The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Read online

  The north wind blew mercilessly those three days, and the air vibrated with heat on the office roof. That little corner of earth, nevertheless, was the only shaded area on the plateau, and from the office the scribes could see, through the branches of the orange tree, a shimmering square of sand that seemed to hum through the entire siesta time.

  After Orgaz’s bath, the task would begin anew. They carried the table outside into the quiet and suffocating atmosphere. Among the rigid palms of the plateau, so black they stood out even against the shadows, the scribes continued to fill in the pages of the Bureau of Records by the light of a lantern among a nimbus of small multicolored satin butterflies that swarmed around the base of the lantern and settled in throngs upon the white pages. This made the task more difficult, for if these butterflies, dressed for a ball, are the most beautiful that Misiones can offer on an asphyxiatingly hot night, nothing is more tenacious than the advance of these silken ladies against the pen of a man no longer strong enough to hold a pen—or let it go.

  Orgaz slept four hours during the last two days, and on the last night, alone on the plateau with his palm trees, his lantern, and his butterflies, he did not sleep at all. The sky was so heavy and so low that he could feel it pressing against his forehead. In the early hours, however, he thought he heard through the silence a deep and distant sound—the drumming of rain on leaves. That afternoon, in fact, the horizon had been very dark in the southwest.

  “Just so the Yabebirí doesn’t act up . . . ,” he said to himself, peering through the shadows.

  The dawn came at last; the sun came out; and Orgaz returned to the office with his lantern, which he left hanging in a corner, forgotten, illuminating the floor. Alone, he continued writing. And when at ten o’clock the young Pole finally awakened from his fatigue, he still had time to help his patrón, who at two o’clock in the afternoon, his face grimy and dirty, threw down his pen and literally collapsed upon his arms, where he remained for so long one could not see his breathing.

  He had finished. After sixty-three hours, hour after hour, facing the square of burning white sand on the lugubrious plateau, his twenty-four Bureau of Records books were in order. But he had missed the launch that left at one for Posadas. There was no recourse but to ride there on horseback.

  As he was saddling his horse, Orgaz observed the weather. The sky was white, and the sun, although veiled by vapors, burned like fire. From the tiered mountains of Paraguay, from the fluvial basin in the southeast came an impression of dampness, of damp hot jungle. But while all around the horizon stripes of livid water streaked the sky, San Ignacio was still choking in oven-dry heat.

  Under such conditions, then, Orgaz trotted and galloped as fast as possible in the direction of Posadas. He descended the hill of the new cemetery and entered the valley of the Yabebirí. He had his first surprise when he saw the river; as he was waiting for the raft, a border of little sticks was bubbling against the shore.

  “It’s rising,” the man on the raft said to the traveler. “It poured today and last night upstream. . . .”

  “And down below?” Orgaz asked.

  “There, too.”

  Orgaz had not been mistaken, then, when the night before he thought he had heard the drumming of rain on the distant forest. Uneasy now about crossing the Garupá, whose sudden floods can only be compared to those of the Yabebirí, Orgaz ascended the slopes of Loreto at a gallop, damaging his horse’s hoofs on the basalt stones. From the high plains that stretched before his view into an enormous landscape, he saw the whole span of the sky, from the east to the south, heavy with blue water, and the forest, drowned in rain, dimly visible through white mists. There was no sun now, and a barely perceptible breeze occasionally infiltrated the asphyxiating calm. He sensed contact with water—the deluge following the long droughts. And galloping swiftly, passing through Santa Ana, Orgaz reached Candelaria.

  There he met his second—although anticipated—surprise: the Garupá, flowing swollen from four days of bad weather, forbade crossing. No ford, no raft; only fermented refuse bobbing amidst pieces of straw, and, in the channel, sticks and water rushing full speed.

  What to do? It was five o’clock. Another five hours and the inspector would be going on board to sleep. Orgaz’s only choice was to reach the Paraná and get into the first craft he found along the shore.

  That was what he did; and, as it began to grow dark beneath the most menacing storm ever seen in any sky, Orgaz descended the Paraná in a stove-in boat mended with a piece of tin that had holes through which water poured in streams like cat’s whiskers.

  For a while the owner of the boat poled lazily down the middle of the river, but, as he was filled with rum acquired with Orgaz’s advance payment, he soon preferred at the least excuse to philosophize with first one and then the other shore. At this juncture Orgaz took command of an oar at the same time that a brusque blast of cool, almost wintry, wind stirred the river into little peaks like those on a grater. Rains came that obscured the Argentine coast. And with the first enormous drops, Orgaz thought about his books, barely sheltered by the cloth of his case. He took off his jacket and shirt, covered the books with them, and again took the oar at the prow. The Indian worked, too, uneasy in the storm. And beneath the riddling deluge those two individuals held the boat in the channel, paddling vigorously, their view limited to only twenty meters, enclosed in a circle of white.

  Their keeping in the main channel was conducive to speed, and Orgaz held them to it as much as possible. But the wind rose, and the Paraná, which spreads as wide as a sea between Candelaria and Posadas, curled into great mad waves. Orgaz had sat upon his books to save them from the water breaking against, and occasionally flooding into, the boat. He could not, nevertheless, continue indefinitely, and even though it meant arriving late in Posadas, he headed toward the shore. And if the waterlogged boat battered from the sides by large waves did not sink in the crossing, it was only because inexplicable things happen sometimes.

  The rain continued, closing them in. The two men, streaming water, looking somehow thinner, got out of the boat, and as they climbed the barranca they saw a dark shadow looming before them. Orgaz’s brow cleared, and, overjoyed that his books would be miraculously saved, he ran to take shelter there.

  He found himself in an old shed used for drying bricks. Orgaz sat down on a stone amidst the wood ashes, while at the very entrance, squatting with his face between his hands, the Indian tranquilly awaited the end of the rain that was drumming on the zinc roof with a rhythm that increased by the minute to a dizzying roar.

  Orgaz, too, looked outside. What an interminable day! He felt it had been a month since he had left San Ignacio. The Yabebirí rising . . . the baked cassava . . . the night he had spent alone, writing . . . staring at the patch of burning sand for twelve hours. . . .

  Far away . . . , all that seemed so far away. He was soaked, and his body ached abominably, but this was nothing compared to how sleepy he was. If only he could sleep, sleep . . . , if only for an instant. But he couldn’t, as much as he wanted to, for the ashes were alive with chiggers. Orgaz emptied the water from his boots, put them on again, and went out to look at the weather.

  Abruptly, the rain had ceased. The crepuscular calm was choking with humidity, and Orgaz was not deceived by the ephemeral truce that would resolve into a new deluge as night approached. But he decided to take advantage of the respite, and he set out on foot.

  He calculated the distance to Posadas at six or seven kilometers. In normal weather, that would have been an easy trip, but the boots of an exhausted man slip in heavy clay and gain no ground, and Orgaz completed those seven kilometers in darkest shadows from the waist down, his body from the waist up glowing in the haze from the electric lights of Posadas.

  Suffering, the torment of his need for sleep buzzing in a head that seemed split open in several places, beyond exhaustion, these things were more than enough to defeat him. But Orgaz’s dominant emotion was that of self-satisfactio
n. The satisfaction of having rehabilitated himself stood out above everything else—this is how he would appear to the inspector from the Department of Justice. Orgaz had not been born to be a public official; he really wasn’t a public official, as we have seen. But he felt in his heart the sweet warmth that comforts a man when he has worked hard to fulfill a simple task, and he pressed forward, quarter-mile after quarter-mile, until he saw a blinding light, not reflected in the sky now, but the lamps themselves . . . Posadas.

  The hotel clock was striking ten when the inspector, closing his valise, saw standing before him a pale man, mud covered from head to toe, with obvious signs of falling should he let go of the frame of the door.

  For the moment, the inspector stood mutely staring at this apparition. When the man managed to take a step forward and place his books upon the table, he recognized Orgaz, although he was still puzzled by his presence there in such a state and at such an hour.

  “And what is this?” he asked, pointing to the books.

  “As you requested,” Orgaz said. “In order.”

  The inspector looked at Orgaz, considered his appearance a moment, and then, remembering the incident in Orgaz’s office, began to laugh in a friendly way as he slapped Orgaz on the back.

  “But I told you that just to have something to say! You’ve been a fool, man! Why did you go to all that trouble?”

  One burning midday when we were with Orgaz on his roof—he inserting heavy rolls of pitch and bleck between the wooden shingles—he told me this story.

  He made no comment at all as he finished. Nine years have passed since that incident took place; I do not know what the pages of his record books held in that moment or what there was in his biscuit tin. But I wouldn’t for anything in the world have wanted to be the inspector who deprived Orgaz of the satisfaction he had won that night.

  The Son

  It is a powerful summer day in Misiones, with all the sun, heat, and calm the season can offer. Nature, at its fullest and most open, seems satisfied with itself.

  Like the sun, the heat, and the calm surroundings, the father, too, opens his heart to nature.

  “Be careful, little one,” he says to his son, summing up all his warnings for the occasion in the one phrase, which his son fully understands.

  “Yes, papá,” responds the child as he picks up the shotgun, fills his shirt pockets with shells, and then carefully buttons the pockets.

  “Come back by noon,” his father says.

  “Yes, papá,” the young boy repeats.

  Balancing the shotgun in his hand, he smiles at his father, kisses him, and leaves.

  The father follows him for a moment with his eyes and then returns to his day’s tasks, made happy by his young one’s joy.

  He knows that his son, raised from tender infancy to be cautious in the presence of danger, can handle a firearm and hunt anything that presents itself. Although very tall for his age, he is only thirteen. And he might seem even younger if one were to judge by the purity of his blue eyes, still fresh with childish surprise.

  The father doesn’t have to raise his eyes from his task to follow in his mind the son’s progress. Now, he has crossed the red path and is heading straight for the woods through the opening in the esparto grass.

  He knows that hunting in the woods—hunting game—requires more patience than his son can muster. After cutting through the woods his cub will skirt the line of cactus and go to the marsh in search of doves, toucans, or perhaps a pair of herons like the one his friend Juan sighted several days ago.

  Only now, a ghost of a smile touches the father’s lips as he recalls the two young boys’ love of hunting. Sometimes they get only a yacútoro, even less frequently a surucuá, and, even so, return in triumph, Juan to his own ranch with the nine-gauge shotgun that he himself has given him, and his son to their mesa with the huge sixteen-gauge Saint-Etienne—a white powder, four-lock shotgun.

  The father had been exactly the same. At thirteen he would have given his life for a shotgun. Now at that age his son has one—and the father smiles.

  It isn’t easy, nevertheless, for a widowed father, whose only hope and faith lies in the life of his son, to raise the boy as he has, free within his limited range of action, sure of hand and foot since he was four years old, conscious of the immensity of certain dangers and the limitations of his own strength.

  The father has had to battle fiercely against what he considers his own selfishness. So easy for a child to miscalculate, to place a foot in empty space, and . . . one loses a son! Danger always exists for man at any age, but its threat is lessened if, from the time one is a child, he is accustomed to rely on nothing but his own strength.

  This is the way the father has raised his son. And to achieve it he has had to resist his heart as well as his moral torments, because this father, a man with a weak stomach and poor sight, has suffered for some time from hallucinations.

  He has seen visions of a former happiness—embodied in most painful illusions—that should have remained forever buried in the oblivion in which he has shut himself. He has not escaped the torment of visions concerning his own son. He has seen him hammering a parabellum bullet on the shop forge, seen him fall to the ground covered in blood—when what the boy was really doing was polishing the buckle of his hunting belt.

  Horrible things. . . . But today, this burning, vital summer day, the love of which the son seems to have inherited, the father feels happy, tranquil, and sure of the future.

  In that instant, not far away, a sharp crack sounds.

  “The Saint-Etienne,” the father thinks, recognizing the detonation. “Two fewer doves in the woods. . . .” Paying no further attention to the insignificant event, the man once again loses himself in his task.

  The sun, already very high, continues to rise. Everywhere one looks—rocks, land, trees—the air, as rarefied as if in an oven, vibrates with heat. A deep humming sound fills the soul and saturates the surrounding countryside as far as the eye can see—at this hour the essence of all tropical life.

  The father glances at his wrist: twelve o’clock. And he raises his eyes to the woods.

  His son should be on his way back now. They never betray the confidence each has in the other—the silver-haired father and the thirteen-year-old boy. When his son responds, “Yes, papá,” he will do what he says. He had said he would be back before twelve, and the father had smiled as he watched him set off.

  But the son has not returned.

  The man returns to his chores, forcing himself to concentrate on his task. It is easy, so easy, to lose track of time in the woods, to sit on the ground for a while, resting, not moving. . . .

  Suddenly the noonday light, the tropical hum, and the father’s heart skip a beat at the thought he has just had: his son resting, not moving. . . .

  Time has gone by: it is 12:30. The father steps out of his workshop, and, as he rests his hand on the mechanic’s bench, the explosion of a parabellum bullet surges from the depths of his memory; and instantly, for the first time in three hours, he realizes he has heard nothing since the blast from the Saint-Etienne. He has not heard stones turning under a familiar step. His son has not returned, and all nature stands arrested at the edge of the woods, awaiting him. . . .

  Ah! A temperate character and blind confidence in the upbringing of a son are not sufficient to frighten away the specter of calamity that a weak-sighted father sees rising from the edge of the woods. Distraction, forgetfulness, an unexpected delay: his heart cannot accept any of these reasons; none would delay his son’s return.

  One shot, one single shot, has sounded, and that a long time ago. The father has heard no sound since, has seen no bird; not one single person has come out of the opening in the esparto grass to tell him that at a wire fence . . . a great disaster. . . .

  Without his machete, distracted, the father sets out. He cuts through the opening in the grass, enters the woods, skirts the line of cactus—without finding the least trace of his son.


  All nature seems to stand still. And after the father has traveled the well-known hunting paths and explored the marsh in vain, he knows surely that each step forward carries him, fatally and inexorably, toward the body of his son.

  Nothing even to reproach himself for, poor creature. Only the cold, terrible, and final realization: his son has killed himself going over a . . .

  But where . . . where! There are so many wire fences and the woods are so foul. Oh, so very foul . . . ! If one is not careful crossing a fence with a shotgun in his hand . . .

  The father stifles a shout. He has seen something rising. . . . No, it isn’t his son, no . . . ! And he turns in a different direction, and then another and another. . . .

  Nothing would be gained here by showing the pallor of the man’s skin or the anguish in his eyes. The man still has not called his son. Although his heart clamors for him, his mouth remains mute. He is sure that the mere act of pronouncing his son’s name, of calling him aloud, will be the confession of his death.

  “Boy!” escapes from him abruptly. . . .

  No one, nothing, responds. The father, who has aged ten years, walks down the sun-reddened paths searching for the son who has just died.

  “Sonny! My little boy!” The diminutive rises from the depths of his soul.

  Once before, in the midst of happiness and peace, this father had suffered the hallucination of seeing his son rolling on the ground, his forehead pierced by a bullet. Now, in every dark corner of the woods he sees sparkling wire; and at the foot of a fence post, his discharged shotgun at his side, he sees . . .

  “Son! My little boy!”