Natalia’s Journey: Loss, Recovery, and Identity in ‘The Pigeon Girl’
Loss and Recovery of Identity in ‘The Pigeon Girl’
The protagonist, initially an innocent and naive girl, evolves into a mature woman. Natalia, later a mother of orphans, meets Quimet at the Festa Major. Their relationship begins with Natalia’s submission and loss of identity (Chapter 1).
At first, she is a kind, timid girl, fearful of the outside world and unable to confront Quimet’s desires and demands. She endures her husband’s machismo and eccentricities, working tirelessly and neglecting her children. She must care for the dovecote and live through a turbulent historical period (the Spanish Civil War). The oppression becomes more heartbreaking with the invasion of the attic by pigeons, until she rebels and begins her journey toward maturity (Chapter 25) and the recovery of her identity.
This internal rebellion against injustice mirrors the revolution at the start of the Civil War, in which Quimet dies. After Quimet’s death and the liquidation of the dovecote, Natalia falls into grinding poverty and must “make the heart of cork” (Chapter 32). In the desolation of the postwar period, she thinks of her family. The grocer offers her hope by giving her work and, later, the possibility of remaking her life by marrying him. With Antoni, she regains the name of Natalia, a step towards the recovery of her identity (Chapter 35).
As the country recovers from the war, Natalia continues to struggle with her problems and anxieties, with little improvement in her economic or social status. She lives virtually imprisoned at home (Chapter 42), where old ghosts resurface. She leaves the house to find peace and create a personal, idealized world, a mixture of reality and embellished memories of the past (Chapter 43).
Natalia completes her path to happiness with a cathartic journey home across the street at night, knife in hand, looking with her eyes and soul and walking towards her old home and old life in the Plaça del Diamant. There, she confronts and kills the past, expelling all the accumulated anguish of her youth with a great shout (Chapter 44). This marks the end of one interwoven life and the beginning of a truly authentic life.
Key Symbols: The Funnel and the Pigeons
The pigeons first appear together (Chapter 12) at the start of serious problems and contribute to liberation in the Plaça del Diamant. There, the dove sits on Matthew’s shoulder, and the pigeons are driven away by the liberating cry and repaid by the knife. The pigeons serve as a leitmotif. Their evolution mirrors the symbolic life of the protagonist, while the other characters are important in relation to them.
These birds, causing work and worries, impose their will on her and are symbols of her life with their breeder, Quimet. They expel the protagonist from her dreams: the attic (Chapter 13), the gallery, the rooms, the little room (Chapter 21). They reflect Colometa’s (Natalia’s) subordination to her husband’s whims. After Quimet’s death and the misery that nearly leads to collective suicide, Natalia, now Antonio’s wife, re-elaborates the entire matter of the doves, undergoing a process of beautification and dream magnification, ending up as an idealized figure who frequents the park (Chapter 43): Madame of the pigeons, they say.
The funnel, conical, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, symbolizes life as an increasingly narrow and distressing path (Chapter 19), leading to the need to “make a cork heart” to “pass a bridge so high and so narrow and so long” (Chapter 33).