Astonished by these responses, I didn’t know which to find most amazing, his language or his ideas. His words emerged from him as charming trills, but entered my ears as if couched in our human language. I looked around to make sure I was indeed awake; yes, it was the same street, the same sad, damp, gloomy shop. Still hopping back and forth, the canary was waiting for me to speak. I asked him then if he didn’t miss the infinite blue sky . . .

“My dear fellow,” trilled the canary, “what does ‘infinite blue sky’ mean?”

“Tell me, then, what you think of this world. What is the world?”

“The world,” responded the canary with a somewhat professorial air, “the world is a junk shop, with a small, square wicker cage hanging from a nail; the canary is the master of the cage he inhabits and of the surrounding shop. Everything else is illusion and lies.”

At this point, the old man woke up and came shuffling over to me. He asked if I wanted to buy the canary, and I asked him if he had acquired it in the same way he had acquired the other things he was selling, and he told me that, yes, he had bought it from a barber, along with a set of razors.

“The razors are in very good condition,” he said.

“No, I only want the canary.”

I paid the asking price, took the canary home with me, bought a vast, circular cage made of wood and wire, which I ordered to be painted white and placed on the veranda, from where the bird could see the garden, the fountain, and a scrap of blue sky.

I intended to make a long study of this phenomenon, but would say nothing to anyone else until I had reached the point where I could dazzle the whole century with my extraordinary discovery. I began to alphabetize the canary’s language, to study its structure, its links with music, the creature’s aesthetic feelings, his ideas and memories. Having completed this initial philological and psychological analysis, I immersed myself in the history of canaries, their origins, their early history, the geology and flora of the Canary Islands, whether he had any knowledge of navigation, and so on. We talked for long hours, with me taking notes, and him waiting, hopping about, and trilling.

Since I had no other family than my two servants, I had ordered them not to interrupt me, not even with a letter or an urgent telegram or an important visitor. They both knew about my scientific interests and so found these instructions perfectly normal and did not suspect for a moment that the canary and I could understand each other.