The city was growing then. It was asphalting streets, raising new houses and spilling them out over fields that had sometimes been abandoned and lying fallow for ages. The old train with its wooden carriages crossed the last almond groves towards the mountains that, pale blue, were silhouetted on the horizon. When the train went by, the birds took flight and Francesc knew that it'd be a while before he could start drawing them again.

"That's it: there's the end of it for today!"

He'd fold the sheets of paper, open the folder and tie the ribbons in a bow.

"That's enough. Feel like some afternoon tea?

We'd have afternoon tea. And while I was eating, he'd take some food to his mother. He did it patiently, lovingly. He made a puree and took it in a little earthenware bowl to the bedroom where she spent all her days. There he fed her, spoonful by spoonful.

"That's good, isn't it, mum-mummy? Isn't that good?"

Sometimes Francesc had to use the spoon to force open, but not violently, the woman's closed, immobile lips.

"It's delicious", he'd answer himself.

I used to watch open-mouthed from outside the room, my impertinent eyes peeping through the half-open door.

I remembered it all looking at the old folder.

My son had gone to sleep, resting his little head on folded arms at the table. And my wife, discreet and generous, lifted him from the chair to carry him to bed.

"I'll do it", I said.

"Sit down", she said smiling. "It's my turn. You stay there and … remember."

"Thanks."

It was then that the blackbird came to Francesc's house.

It was an ungainly chick covered with grey fuzz, a noisy chick, all over the place in its movements, histrionic.

"Jas, look what we've got here", said Francesc on finding me at the door of his house. I often went to look at the drawings and especially to contemplate the mysterious white woman who was confined to her bedroom.

Francesc, that day, had something in his hands that were closed like a box against his chest.

"I found it in the kitchen garden. On the ground. If I'd been half an hour later, the cats wouldn't have left as much as a morsel."

He smiled happily. He liked birds. He loved their forms, he told me, the colours of their plumage, the way they sang. He drew them but also put food out for them, gazed at their nests in the eaves, in the branches of the trees in the little yard of his house, in the trees of the last orchards, in the last holes in the dry walls that the city was swallowing up.

"Scraggy little thing."

Saying this, he opened his hands and I saw it, the blackbird, still a chick, its beak open in fretful, yellow contortion.

"It's hungry", I said.

"They're always hungry, the chicks", Francesc agreed, happy with the little ball of life in his hands. "You know what we'll do? You go and look for some small snails in the yard, and beetles and grubs. I'll go and find a cage for the blackbird."

In no time at all, both my hands were full of small creatures. Francesc had found an old shoebox with the lid full of holes so the little bird could breathe.

"Now you'll see."

He opened the box. The blackbird, on the floor of the box that was already soiled with droppings, looked like a diminutive heap of ruffled down, but it opened wide its beak as if it wanted to swallow the whole world. Francesc crushed the shells of the snails I had brought and pulled out their horns. One by one, he placed them before the disproportionately open beak of the blackbird chick and the anxious beak dispatched of them in a trice.

"It certainly is hungry! Now the beetles, let's have them."

The small beetles, too, squashed one by one, ended up in the craw of the voracious chick.

"It hasn't eaten for hours", Francesc said, moved. He hadn't been looking at me the whole time. He only had eyes for the bird, the food he was giving it, the insects he was selecting from among my catch.

"Jas", he said at last, "now it's your turn".

The chick took more of the little creatures from my hand, now a grub, now a beetle, now a tender white snail. Its hunger gradually died down. And we could see how its dark eyes were slowly closing. It was trembling with pleasure, the blackbird chick. All fluffed up on the bottom of the cardboard box, warm and finally calm, beak closed, hunger sated.

"What good luck!" Francesc said. Suddenly he added, "Make sure it doesn't get away, I'm going to get my pencils."

The first drawings of the fledgling blackbird were also in Francesc's old folder. Those first sketches of swiftly-drawn lines, mere insinuations of forms, of movements, dense and fine, grey lines, shadows.

The exquisite drawings of Francesc who was so happy that day with his find.

Drawings that now took me back, without my ever thinking I’d see them again, to years I thought I'd lived as if by miracle.

(From Dama Blanca, merla negra, 2004)

Translated from the Catalan by Julie Wark ©