The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Read online

  “I can say it to you; I think it is a hopeless case. He might improve, be educated to the degree his idiocy permits, but nothing more.”

  “Yes! Yes . . . !” Mazzini assented. “But tell me: do you think it is heredity, that . . . ?”

  “As far as the paternal heredity is concerned, I told you what I thought when I saw your son. As for the mother’s, there’s a lung there that doesn’t sound too good. I don’t see anything else, but her breathing is slightly ragged. Have her thoroughly examined.”

  With his soul tormented by remorse, Mazzini redoubled his love for his son, the idiot child who was paying for the excesses of his grandfather. At the same time he had to console, to ceaselessly sustain Berta, who was wounded to the depths of her being by the failure of her young motherhood.

  As is only natural, the couple put all their love into the hopes for another son. A son was born, and his health and the clarity of his laughter rekindled their extinguished hopes. But at eighteen months the convulsions of the first-born were repeated, and on the following morning the second son awoke an idiot.

  This time the parents fell into complete despair. So it was their blood, their love, that was cursed. Especially their love! He, twenty-eight; she, twenty-two; and all their passionate tenderness had not succeeded in creating one atom of normal life. They no longer asked for beauty and intelligence as for the first-born—only a son, a son like any other!

  From the second disaster burst forth new flames of aching love, a mad desire to redeem once and for all the sanctity of their tenderness. Twins were born; and step by step the history of the two older brothers was repeated.

  Even so, beyond the immense bitterness, Mazzini and Berta maintained great compassion for their four sons. They must wrest from the limbo of deepest animality, not their souls, lost now, but instinct itself. The boys could not swallow, move about, or even sit up. They learned, finally, to walk, but they bumped into things because they took no notice of obstacles. When they were washed, they mewed and gurgled until their faces were flushed. They were animated only by food or when they saw brilliant colors or heard thunder. Then they laughed, radiant with bestial frenzy, pushing out their tongues and spewing rivers of slaver. On the other hand, they possessed a certain imitative faculty, but nothing more.

  The terrifying line of descent seemed to have been ended with the twins. But with the passage of three years Mazzini and Berta once again ardently desired another child, trusting that the long interim would have appeased their destiny.

  Their hopes were not satisfied. And because of this burning desire and exasperation from its lack of fulfillment, the husband and wife grew bitter. Until this time each had taken his own share of responsibility for the misery their children caused, but hopelessness for the redemption of the four animals born to them finally created that imperious necessity to blame others that is the specific patrimony of inferior hearts.

  It began with a change of pronouns: your sons. And since they intended to trap, as well as insult each other, the atmosphere became charged.

  “It seems to me,” Mazzini, who had just come in and was washing his hands, said to Berta, “that you could keep the boys cleaner.”

  As if she hadn’t heard him, Berta continued reading.

  “It’s the first time,” she replied after a pause, “I’ve seen you concerned about the condition of your sons.”

  Mazzini turned his head toward her with a forced smile.

  “Our sons, I think.”

  “All right, our sons. Is that the way you like it?” She raised her eyes.

  This time Mazzini expressed himself clearly.

  “Surely you’re not going to say I’m to blame, are you?”

  “Oh, no!” Berta smiled to herself, very pale. “But neither am I, I imagine! That’s all I needed . . . ,” she murmured.

  “What? What’s all you needed?”

  “Well, if anyone’s to blame, it isn’t me, just remember that! That’s what I meant.”

  Her husband looked at her for a moment with a brutal desire to wound her.

  “Let’s drop it!” he said finally, drying his hands.

  “As you wish, but if you mean . . .”

  “Berta!”

  “As you wish!”

  This was the first clash, and others followed. But, in the inevitable reconciliations, their souls were united in redoubled rapture and eagerness for another child.

  So a daughter was born. Mazzini and Berta lived for two years with anguish as their constant companion, always expecting another disaster. It did not occur, however, and the parents focused all their contentment on their daughter, who took advantage of their indulgence to become spoiled and very badly behaved.

  Although even in the later years Berta had continued to care for the four boys, after Bertita’s birth she virtually ignored the other children. The very thought of them horrified her, like the memory of something atrocious she had been forced to perform. The same thing happened to Mazzini, though to a lesser degree.

  Nevertheless, their souls had not found peace. Their daughter’s least indisposition now unleashed—because of the terror of losing her—the bitterness created by their unsound progeny. Bile had accumulated for so long that the distended viscera spilled venom at the slightest touch. From the moment of the first poisonous quarrel Mazzini and Berta had lost respect for one another, and if there is anything to which man feels himself drawn with cruel fulfillment it is, once begun, the complete humiliation of another person. Formerly they had been restrained by their mutual failure; now that success had come, each, attributing it to himself, felt more strongly the infamy of the four misbegotten sons the other had forced him to create.

  With such emotions there was no longer any possibility of affection for the four boys. The servant dressed them, fed them, put them to bed, with gross brutality. She almost never bathed them. They spent most of the day facing the wall, deprived of anything resembling a caress.

  So Bertita celebrated her fourth birthday, and that night, as a result of the sweets her parents were incapable of denying her, the child had a slight chill and fever. And the fear of seeing her die or become an idiot opened once again the ever-present wound.

  For three hours they did not speak to each other, and, as usual, Mazzini’s swift pacing served as a motive.

  “My God! Can’t you walk more slowly? How many times . . . ?”

  “All right, I just forget. I’ll stop. I don’t do it on purpose.”

  She smiled, disdainful.

  “No, no, of course I don’t think that of you!”

  “And I would never have believed that of you . . . you consumptive!”

  “What! What did you say?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Oh, yes, I heard you say something! Look, I don’t know what you said, but I swear I’d prefer anything to having a father like yours!”

  Mazzini turned pale.

  “At last!” he muttered between clenched teeth. “At last, viper, you’ve said what you’ve been wanting to!”

  “Yes, a viper, yes! But I had healthy parents, you hear? Healthy! My father didn’t die in delirium! I could have had sons like anybody else’s! Those are your sons, those four!”

  Mazzini exploded in his turn.

  “Consumptive viper! That’s what I called you, what I want to tell you! Ask him, ask the doctor who’s to blame for your sons’ meningitis: my father or your rotten lung? Yes, viper!”

  They continued with increasing violence, until a moan from Bertita instantly sealed their lips. By one o’clock in the morning the child’s light indigestion had disappeared, and, as it inevitably happens with all young married couples who have loved intensely, even for a while, they effected a reconciliation, all the more effusive for the infamy of the offenses.

  A splendid day dawned, and as Berta arose she spit up blood. Her emotion and the terrible night were, without any doubt, primarily responsible. Mazzini held her in his embrace for a long while, and she cried hopelessly, bu
t neither of them dared say a word.

  At ten, they decided that after lunch they would go out. They were pressed for time so they ordered the servant to kill a hen.

  The brilliant day had drawn the idiots from their bench. So while the servant was cutting off the head of the chicken in the kitchen, bleeding it parsimoniously (Berta had learned from her mother this effective method of conserving the freshness of meat), she thought she sensed something like breathing behind her. She turned and saw the four idiots, standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the operation with stupefaction. Red. . . . Red. . . .

  “Señora! The boys are here in the kitchen.”

  Berta came in immediately; she never wanted them to set foot in the kitchen. Not even during these hours of full pardon, forgetfulness, and regained happiness could she avoid this horrible sight! Because, naturally, the more intense her raptures of love for her husband and daughter, the greater her loathing for the monsters.

  “Get them out of here, María! Throw them out! Throw them out, I tell you!”

  The four poor little beasts, shaken and brutally shoved, went back to their bench.

  After lunch, everyone went out; the servant to Buenos Aires and the couple and child for a walk among the country houses. They returned as the sun was sinking, but Berta wanted to talk for a while with her neighbors across the way. Her daughter quickly ran into the house.

  In the meantime, the idiots had not moved from their bench the whole day. The sun had crossed the wall now, beginning to sink behind it, while they continued to stare at the bricks, more sluggish than ever.

  Suddenly, something came between their line of vision and the wall. Their sister, tired of five hours with her parents, wanted to look around a bit on her own. She paused at the base of the wall and looked thoughtfully at its summit. She wanted to climb it; this could not be doubted. Finally she decided on a chair with the seat missing, but still she couldn’t reach the top. Then she picked up a kerosene tin and, with a fine sense of relative space, placed it upright on the chair—with which she triumphed.

  The four idiots, their gaze indifferent, watched how their sister succeeded patiently in gaining her equilibrium and how, on tiptoe, she rested her neck against the top of the wall between her straining hands. They watched her search everywhere for a toe hold to climb up higher.

  The idiots’ gaze became animated; the same insistent light fixed in all their pupils. Their eyes were fixed on their sister, as the growing sensation of bestial gluttony changed every line of their faces. Slowly they advanced toward the wall. The little girl, having succeeded in finding a toe hold and about to straddle the wall and surely fall off the other side, felt herself seized by one leg. Below her, the eight eyes staring into hers frightened her.

  “Let loose! Let me go!” she cried, shaking her leg, but she was captive.

  “Mama! Oh, Mama! Mama, Papa!” she cried imperiously. She tried still to cling to the top of the wall, but she felt herself pulled, and she fell.

  “Mama, oh, Ma——” She could cry no more. One of the boys squeezed her neck, parting her curls as if they were feathers, and the other three dragged her by one leg toward the kitchen where that morning the chicken had been bled, holding her tightly, drawing the life out of her second by second.

  Mazzini, in the house across the way, thought he heard his daughter’s voice.

  “I think she’s calling you,” he said to Berta.

  They listened, uneasy, but heard nothing more. Even so, a moment later they said good-by, and, while Berta went to put up her hat, Mazzini went into the patio.

  “Bertita!”

  No one answered.

  “Bertita!” He raised his already altered voice.

  The silence was so funereal to his eternally terrified heart that a chill of horrible presentiment ran up his spine.

  “My daughter, my daughter!” He ran frantically toward the back of the house. But as he passed by the kitchen he saw a sea of blood on the floor. He violently pushed open the half-closed door and uttered a cry of horror.

  Berta, who had already started running when she heard Mazzini’s anguished call, cried out, too. But as she rushed toward the kitchen, Mazzini, livid as death, stood in her way, holding her back.

  “Don’t go in! Don’t go in!”

  But Berta had seen the blood-covered floor. She could only utter a hoarse cry, throw her arms above her head and, leaning against her husband, sink slowly to the floor.

  Drifting

  The man stepped on something soft and yielding and immediately felt the bite on his foot. He leaped forward and, turning with an oath, saw a yararacusú coiled for another attack.

  The man cast a quick glance at his foot, where two little drops of blood were slowly forming, and drew his machete from his belt. The snake saw the danger and drew its head deeper into the very center of its spiral, but the machete struck flat, smashing the snake’s vertebrae.

  The man bent over the bite, wiped off the drops of blood, and thought for a moment. A sharp pain originating in the two small violet punctures began to spread through his whole foot. Hurriedly he bound his ankle with his kerchief and continued along the trail to his small ranch.

  The pain in his foot grew worse, with a sensation of swelling tautness, and suddenly the man felt two or three flashing pains radiating like lightning from the wound halfway up his calf. He moved his leg with difficulty now, and a metallic dryness in his throat, followed by a burning thirst, wrenched another oath from him.

  He reached his ranch finally and threw his arms over the wheel of a sugar-cane press. The two violet puncture wounds had disappeared in the monstrous swelling of his foot. The skin seemed to be stretched thin and taut to the point of bursting. He tried to call his wife, but his voice broke from his parched throat in a raucous cry. Thirst devoured him.

  “Dorotea!” he managed to gasp in a gravelly voice. “Get me some rum!”

  His wife came running with a full glass, which the man gulped down in three swallows. But there was no taste at all.

  “I told you rum, not water!” he grated again. “Get me rum!”

  “But it is rum, Paulino!” the woman protested, frightened.

  “No, you gave me water! I want rum, I tell you.”

  The woman ran away again, returning with the demijohn. The man drank two or three more glasses but felt nothing in his throat.

  “Well, this is getting bad,” he muttered, looking at his foot, livid and already bearing the luster of gangrene. The flesh swelled like a monstrous sausage over the buried binding of the kerchief.

  The shooting pains were settling into continuous lightning-like flashes that now reached to his groin. The atrocious dryness in his throat that his breath seemed to heat to the boiling point increased by the second. When he tried to stand upright, a fulminating surge of vomit gripped him for half a minute, his head leaning against the wooden wheel.

  But the man did not want to die, and he made his way down to the shore and climbed into his canoe. He seated himself in the stern and began to paddle into the middle of the Paraná. Once there, in the current of the river which runs about six miles an hour in the area of the Iguazú, he could reach Tacurú-Pacú in less than five hours.

  The man, with somber energy, successfully reached the middle of the river, but there his numb hands dropped the paddle in the canoe, and after a new attack of vomiting—blood this time—he took a look at the sun, which had already crossed behind the mountain.

  His entire leg, halfway up his thigh, was now a hard, misshapen slab of flesh bursting the seams of his pants. The man cut the binding and slit open his pants leg with his knife: the area of his groin was terribly painful, covered with huge livid spots, and puffed and swollen. The man thought he would never be able to reach Tacurú-Pacú by himself, and he decided to ask for help from his comrade Alves, even though they had been less than friendly with each other for some time.

  The current of the river now rushed toward the Brazilian shore, and the man easily b
eached his canoe. He dragged himself along the trail up the slope, but after twenty meters, exhausted, he lay stretched out flat on his stomach.

  “Alves!” he yelled with all the strength he could muster and listened in vain.

  “Alves, comrade! Don’t deny me this favor!” he shouted again, raising his head from the ground.

  In the silence of the jungle there was not one sound. The man had the strength to return to his canoe, which the current seized again, carrying it swiftly downstream.

  The Paraná there cuts through the depths of a great ravine whose walls, a hundred meters high, enclose the river in funereal shadow. From the shores, bordered by black blocks of basalt, ascends the forest, also black. Ahead, as well as upstream, the eternal lugubrious ramparts darken the whirling muddy river, ceaselessly boiling and bubbling. The landscape is menacing, and a deathlike silence reigns. At dusk, nevertheless, its somber and quiet beauty assumes a unique majesty.

  The sun had already set when the man, half-conscious in the bottom of the canoe, was shaken by a violent chill. Suddenly, astonished, he dully raised his head; he felt better. His leg was less painful; his thirst was diminishing; and his chest, relieved now, relaxed in slow respiration.

  The poison was beginning to subside, there was no question. He felt almost well, and, although he hadn’t strength to move his hand, he was counting on the dewfall to restore him completely. He calculated he would be in Tacurú-Pacú in less than three hours.

  His feeling of well-being increased and, with it, a somnolence filled with memories. He no longer had any feeling in his leg or in his belly. Would his comrade Gaona still be living in Tacurú-Pacú? Perhaps he might also see his former employer, Mister Dougald, and Mister Dougald’s agent.

  Would he be there soon? The sky to the west opened into a golden screen, and the river, too, took on color. A dusky freshness spilled from the mountain on the Paraguayan shore—in shadows now—a penetrating aroma of orange blossom and woodsy sweetness. High overhead a pair of macaws glided silently toward Paraguay.

  The canoe drifted swiftly downstream on the golden river, whirling at times, caught in a gurgling whirlpool. The man in the canoe felt better every moment and meanwhile mused on the exact amount of time that had passed since he had last seen his employer, Mister Dougald. Three years? Maybe not, not that long. Two years and nine months? Perhaps. Eight and a half months. Yes, that was it, surely.