The Bird Hotel

Leila is a secondary character, both mentor and foil to Irene. Like Irene, Leila is a white woman born in the United States who decides to live abroad. When Irene meets her, Leila is older, anywhere between sixty and seventy-five. She is thin, and her hair is completely white, but her face has a serene glow. Leila is tough, unsentimental, and not given to displays of emotion. She generally has a good instinct about people’s characters but, as Irene observes, she is an artist, not a businessperson. She creates a beautiful garden around La Llorona, nearly a paradise, incorporating a variety of plants and sculptures. But Leila is also a realist, and as she warns Irene, there are serpents in this paradise; Leila, even more so than Irene, is trusting and generous, and Gus takes advantage of her by overcharging for his work and stealing supplies.

Leila’s life story embodies the themes of wandering and seeking, as she determines to leave Nebraska for Paris, drawn by the stories told by the French woman her uncle married during World War II. Leila has had many love affairs, but her only regret is that she was not allowed to have a relationship with her daughter, Charlotte. Leila relates to Irene as something like a surrogate daughter, and Irene shares this sense of affection, or at least sympathetic nature; when Leila dies, Irene weeps for her as she never fully mourned the loss of her mother.

Mirabel is a secondary character in the novel, and her storyline integrates the themes of romantic love and motherhood. Mirabel is around 16 when Irene first arrives at La Llorona. She has a heart-shaped faced and dark hair she wears in a thick braid, “large dark eyes beautiful dark skin, [and] the bearing of a queen” (62). Irene thinks her beauty is otherworldly, “that kind of beauty that seemed to glow from within” (62). Mirabel wears the traditional skirt of the women in her village, a length of fabric wrapped around her body and held in place by a belt. She spent a year making the beaded belt she wears (89). At work, she is “swift, efficient, but never hurried, and taking great care in everything she did” (89).

Mirabel’s mother died when she was nine or ten, and that is when Mirabel asked Leila for a job at the hotel. She is skilled at making custom fruit drinks, guided by her intuition, but she never seeks to monetize or exploit this skill. Mirabel is proud; she refuses Elmer’s offer of marriage because she refuses to forgive him for stealing from Irene. Mirabel is Catholic and, after she is raped by the Lizard Men, she believes she is at fault for committing a sin. She is also an example of resilience and endurance, surviving this attack and removing to live with her grandmother to give birth.

After Elmer rescues her, proving his love and fidelity, Mirabel seems content to marry him. She even wants to name her baby Elmer after him, though she agrees to name him Moses instead, after the biblical figure. Mirabel’s beautiful beaded belt is an example of the beauty and sophisticated craft of her Indigenous culture, just as her attack is a further example of Western exploitation and degradation of her native area, its people and resources. Mirabel’s survival and her ability to go on to create the family she wished for is testimony to the resilience, healing, recovery, and regrowth that are essential themes of the book.

Amalia is a secondary character who plays a small supporting role, but she figures as a foil to Irene and an example of a foreign resident of La Esperanza who becomes invested in the well-being of the community. Amalia knew oppression and imprisonment in her life in communist East Germany, and that is one reason she appreciates the freedom and natural beauty of the region around La Esperanza. A certain guard in prison used to torture the prisoners by waking them repeatedly with loud noises, and so Amalia’s retreat to La Esperanza is in one sense a retreat from the noise of urban environments.

Amalia proves a mentor to the children of the village and originates several schemes to help the community be self-sustaining. She teaches Clarinda and others how to make bags from scraps of fabric which they can then sell. She invents the eco-block, discarded plastic bottles filled with trash, which then become walls for local buildings like schools. This symbolizes all the ways in which La Esperanza takes the ill effects of foreign influence and turns them to good. She is also an advocate of good nutrition and tries to teach the children the importance of a healthy diet rather than the processed and packaged foods that are becoming available to them. Likewise, she encourages local mothers to breastfeed when they can rather than giving their infants formula. In this, Amalia shows that she respects and supports the customs and wisdom of the native residents. Her influence in the community, including sending Clarinda to school, is an example of positive outside influence, assimilation, and reconciliation with the cultural pathways of La Esperanza.

Gus is a secondary character who plays a role as one of the novel’s chief betrayers, an echo and parallel of the betrayal Irene feels from her mother. When he offers his help after Leila dies, Irene thinks Gus is reliable and is grateful to him, though she eventually realizes that he is misleading in his talk and promises, prone to fabricating: an “operator,” Irene calls him. But he is also charming and gregarious, and Irene thinks of him for a time as a brother, standing in for the family she never had.

Gus is a refugee like Irene, though he left England because he was implicated in a crime. Despite his sometimes-unsavory behavior, he is a loyal husband and devoted to his family, and in that way he speaks to the novel’s theme about the strength and endurance of family bonds. At the same time, Gus’s dishonesty is of a piece with the other foreigners who exploit the local resources for their own gain, as shown by the farm he and Dora set up to produce the baby-making herb. His version of justice, in his claim that he deserved to inherit Leila’s property, is a skewed one, reflecting on that larger theme, but the volcano that wipes out his profits from the theft of Leila and Irene’s property signals a larger, natural justice at work. In time, Irene returns his property to the villagers, and La Llorona thrives, while Gus and Dora, Andres, and the Lizard Men disappear, speaking to the ability of the area to right itself after a disaster, regrow, and renew.