He told himself he wasn’t even looking and therefore, having seen he should make an effort to remember, to record it somehow, no matter how temporary the medium. What he had been concentrating on was the breeze-blown and absurdly short white skirt of the woman in front of him, striding long-legged down the sidewalk outside the National Library. He walked past it and five steps on, the needle-nose plier of its beak, its white breast and gray jacket, the hangdog of its upraised claws appeared in his mind like a transparency over the woman’s blazer and bounce. He turned around and looked back at the hummingbird, thinking that his stance might attract the interest of another passerby. Not hoping for it but thinking rather that the strangeness, the sadness even, that such a bird would be lying dead in such a place might be worth someone else’s commentary. The distraction of those around him did not make him feel special, having been more than content to squander his own powers of observation for several city blocks of traditional objectification, with nine-tenths of his mind in its customary doze, and of the remaining tenth, two parts circling the soon-to-be-answered question whether Agrippa D’Aubigne’s Sa vie a ses enfants would be properly this time, the final eight parts in leisurely speculation on the style of panties she was wearing or whether, and here he was guided by a hint the breeze had provided, she might not be nude beneath the white skirt. Had he a handkerchief on him, in which to hammock the little bird, set it somewhere away from the jackboots and high heels? No. Nor was he inclined to linger much longer, the bird now beyond all manner of harm or misfortune, the woman with the lovely legs and admirable backside and to whom he would have been unfailingly polite had she reversed course and sought direction, now lost in the crowd.
He looked up at the high arched windows of the northern reading room, the broad white shades drawn three quarters of the way up, the gold of the sun and the blue light from within a conspiracy that never failed to slow his pulse. He imagined the half-blind bibliographer, hunched at his desk, thin effeminate fingers drawing maps and manuscript pages from every corner, smoothing their surfaces with the upside down paperweight, effecting a noise like a ceiling fan set to such a low revolution that each pass would seem to be its last. He left the bird and continued walking, but in a different direction from the one originally intended. There was a department store on the other side of the park, the Library would still be there when he returned, a rereading of the opening pages of Sa vie no longer seemed so pressing, in any event he had the image of the boy Agrippa and the impressive gibbets set firmly in his mind, details locked for some fair time to come. He found his own psychology predictable and not a source of pride. Where would handkerchiefs be sold? With the ties, wallets, priest’s collars? Unlikely that they would be available in emergency oneses, so a box perhaps? And the box, emptied, might be more practical as a hummingbird coffin? That the little carcass might no longer be there upon his return, that this present excursion might prove a waste of time was of secondary concern. The neurotic pleasure of success, its possibility led him past Our Lady’s burbling fountain, and across the street and in under the shade of the awning fronting Settembrini Brothers. He caught a glimpse of himself in the lobby mirror and was not revolted. Why the frown though? As if his mind housed anything of remote interest. His career as a cipher might well be ended but without explicit instructions to take center stage, to enact the worm in its turning, to lie down and expire in decent silence, he was powerless to stop. An anonymous girl seen only from behind, then a bird no longer bearing any of the qualities that signified ‘bird’ and what next, once the shop clerk set down his pile of argyle socks and turned towards him?