A Raven on the Snow
by Patricio Pron translated by Kathleen Heil
That winter the city was full of ravens. They usually gathered in the parks, where they could be found in little groups of three or four, inspecting their surroundings with a wicked stare. If they noticed something shiny in the snow—a wrapper or a scrap of paper—they'd land on it, grabbing it with their beaks, and then spit it out in contempt. Sometimes the ravens would fight over the object, thereby sharing the confusion and disappointment their find created. Then, still united in some way by their defeat, they'd move away from each other slightly before going after the object again with little hops that were both ridiculous and threatening.
He became obsessed with the ravens as soon as he noticed them on the campus of the university he attended. Around town, people were speculating as to why the ravens—which normally arrive in the summer—had arrived so early, and he began taking part in these discussions, usually by pretending to be a disinterested bystander, enjoying his beer while eavesdropping on the polemicists at the bar, or by acting as if he were evaluating the quality of a certain pencil in a store in order to overhear the employees' conversations, but sometimes he'd also speak up, as if he—who came from a city with no ravens at all, from a country in which ravens were only mythical creatures like Simurgh or the bird who told the tale of the end of the world—had something to say about the matter. He'd lean forward on the table—as though this afforded him some kind of authority, or were a necessary requirement in order to be better understood, like those insufferable speakers who spend the whole time clearing their throats—and would explain his findings, which were generally limited to things that his audience, having grown up in a city with ravens, already knew; but he, with the innocence of someone who finds everything about his surroundings unfamiliar (the innocence of the ethnologist who can only comprehend that which he names), considered these remarks revelatory and crucial.
In the weeks following the ravens' arrival he neglected his schoolwork in order to spend more time observing them. He'd sit in a park wearing a coat over every sweater he owned, taking notes while studying the birds' movements. Sometimes when one got too close he'd kick the air in a way that, inevitably, didn't scare the bird at all; with a hop, it would move away a few steps, resuming its watch after a reasonable interval. His notebook was full of entries, but they were practically illegible since he wrote with his gloves on and shivered the whole time.