The Town Where the Fish Learned to Fly

More about The Town Where the Fish Learned to Fly

Nobody in the town remembered exactly when the fish began flying, because by then they had already grown accustomed to more serious inconveniences. The moon had been hanging over the old monastery for eleven years without moving, the lemons whispered the names of the dead whenever they ripened, and every Thursday afternoon the sea returned something that had been lost on land.

It was therefore considered perfectly reasonable when three red fish crossed the plaza at the height of the bell tower.

Only the foreigner noticed them.

He had arrived twenty-seven years earlier intending to stay until Tuesday. He occupied the same table beneath the lemon vines, drinking coffee so slowly that the proprietor suspected the cup had become an heirloom. Beside him sat a black-and-white cat who had appeared one morning from the tiled corridor and behaved thereafter as though it owned the building, the staircase, the mountain, and certain portions of the Mediterranean.

The foreigner collected useless knowledge. He knew why peacocks screamed before rain, why ancient statues lost their noses, and why certain books opened by themselves to illustrations of fish. His room contained shells, astronomical instruments, broken pottery, maps of countries that had ceased to exist, and one blue vase painted with a woman whose expression changed according to the phase of the moon.

One afternoon he noticed that the staircase descending from his terrace did not arrive at the street.

It descended into his childhood.

At the bottom stood a house he had not seen for sixty years. Flowers grew where the doorway should have been. His mother was inside, younger than he remembered her, setting the table for people who had not yet been born.

He did not go down.

By then he had learned that miracles are often traps constructed from longing.

Instead he remained beside the cat and watched the impossible islands drift slowly across the sky, carrying ruined temples, cypress trees, and solitary houses whose inhabitants leaned from their balconies waving handkerchiefs at the world below.

At sunset the great stone face inside the moon opened its eyes.

The townspeople continued buying bread.

A donkey climbed the coastal road.

The peacock screamed once.

And the foreigner finally understood what the town had been trying to tell him all those years: paradise was not another place. It was this place, seen without the unfortunate habit of insisting that everything make sense.

He raised his coffee toward the flying fish.

The cat, who had understood this from the beginning, went to sleep.