They appear in the house in late fall. The greatest number are in the attic. Some of them freeze into stillness and wait for the spring; others, the older ones, simply fall asleep and fail to wake up. The brown of their wings is downy and lusterless. The yellow of their peacock eyes has the warmth and brightness you can see in the windows of country cottages as a clear frosty dusk is falling, when it looks as if pieces of the burning western sky have been mounted in the frames.
The European Peacock butterfly, with wings made of pine bark (the kind that children use to make toy boats) that the sun has burned holes in. The edges are black, carbonized, while all around the prick-marks from the sun there’s a glittering lilac-and-blue shimmer. It’s the color metal takes on when it’s fired to white heat then cooled; the rainbow becomes fixed in it, the temperature having permanently diffracted the light.
Some of them get into a room that’s cold and rarely used. But it’s enough to light the fire for a rustling sound to start up in the corners. They try to rise from the floor, from the dust and darkness. These creatures of air and light can be heard making a gray, powdery sound. The strongest ones occasionally fly up and flap toward the window.
Outside it’s cold, the whiteness extends into infinity, yet they knock stubbornly against the pane. If they were let out, the frost would cut them down in a second, the way a candle flame will destroy a moth in the blink of an eye.
They die in a flutter of wings, in the cold sun of December. The sound has something of the susurration made by paper that’s crumbling with age—if you rub it between your fingers it disintegrates into tiny pieces.
Eventually the sun sets, the room cools, dusk falls, and everything goes silent. Then they can be examined closely. The texture of the undersurface of their folded wings is like a fine mineral. The dark blue is shot through with black veins, while here and there you can see flecks of gold like those in a lump of coal. This combination of minerality and light makes their death seem unreal: surely it’s not possible for something basically untouched by time to come so abruptly to an end.
But aside from the whole ones lying calm and hunched on their side, in the dark nooks and crannies you can find dozens of single torn-off wings. This may have been suicide, or some ultimate kind of self-repudiation.