The Dodge Magazine, 2026
in The Dodge Magazine, Summer Issue, translation by Tobias Ryan of L’enfant de Goya (Libres Cahiers pour la psychanalyse, 2012).
“My grandfather loved birds.
He had an aviary of canaries and exotic nightingales. What he preferred, however, were the birds uncaged. Sat on a stool in the yard, he would scatter seeds to attract them. Turtledoves, bullfinches, tits and blackbirds, which he would protect from cats. Swallows and martins would visit in the orchard, he knew their names and he would teach me them.
— Look, a goldfinch.
More than any other, this name brings with it memories of catapults, traps, and murder, which he blamed on the malignancy of childhood.
The cats were on the lookout. He kept his eye on them, who, perhaps because they had been lectured so often and called dirty beasts, avoided hunting in front of him. And if they tore some prey limb from limb, as I had often seen them doing in the garden, they never took it to him as a trophy.
By the time he could no longer live alone and had to sell his house, the aviary and yard were already almost deserted. The last of the chickens had been given to a neighbour. The cats followed him to my mother’s.
From then on, it was from the balcony that he would watch the birds. He would leave out side-plates of butter and seeds, preventing the cats from stalking there, and scolding them whenever he found them watching the sparrows from behind the glass.
I had been in convalescence for several months.
As a child, as it had been him who had most often looked after me, it was him who had nursed me back to health. Bronchitis, ear infections, endless coughs and colds. He would wake up at night, feel my forehead and, if he reckoned I wasn’t doing well, he would prepare a mustard plaster. He would bring a basin of hot water, wet the bandages and wrap me as though I were gravely wounded. You had to put up with the prickly heat, say nothing, stop coughing. I would moan, sweat bullets, it would hurt. In the end, I would fall asleep.
There is a twinge of worry within me whenever I hear the names of those remedies from another time, when we were unable to do a great deal, and those of which we still speak: slug syrups, eucalyptus rubs, camphor injections. All threaten. A former lunger, he had been in sanitoria, had known those who had received the first anti-tubercular treatments, the type that left you deaf and mad, those mutilated by thoracotomies, the dead too, and so many other oddities such as might emerge from a painting of hell: hallucinating alcoholics, visions of hairy spiders or enraged apes, vibrant serpents and sadistic marionettes…”