The Day the Barber’s Magpie Went Quiet

Transcripción

A barber in Rome had a magpie that could imitate almost every word it heard. Then some trumpets sounded outside the shop, and the bird fell silent. A day passed. Then another. People who knew its chatter began to worry. Had that sudden noise damaged its hearing? Had it lost its voice? This little mystery comes from A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals, published in nineteen hundred and one. The silence ended with a flourish. According to the story, the magpie suddenly performed the trumpet call, complete with its pauses and changes. The familiar chatterbox had acquired a quite different performance. The narrator gives the triumph a curious cost. The bird, we are told, had forgotten everything it knew before. We cannot know from this brief account what the magpie was doing during those quiet days. But we can share the barber’s surprise: the bird everyone feared had fallen mute had returned to the conversation sounding like a trumpet.