Parrot

The Parrot is the household bird whose escape brings Juvenal Urbino to the mango tree where he falls to his death. The animal survives the accident: after Urbino’s death, Fermina Daza gives it to the new Museum of the City, a final act in clearing the house of the objects and memories bound to her husband.

The Accident

At eighty-one, Juvenal Urbino falls from a mango-tree branch while trying to catch the Parrot, breaking his spine. The death is startlingly unlike the distinguished doctor’s public stature: the city’s oldest and best-qualified physician, renowned for other meritorious reasons, dies in an attempt to retrieve a bird. The Parrot is the immediate focus of that attempt, though the account gives it no motive or perspective of its own.

Survival and Removal

After her husband dies, Fermina Daza begins burning his clothes and, at intervals, other possessions, discovering that her hand does not tremble as she feeds them to the fire. She also has the mango tree cut back at the roots, removing the site of the fatal accident, and gives the living Parrot to the new Museum of the City. The bird is not killed or kept in the house: it is transferred elsewhere as part of the same deliberate clearing.

Place in the Household’s Aftermath

The Parrot’s fate belongs to Fermina Daza’s reordering of the home after bereavement. Once the tree has been cut back and the bird given away, she can breathe freely in the large, easy house she had always wanted, now entirely her own. The bird thus links the accident that ends Juvenal Urbino’s life to the practical acts through which his widow makes space for a changed life.