was, if anything, only an afterimage made visible by the darkness of our private griefs.
When he told his father “I am thirsty,” Horacio plunged his bill into his own haggard chest and bled for Natán.
Drink, Horacio said with his eyes. Possibly also with his beak. Natán couldn’t discern. His father had not spoken before. Or maybe he had. Or maybe it was the sun scrambling his brains.
Natán dipped a finger, and then two, into the feathers and the blood and placed them in his mouth. The metal taste gave way to acidity. What one might call a long nose on a wine.
Against the richness of the blood his body heavied in demand of sleep.
Natán dragged himself to the edge of the dinghy and washed his face. To be surrounded by water that quickened death. He let out a singular laugh like the bark of a seal. In his reflection, clouds rolled past his shoulders. Below, in the profundity of the ocean, a shoal of fish ribboned by, magenta and blue.
Natán dove in. Imagined he was a mermaid in native habitat. The water cooled his skin and stung his eyes. A beam of light carved the darkness and he followed it to its end: three masts, hull, keel, a bowsprit spearing into the blue.
Seaweed flapped against the keel and coral. Somewhere a million different fish whirled against the current, trapped behind a net of bubbles. A barracuda eviscerated a seal. Seagulls circled.
A thousand miles away Irina tended a fire that could soon die. Dreamt up her son eating her brazo de reina. Baked. Dreamt up a twin birth, someone else’s. She shaped pan de bono with one hand while sipping tinto with the other. Irina was all holy.
Natán swam deeper into the black. Palpating the rudder, a crinkly slosh knocked against his head – assorted detritus: chip bags, grocery bags, milk jugs, a Barbie leg, ceramic tiles, a coffee canister, the slimed vinyl of a banana-yellow raincoat, the clink of thin metal. Something speared into his side. A tiny ship, a child’s toy, of half-rotted wood and the curve of a fish’s carcass. The ship’s belly held a laid-out table. Twisting branches bedecked in orange fruit bunched in glass vases. At the feast’s center: the shelled eggs of a slit-open iguana. Halved guanabanas nestled into bowls.
Would he be doomed to wretchedness? Had he been already? He is forever an afterimage of himself in grief for his own looming death. The living twin to his own ghost.
Is anyone ever alone?
He wrestled a fish with both hands. Pierced its flopping body with the pointed shaft of the toy ship. Gripped it and kicked up to where air and water meet.
His father perched on the dinghy. Not one, but two pelicans gray against the sky.
Birds in the distance skimmed fish.
He swam over to the garbage grove, island-wide, and elbowed his way on. Arranged the soft parts – cling film, yellow egg cartons, plastic wrap – around which he dug his arms. He would build Irina a new fire.
He shoved the belly of the fish into his mouth. The pelicans’ caws swirled in his ear. His skin itched, pimpled.
He had saved his mother. He would build her a home. A new fire. But first to glide to her. Irina would sleep. Yes, here she would sleep.
Lisa Wartenberg Vélez is a Colombian writer of fiction who split her childhood between Bogota and South Florida. Her work has received creative and/or financial support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Workshops, Ucross Foundation, Tin House Workshop, and others. MFA: University of Houston (2023). Her work appears in Nimrod, Ghost Parachute, and elsewhere, is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, and is anthologized in Best Debut Stories 2023(Catapult) as a PEN / Dau Prize winner.
Stills from Witness in the City (1959), directed by Éduard Molinaro. The screenplay was written by Boileau-Narcejac, the pen name used by Pierre Boileau (28 April 1906 – 16 January 1989) and Pierre Ayraud, also known as Thomas Narcejac (3 July 1908 – 7 June 1998).
