Colibrì

Colibrì, the novel’s hummingbird image, gives physical form to a central contradiction in Norma Jeane Baker’s life: she can feel as small and frightened as a trapped bird, yet she also recognizes in hummingbirds a kind of courage that persists under threat. The image recurs across marriage, performance, memory, and private reflection, changing from a description of panic into an emblem of alert, vulnerable survival.

The Night Bird

During her marriage to Bucky Glazer, Norma Jeane wakes him in the night in a state of panic, trembling and drenched in sweat. The narration divides her into a cheerful, compliant daytime self and a frighteningly unpredictable nocturnal double. Holding her close, Bucky feels her heart beating wildly and thinks of her as a scared little bird, specifically a hummingbird. The comparison makes her fear seem delicate and exposed, but it does not make her passive: she clings to him with surprising force, almost like a man.

The scene’s emotional balance is unsettled. Bucky has to wake and comfort her, although he is exhausted and unused to sharing a bed every night; his confusion briefly turns the embrace into the memory of a wrestling match. Norma Jeane begs him not to leave, addresses him as Daddy, and asks for a promise. The hummingbird image therefore sits between tenderness and alarm. It conveys how desperately she needs reassurance while also registering the intensity with which she holds on. The bird is vulnerable, but it is not simply limp in someone else’s hands.

A Heart with Wings

In a diary entry dated September 1947 in Hollywood, the image becomes Norma Jeane’s own account of her body. She records waking early after a sleepless night, sweating, hearing voices that call and warn her, and feeling her heart pound as if something small and feathered were trapped inside her chest. She tentatively identifies the feeling as joy, leaving excitement and fear unresolved rather than separating them neatly.

The surrounding entry places this bodily sensation amid birds outside her apartment window and the anticipation of a day that may shape her future. Norma Jeane is due to visit Mr. Z’s aviary and then audition for Scudda-Hoo! Scudda Hay! She is the only student in her class receiving the audition, but expects only a minor role and struggles to believe the praise Bucky Glazer’s agent, Mr. Shinn, has given her. The bird inside her chest thus marks a threshold: hope arrives not as calm confidence but as a fluttering, almost alarming force. Her body registers the possibility of change before she can trust it.

Exclusion and the Image’s Reappearance

The image also appears beside a painful account of acting-class humiliation. The narrator recalls Norma Jeane as exceptionally beautiful but so insecure that a single word, smirk, or act of ignoring her could devastate her. When called on to perform, she trembles and struggles to enter a role, as though courage were hidden somewhere inside her and she had to grope blindly to find it. Her classmates knowingly punish her by making her feel unwanted, unlike them, and wrong for the part the Studio expects her to play. The passage ends with the heading Colibrì, followed by a statement by Mary Baker Eddy about divine love meeting human need.

That placement makes the hummingbird more than a decorative symbol of beauty. It follows a scene in which others try to define Norma Jeane from the outside, telling her, in effect, that what is within her does not fit what they see. The small bird offers a counter-image to this judgment: an identity that may look fragile but contains a life of its own. The religious statement that follows introduces a language of care and sufficiency beside an experience of deliberate rejection. The juxtaposition does not resolve her insecurity; it shows the distance between the comfort she needs and the cruelty she encounters.

Observation, Memory, and Endurance

Later, in a private reflection, Norma Jeane notices hummingbirds behind the Studio Club and returns to them in sustained detail. They are so small that they can be mistaken for bumblebees, yet they are lively, strong, and courageous. She wonders how they avoid being eaten by hawks, crows, and jays. Their needle-like bills reach into flowers for nectar, and they must feed continually or lose their strength and die. Their wings beat too quickly to see, and they can fly sideways and backward.

This is not merely an abstract emblem imposed on the birds: Norma Jeane attends to the particular conditions of their survival. Their quickness and energy coexist with constant exposure to predators and the risk of exhaustion. She remembers telling Nonna Della that thoughts fly in every direction, making the hummingbird’s movement an image for mental life as well as bodily persistence. In the same reflection, the sight of the birds seems to bring back Nonna Della’s voice, and Norma Jeane believes that her grandmother has forgiven her and loves her. The birds consequently connect present observation to remembered affection and a hope of reconciliation.

The reflection ends with questions about whether Norma Jeane loves Otto öse and whether she loves those who hurt or offend her. Those questions keep the image from becoming a simple promise that endurance will bring safety. Colibrì gathers together a frightened heart, a difficult performance, a fragile creature’s need to keep feeding, and the effort to think and love amid injury. Its force lies in that tension: survival is neither effortless nor proof that the danger has passed, but a continual motion that the novel finds both vulnerable and astonishing.