The Missing Peacock Feather

I found it just when I was not looking for it.  This morning I was dusting a bookcase with a damp cloth and a book fell to the floor.  I picked it up and noticed it was a novel by Colombian author Laura Restrepo.  She is a journalist whom, I think, lives or has lived in Bogota.  She employs her chops as a journalist in her style of writing fiction.  This will be her third novel that I will be reading, "Historia de un Entusiasmo", or the Tale of a Passion.  I am reading it in Spanish, like her other novels.  They are a challenging read, but worth it, and intellectually hugely rewarding.  Her first novel that I read, "La Novia Obscura", or, the Dark Bride, touches on a young indigenous prostitute in a brothel in a small isolated jungle community in Colombia that services the male workers of the petroleum refining plant nearby.  This is fiction and Laura Restrepo positions herself as a journalist visiting to get the full story about the young woman and her four baby sisters she has brought to live with her under her charge since the death of their mother.

The second book, El Leopardo al Sol, or the Leopard in the Sun, is about two duelling and obscenely wealthy families of Colombian narco-traffickers.  This current novel of hers, which is really older than the others, promises to be a gripping read about the warring factions of Colombia's fifty year plus civil war sitting down to talk for the first time in 1984.  None of these books is easy reading, whether in Spanish or (I suspect) in English translation, but I find her writing so uncompromising in its clarity, dignity and relentless demand for the truth that I really wonder that she hasn't had more press in the English speaking world.  I certainly like her writing better than what I've read by Gabriel Garcia Marquez  whom I have found to be dull, plodding and quite the old school misogynist.  I actually did read most of El Amor en los Tiempos de Colera (Love in the Time of Cholera) but as I was slogging through the last hundred pages of so some local Latino snatched it from my café table while I was visiting the washroom.

When the book fell to my feet this morning it felt like an offering.  I have lately been lamenting having nothing interesting to read on some of my longer bus rides as I used to be in the habit of always packing in my bag a book in Spanish to read in transit.  And I found my missing peacock feather.

I have long loved peacocks and peacock feathers.  I have three long elegant ones on display in my apartment, with a white eagle feather that I found sixteen years ago when there seemed no real hope or purpose left in my life.

When I opened the book this morning I noticed that about twenty pages inside was my missing peacock feather, the one I delight to use as a bookmark.  I had forgotten that I had already tried to begin reading it last year, then lost interest because it was slow going.  Today, on the bus, I began reading it again from the beginning only to find that I found her writing in Spanish clear and much easier to understand than before, a tribute to the progress I am making.

I am also glad to have my feather again.  Every time I open this book I will see it and I will be reminded of the kind of beauty and perfection that resonate alike in nature and in good art.