The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Read online

  The Texas Pan American Series

  The Decapitated Chicken

  and Other Stories by Horacio Quiroga

  Selected & translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

  Introduction by George D. Schade

  University of Texas Press

  Austin

  The Texas Pan American Series is published with the assistance of a revolving publication fund established by the Pan American Sulphur Company.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Quiroga, Horacio, 1879–1937.

  The decapitated chicken, and other stories.

  (The Texas Pan American series)

  CONTENTS: The feather pillow.—Sunstroke.—The pursued, [etc.]

  I. Title.

  PZ3.Q5Del0 [PQ8519.Q5] 75-40167

  ISBN 0-292-77514-8

  ISBN 978-0-292-75350-1 (library e-book)

  ISBN 978-0-292-75351-8 (individual e-book)

  Copyright © 1976 by the University of Texas Press

  All rights reserved

  Illustrations by Ed Lindlof in the printed book do not appear in this ebook.

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Feather Pillow (1907)

  Sunstroke (1908)

  The Pursued (1908)

  The Decapitated Chicken (1909)

  Drifting (1912)

  A Slap in the Face (1916)

  In the Middle of the Night (1919)

  Juan Darién (1920)

  The Dead Man (1920)

  Anaconda (1921)

  The Incense Tree Roof (1922)

  The Son (1935)

  Introduction

  A new edition of Horacio Quiroga stories—in this case, the first selective translation into English ranging over his complete work—reminds us of a superb writer and offers a pretext for talking about him. Of course, the round dozen stories which make up this volume can speak for themselves, and many translations appear unescorted by an introduction; nonetheless, readers who are not acquainted with Quiroga may wish to learn something further about this author, generally regarded by the critics as a classic and one of the finest short-story writers Latin America has produced. Surveying his work afresh, we find that this favorable verdict still holds true and that his achievement continues to be admirable. Quiroga stands apart from the bulk of his contemporaries in Spanish American literature and head and shoulders above most of them.

  Certain thematic designs run through Quiroga’s life and also through his stories. He was born the last day of the year 1878 in El Salto, Uruguay, and died by his own hand in February, 1937, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The fifty-eight–year span of his lifetime was crammed with adventure, hazardous enterprise, and recurrent tragedy and violence, particularly suicide. When he was a babe in arms, his father was accidentally killed when a shotgun went off on a family outing. Later his stepfather, desperately ill and of whom Horacio was fond, shot himself, and the young Quiroga, seventeen at the time, was the first to come upon the grisly scene. In 1902 Quiroga accidentally shot and killed, with a pistol, one of his best friends and literary companions. In 1915 his first wife, unable to endure the hardships of life in the jungle of Misiones where Quiroga insisted on living, committed suicide by taking a fatal dose of poison, leaving the widower with two small children to raise. Finally, Quiroga himself took cyanide to end his own life when he realized he was suffering from an incurable cancer.

  His love affairs and marriages were also turbulent. He married twice, both times very young women; his second wife, a friend of his daughter, was nearly thirty years his junior. The first marriage ended with his wife’s suicide; the second, in separation. This singular amount of violence marring the writer’s personal life cannot be overly stressed, for it explains a great deal about his obsession with death, which is so marked in his work.

  Quiroga’s zest for adventure and the magnetic attraction the jungle hinterland of northern Argentina held for him are also biographical details that have great impact on his work. His first trip to the province of Misiones occurred in 1903, when he accompanied his friend and fellow writer Leopoldo Lugones as photographer on an expedition to study the Jesuit ruins there. Next came a trip to the Chaco to plant cotton, where he built his own hut and had his first pioneering experience. In 1906 he bought some land in San Ignacio, Misiones, and from that date on divided his time between the hinterland and Buenos Aires. He tried various experiments in Misiones, such as the making of charcoal and the distillation of an orange liqueur. These endeavors ended in failure but provided him with good material for his stories, as did his myriad other activities there, like constructing his bungalow, furniture, and boats and hunting and studying the wildlife of the region.

  In his teens Quiroga began writing under the aegis of the Modernist movement, which dominated the Spanish American literary scene at the turn of the century. Soon, however, he reacted against the decadent and highly artificial mode of his first book, Los arrecifes de coral (Coral reefs, published 1901), which contained Modernist poems, prose pieces, and stories, and turned to writing tales firmly rooted in reality, though they often emphasized the bizarre or the monstrous.

  Commentators have tended to discount the significance or merit of some of Quiroga’s early works, such as the longish story “The Pursued.” Recently this tale has received more favorable critical attention. Our translator, who has made an excellent selection of Quiroga’s stories that few would quarrel with, maintains that “The Pursued” is the most modern piece he wrote because of what it anticipates. It is undeniably one of Quiroga’s more ambiguous and inscrutable stories, lending itself to various interpretations as it elaborates on the theme of madness.

  Another early story, “The Feather Pillow,” first published in 1907, is a magnificent example of his successful handling of the Gothic tale, reminiscent of Poe, whom he revered as master. The effects of horror, something mysterious and perverse pervading the atmosphere, are all there from the beginning of the story, and Quiroga skillfully, gradually readies the terrain, so that we are somewhat prepared for, though we do not anticipate, the sensational revelation at the end. But this story takes on much more meaning and subtlety when we realize that the anecdote can be interpreted on a symbolical level: the ailing Alicia suffers from hallucinations brought on by her husband’s hostility and coldness, for he is the real monster.

  For three decades Quiroga continued writing and publishing stories in great quantity—his total output runs over two hundred—many of them also of impressive quality. Certain collections should be singled out as high points: Los desterrados (The exiled, published 1926) and Cuentos de amor, de locura, y de muerte (Stories of love, madness, and death, published 1917). The splendid title of Cuentos sets forth his major themes and could properly be the heading for his entire work. Quiroga also achieved great popularity with his Cuentos de la selva (published 1918), translated into English as Jungle Tales, a volume for children of all ages, permeated with tenderness and humor and filled with whimsy. These delightful stories are peopled by talking animals and are cast in a fable mold, usually with an underlying moral.

  “Anaconda,” which describes a world of snakes and vipers and how they battle men and also one another, is one of Quiroga’s most celebrated stories. It moves at a more leisurely pace than the typical Quiroga tale, with spun-out plot, lingering over realistic details. The characters in this ophidian world are more compelling than believable, and the animal characterization is not perhaps as striking as that of some shorter narratives like “Sunstroke.” But Quiroga, the fluent inventor at work, can almost always make something interesting happen. “Anaconda” lies on the ill-defined frontier b
etween the long story and the novella and will gainsay those who think Quiroga sacrifices everything to rapid narrative. Consequently, it loses something of the dramatic intensity of other stories, despite its original title of “A Drama in the Jungle: The Vipers’ Empire.” The tight-knit, tense structure we can perceive in “Drifting,” “The Dead Man,” and many other Quiroga stories is considerably slackened here. On the other hand, Quiroga compensates for this by offering us a story of exuberant imagination, rich in irony, with abundant satirical implications about man and his behavior. Like the Jungle Tales, “Anaconda” will have a special appeal for children, but, unlike the former, it is essentially directed to a mature audience.

  If we examine Quiroga’s stories attentively, we will find moments full of vision concerning mankind, often illuminating a whole character or situation in a flash. Quiroga has an astute awareness of the problems besetting man on every side, not only the pitfalls of savage Nature but also those pertaining to human relationships. Man is moved by greed and overweening ambition, hampered by fate, and often bound by circumstances beyond his control. Quiroga penetrates the frontiers of profound dissatisfaction and despair felt by man. His vision is clear and ruthless, and his comments on human illusions can be withering. Yet it is man’s diversity that emerges in these stories, his abjectness and his heroism. Though Quiroga never palliates man’s faults and weaknesses, the heroic virtues of courage, generosity, and compassion stand out in many of his stories.

  All this rich and multifarious human material is shaped and patterned into story form by a master craftsman. Quiroga was very conscious of the problems involved in the technique and art of the short story, and, like Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of the genre, he wrote about them. His most famous document on technique is what he dubbed a “Manual of the Perfect Short Story Writer,” a succinct decalogue filled with cogent and compelling advice. The usual warnings stressing economy of expression are here: for instance, “Don’t use unnecessary adjectives”; and also those concerned with careful advance planning: “Don’t start to write without knowing from the first word where you are going. In a story that comes off well, the first three lines are as important as the last three.” It is easy to find apt examples of the latter dictum in Quiroga’s work: “Drifting,” “The Dead Man,” “The Decapitated Chicken,” “The Feather Pillow,” and so on, to cite only from the stories translated in this collection.

  The last commandment in Quiroga’s decalogue to the person desiring to write perfect short stories is probably the most suggestive: “Don’t think about your friends when you write or the impression your story will make. Tell the tale as if the story’s only interest lay in the small surroundings of your characters, of which you might have been one. In no other way is life achieved in the short story.” Quite rightly Quiroga emphasizes the word life, for it is this elusive and vital quality which lies at the core of his stories. The idea that the author or his narrator might be one of the characters is also significant, for he often was one of the characters, at least in some aspect, or felt that he was one of them.

  Certainly in his best stories Quiroga practiced the economy he talks about in his manual and which is characteristic of good short-story writers. Almost every page will bear testimony to this laconic quality. It is a brevity which excludes everything redundant but nothing which is really significant. Wonderful feats of condensation are common, as in “The Dead Man,” where he shows his powers in dramatic focus on a single scene, or in “Drifting,” a stark story in which everything seems reduced to the essential, the indispensable. The brief opening scene of “Drifting,” where a man is bitten by a venomous snake, contains the germs of all that comes afterward. The language is terse and pointed, the situation of tremendous intensity, the action straightforward and lineal. Everything moves in an unbroken line from beginning to end, like an arrow to its target, to use Quiroga’s phrase referring to technique in the short story. The title, too, is particularly appropriate: while the dying protagonist literally drifts in his canoe downriver seeking aid, we see him helplessly adrift on the river of life, unable to control his fatal destiny from the moment the snake sinks its fangs into his foot.

  In “Drifting,” “The Son,” “The Dead Man,” and other stories, Quiroga plays on a life/death vibration, juxtaposing the two. While the throes of death slowly diminish the protagonist of “The Dead Man,” Nature and the landscape surrounding him pulsate with life—the ordinary domestic quality of daily life he is so accustomed to—so that he cannot accept the fact of his dying. Our curiosity is kept unfalteringly alive by Quiroga’s dramatic technique. At his finest moments Quiroga reaches and maintains a high degree of emotional intensity, as in the three stories cited above, which have in common their magnificent treatment of death. Quiroga flinches from none of the difficulties perhaps implicit in this theme. In his dealing with death he is natural and matter-of-fact; we find no mawkish romantic sentimentality, no glossing over of realistic attributes, and no gloating over ugly clinical details characteristic of naturalistic writers.

  There is also much suggestion and implication, rather than outright telling, in Quiroga’s best work. “The Dead Man” is probably the most skillful instance of this technique, but interesting examples abound throughout Quiroga’s narratives. A case in point is the heartfelt story “The Son,” where the protagonist father, suffering from hallucinations, imagines that his young son, who went hunting in the forest, has had a fatal accident. The father stumbles along in a frenzy, cutting his way through the thick and treacherous jungle, seeking a sign of the boy. Suddenly he stifles a cry, for he has seen something in the sky. The suggestion, confirmed later by the boy’s death at the end of the story, is that the father saw a buzzard.

  Dialogue does not play a heavy role in Quiroga’s work. Occasionally we listen to scraps of talk, but, in the main, his stories do not move by dialogue; they are thrust along by overt action. Exceptions to this rule are “Anaconda” and some other animal tales. A stunning example of Quiroga’s handling of dialogue occurs in “A Slap in the Face” toward the end of the story where the peon wreaks his terrible revenge on Korner, beating the boss into a bloody, inert pulp with his riding whip. Here Quiroga contrasts most effectively Korner’s silence, symbolical of his beaten condition, with the peon’s crackling commands Levántate (“Get up”) and Caminá (“Get going”), the only words uttered in the latter part of this violent, sadistic scene. The word caminá, repeated four times at slight intervals, suggests an onomatopoeic fusion with the sound of the cracking whip, another instance of Quiroga’s technical genius—language functioning to blend auditory effects with content.

  Narrative interest seems to prevail over other elements which often dominate in the short story, such as the poetical, symbolical, or philosophical. And Quiroga does not have a social ax to grind. But some of the most trenchant social commentary in Spanish American fiction can be perceived in his stories, particularly those concerned with the exploitation of Misiones lumberjacks, like “Los mensú” (“The Monthly Wage Earners”) and “A Slap in the Face.” In these tales no preaching is involved. Quiroga is clearly on the side of the oppressed but does not express their point of view exclusively. Consequently, the reader draws his own conclusions, and the social impact is more deeply felt.

  Setting, as well as narrative technique, is vitally important to Quiroga, because it is inseparable from the real, the ordinary, domestic, day-to-day experience of human existence. Quiroga’s feelings are bound up in place, in his adopted corner of Argentina, Misiones province, rather than the urban centers of Buenos Aires or Montevideo, where he also lived. He is vastly attracted to the rugged jungle landscape, where the majority of his best stories take place (nine of the twelve translated here). And he makes us feel the significance of his setting, too—the symbolic strength of the rivers, especially the Paraná, and the power and hypnotic force of its snake-infested jungles. So does this dot on the map that is Misiones come throbbingly alive for us. It is not just a f
ramework in which to set his stories but an integral part of them, of Quiroga himself, brimming over with drama and life.

  In the best stories, many of which appear in this collection, action is perfectly illustrative: the stories have not only movement but also depth. The apparent spareness allows for a greater complexity and suggestion. A fine short story should have implications which will continue to play in the reader’s mind when the story is done and over, as we can attest in “The Feather Pillow,” “The Dead Man,” and almost all the stories included here. We are struck at the end of “A Slap in the Face” by the dual function of the river, which provides the final solution. The peon thrusts the almost lifeless, despicable Korner onto a raft where he will drift inevitably to his death, while the peon takes off in a boat in the opposite direction toward haven on the Brazilian shore. Thus the river assumes the role of justice, meting out death to the guilty and life to the accused. “Juan Darién” is probably one of the most subtle and interesting stories Quiroga ever penned. Rich in suggestions, it opens up to us a world of fantastic reality in which the protagonist is a tiger/boy. At one point in the story Quiroga has the inspector say that truth can be much stranger than fiction. Interpretations of this story will vary, but the most rewarding one may well be that of Juan Darién as a Christ-like figure.

  Swift recognition for his mastery of the short story came to Quiroga fairly early in his career, and he continued to enjoy fame throughout his lifetime. In the Spanish-speaking world he is still popular today and almost universally admired, though the type of story he excelled at, in which man is pitted against Nature and rarely if ever wins out, is no longer so commonly composed in Latin America. The contemporary Argentine Julio Cortázar, a writer very unlike Quiroga but also topflight in the short-story genre, has pointed out perspicaciously Quiroga’s best and most lasting qualities: he knew his trade in and out; he was universal in dimension; he subjected his themes to dramatic form, transmitting to his readers all their virtues, all their ferment, all their projection in depth; he wrote tautly and described with intensity so that the story would make its mark on the reader, nailing itself in his memory.