The proof of the birds

Literary Review, Summer, 1995 by Lidia Jorge, Richard Zenith

Two months previously, the Professor had subjected himself to a noisy bus with American video films just so that he could find a quiet spot suitable for carrying out his proof. During the trip, which took much longer than the schedule showed, he had the opportunity of asking a man whose accent seemed to be from the region where he was headed if there was a particular beach he would recommend for bird watching. The man had a very dark complexion, and in spite of wearing a windbreaker with a Swedish word emblazoned on the back, he was covered by infinite wrinkles.

"They've all fled," the man had said, in the spirit of tragedy which takes hold of certain people at a certain point in life.

But the Professor finally found a quiet room next to a small beach, where he was assured that no one would bother him, and where he would be able to see various types of birds in flocks, busily pecking at fish remains, as soon as summer arrived.

"In flocks?" he asked, feeling that his instinct had brought him to the right place.

"Swarms of them!"

It happened that the word flock carried special significance for the Professor. He had sought out that particular place because he'd felt that the time for the proof had come. The previous winter someone a student, presumably - had sent him a page of text whose author he only discovered later. It took up just eight lines, and although he didn't have a good memory, he had learned it by heart that very day. It was called Argumentum Ornithologicum and opened with at sentence whose music would not leave that part of his mind where ideas lose their meaning and become pure impulse. It was a poem by Borges: "I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less. I don't know how many birds I saw. Was their number definite or indefinite?" He'd been repeating these lines to himself since then, with his eyes closed. But he preferred to say the crucial lines out loud: "If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, for no one will know for certain how many there are." The Professor's ambition was to count an entire flock of birds in flight so as to demonstrate the contrary of what, by other arguments, he had always demonstrated with great vehemence: that God did not exist. To make such a radical change of opinion, he needed time, a flock of birds, and silence all around him, though the silence he had imagined always included the unceasing rumble of the sea. He was no longer a young man. To be able to raise his finger and count one, two, nine, ten, twelve birds - a definite and finite number of them - had become a point of honor, an end in itself. And so he had arduously saved up his earnings for nine months and made that round-trip journey in that horrendous bus just so that he could bring off his proof, on an afternoon when he would be alone on the beach, with the sun dipping down towards the horizon. He had it all worked out in his mind. He would be next to the water with his trousers rolled up to his knees, a flock of birds would pass by heading in the direction of the sunset, and he would count the creatures one by one, entering by this symbolic manner into the occult science of God's positive numbers. The number would be determined, and thus definite. This would be the most important moment of his life. And in his mental picture, which had an obsessive and passionate quality, like a kiss projected into the future, he would always be alone with his thought, with no other human presence there. Then, as he walked back towards the house where he had rented a room, the Professor would be another man . . . But he'd been at the beach for almost a month, and had still not been able to achieve his goal.

There was sand, there was the ocean, the afternoon, and the flocks of birds - pigeons, seagulls, herons, or some other species. He didn't know which, nor care. But contrary to what he'd been promised by the lady who rented him a room in her house, the overflow of vacationers from other beaches would come and stretch out on the sand during the day, and many of them stayed until dusk. Not only that, they came loaded down with noisy objects, surrounding themselves with technology and electronics as if they feared they might get lost in some desert they dreaded crossing. Everything all around them clicked and whirred. And when at the end of the day this hubbub finally dissipated across the gently sloping shore, then the young woman would appear, pushing along her baby in the carriage with sand-scooping devices on the wheels. Her figure, whose flesh had just recently been ripped by childbirth, would walk back and forth between him and the birds, so that he couldn't possibly concentrate. A flock would pass by, he'd begin to count, "One, two, three, four . . .," but when he had come to the fifth creature, the figure of the young woman pushing the child would inevitably intervene. And now it was his next-to-the-last day. For the hundredth time a beautiful flock had just eluded him. Ah! If that woman only knew the harm she was causing! What he would give if she'd turn right around with that carriage and clear out! The Professor got up his courage, abandoned his beach chair in the sand, and on an impulse no doubt dictated by the determination which our will manifests on the brink of defeat he marched in the direction of the young woman. He was only vaguely aware that she would probably think he was a kook. He began by smiling at the baby. Despite his determination, it was hard to speak.