The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Read online

  Finally, always downstream amidst sticks and seeds that seemed as motionless as I, although we were rolling swiftly downstream on smooth water, I passed the island of Toro, left behind the mouth of the Yabebirí and the port of Santa Ana, paddled up the Yabebirí to the sugar mill, where I immediately returned to the Paraná since I wanted to reach San Ignacio the same evening.

  But back in Santa Ana I stopped, hesitant. The Greek was right: the Paraná at low water or normal flow is one thing, but these swollen waters were something quite different. Even in my canoe, the rapids I had passed as I returned upriver had worried me, not for the strength needed to paddle against the current, but because of the fear of overturning. Every shoal, as everyone knows, forms an adjacent pool of still water: this is precisely where the danger lies—in coming out of dead water to collide, sometimes at right angles, with a current going like hell. If one’s craft is stable, there’s nothing to fear; but, with mine, nothing is simpler than sounding the rapids upside down if the light is at all bad. So, since it was beginning to get dark, I was in the process of beaching my canoe to wait for the following day when I saw a man and a woman approaching me down the barranca.

  They looked to be man and wife, foreigners, I would judge from their appearance, although familiar with the clothing of the country. He was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, though it showed no signs of hard work. She was wearing a one-piece apronlike garment cinched by an oilcloth belt. Upstanding members of the bourgeoisie, in short: their air of satisfaction and well-being was typical of that class, qualities assured at the expense of the work of others.

  Both, after a cordial greeting, examined my toylike canoe with great curiosity and then looked at the river.

  “You do well, sir, to stay here,” the man said. “With the river like this, it’s no place to be in the middle of the night.”

  The woman adjusted her belt. “Oh, sometimes,” she smiled, coquettishly.

  “Naturally,” he replied. “I didn’t mean that in regard to us. I was referring to this gentleman here.”

  And he said to me, “If you’re thinking of staying here, sir, we can offer you a comfortable evening. We’ve had a little business here for the past two years. It’s not very much, but one does what he can. Isn’t that right, sir?”

  I nodded agreeably, following them to their little store, since a store was really what it was. I dined, nevertheless, much better than in my own house, attended to with details of comfort that seemed a dream in a place like that. These were excellent types, my bourgeois, happy and clean—after all, they did no hard work.

  After an excellent cup of coffee, they returned with me to the beach where I pulled my canoe even higher, knowing that the Paraná, once its waters run red and are pocked with whirlpools, is capable of rising two meters in one night. Again they both contemplated the invisible mass of the river.

  “Yes, you do very well to stay, sir,” the man repeated. “No one can navigate the Teyucuaré at night, not like it is now. There’s no one capable of that . . . , except my wife.”

  I turned abruptly toward the woman who was again toying with her belt.

  “You’ve passed the Teyucuaré in the middle of the night?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes sir! But only once . . . and not because I wanted to. We were crazy that night.”

  “But the river?” I insisted.

  “The river,” the man interrupted. “It was crazy, too. You know those reefs around the island of Toro, don’t you? They’re half out of water now. But that night they were completely covered. Everything was water as far as you could see, and water roaring over the rocks; we heard it from here. That was some night, sir. And I have a little souvenir of that night. Would you strike a match, please?”

  The man raised his pants leg to the back of his knee, and on the inner side of his calf I saw a deep scar, crisscrossed with thick silvery scars like a map.

  “You see that, sir? That’s my souvenir of that night. The sting of a ray. . . .”

  Then I recalled a story I’d heard somewhere about a woman who had rowed one whole day and night, carrying her dying husband. And this was the woman, this neat little bourgeois woman, delighted with success?

  “Yes, sir, I’m the one,” she burst out laughing at my astonished expression—no words were needed. “But now I’d die a hundred times before I’d ever think of attempting it. Times were different then; that’s all over now!”

  “Forever,” the man seconded. “When I recall . . . We were mad, sir. But we were spurred on by misery and disillusion. Yes, those were different times!”

  I could believe it! If they had done that, times must have been different. But I didn’t want to go to bed without learning some of the details, and there in the darkness facing the same river, invisible except for the warm water touching the shore at our feet—but audible, rising and rising as far as the opposite shore—I came to know what a feat that nocturnal epic had been.

  Deceived about the resources of the country, having exhausted what little capital they had brought with them in mistakes common to new settlers, the couple found themselves one day at the end of their resources. But they were courageous, and they used their last pesos to buy a useless old boat which they rebuilt at the cost of infinite fatigue, and then with it they undertook the river traffic, buying honey, oranges, bamboo, straw—all on a small scale—from the settlers scattered along the river, and then sold on the beach of Posadas, almost always making bad deals, since they were at first ignorant of the pulse of the market. They carried liters of caña brandy when barrels of it had been delivered the day before, and oranges when the coast was yellow with them.

  A hard life and daily failure had erased from their minds any preoccupation except that of arriving at Posadas by dawn and then rowing back up the Paraná by the strength of their arms. The woman always accompanied her husband, rowing with him.

  On one such day, the twenty-third of December, the woman said, “We could take our tobacco to Posadas and the bananas from Francescué. On the return we could bring Christmas cakes and colored candles. Day after tomorrow is Christmas, and we can easily sell them to the little stores.”

  The man replied, “We won’t sell many in Santa Ana, but we can sell the rest in San Ignacio.”

  So that same afternoon they descended the river to Posadas, to row back up the following day before dawn.

  Well: the Paraná was swollen with dirty flood waters rising by the minute. And when the tropical rains had simultaneously emptied all their waters into the river basin upstream, the long sections of quiet water which are the rower’s most faithful friend were inundated. Water poured down from every direction. At such times the immense volume of the river becomes a single liquid mass flowing uninterruptedly. And if at a distance the channel of the river looks like a smooth ribbon with straight luminous stripes, when one is close at hand, upon the river, the whirling eddies form a surface like moiré silk.

  Nevertheless, this couple did not hesitate an instant to begin rowing sixty kilometers upriver, their only motivation that of earning a few pesos. Their inborn love of the centavo had been exacerbated by glimpsed poverty, and even though they were now near their golden dream—a dream later realized—at that moment they would have confronted the Amazon itself had it meant augmenting their savings by five pesos.

  So they undertook the return trip, the woman rowing and the man poling in the stern. They scarcely moved, although they threw all their strength into the rowing, strength that had to be redoubled every twenty minutes when they came to the rapids, where the woman’s oars splashed with desperate intensity and the man’s effort doubled him over the pole buried a meter deep in water.

  So passed ten, fifteen hours. Brushing the trees and reeds along the shore, imperceptibly the boat ascended the immense and shining avenue of water and, close to the shore, seemed a very poor thing indeed.

  The couple was in perfect training, and they were not oarsmen to be defeated by fourteen or sixteen
hours of rowing. But it was when they were within sight of Santa Ana, preparing to come ashore to spend the night, that the man stepped out into the mud, screamed an oath, and leaped back into the boat: above his heel, on the Achilles tendon, a blackened puncture wound with livid, already swollen edges announced the sting of the ray.

  The woman smothered a cry.

  “What was it . . . ? A ray?”

  The man had clasped his foot in his hands, squeezing it with convulsive force.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it very painful?” she added, seeing his grimace. And he, his teeth clenched, “Like a thousand demons . . .”

  During the harsh struggle that had hardened their hands and features, the couple had eliminated from their conversation any words that taxed their energies. Wildly, each tried to think of a remedy. What? They could think of nothing. Suddenly the woman remembered: applications of dried chili plant.

  “Quick, Andrés!” she exclaimed, grabbing the oars. “Lie down in the stern; I’ll row to Santa Ana.”

  As the man, his hand still clutching his ankle, lay down in the stern, the woman began to row.

  For three hours she rowed in silence, concentrating her dark anguish in desperate muteness, erasing from her mind anything that might rob her of strength. In the stern, the man, in turn, was immersed in his torture, since there is nothing comparable to the hideous pain caused by the sting of a ray (if one excludes the scraping of a tubercular bone). Only occasionally did a groan escape that, in spite of his efforts, was drawn out into a scream. But the woman didn’t hear, or tried not to hear; her only sign of conscious awareness was her glances over her shoulder to gauge the remaining distance.

  Finally they arrived at Santa Ana, but none of the settlers had the necessary chili plant. What to do? Not even in the wildest dream was there any possibility of reaching the town. In the depths of her anxiety the woman suddenly recalled that up the Teyucuaré, at the foot of Blosset’s banana grove, on the water itself, lived a German naturalist working for the Paris Museum. She remembered, too, that he had cured two neighbors of snakebite and was more than likely capable of curing her husband.

  So she resumed the trek, commencing the most vigorous struggle ever undertaken by a simple human being—a woman!—against the implacable will of Nature.

  Everything was against her: the rising river and the distorted images of the night that tricked her into believing the boat was close to shore when in reality she was exhausting herself in the midst of a current ten fathoms deep, her hands staining the oar grip with blood and running blisters; they were in the power of the river, the night . . . and misery.

  She was able to save some strength as far as the mouth of the Yabebirí, but, in the interminable broad waters from the Yabebirí to the first steeply rising cliffs of the Teyucuaré, there was no relief because outside the normal channel the river ran through beds of water plants and every three strokes of the oar plowed up plants instead of water; the bow of the boat caught in the knotty stems, dragging them along behind, and the woman had to reach into the water and tear them loose. When she would drop again, exhausted, onto the wooden seat, her body, from her head to her feet, was one mass of suffering.

  Finally, as the night sky to the north was blackened by the hills of the Teyucuaré, the man, who had some time ago abandoned his grasp on his ankle in order to hold desperately to the sides of the boat, screamed.

  The woman stopped rowing.

  “Does it hurt much?”

  He was surprised by her voice. “Yes,” he panted. “But I didn’t mean to scream. I couldn’t help it.” And he added more quietly, as if he feared he would sob if he raised his voice, “I won’t let it happen again. . . .”

  He knew very well what it would mean in those circumstances to lose spirit in front of his poor wife, who was accomplishing the impossible. There is no doubt that the shout had escaped him because the hideous pain in his foot and his ankle, the exacerbating, flashing, stabbing pain, had maddened him.

  But now they were in the shadow of the first cliff, striking the brute mass rising sharply some hundred meters overhead with the port oar. From there to the shoals south of the Teyucuaré the water was still and calm in some sections—an enormous relief the woman could not enjoy because another scream arose from the stern. She did not look at him. But the wounded man, bathed in cold sweat, trembling to the fingers gripping the sides of the boat, could no longer contain himself, and again he screamed.

  For a long while the husband had conserved a residue of energy, of courage, out of compassion for that other human suffering, for the woman exhausting her last forces, and only at long intervals had he allowed a moan to escape. But finally all his resistance was reduced to a pap of shattered nerves, and, crazy with pain, unaware of it himself, he had burst out in uninterrupted screams of intolerable suffering.

  Meanwhile, the woman, bent double, kept her eyes fixed on the shore to hold the boat at the correct distance from the shore. She didn’t think; she didn’t hear; she didn’t feel: she rowed. Only when a stronger scream, a true howl of torture, shattered the night would she loosen her grip on the oars.

  But finally she let go of the oars completely and threw her arms across the gunwales.

  “Don’t scream,” she murmured.

  “I can’t help it!” he cried. “It’s too much!”

  She sobbed, “I know . . . ! I understand! But don’t scream. I can’t row when you scream!”

  “I understand that, but I can’t help it. Ohhhhh!” And, maddened by pain, he screamed louder and louder, “I can’t help it! I can’t help it! I can’t . . .”

  The woman sat a long while, her head on her arms, crushed, motionless, dead. Finally, once again, she sat upright and mutely resumed the trek.

  What that woman did then, that same small woman who had already rowed eighteen hours with a dying husband in the bottom of the boat, was one of those things that happens only once in a lifetime. She had to confront the rapids south of the Teyucuaré in the shadow of night, rapids that thrust her ten times into the whirlpools of the channel. Another ten times she tried to hug the cliff and drag the boat around the bend, and failed. She turned again to the rapids, where finally she succeeded in finding the correct angle of entry and then was caught in the power of those waters for thirty-five minutes, rowing desperately so as not to lose headway. She rowed all that time with her eyes smarting from blinding sweat, without releasing her hold a single instant. For thirty-five minutes she stared at the cliff three meters away she could not get around, gaining only centimeters every five minutes, where the water flowed so swiftly she had the sensation she was beating her oars against the air.

  With what strength—her strength was exhausted—with what incredible straining of her last vital forces was she able to sustain that nightmarish struggle? She, more than anyone, would never be able to say. Especially when one realizes that, as a stimulus, the pitiable woman had only the measured screams of the husband lying in the stern.

  The rest of the trip—two more rapids in the depths of the abyss and a last, but infinitely long, rapid as she turned the bend of the last hill—demanded no greater effort. But when the boat finally touched the shore of the port of Blosset and the woman tried to get out of the boat to make it secure, she suddenly found she had no arms, no legs, no head—she could feel nothing except the hill tumbling down upon her . . . , and she fainted.

  “That was how it was, sir. I was in bed two months, and you already saw what my leg looks like. Ah, the pain, sir. But if it weren’t for this woman here I’d never have been able to tell you the story,” he concluded, placing his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

  The small woman accepted his gesture, laughing. Both of them smiled, calm, clean, established at last in their lucrative store—their ideal.

  And as we stood again looking at the dark, warm, rising river flowing by, I asked myself what ideal is to be found at the core of an action when it is separated from the motivations that have fired it, since
my wretched merchants, unbeknown to themselves, had committed an act of heroism.

  Juan Darién

  Herein is told the tale of a tiger who was raised and educated among men and whose name was Juan Darién. Dressed in pants and a shirt he attended school for four years, and he did his lessons correctly even though he was a tiger from the jungle; this was possible because his body was that of a human being, in accordance with what is told in the following lines.

  Once upon a time, at the beginning of autumn, a plague of smallpox that killed many people was visited upon a small village in a distant land. Brothers lost their little sisters, and infants who were just learning to walk were left with neither father nor mother. Mothers in turn lost their children, and one poor young widow woman herself carried her baby boy to be buried, the only thing she had in the world. When she returned to her home, she sat thinking about her child. And she murmured, “God should have had more compassion for me, but he has taken away my son. There may be angels in heaven, but my son doesn’t know them. My poor little baby! I’m the only person he ever knew.”

  Since she was sitting behind her house, facing a little gate, she could see the jungle as she gazed into the distance.

  Well now, in that jungle there were many ferocious animals that roared at nightfall and at dawn. And the poor woman, still sitting there, chanced to see in the darkness a tiny, hesitant creature coming through her gate, something that looked like a little cat with scarcely strength to walk. The woman bent down and picked up a little tiger, only a few days old, its eyes still unopened. And when the miserable little cub felt the touch of her hands, it purred with contentment because it was no longer alone. The woman held the little enemy of man at arm’s length for a long while, the small defenseless beast she could so easily have destroyed. But she stood pensively considering the helpless cub that had come from heaven knows where and whose mother was surely dead. Without thinking what she was doing she held the cub to her bosom and encircled him with her large hands. And the little tiger, feeling the warmth, sought a comfortable position, purred tranquilly, and fell asleep with his head pressed fast against the maternal breast.