“Nothing that does not speak will come into this house”

“Nothing that does not speak will come into this house” is Dr. Urbino’s categorical response to Fermina Daza’s renewed campaign to buy a dog. Intended to settle a domestic dispute, the sentence instead gives her a loophole: she brings home a talking parrot, whose place in the household eventually becomes bound up with the accident that kills her husband.

The rule and its occasion

After a rabid mastiff tore through the household’s animals, Dr. Urbino ordered the surviving creatures killed and their bodies burned; the house was disinfected. Fermina Daza conceded that he had been right in this domestic matter, and for a time said little more about keeping animals. Later, after thieves stole the family silver, Dr. Urbino fortified the house with locks and bars and began sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. Even the robbery, however, did not persuade him to accept a guard dog.

When Fermina again argued for a dog, Dr. Urbino invoked speech as the test for entry. His statement sounds like a final prohibition, but it is also a rule whose literal wording leaves room for an exception. The irony is that the exception is not another human guest, but an animal capable of speaking.

Fermina’s answer

Months after the robbery, Fermina returned from Curaçao with a royal Paramaribo parrot. It had learned sailors’ blasphemies and delivered them in a remarkably human voice; its price was twelve centavos. The bird met the condition Dr. Urbino had laid down, though not the intention behind his resistance to a dog.

The parrot gradually won him over. Its human-sounding speech and antics amused him, and its usefulness became unmistakable when thieves tried again to enter through the attic skylight. The bird mimicked a mastiff’s barking and cried out warnings, sounds it could not have learned in the house. Dr. Urbino then took charge of its care, arranging a perch beneath the mango tree with water, ripe bananas, and a trapeze. In cold months it slept indoors, in a covered cage; later it was kept caged during the day and released for lessons with Dr. Urbino on the patio terrace.

From household maxim to fatal consequence

The bird’s life in the house is marked by a succession of escapes and restraints. Once, doing acrobatic tricks on the kitchen beams, it fell into a pot of stew and survived scalded and without its feathers. After that, the family kept it caged even in daylight. Its wings had grown too long by the morning they were about to clip them, and it escaped to the top of the mango tree, where the household could not catch it for three hours.

The story gives Dr. Urbino’s earlier remark a consequence he never foresaw. His words bring the parrot into the home; the bird’s escape prompts the effort to retrieve it, and that effort leads to the fatal climb. What began as a domestic quip thus joins speech, animal life, and accident in a chain of events: the phrase meant to close an argument helps open the way to the ending.