The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Read online

  There, among canes so tall they obscured the ground from which they rose, the jungle tigers were pacing in the dark, their eyes like brilliant moving lights. The man was still unconscious. The tiger said, “Brothers, for twelve years I lived among men, like a man. And I am a tiger. Perhaps what I am about to do will erase that stain. Brothers, tonight I break the last tie that binds me to the past.”

  After saying this, the tiger grasped the still-unconscious man in its mouth and climbed to the highest point in the canebrake, where it left him tied between two bamboos. Then it set fire to some dry leaves on the ground, and soon a crackling blaze arose.

  The frightened beasts retreated before the fire, but the tiger said to them, “Peace, brothers!” And they were calmed and, with their front paws crossed, stretched out on their bellies to watch.

  The canebrake burned like an enormous fireworks display. The cane exploded like bombs, and the escaping gases crisscrossed like slim, brightly colored arrows. The flames ascended in swift muted puffs, leaving livid empty spaces; and at the summit, where the fire had not yet reached, the cane swayed, curling in the heat.

  But the man, touched by the flames, had regained consciousness. He saw the tigers below with their reddish eyes raised toward him, and he understood.

  “Forgive me, forgive me,” he howled, twisting and turning. “I beg forgiveness for everything.”

  No one answered. The man then felt he had been abandoned by God, and he cried with all his soul, “Forgive me, Juan Darién!”

  When he heard this, Juan Darién raised its head and coldly said, “There is no one here called Juan Darién. I do not know Juan Darién. That is a man’s name, and here we are all tigers.”

  And turning toward its companions, as if it did not understand, it asked, “Is any one of you named Juan Darién?”

  But now the flames were blazing high as the sky. And among the pointed Bengal lights shooting through the wall of flame could be seen a burning, smoking, black body.

  “I’ll soon be with you, brothers,” said the tiger. “But there is still something I must do.”

  And once again it set out toward the village, followed, unnoticed, by the tigers. It stopped before a poor, sad garden, leaped over the wall, and, after passing by many stones and crosses, came to a halt before an unadorned piece of land where the woman it had called mother for eight years lay buried. The tiger knelt—it knelt like a man—and for a moment there was silence.

  “Mother!” the tiger finally murmured with profound tenderness. “Only you among all humans recognized the sacred right to life that belongs to every being in the Universe. Only you recognized that man and tiger are different only in their hearts. You taught me to love, to understand, and to forgive. Mother! I am sure you hear me. I am your son forever, no matter what happens in the future, but yours only. Good-by, dear mother!”

  And when the tiger rose, it saw the reddish eyes of its brothers observing it from behind the adobe wall, and once again it joined them.

  At this moment from the depths of the night the warm wind carried to them the sound of a shot.

  “It is from the jungle,” the tiger said. “It is men. They are hunting and killing and slaughtering.”

  Turning then toward the village illuminated in the reflection of the burning jungle, it exclaimed, “Heartless and unredeemed race! Now it is my turn!”

  And returning to the tomb where it had just prayed, the tiger tore the dressing from its wound with a sweep of its paw, and on the cross which bore its mother’s name, with its own blood, wrote in large letters

  AND

  JUAN DARIÉN

  “Now we are at peace,” it said, and directing with its brothers a roar of defiance toward the terrified village, it concluded, “Now, to the jungle! And a tiger forever!”

  The Dead Man

  With his machete the man had just finished clearing the fifth lane of the banana grove. Two lanes remained, but, since only chirca trees and jungle mallow were flourishing there, the task still before him was relatively minor. Consequently the man cast a satisfied glance at the brush he had cleared out and started to cross the wire fence so he could stretch out for a while in the grama grass.

  But as he lowered the barbed wire to cross through, his foot slipped on a strip of bark hanging loose from the fence post, and in the same instant he dropped his machete. As he was falling, the man had a dim, distant impression that his machete was not lying flat on the ground.

  Now he was stretched out on the grass, resting on his right side just the way he liked. His mouth, which had flown open, had closed again. He was as he had wanted to be, his knees doubled and his left hand over his breast. Except that behind his forearm, immediately below his belt, the handle and half the blade of his machete protruded from his shirt; the remainder was not visible.

  The man tried to move his head—in vain. He peered out of the corner of his eye at the machete, still damp from the sweat of his hand. He had a mental picture of the extension and the trajectory of the machete in his belly, and coldly, mathematically, and inexorably he knew with certainty that he had reached the end of his existence.

  Death. One often thinks in the course of his life that one day, after years, months, weeks, and days of preparation, he will arrive in his turn upon the threshold of death. It is mortal law, accepted and foreseen; so much so that we are in the habit of allowing ourselves to be agreeably transported by our imaginations to that moment, supreme among all moments, in which we breathe our last breath.

  But between the present and that dying breath, what dreams, what reverses, what hopes and dramas we imagine for ourselves in our lives! A vigorous existence holds so much in store for us before our elimination from the human scene! Is this our consolation, the pleasure and the reason of our musings on death? Death is so distant, and so unpredictable is that life we still must live.

  Still . . . ? Still not two seconds passed: the sun is at exactly the same altitude; the shadows have not advanced one millimeter. Abruptly, the long-term digressions have just been resolved for the man lying there; he is dying.

  Dead. One might consider him dead in his comfortable position.

  But the man opens his eyes and looks around. How much time has passed? What cataclysm has overtaken the world? What disturbance of nature does this horrible event connote?

  He is going to die. Coldly, fatally, and unavoidably, he is going to die.

  The man resists—such an unforeseen horror! And he thinks: it’s a nightmare; that’s what it is! What has changed? Nothing. And he looks: isn’t that banana grove his banana grove? Doesn’t he come every morning to clear it out? Who knows it as well as he? He sees the grove so perfectly, thinned out, the broad leaves bared to the sun. There are the leaves, so near, frayed by the wind. But now they are not moving. . . . It is the calm of midday; soon it will be twelve o’clock.

  Through the banana trees, high up, the man on the hard ground sees the red roof of his house. To the left, a glimpse of the scrub trees and the wild cinnamon. That’s all he can see, but he knows very well that behind his back is the road to the new port and that in the direction of his head, down below, the Paraná, wide as a lake, lies sleeping in the valley. Everything, everything, exactly as always: the burning sun, the vibrant air, the loneliness, the motionless banana trees, the wire fence with the tall, very thick posts that soon will have to be replaced. . . .

  Dead! But is it possible? Isn’t this one of many days on which he has left his house at dawn with his machete in his hand? And isn’t his horse, his mare with the star on her forehead, right there just four meters away, gingerly nosing the barbed wire?

  But yes! Someone is whistling. . . . He can’t see because his back is to the road, but he feels the vibration of the horse’s hooves on the little bridge. . . . It is the boy who goes by toward the new port every morning at 11:30. And always whistling. . . . From the bark-stripped post he can almost touch with his boot the live-thicket fence that separates the grove from the road; it is fi
fteen meters. He knows it perfectly well, because he himself had measured the distance when he put up the fence.

  So what is happening, then? Is this or isn’t it an ordinary midday like so many others in Misiones, in his bushland, on his pasture, in his cleared-out banana grove? No doubt! Short grass, and hills, silence, leaden sun . . .

  Nothing, nothing has changed. Only he is different. For two minutes now his person, his living personality, has had no connection with the cleared land he himself spaded up during five consecutive months, nor with the grove, work of his hands alone. Nor with his family. He has been uprooted, brusquely, naturally, because of a slippery piece of bark and a machete in the belly. Two minutes: he is dying.

  The man, very weary, lying on his right side in the grama grass, still resists admitting a phenomenon of such transcendency in the face of the normal, and monotonous, aspect of the boy who has just crossed the bridge as he does every day.

  But it isn’t possible that he could have slipped! The handle of his machete (it’s worn down now; soon it will have to be changed for another) was grasped just right between his left hand and the barbed wire. After ten years in the woods, he knows very well how you manage a bush machete. He is only very weary from the morning’s work and is resting a little as usual.

  The proof? But he himself planted this grama grass that is poking between his lips in squares of land a meter apart! And that is his banana grove and that his starred mare snorting cautiously by the barbed wire! The horse sees him perfectly; he knows she doesn’t dare come around the corner of the fence since he himself is lying almost at the foot of the post. The man distinguishes her very well, and he sees the dark threads of sweat on her crupper and withers. The sun is as heavy as lead, and the calm is great; not a fringe of the banana trees is moving. Every day he has seen the same things.

  . . . Very weary, but he’s just resting. Several minutes must have passed now. . . . And at a quarter to twelve, from up there, from his house with the red roof, his wife and two children will set out for the grove to look for him for lunch. He always hears, before anything else, the voice of his smaller son who tries to break away from his mother’s hand: “Pah-pah! Pah-pah!”

  Isn’t that it . . . ? Of course, he hears it now! It’s time. That’s just what he hears, the voice of his son. . . .

  What a nightmare! But, of course, it’s just one of many days, ordinary as any other! Excessive light, yellowish shadows, ovenstill heat that raises sweat on the motionless horse next to the forbidden banana grove.

  . . . Very, very tired, but that’s all. How many times, at midday like this, on his way to the house, has he crossed this clearing that was a thicket when he came, and virgin bush before that? He was always tired, slowly returning home with his machete dangling from his left hand.

  But still he can move away in his mind if he wants; he can, if he wants, abandon his body for an instant and look at the ordinary everyday landscape from the flood ditch he himself built—the stiff grama grass in the field of volcanic rock, the banana grove and its red sand, the wire fence fading out of sight in the distance as it slopes downward toward the road. And, farther still, the cleared land, the work of his own hands. And at the foot of a bark-stripped post, thrown on his right side, his legs drawn up, exactly like any other day, he can see himself, a sunny little heap on the grama grass—resting, because he is very tired.

  But the horse, striped with sweat, cautiously motionless at a corner of the fence, also sees the man on the ground and doesn’t dare enter the banana grove, as she would like to. With the voices nearby now—“Pah-pah!”—for a long, long while, the mare turns her motionless ears toward the heap on the ground and finally, quieted, decides to pass between the post and the fallen man—who has rested now.

  Anaconda

  It was ten o’clock at night and suffocatingly hot. Haze hung heavy over the jungle, and not a breath of air was stirring. The carbon black sky was split intermittently from horizon to horizon by silent lightning flashes, but the hissing rainstorm to the south was still far away.

  Down a cow path through the middle of white esparto grass Lanceolada [she-of-the-lance-shaped-head] advanced with all the generic slowness of serpents. She was a beautiful yarará, a meter and a half long, the black angles of her body clearly delineated, scale by scale. She advanced, testing the security of the terrain with her tongue, which in the ophidians perfectly replaces the function of fingers.

  She was hunting. When she reached a crossing in the paths she stopped, very carefully coiled upon herself, settled herself more comfortably, and, after lowering her head to the level of her coils, adjusted her lower mandible and waited, motionless.

  Five hours passed, minute after slow minute. At the end of this time she lay as motionless as when she had begun her vigil. A bad night! Day began to break, and she was about to retire when she changed her mind. An enormous shadow was silhouetted against the purplish eastern sky.

  “I should go by the House,” the yarará said to herself. “I haven’t heard any noise for days, but one needs to keep on the alert. . . .”

  Prudently, she glided toward the dark shadow.

  The house to which Lanceolada was referring was an old whitewashed wooden building surrounded by a veranda. Two or three sheds were scattered around the grounds. The building had been uninhabited from Time Immemorial. Now unexpected and unusual sounds were heard: the ring of iron against iron, the neigh of a horse, a combination of sounds that betrayed the presence of Man a mile away. A bad state of affairs. . . .

  But one must make sure, which Lanceolada did much sooner than she had wished.

  Through an open door she heard an unmistakable sound. The viper raised her head, and, as she noted that a cold clearness on the horizon was heralding the dawn, she saw a slim shadow, tall and strong, moving toward her. She heard footsteps, too—the strong, sure, enormously distanced thuds that announce the enemy a mile away.

  “Man!” Lanceolada hissed. And quick as lightning she coiled in readiness.

  The shadow was upon her. One enormous foot fell alongside her, and the yarará, with all the violence of the attack upon which one gambles his life, struck and then recoiled to her former position.

  The man stopped; he thought he had felt a blow on his boots. Without moving his feet he surveyed the weeds around him but could see nothing in the darkness, barely broken now by the vague light of dawn, so he continued on his way.

  Now Lanceolada could see that the House was beginning to take on life, real and effective life . . . MAN. The yarará retreated to her nest, taking with her the conviction that this nocturnal incident had been only the prologue to a great drama soon to unfold.

  II

  The following day, Lanceolada’s first preoccupation was the danger that, with the arrival of Man, would filter down upon the whole Family. Man and Devastation have been synonymous from Time Immemorial throughout the entire Kingdom of the Animals. For the Vipers, the poisonous snakes, particularly, the disaster was personified in two horrors: the searching machete that cut into the very belly of the jungle and the fire that suddenly annihilated the woods and, with it, the hidden lairs.

  So it was urgent to prevent that disaster. Lanceolada waited for the coming of the following night to set her campaign in motion. Without much effort she found two companions to spread the alarm. She, for her part, searched until twelve o’clock for the most propitious place to hold the gathering. So at two o’clock in the morning the Congress found itself, if not complete, at least with the majority of the species present to decide what should be done.

  At the base of a rampart of natural stone five meters high and, of course, deep in the woods, was a cavern hidden by the ferns that almost obscured the entrance. For a very long time it had served as a shelter for Terrífica, a rattlesnake ancient among the ancients whose tail boasted thirty-two rattles. She was only 140 centimeters long, but, on the other hand, in girth she was almost as thick as a bottle. She was a magnificent specimen, marked transversel
y with yellow rhomboids, vigorous, tenacious, capable of facing her enemy for seven hours without moving, quick to set the fangs with the canals that are—and who should know if not those superior to her in size—the most admirably constructed of all the venomous snakes.

  Consequently it was there, before imminent danger, presided over by the rattlesnake, that the Congress of Vipers met. Besides Lanceolada and Terrífica, the rest of the yararás of the district were there: little Coatiarita, the Benjamin of the Family, with the very visible reddish lines along her sides and her particularly sharp-pointed head. Also there, negligently stretched out as if there were all sorts of reasons besides having her white and brown stripes upon long salmon-colored bands admired, was slim Neuwied, the model of beauty who had kept for herself the name of the naturalist who had identified her species. Cruzada was there—víbora de la cruz, called Viper of the Cross in the south—the powerful and audacious rival of Neuwied’s beauty. Atrocious Atroz was there; a sufficiently oracular name she had; and last, Urutú Dorado, the golden Dorado yararacusú, discreetly hiding in the depth of the cavern her 170 centimeters of black velvet obliquely striped by golden bands.

  It should be noted that the species yarará of the formidable genre Lachesis, to which all the members of the assembly except Terrífica belong, has long been famous for the ancient rivalry among its numbers for beauty of design and color. There are, in fact, few beings as generously endowed as they.

  According to the laws of the vipers, scarce species or those without real dominion in the territory cannot preside over the assemblies of the Empire. For this reason Urutú Dorado, a magnificently deadly animal, but one whose species is very rare, cannot pretend to this honor, so she gracefully yields to the rattlesnake Terrífica, weaker than she, but abounding in miraculous numbers.

  The quorum of the Congress, then, was established, and Terrífica opened the session.