Loneliness · fiction
Corn for the pigeons
Almost a prayer: in a schist village in Portugal, an eighty-three-year-old widower talks to the pigeons, until the afternoon he walks down the street.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
Every day, at four in the afternoon, he gave corn to the pigeons and talked to them.
The village was in the interior of Portugal, on a hillside where the schist houses held on to one another like old people holding hands. When he was a boy, three hundred people lived there. Now there were eighteen. He was eighty-three, and his wife had died four years earlier. His children lived far away, one in France, the other in a big city on the coast. They called on Sundays. Sometimes.
The pigeons arrived at four, as if they knew the time. He scattered the corn on the stone slab in front of his door and talked.
He talked about his wife. About the day he met her, at the August festival, in a blue dress with a bow she had sewn the day before. About the grape harvests of old, when the whole village went down to the terraces and sang. About his back pain. About the price of bread in town. About the television, which only showed disasters.
The pigeons ate. They didn't answer. But they stayed.
At night, he prayed. He wasn't quite sure he believed. He prayed the way one talks to a wife who isn't there: out of habit, out of love, out of fear of complete silence. He said: "If there's someone listening, let them hear me. If there isn't, at least I hear my own voice, and I know I'm still here."
On one of those nights, rosary in hand and the light off, he had a vision.
He saw the village full again. Not as it had been: as it could be. Schist houses with their windows open, children running through the lanes, a communal oven smoking. And he saw who those people were. They weren't the ones who had left. They were others. People from far away, from other countries, other languages. A family fleeing a war. A young couple tired of the city. A woman who worked remotely with a screen and needed silence.
And he saw himself in the middle of them. Not as a lonely old man. As the one who knew. The one who knew where the spring rose, how to prune the vine, which month to sow cabbage. The one who told the village's stories to children who had never heard them.
He woke in the morning with a restlessness he hadn't felt in years.
At four in the afternoon, he went to feed the pigeons as always. But, this time, he looked around. In the house at the bottom of the street, the one that had been shut for ten years, a window was open. He had heard someone had bought that house. He hadn't paid attention.
He left the bag of corn on the slab and walked slowly down the street, with his cane. He knocked on the door.
A young woman in her early thirties opened it, her hair tied up and her hands stained with paint. Behind her, a child peeked out.
"Good afternoon," he said. "I live up the street. I wanted to know if you need anything."
The young woman smiled, a little flustered.
"Actually, we do. We don't know how to light the fireplace. And the tap water is coming out brown."
He went in.
He stayed three hours. He lit the fireplace, showed her the tank valve, told the story of the house, which had belonged to the blacksmith. The child listened to everything sitting on the floor, mouth open.
When he left, it was already night. The pigeons had gone. The corn had stayed on the slab, almost all of it.
That night, he prayed again. This time, he only said thank you.
Bairo says that, after six months alone in front of the computer, he stopped being alone: he found help in old acquaintances and decided to carry on with them. Read: The seventh attempt.
The way forward
Loneliness shrinks when we stop waiting for visitors and start offering help. You know things someone near you needs to learn: offer them. And, if the sadness weighs too much, in Brazil CVV is there to talk too, at 188, at any hour; elsewhere, reach out to your local helpline.