Macaw Sitting in Montreal
This is not “Kafka”- because that haughty macaw wouldn’t let me photograph him. But here’s the likeness of another parrot I once cared for, in another house-sitting stint. All Tiguidou!" [“Jiggi-doo” means parfait! in Quebec French] did was knaw my laptop AC adapter cord in half so I couldn’t meet my Montreal Gazette deadline.
A dream job— a summer’s house-sitting gig in a beautiful Montreal condo proves to be a daily housemaid’s tale of cleaning scattered peanut shells off Oriental carpets and pulling parrot feathers off flypaper. Who was in captivity—the bird or the bird sitter?
South American Serenade
Banana tree - See them where they grow, or just buy them at your local grocery, with no tarantulas?
I have a secret scorn for armchair travelling. You can’t say you’ve been-there–done- that by reading about a place. You’ve got to get that volcano sulphur up your nostrils, the Dead Sea salt crusting your body, the harrowing vertigo of an Egyptian pyramid climb. Yet here I am, trying to lure you in to my own gnawed armchair traveller’s tale, because one should think twice about going on a flesh-and-blood trip through the Peruvian Amazon...
Do you really want to traipse through a habitat with tarantulas the size of dinner plates, which the Piraroa Indians hunt as roasted delicacies?
My virtual trip with Kafka was thrilling enough, with his broom handle-crushing beak, velociraptor vocal chords, shrewd intelligence, and loopy mood swings. Throughout my virtual Amazon expedition, I endured parrot-haunted dreams and beaked nightmares. I awakened in an Amazonian sweat, feeling my tongue like thick black leather and my hands curled into sleep-numbed claws. I pried them open and stumbled to the bathroom mirror. No hooked beak. No cobalt blue feathery eyebrows. Just a beer-dehydrated tongue. Well…
Kafka was not Franz , the tormented Czech author of The Metamorphosis whose character wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a beetle, but the petulant avian companion of my worldly Montreal friend Monti. Such a vain bird, Kafka was. But if you had breast feathers like an Aztec sunset and an iridescent tail that glimmered like a scarab beetle, you’d preen too. So Monti wore his best friend like a Tiffany jewel.
Parrot sitting 101
The morning of my “parrot-sitting orientation, ” I was waiting for Monti on the sunny roof garden of his Montreal condo. It seemed that I’d been gazing for almost an hour at the gnawed tree branch stuck into a Christmas tree base, wondering what my summer was going to be like, when a flash of blue luminescence loomed in front of me. As my brain unscrambled the image, I saw Monti’s bald shiny head sporting wire-rim sunglasses tinted the same iridescent blues as the macaw hanging jauntily upside down on his arm.
“Hey Nancy, meet Kafka,” ballyhooed Monti, swinging his parrot like a Hermes handbag. “It’s all very simple, you’ll see. You’ll let Kafka out of his cage a few hours a day. You’ll chain him to his tree branch, so he can be outside on the rooftop without flying away. Be sure you untangle him every half-hour or so. Give him a shower with the garden hose set on fine mist. Not exactly an Amazonian rain but what the hell. To get the old bird up on your hand, just say OUP.’ To get him back into his cage, just lure him with a peanut.”
I stared at Kafka’s huge hooked nut-crunching beak, capable of hacking holes in cement...at his thick black tongue, agile as a thief’s leather glove... at his dilating irises in cheeks striped black-and-white like a painted savage. “OUP” I said, offering my finger just like Monti. Crunch! “Ow!!!!!!” “Bad bird,” Monti laughed. “Don’t worry, Nancy. Kafka doesn’t bite very hard.” I looked at my thin, torn bleeding finger, then at Monti’s thick manly calloused fingers. “No celery,” Monti continued, flying around his condo kitchen. “He’ll choke on the fibers. No apricots or avocados—the seeds are poisonous. Core the apples—and be sure to remove every last seed.”
Kafka’s organic treats
Fridge drawers marked KAFKA’s FRUIT and KAFKA’s VEGGIES brimmed with organic baby carrots, red peppers, chile peppers, luscious seedless grapes, mangoes, watermelon, and sacks of organic hazelnuts, walnuts and peanuts—more stuff than I’d ever had in any fridge of my own. At the jail-size cage Monti said: “Here’s some Montreal Gazettes to line the cage bottom with, showing what he thought of the newspaper which published our travel stories. “Hose the cage down once a week. And have a great summer!”
Old MacDonald had a farm, Eee-I, Eee-I, OH. And the Devil knows everything has its price. The pact I had made with Monti was to have his elegant condo on an historic square in Montreal’s Saint-Henri district for the summer, in exchange for caring for his most prized possession, his blue-and-yellow macaw.
I was in between lives and accomodations, and tempted by the thought of lascivious soaks by starlight in the huge tub under the bathroom skylight. Candlelit dinners on the roof garden. Inspired writing on the balcony over the leafy historic square with the burbling fountain. Not sweeping up peanut shells, and making crisis calls to friends and friends of friends who knew anything about birds.
SOS calls to avian savvy friends
—Sorry to call you at work, Laurence, but “I can’t get Kafka into his cage. These parrots fly 20 miles an hour! He’s smashed the antique Italian ceramic kitchen canisters. Gnawed the tops of the cupboard and closet doors—mahogany chips everywhere! !!!
—Don’t chase him, Nancy, he could have a heart attack. Turn off the lights. He’ll go back into his cage. Birds are afraid of the dark. And when he gets back in – don’t ever let him out!!! —Hi Scott, I know you’re under deadline, but it’s another Kafka SOS . He flew into that damn fly paper Monti hangs to catch fruit flies! —Well just pull him down, Nancy. —Yeah well now he’s dragging the gluey strip all over the floor! —So pull it off him. I’ve gotta go. —My Gawd!!! Scott, I just yanked out his long tail feathers! I’ve castrated him! He looks ridiculous. What’ll I tell Monti?!!! —Don’t tell him anything. Glue ‘em back on with superglue. —It’s Nancy again, sorry to wake you, but Kafka’s dead. —What?!! —He fell down behind the fridge. I think he’s electrocuted. —Do you smell anything? Like burned chicken? —No but I don’t hear a thing. No rustling feathers. No squeaks. —Move the fridge. —Me? It weighs ten tons—one of those sexy black ice-making triple-doored behemoths. —Well, stick a broom handle down behind and see if he climbs up.
Babysitting a spoiled dinosaur, I was
And so on... My fingers bitten, arms clawed red, I swore on all the macaw fridge magnets from Florida to Peru I’d never touch Kafka again. I was terrified of killing Monti’s $1,500 friend, or being killed with a chomp on my jugular or a stab to my wrist. I needed the gizmo I’d seen in a parrot magazine, a Kaylor body harness. But all I found at the local pet shop, the Reptile Emporium on Rue Notre Dame, was an iguana leash. I might try that, the owner suggested. Was I aware that macaws were related to iguanas? Paleontologists had unearthed proof that dinosaurs didn’t vanish but grew V-shape furcula—wishbones—and took flight. That explains Kafka’s velociraptor screams...
But surely parrots had evolved. Otherwise, how did the Florida trainers at Busch Gardens and Weechi-Wachee get cockatiels to pedal tiny bicycles across a tightrope, and a chorus of five macaws to sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm?”
I could not believe my ears, even after playing the tape I’d made on my trip to Florida’s Gulf Coast:
Old MAC-Donnnnnn-allllld HADDAH Farmmmmm.....Eee I....Eee I OHhhhhhhhgh over and over again.
Breakfast with Kafka... (At the crack of dawn):
Ack! Ack! Scureeeeak! Wanna peanut! Wanna peanut! P-e-a-nut !
My daily routine
Stumble down the winding staircase. Grab slimey water bowl and grungy food pan from cage. Chop watermelon. Slice canteloupe. Dice apples and remove toxic seeds. Crack walnuts with hammer. Prepare broccoli flowers. Chile peppers. Vacuum living room, sucking up peanut shells, wilted lettuce, carrot scraps, busted sunflower seeds, broccoli bits - the riff-raff of a spoiled South American macaw.
The morning I offered Kafka a tortilla, I thought we’d finally become friends. He stuffed it into his beak and I was startled to hear him croon Mmmmmm like a gourmet making a new discovery. He let me pet his head. The next morning, as I almost looked forward to our feeding ritual, he snatched the tortilla in his claw and threw it in my face then scattered the bowl of freshly chopped veggies all over the just-vacuumed carpet.
Tantrums!
I went ballistic. That’s it!!! I screamed, grabbing the empty food bowl out of the cage. No more food for you! I wanted to choke him on celery. Roast him in the neighbor’s barbecue pit, even though the Machiguenga Indians say the meat is tough and stringy. Aha! Mummify him in fly paper! I hated the bird as much as I loved it. Like a co-dependent yo-yo-ing around an alcoholic.
Kafka’s intelligence, curiosity and sociability made him weirdly adorable. At times I felt sorry for the blasted parrot, far away from his native habitat of lush tropical forests from central Mexico to northern Argentina. Stuck in a land of pale colorless avians— snow geese and snowy owls...staring through his cage bars onto what? A pigeon-shit covered statue of French explorer Jacques Cartier.
And what did Kafka hear all day but CBC Radio news and weather, and Radio Canada diatribes on Quebec Independence. He wasn’t bilingual, like the mynah bird I’d seen in a classified ad in La Presse. (The English word for pea-nut is easier to pronounce than the French cacahouete ka-ka-whet. ) But Kafka’s astounding vocal range—from tiny sympathetic whimpers to deafening Jurassic roars—was a whole movie studio of sound effects.
A movie studio of sound effects.
One night I actually overheard Kafka engaged in chit-chat with himself. How’re you? he asked. Not bad, he replied. Eager to record this wondrous monologue, I crept down the oak staircase with my microcassette tape recorder. And the very second I pressed the record button, he shut up.
Kafka was the boss. He knew it. That was the problem. He sensed my fear. My frustration and weariness. He could probably hear my heart beating loudly, too, whenever I got near him. The only way to survive the last six weeks of the summer was to change my attitude. How I didn’t know, but a long Greyhound bus ride to Tennessee for my father’s 70th birthday, while Kafka stayed locked in his cage with a week’s worth of food and water, gave me some emotional distance from the spoiled brat. If macaws have the emotional age of three-year old humans, then I had to show him that I was the parent! But how? How?
The answer turned out to be profound. What is fear but the absence of love? The feeling of other rather than one-ness. It sounds like a spiritual cliché. But one night I awoke on a hot cricket-chorused night in East Tennessee with the sensation of having just been embraced, held close, loved even by a huge soft, warm, bright-feathered being.
Animal totem dream
In my dream vision the macaw was at least seven feet tall. He appeared before me and then he raised his magnificent wings and pulled me deep into the soft warmth of his plumey breast, while saying—telepathically of course, not in parrot squawk—I miss you. Would the native Americans say that this was a visitation from my animal totem? I have thought so ever since. The experience left me feeling protected, and bathed in love. And when I went back to Montreal on the bus, to continue my parrot-sitting job, it was very strange, but all was peace between myself and Kafka. Peace and co-operation.
Can a writer who is bird-sitting for a Macaw magically transform into a Macaw?
We’d spent the summer mostly housebound together, Kafka and I. He couldn’t fly anywhere. I couldn’t drive anywhere, for fear that he’d throw a food-scattering tantrum and starve. So we both dreamed of the Amazon, the lush Peruvian jungle of the Tambopata River I’d seen pictured in National Geographic’s macaw special “Winged Rainbows.” Until Monti returned from Turkey with an armload of Turkish carpets— and happened to mention that Kafka was born in a small town in northern Ontario.
