On Pigeons

I knew pigeons died in the same abstract way one knows, for example, that pedestrians die. You hear about it, you can rationalize the fact that it is true, they must sometimes die, considering the risks and all. But if you haven’t seen it happen, the idea is as thin as air. And if something is intangible, it’s as good as if it didn’t exist.

                That morning, the death of pigeons came into existence for me. Happily trotting along my usual path, I encountered a dead pigeon. Crushed would be a more accurate description. You could barely tell it was a pigeon, or that it had ever been one, if it weren’t for the wings. Two widespread white wings, plastered on the pavement, on top of the zebra crossing. There wasn’t blood, guts or any sort of gory evidence of its once-living nature; just two white wings and a gray mass where the body should have been. It seemed hopelessly poetic: wings that once crossed the skies plastered to the ground.

                The next day, I passed there again, and the once-pigeon remained exactly where I had seen it. No ritual, no concern, no funeral chants or black garments, no candles. No one mourns a pigeon. When it comes to pet dogs or cats (of whose mortality we are painfully aware of, for having encountered it many times), there is always some sort of ceremony. Some are buried in the backyard, some are cried for, others wistfully remembered when their absence becomes noticeable in the empty spaces left in their owner’s day-to-day routine. But why are pigeons less deserving of mourning? Because we have not chosen to give them our affection. Humans, how complex, how arbitrary! The animals we choose as worthy of love become in some way reflections of our personalities, extensions of our livelihoods, creatures that depend on us for survival and thus make us feel powerful and wanted. That is why no one mourns pigeons.

                Mourning itself is much more about the living than the dead. We mourn so that those who stayed can have time to understand what this absence will mean. So that they can deal with the frustration of loosing something dear, and the helplessness of being absolutely uncapable to change or challenge such reality. We mourn because we are selfish. Because changes in our routine and the realm of our possibilities make us uncomfortable, because being limited makes us angry. It upsets us that we will never be able to play with that dog again, or hear that family member’s voice. Even if we didn’t really played with the dog anyway. Even if we never called that aunt. The impossibility of those coulds (but I could call, but I could play) makes them that much more valuable.

                I’ll admit, that dead pigeon shook me. Its broken angel wings decorating a side street… And a white pigeon, at that. I can comprehend, I can even accept, that grey pigeons die. It’s in the contract, they must, that’s how it is. But white pigeons? The symbol of peace, magically summoned in trickster shows around the world, the carrier pigeons of every movie and book story, the emissary of God to Noah to let him know that yes, there was land, and their sufferings would soon be over? White pigeons cannot die just like that. But they do - how many die unthought of in a big city like São Paulo?

                And as I reflected about the amount of things that happen and I don’t know, I looked at the inhabitants of the tents under the bridge. I see them everyday, with small changes in their surroundings. Sometimes their clothes are drying in a tree, sometimes their blankets are folded, they might have more or less furniture. Items are added routinely: abandoned supermarket shopping carts, old armchairs and dirty cushions. They, too, have been deemed socially invisible. And if the unmourned death of that pigeon hit me as such an unholy extinction, what can be said of those who die under bridges? Humans, men and women with skills and capacities, with memories and feelings, die like pigeons on the concrete.

If their deaths will not be remembered, may we at least look at them while they are alive.