The terrifying tale of the telepathic peacock

 Melissa, our host in Providencia – a tiny island off Nicaragua’s coast that, somehow oddly, belongs to Colombia and where we are just lazing off, since there is no point whatsoever subjecting the locals to our brand of electro - tells us the horrifying and 100% accurate story of the evil genius island peacock. This peacock, whose cries resembling a melancholy fog siren I can hear as I write, has been abandoned on the island, along with a bunch of other animals, some of its own kind, by an Italian fleeing his Caribbean home. The menagerie owner was by trade an alternative healer and could discover one’s ailments simply by looking at them.  After being abandoned, the peacocks have a terrifying faith: the two females die shortly, unable to survive in the bush. The two males succumb to bestial conducts: they split the territory in two, each owning one side of the road. Each patrols his territory, emitting piercing calls that die, frightened and alone, where the sharp rocks plunge into the sea. Increasingly terrorized by the utter uselessness of their masculinity, they engage in a fight to the death; the peacock owning the side of the road where Marissa’s house is kills the other peacock gruesomely.

Since then, for the past 8 years, the peacock lives alone on his land, flying around, perching on the tall trees, scouring the bush without ever crossing into his dead rival’s territory, no matter how big the threat to his life. He promptly and mercilessly stifles all of Melissa’s agricultural endeavours, devouring her young melons, flowers, cucumbers and peppers with the precision of a vegan piranha.  This converts Melissa, a committed Adventist otherwise, into his arch-enemy: she promises to do away with the evil patriarch and ritually cook him in a spicy Caribbean casserole. “This is for my young cucumbers!” she would cry, before biting into a sauce-dripping leg.  

 But the peacock has amazing abilities, avoiding all her traps: the cane sugar dipped in rum fails to inebriate him. When a noose made of thin fishing rod is laid in the grass, the peacock saunters around it, eating the bait, without even once stepping inside the circle of death whose other end Melissa, hidden in her kitchen, feverishly holds through a crack in the door. When, exasperated, Melissa asks her husband to borrow a friend’s gun, the peacock disappears for three days without trace, confounding their assiduous searches of his territory. Since then he seems to provoke her, eating from the tourists’ hands but flying away as she gets near, permanently spying on her from nearby trees, ravaging her garden in a protracted guerrilla war. Melissa is convinced that the Mesmeric Italian healer endowed his peacock with telepathic powers that allow him to triumph over his enemies, each victory deepening his isolation.

 The Pill, predictably aroused by the romanticism of this classical story, starts thinking of ways to kill the feathered white whale. Discussions about the tastiness of peacocks start (because in Spanish a peacock is a “pavo real”, a ‘’royal turkey’’, Melissa launches one of her main offensives around Christmas); plans of female peacock decoys and fishing nets are proposed. A week later though, das Pill is endeared by the fellow and starts feeding him bread every day which, of course, he takes from her palm.

As we speak, the last peacock of Providencia, aware of all these conspiracies to murder him, flaps his heavy wings from tree to tree, does intricate mating dances to no one in particular and, at dusk, launches shrill calls towards the darkened seas, his powerful telepathic brain squeezed in the castrating vice of solitude.