No one knows this, but last year while I was in Viterbo, I was a pimp. No, it was not a project for my class trip to Pompeii. Nor did I benefit from the job. In fact it was forced on me by...pigeons.
I was lying on the floor of my room, struggling with a confusing image of Mercury told by Virgil in cruelly complicated Latin: he, headlong, sent himself towards the waves with his whole body, similar to a bird which, around the shores, around the fishy rocks, flies low lying near the sea? The Cyllenian progeny coming from the maternal bird? While debating whether to ask my host mother for help, knowing this usually proved more complicated and frustrating since I rarely said “headlong” or “progeny” in Italian, soft cooing distracted me from the Aeneid. I looked up from my laptop and spied a pigeon sitting comfortably in the flower box on my balcony.
I smiled and remembered fond Latin class memories in room 28 with an irate and exasperated Ms. Durham, banging on the air conditioner to soften the blasting coos. Pigeons were the only familiar link between my Italian life and my American life. But after the one singing pigeon, more came. Soon six pigeons would flap around, ruining the plants and belting out unrhythmic chants. They were flirting with each other and using my balcony as a brothel. Every day they gathered right outside my window earlier and earlier to start the disorganized chorus, just as every day I worked my way through another book of the Aeneid.
In May, I excitedly flipped to book 12, the final book. Having read the fantastically gory war scenes, I wanted to take action. A new epic poem would be written about me, called the Alizid, about sex, violence and pigeons rather than arms and a man. But on the bus, I read about Aeneas’ injury. Venus, his mother, shrouded herself in mist in order to come down from Mount Olympus and save her son from the seemingly incurable arrow wound. I looked up from my lovingly crumpled book and sighed. My mother was farther away from Italy than Mount Olympus seemed to be and she did not have the magic powers to heal my pigeon scratches and bites. Pigeons are evil creatures -- I could lose an eye!
Early one mid-May morning, I stumbled to the glass door that separated me from the feathery prostitutes. My alarm clock blinked 5:30 as I glared out at the pigeons. My new alarm clock had no snooze button; they had won the day.
Even though I was planning to wake up two hours later to take my Italian AP exam, I marched four steps into the bathroom to take a shower and soothe my anger. Even from the opposite end of my apartment building, I felt their conniving presence. Careful as I always was to not splash any water on the tiled floor, I thought I noticed the floor shaking slightly in rhythm with my archenemies.
My previous passivity had been like Aeneas’ initial hesitation when Turnus pleaded for mercy. But these pigeons were not pleading for mercy--they knew the anguish they were causing me and they were reveling in my pain. They had to die. So I drove my sword deep into their chest, just like Aeneas did. Well...I bought colorful metallic windmills to scare them away.
Months later, in my white splattered brownstone, my host family emailed me pictures of the fist-sized “piccioncini”. Among the shiny shrink paper that crackle in the wind were yellow fuzzballs lying lazily in the dead flowers of my balcony flower boxes. How could I still be angry? Besides, killing off an entire community of birds would probably have altered the entire food population and I would have become a biologist’s worst enemy. Thankfully, walking through Brooklyn is not as terrifying as walking through Saint Marco’s Square in Venice, where the pigeons actually rest on pedestrians if they stop moving. So I will just have to shake my head in a sympathetic manner like I did when the Italian government fell for the 61st time since Mussolini, and let Italy deal with its own problems.
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