The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Read online

  Even the forces that submit a poor hallucinated father to the most atrocious nightmares have their limits. And our father feels his reason slipping away—when suddenly he sees his son step out of a cross path.

  The look on the face of a father in the woods without his machete is enough to cause a thirteen-year-old boy to hasten his step, his eyes moist.

  “My little boy,” the man murmurs and drops exhausted to the white sand, clasping his arms about his son’s legs.

  The child stands, his legs encircled, and, as he understands his father’s pain, slowly caresses his head, “Poor papá. . . .”

  Time begins again. Soon it will be three o’clock. Together now, father and son undertake the return home; and if one can admit to tears in the voice of a strong man, let us mercifully close our ears to the anguish crying in that voice.

  “Why didn’t you watch the sun to keep track of the time?” the father murmurs.

  “I looked, papá. . . . But as I started back I saw Juan’s herons and I followed them. . . .”

  “What you have put me through, my son . . . !”

  “Pah-pah . . . ,” the boy murmurs, too.

  After a long silence: “And the herons, did you kill them?” the father asks.

  “No. . . .”

  An unimportant detail, after all. Under the blazing sky, in the open, cutting through the esparto, the man returns home with his son, his arm resting happily on the boy’s shoulders, almost as high as his own. He returns bathed in sweat, and, though broken in body and soul, he smiles with happiness. . . .

  He smiles with hallucinated happiness. . . . Because this father walks alone. He has found no one, and his arm is resting upon empty air. Because behind him, at the foot of a fence post, with his legs higher than his body, caught in a wire fence, his beloved son, dead since ten o’clock in the morning, lies in the sun.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The Quiroga stories in this book are available in several Spanish editions. In translating these stories I used the Biblioteca Rodó Series (Horacio Quiroga, Cuentos, Biblioteca Rodó Series, Montevideo, 1937–1945), in which the stories are located as follows:

  “Sunstroke” (“La insolación,” vol. 2)

  “The Pursued” (“Los perseguidos,” vol. 7)

  “The Decapitated Chicken” (“La gallina degollada,” vol. 1)

  “Drifting” (“A la deriva,” vol. 1)

  “A Slap in the Face” (“Una bofetada,” vol. 1)

  “In the Middle of the Night” (“En la noche,” vol. 3)

  “Juan Darién” (“Juan Darién,” vol. 4)

  “The Dead Man” (“El hombre muerto,” vol. 2)

  “Anaconda” (“Anaconda,” vol. 3)

  “The Incense Tree Roof” (“El techo de incienso,” vol. 5)

  “The Son” (“El hijo,” vol. 1)

  I took “The Feather Pillow” (“El almohadón de pluma”) from Quiroga’s Sus mejores cuentos, with introduction and notes by John A. Crow (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, 1943).