The hummingbird

The hummingbird begins as a family nickname for Marco Carrera, whose childhood growth was markedly delayed, and becomes the governing image of a life spent trying to remain steady amid abrupt changes and severe losses. Its meaning shifts from his mother’s protective story about his smallness and special qualities to a wider figure for survival, historical recurrence, and the purpose he finds in raising Miraijin.

Origin as a Nickname

Marco’s mother, Letizia, called him the hummingbird because he was much smaller than other children. His physical development had remained on the lowest growth percentiles from infancy, and by the age of three he had fallen outside the usual charts. Letizia interpreted his smallness not simply as a medical concern but as evidence that nature meant to distinguish him. In her view, Marco’s proportionate appearance, grace, beauty, and speed were signs of unusual gifts; the nickname made those qualities part of the reassuring account she repeated as his growth lagged.

That account became a point of conflict between Letizia and Marco’s father, Probo. Letizia trusted her idea of the hummingbird and drew support from her reading of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s work on growth and form. Probo, increasingly worried as Marco entered adolescence without developing in the expected way, believed that the family should seek whatever scientific help was available. When Marco was fourteen, the parents agreed to consult a specialist in Milan. Letizia independently reviewed the proposed treatment and accepted it as the only serious option then available. The nickname thus stood at the intersection of two competing responses to difference: Letizia’s effort to understand and protect Marco’s distinctiveness, and Probo’s insistence that his growth problem warranted medical intervention.

A Body That Changes All at Once

The treatment Marco underwent in autumn 1974 produced a striking change. He grew sixteen centimeters in eight months, from 1.56 meters in October to 1.72 meters the following June; his growth then stabilized, eventually bringing him just above the national average as an adult. The swift physical transformation echoed the central paradox of the hummingbird image: a figure associated with smallness and stillness could also carry speed and sudden movement.

Marco experienced the growth spurt by living through it rather than treating it as a crisis to be mastered. From November to June, he grew roughly two centimeters a month. His body seemed to make up abruptly for years of delay, and he tried to keep pace with the change without imposing conditions or turning it into a source of shame. The treatment ended the literal childhood basis of the nickname, but did not erase it. For Marco, being a hummingbird became a memory; for the narrative, it became a pattern through which to understand the changes that followed.

Stillness, Upheaval, and Survival

The adult meaning of the hummingbird is not that Marco escapes change. It is that he often remains in place while life around him moves, then is thrown suddenly into an unfamiliar situation. Such transitions tend to bring pain and the question of why they have happened to him. The image holds together these contrary states: suspended years and abrupt upheaval, the desire to stay still and the necessity of continuing.

The novel’s opening account describes Marco as a person who never quite falls to the bottom. He moves ceaselessly in order to remain steady, and, when steadiness fails, tries to find a stopping point in the fall. In that formulation, endurance does not mean living less. It names an active response to instability: the work of surviving loss without allowing loss to define the full measure of life.

Marco eventually reads the recurrence of upheaval through the question of timing. He does not arrive at an explanation in advance; the answer becomes intelligible only when events have brought him to their darkest point. The six questions associated with inquiry—who, how, when, where, what, and why—make the question of when decisive in his account. The hummingbird’s stillness, then, is not simple passivity. It is bound to the possibility that a purpose may become visible only after a long interval of apparent suspension.

The Hummingbird in Aztec Imagery

A 2005 letter from Luisa Lattes brings the nickname into a different frame. She writes after reading a newspaper report about an exhibition on the Aztec empire and recognizes Marco in its account of beliefs about the afterlife. In the report she recounts, the fate of the dead depends on how and when they died. People who died of old age or disease were assigned to Mictlan, the lowest level of the underworld; those who drowned or were struck by lightning went to Tlalocan, the realm of the rain god Tlaloc. Women who died in childbirth and warriors killed in battle or sacrificial victims had other destinations.

The report adds that warriors and sacrificial victims who joined the sun’s daily battle against darkness became hummingbirds or butterflies after four years. Luisa sees an unsettling resonance in this image: an ancient civilization imagined a hummingbird as the outcome of heroic death, while Marco’s nickname had begun as a name for a small boy whom his mother believed nature had set apart. Her letter does not make the myth a literal explanation of Marco’s life; instead, it extends the word’s associations with death, endurance, and transformation, placing a private family name beside a vanished civilization’s account of what may follow a person’s death.

Miraijin and the Image’s Final Meaning

By 2016, Marco gives the hummingbird a purpose connected to the future. He recognizes his life as exceptional from its earliest sign—the smallness that kept him apart from other children—and understands the treatment that returned his growth to the average as another extraordinary turn. In retrospect, the abrupt changes and painful events seem to him to form a path rather than a random sequence. The answer he finds is Miraijin: she is the new human being, born to change the world, and Marco believes that he has been given the privilege of raising her.

This belief had been shared with Adele while she was alive. Marco repeated her conviction that humanity began again with Miraijin, though he had not initially understood it as more than a story that helped his daughter live with what she had endured. After Adele’s death, that belief becomes more than a comforting idea. Marco is left to care for Miraijin and to find the strength to continue through grief; raising her gives his own survival a direction.

In his final letter to Luisa, Marco calls himself the hummingbird and contrasts that identity with the familiar demand that everyone must get up and run. He says that if he could have stopped, the two of them might have been together, but that his life has carried him elsewhere. His mission is now to raise Miraijin, the eight-year-old girl sleeping under his roof. The image therefore closes on a change in priority: the love he had carried for Luisa across decades remains part of his past, but his first and last thoughts now belong to the child in his care. The hummingbird signifies not a refusal of motion but endurance through change, sustained at last by responsibility for the future.