The presence of parrots on Place d’Arezzo was puzzling.
How did these birds from hot countries come to be on our cold continent? Why had this tropical jungle taken root in the heart of the city? By what strange madness were savage cries, rutting screams, wild debaucheries, raw, honest, barbaric colors stirring the gloomy calm of the capital of Europe?
Only the children here thought the presence of parrots and parakeets was normal, but as is well known, the weakness—and strength—of young minds is that they accept everything.
Adults tried to explain this incongruity with a legend.
Five decades earlier, at Number 9, the town house then occupied by the Brazilian consul, a telegram informed the diplomat that he was to return to Rio urgently. Forced to travel by air rather than by sea, he had had to keep his baggage to a minimum and realized that it was impossible to take his bird collection. Unable to find someone to take in his precious specimens, he had therefore, with a heavy heart, on the morning of his departure, opened the cages and restored the birds to the sky from the high windows of his living room. Unaccustomed to long flights, the multicolored mass of parrots, cockatoos, conures, macaws, parakeets, lorikeets, cockatiels, and kakarikis had seen it as wasted effort to venture beyond the nearest trees, and had set up home on Place d’Arezzo.
And so as they trod the sidewalks, visitors felt as if they were entering some kind of crazy movie, in which, through a bizarre superimposition, the images came from civilization, the soundtrack from nature.