The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Read online

  And he didn’t. He stood an instant more before he moved away from the threshold and returned to the entrance hall. Rapidly, I left the table, tiptoed to the door, and stuck out my head. “He knows I’m going to do this.” Nevertheless, he continued at a tranquil pace and disappeared.

  Considering what had just happened, I appreciated the superhuman effort the pursued one made in not turning around, knowing that behind his back I was devouring him with my eyes.

  One week later I received this letter:

  My dear X:

  Because of a bad cold, I haven’t been out for four days. If you are not afraid of the contagion, you would give me great pleasure by coming to chat with me for a while.

  Yours very truly,

  Lucas Díaz Vélez

  P.S. If you see Lugones, tell him I have been sent something that will interest him very much.

  I received the letter at two o’clock in the afternoon. As it was cold and I was planning to go for a walk, I hurried over to Lugones’s.

  “What are you doing here at this time of day?” he asked me. I didn’t see him very frequently in the afternoon in those days.

  “Nothing. Díaz Vélez sends you his regards.”

  “So it’s still you and Díaz Vélez,” he laughed.

  “Yes, still. I just received a letter from him. It seems he hasn’t been out of the house for four days.”

  It was evident to both of us that this was the beginning of the end, and in five minutes’ speculation on the matter we had invented a million absurd things that could have happened to Díaz. But since I hadn’t told Lugones about my hectic day with Díaz, his interest was soon exhausted and I left.

  For the same reason, Lugones understood very little about my visit. It was unthinkable that I had gone to his house expressly to tell him that Díaz was offering him more honey cakes; and, since I had left almost immediately, the man must have been thinking everything except what was really at the heart of the matter.

  At eight o’clock I knocked at Vélez’s door. I gave my name to the servant, and a few moments later an elderly lady, obviously from the provinces, appeared. Her hair was smooth, and she was wearing a black dressing gown with an interminable row of covered buttons.

  “Do you want to see Lucas?” she asked, looking at me suspiciously.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He is somewhat ill; I don’t know whether he will be able to receive you.”

  I objected that nonetheless I had received a note from him. The old lady looked at me again.

  “Please be good enough to wait a moment.”

  She returned and led me to my friend. Díaz was sitting up in bed with a jacket over his nightshirt. He introduced us to each other.

  “My aunt . . .”

  When she withdrew, I said, “I thought you lived alone.”

  “I used to, but she’s been living here with me for the last two months. Bring up a chair.”

  The moment I saw him I was sure that what Lugones and I had conjectured was true; he absolutely did not have a cold.

  “Bronchitis . . . ?”

  “Yes, something like that. . . .”

  I took a quick look around. The room was like any other room with whitewashed walls. He, too, had incandescent gas. I looked with curiosity at the cone, but his whistled, whereas mine popped. As for the rest, a beautiful silence throughout the house.

  When I looked back at him, he was watching me. It must have been at least five seconds that he had been watching me. Our glances locked, and a shiver sent its tentacles to the marrow of my bones. But he was completely mad now! The pursued one was living just behind Díaz’s eyes. The only thing, absolutely the only thing in his eyes was a murderous fixation.

  “He’s going to attack me,” I agonized to myself. But the obstinacy suddenly disappeared, and after a quick glance at the ceiling Díaz recovered his habitual expression. He looked at me, smiling, and then dropped his eyes.

  “Why didn’t you answer me the other evening in your room?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think I didn’t come in because I was afraid?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But do you think I’m not really ill?”

  “No. . . . Why?”

  He raised his arm and let it fall lazily on the quilt.

  “I was looking at you a little bit ago. . . .”

  “Let’s forget it, shall we!”

  “The madman had escaped from me, hadn’t he?”

  “Forget it, Díaz, forget it!”

  I had a knot in my throat. His every word had the effect on me of one more push toward an imminent abyss.

  If he continues, he’ll explode! He won’t be able to hold it back! And then I clearly realized that Lugones and I had been right. Díaz had taken to his bed because he was afraid! I looked at him and shuddered violently. There it was again! The assassin was once more staring through eyes now fixed on me. But, as before, after a glance at the ceiling, the light of normalcy returned to them.

  “One thing is certain, it’s fiendishly quiet here,” I said to myself.

  A moment passed.

  “Do you like the silence?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It’s funereal. Suddenly you get the sensation that there are things concentrating too much on you. Let me give you an example.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His eyes were shining with perverse intelligence as they had at other times.

  “Well, suppose that you, like me, have been alone, in bed, for four days, and that you—I mean, I—haven’t thought about you. Suppose you hear a voice clearly, not yours, not mine, a clear voice, anywhere, behind the wardrobe, in the ceiling—here in this ceiling, for example—calling you, insult—”

  He stopped: he was staring at the ceiling, his face completely altered by hatred, and then he shouted, “There are! There are!”

  Shaken to my soul, I instantly recalled his former glances; he heard the voice that insulted him from the ceiling, but I was the one who pursued him. No doubt he still possessed discernment enough not to link the two things together.

  His face had been suffused with color. Now, by contrast, Díaz had become frightfully pale. Finally, with an effort, he turned away from the ceiling and lay quietly for a moment, his expression vague and his breathing agitated.

  I could not remain there any longer. I glanced at the night table and saw the half-open drawer.

  “As soon as I stand up,” I thought with anguish, “he’s going to shoot me dead.” But in spite of everything, I rose and approached him to say good-by. Díaz, with a sudden start, turned toward me. In the time it took me to reach his side, his breathing stopped and his fascinated eyes took on the expression of a cornered animal watching the sights of a shotgun drawing near.

  “I hope you feel better, Díaz. . . .”

  I did not dare hold out my hand, but reason is as violent as madness and is extremely painful to lose. Díaz came to his senses and extended his hand.

  “Come tomorrow; I’m not well today.”

  “I’m afraid I . . .”

  “No, no, come. Come!” he concluded with imperious anguish.

  I left without seeing anyone, feeling, as I found myself free and remembering with horror that extremely intelligent man battling with the ceiling, that I was cured forever of psychological games.

  The following day, at eight o’clock in the evening, a boy delivered this note to me:

  Sir:

  Lucas insists on seeing you. If it wouldn’t be a bother I would appreciate your stopping by here today.

  Hoping to hear from you,

  Desolinda S. de Roldán

  I had had a disturbing day. I couldn’t think about Díaz that I didn’t see him shouting again during that horrible loss of conscious reason. His nerves were strung so tight that a sudden blast from a train whistle would have shattered them.

  I went, nevertheless, but as I walked along I found I was painfully shaken
by the least noise. So when I turned the corner and saw a group in front of Díaz Vélez’s door, my legs grew weak—not from any concrete fear, but from coincidences, from things foreseen, from cataclysms of logic.

  I heard a murmur of fear.

  “He’s coming; he’s coming!” And everyone scattered into the middle of the street.

  “There it is; he’s mad,” I said to myself, grieved by what might have happened. I ran, and in a moment I stood before the door.

  Díaz lived on Arenales Street between Bulnes and Vidt. The house had an extensive interior patio overflowing with plants. As there was no light in the patio, as contrasted with the entryway, the patio beyond lay in deep shadow.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Several persons replied:

  “The young man who lives here is crazy.”

  “He’s wandering around the patio. . . .”

  “He’s naked. . . .”

  “He keeps running out. . . .”

  I was anxious to know about his aunt.

  “There she is.”

  I turned, and there against the window was the poor lady, sobbing. When she saw me she redoubled her weeping.

  “Lucas . . . ! He’s gone mad!”

  “When?”

  “Just a while ago. . . . He came running out of his room . . . shortly after I had sent you . . .”

  I felt someone was speaking to me.

  “Listen, listen!”

  From the black depths of the patio we heard a pitiful cry.

  “He yells like that every few minutes. . . .”

  “Here he comes; here he comes!” everyone shouted, fleeing.

  I didn’t have time or strength to run away. I felt a muffled, precipitous rush, and Díaz Vélez, livid, completely nude, his eyes bulging out of his head, rushed into the entrance hall, carried me along in front of him, made a ridiculous grimace in the doorway, and ran back into the patio.

  “Get out of there; he’ll kill you,” they yelled at me. “He shot at a chair today.”

  Everyone had clustered around the door again, peering into the shadows.

  “Listen. . . , again.”

  Now it was a cry of agony that emerged from the depths. “Water . . . ! Water . . . !”

  “He’s asked for water two times.”

  The two officers who had just arrived had decided to post themselves on either side of the entrance hall at the rear and seize Díaz the next time he rushed into the hall. The wait was even more agonizing this time. But soon the cry was repeated, and, following it, the scattering of the crowd.

  “Here he comes!”

  Díaz rushed out, violently hurled an empty vase into the street, and an instant later was subdued. He defended himself fiercely, but, when he saw it was hopeless to resist, he stopped struggling, astonished and panting, and looked from person to person with surprise. He did not recognize me, nor did I delay there any longer.

  The following morning I went to have lunch with Lugones and told him the whole story—this time we were very serious.

  “What a shame; he was very intelligent.”

  “Too intelligent,” I confirmed, remembering.

  All this was June 1903.

  “Let’s do something,” Lugones said to me. “Why don’t we go to Misiones? That will give us something to do.”

  We went, and four months later we returned, Lugones with a full beard and I with a ruined stomach.

  Díaz was in an institution. Since the crisis, which had lasted two days, there had been no further incidents. When I went to visit him, he received me effusively.

  “I thought I’d never see you again. Have you been away?”

  “Yes, for a while. Getting along all right?”

  “Just fine. I hope to be completely well before the end of the year.”

  I couldn’t help looking at him.

  “Yes,” he smiled. “Although I feel fine, I think it’s prudent to wait a few months. But deep down, since that night, nothing has happened.”

  “Do you remember . . . ?”

  “No, but they told me about it. I must have been quite a sight, naked.”

  We entertained ourselves a while longer.

  “Look,” he said seriously, “I’m going to ask you a favor: come see me often. You don’t know how these gentlemen bore me with their innocent questions and their snares. All they succeed in doing is making me bitter, eliciting ideas from me that I don’t like to remember. I’m sure that in the company of someone a little more intelligent I will be wholly cured.”

  I solemnly promised him to do it, and for two months I returned frequently, never denouncing the least fault, sometimes even touching on our old relationship.

  One day I found an intern with him. Díaz winked lightly and gravely introduced me to his guardian. The three of us chatted like judicious friends. Nevertheless, I noted in Díaz Vélez—with some pleasure, I admit—a certain fiendish irony in everything he was saying to his doctor. He adroitly directed the conversation to the patients and soon placed his own case before us.

  “But you are different,” objected the doctor. “You’re cured.”

  “Not really, if you consider that I still have to be here.”

  “A simple precaution . . . you understand that yourself.”

  “But what’s the reason for it? Don’t you think it will be impossible, absolutely impossible, ever to know when I’m sane—with no need for ‘precaution,’ as you say. I can’t be, I believe, more sane than I am now.”

  “Not as far as I can see,” the doctor laughed happily.

  Díaz gave me another imperceptible wink.

  “It seems to me that one cannot have any greater conscious sanity than this—permit me: You both know, as I do, that I have been pursued, that one night I had a crisis, that I have been here six months, and that any amount of time is short for an absolute guarantee that the thing won’t return. Fine. This ‘precaution’ would be sensible if I didn’t see all this clearly and discuss it intelligently. . . . I know that at this moment you are recalling cases of lucid madness and are comparing me to that madman in La Plata. The one who in bad moments quite naturally made fun of a broom he thought was his wife but, when completely himself and laughing, still kept his eyes on the broom, so that no one would touch it. . . . I know, too, that this objective perspicacity in following the doctor’s opinion while recounting a similar case to one’s own is itself madness . . . and the very astuteness of the analysis only confirms it. . . . But . . . even so—in what manner, in what other way, may a sane man defend himself?”

  “There is no other way, absolutely none,” the intern who was being interrogated burst out laughing. Díaz glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and shrugged his shoulders, smiling.

  I had a strong desire to know what the doctor thought about this superlucidity. At a different time I would have valued such lucidity even at the cost of disordering my nerves. I glanced at the doctor, but the man didn’t seem to have felt its influence. A moment later we left.

  “Do you think . . . ?” I asked him.

  “Hum! I think so . . . ,” he replied, looking sideways at the patio. Abruptly, he turned his head.

  “Look, look!” he told me, pressing my arm.

  Díaz, pale, his eyes dilated with terror and hatred, was cautiously approaching the door, as he had surely done every time I came—looking at me!

  “Ah! You hoodlum!” he yelled at me, raising his fist. “I’ve been watching you come for two months now!”

  The Decapitated Chicken

  All day long the four idiot sons of the couple Mazzini-Ferraz sat on a bench in the patio. Their tongues protruded from between their lips; their eyes were dull; their mouths hung open as they turned their heads.

  The patio had an earthen floor and was closed to the west by a brick wall. The bench was five feet from the wall, parallel to it, and there they sat, motionless, their gaze fastened on the bricks. As the sun went down, disappearing behind the wall, the idiots rejoi
ced. The blinding light was always what first gained their attention; little by little their eyes lighted up; finally, they would laugh uproariously, each infected by the same uneasy hilarity, staring at the sun with bestial joy, as if it were something to eat.

  Other times, lined up on the bench, they hummed for hours on end, imitating the sound of the trolley. Loud noises, too, shook them from their inertia, and at those times they ran around the patio, biting their tongues and mewing. But almost always they were sunk in the somber lethargy of idiocy, passing the entire day seated on their bench, their legs hanging motionless, dampening their pants with slobber.

  The oldest was twelve and the youngest eight. Their dirty and slovenly appearance was testimony to the total lack of maternal care.

  These four idiots, nevertheless, had once been the joy of their parents’ lives. When they had been married three months, Mazzini and Berta had oriented the self-centered love of man and wife, wife and husband, toward a more vital future: a son. What greater happiness for two people in love than that blessed consecration of an affection liberated from the vile egotism of purposeless love and—what is worse for love itself—love without any possible hope of renewal?

  So thought Mazzini and Berta, and, when after fourteen months of matrimony their son arrived, they felt their happiness complete. The child prospered, beautiful and radiant, for a year and a half. But one night in his twentieth month he was racked by terrible convulsions, and the following morning he no longer recognized his parents. The doctor examined him with the kind of professional attention that obviously seeks to find the cause of the illness in the infirmities of the parents.

  After a few days the child’s paralyzed limbs recovered their movement, but the soul, the intelligence, even instinct, were gone forever. He lay on his mother’s lap, an idiot, driveling, limp, to all purposes dead.

  “Son, my dearest son!” the mother sobbed over the frightful ruin of her first-born.

  The father, desolate, accompanied the doctor outside.