B0040702LQ EBOK (38 page)

`If you're putting down everything, Senor Don Alonso,
you'd better include the cockerel as well.'

He said it with no ironic intention, but realised afterwards that it could have been taken that way. Don Alonso de
Quesada nodded and added the cockerel to the list.

It seemed to Cervantes that this posturer, Don Alonso, was
frighteningly, extraordinarily contradictory. His body was
inhabited by two very different beings. That remark about the
chickens was the last thing Cervantes would have expected
Don Alonso to say; for he seemed to combine the appearance
and the inner qualities of generosity and largesse of such
heroes as Amadis de Gaula. Amongst the worthy people who
have studied the matter, there are those who believe they can
prove that the idea of noting down the number of chickens
came from the bride's brother, the cleric. There are even those
who say it was the bride's idea.

The truth is that it was Don Alonso, the uncle, who wrote it
down.

For a moment, Cervantes thought that it would be good
to separate the two people who seemed to inhabit Don
Alonso's body, since together they created a monster.
Dona Catalina laughed quietly, gleefully, and, seeing her husband still looking at Don Alonso rather oddly, said in a
low voice:

`Don't pay any attention to my uncle, he's a bit reesty.'

Cervantes didn't know what Dona Catalina meant.

`Reesty?'

`He's always had my best interests at heart,' she added, still
in a low voice, `but he is a bit cockieleekie.'

That explanation wasn't particularly clear either, nor did it
clarify her previous one.

Dona Catalina had run together those three words, `a bit
cockieleekie', and it seemed to Cervantes that, in the staccato
way she said them, there was an allusion to the clucking of
chickens.

From the day that Cervantes signed the marriage contract,
he began to see in Dona Catalina's profile a vague similarity
to that of a bird. One day, he discovered that she could look to
the side with one eye, without turning her head, and that her
eyes were becoming flatter, like the eyes in Egyptian paintings,
and could move independently of each other.

This observation inclined him to presentiments which he
himself dismissed at first, but to which he returned later as if,
in them, lay the solution to a mystery. Despite these observations, Cervantes genuinely loved Dona Catalina, otherwise
they would not have got married. That is one point on which
everyone agrees.

In the birth of that love, various factors came together, as
they usually do. Cervantes was not a man to fall in love at first
sight; indeed he distrusted such things, although, naturally, the
naked call to the senses played its part in the arousing of the
attention that necessarily precedes love. Dona Catalina was
very young, almost a child, yet she had been the one to initiate
the relationship that so swiftly carried her to the altar. It is
worth remembering precisely what happened because there
was something odd about it, almost like something out of a
novel.

Two years before, Dona Catalina and her brother had gone
to Madrid and, contrary to her brother's wishes, she went to
see a play by Lope de Vega at the Principe open air theatre. In the play, the title of which I cannot now recall, the heroine
declared her love to the leading man and then placed him in
various equivocal situations in order to win his heart and to
put him in the dilemma of either marrying her or gaining
the reputation of a cad. The young woman came and
went dressed as a man and became embroiled in exploits
as dangerous as any experienced by some of Calderon's
heroines. All this struck Dona Catalina as unusual and daring,
but perfectly possible since it happened in the theatre and was
applauded by the audience.

Dona Catalina did not go quite that far with Cervantes.
Nevertheless, emboldened by Lope's play, she wrote
Cervantes a love letter. The letter, however, was anonymous
and unsigned. Cervantes received the letter, for which he had
to pay the postage - not the first time that this unlucky circumstance had obliged him to put his hand into his own
pocket - read it with a smile and said to himself `It's a shame I
don't know who this young woman is, nor where she lives,
because she does seem to be truly innocent and truly in love.'

From the experience of many years, Cervantes knew that,
generally speaking, he only attracted two sorts of women: the
stupid and the mad. Sometimes he had wondered if the same
thing happened to all men and that perhaps there were only
two sorts of women in the world, whom only sweet maternity
would one day redeem from their madness or stupidity. But
he couldn't quite work out from Dona Catalina's letter which
she was. She seemed neither stupid nor mad. She seemed
merely rather outspoken and a little frightened by her own
boldness. Twice in the letter she declared herself to be a maid.

Cervantes took a long time to realise that the letter had
been written by Dona Catalina. In fact, he didn't find out
until after they were married.

For her part, the young girl who had written the letter
spent a year waiting for a reply. She couldn't understand why
her beloved did not answer. She forgot that she hadn't signed
the letter and that she hadn't given a return address. How
could he respond? And the days and the nights passed without
her receiving a reply, which made her feel humiliated and ashamed. Nevertheless, she found a way of meeting Cervantes
and making advances that were half-coquettish, half-shy.
Cervantes noticed and, like any other man, took the bait. His
bride's embarrassment, or rather her feeling of frustration,
lasted for some time, until Cervantes found out what had
happened and said, laughing: `How could I answer, if you
didn't put your name at the bottom of the letter?' And he
showed her the letter, which he had carefully preserved.

By then, Dona Catalina had already begun to cease being a
woman. That is, while still continuing to be a woman, her
transformation into a chicken had already started. And no one
could do anything about it.

Some readers may find it odd that I should write these
pages about Cervantes' wife, but I think the moment has
come to tell the truth, the truth which was hidden in vain by
Rodriguez Marin, Cejador and others who wished to preserve the decorum of the Cervantes family. There was always
a mystery about Cervantes' conjugal relations, which no one
denies. Why was his wife never seen living with him in
Madrid or in Valladolid? It is as if he wanted to hide her
away in the rustic gloom of the village. Why did he not take
her with him? Some Cervantes scholars know why, but they
still keep it a secret. I believe the moment has come to reveal
that secret. It is because his sweet wife was turning into a
chicken, although even she did not realise it, especially not at
first.

Cervantes also took a while to accept the metamorphosis
which was less a misfortune than what might be termed an
unfortunate miracle. Cervantes did not know what to think.
One night, she did seem to be aware of what was happening
and she said, after looking at herself in the mirror:

`I look a bit of a birdbrain, don't you think?'

The writer smiled and laughingly called her his little chick;
as everyone knows, lovers often give each other animal names
and there are those who see in that tendency the satanic
nature of sexual desire. Being a birdbrain was not so bad; that
is, it was better than being a chicken. Cervantes began to
observe her closely and noticed that her head was getting smaller and her legs thinner. Her chest and hips, on the other
hand, seemed to be merging to form one large bulge.

One day he decided to go off to Madrid to try and sell a
play, but Dona Catalina didn't want him to go and Cervantes
postponed the journey twice. On another occasion, when he
got a letter from an old comrade from the battle of Lepanto,
who was writing to him from Bogota - the city that was later
to become the political centre of Gran Colombia - she said,
stuttering a little:

`From Bogota? A letter from Bobobogataaa?'

And it sounded as if she were clucking the way chickens do
after laying an egg. A little girl, who was Dona Catalina's
niece, thought that when they laid an egg, chickens were
saying: `putputputputputputput!', thus reminding people that
they had a right to the corn that was given them. The little
girl did a very good imitation of a chicken.

Cervantes was fond of the little girl. One winter's day, the
writer carved her a dog out of the ice on the terrace. It had
snowed, and the water dripping off a walnut tree had frozen,
and Cervantes, occasionally blowing on his fingers, made a
sculpture from it for the little girl. She, with her thick mittens
on, played with the ice dog and even gave it a collar made out
of pink ribbon. Then she left it on the floor of the terrace and
later, when the sun came out, the ice dog melted. The little
girl looked for it in vain and very sadly went to tell Cervantes:

`The little dog has peed himself to death.'

The stain left by the water stayed on the floor.

Time passed pleasantly. Cervantes laughed with the little
girl and had affectionate talks with his wife, and when Don
Alonso de Quesada made one of his rare visits, Cervantes did
not argue with him when the good old man insisted that there
was no heroism or merit in wounds caused by an arquebus,
since the shot was fired from a distance, and that only wounds
inflicted by the sword or the pike had any true merit. Don
Alonso himself always dragged around with him a huge
sword, which he wore on a goatskin baldric to save his bad
back.

Cervantes, who had lost the use of his left hand after being wounded by a shot from an arquebus and bore the scar of
another on his chest, realised that Don Alonso wanted to
belittle his glory as a soldier on land and sea. The old man had
some very odd ideas. For example, he would not allow his
name to be spoken at night because he saw in that fateful
circumstance untold dangers that all had to do with Urganda,
the unknown. He used to read books about chivalry and
when, one day, Dona Catalina's brother, who was by nature
impatient and a bit of a busybody, asked the gentleman
what exactly he was doing in Esquivias, he smoothed his
drooping moustaches and replied:

`I'm waiting, that's what I'm doing, waiting.'

`And what are you waiting for?'

`I am awaiting the ineluctable end.'

He sometimes spoke rather strangely.

Dona Catalina did not understand what Don Alonso
meant. The priest understood very well and so did Cervantes.
But Cervantes had lost any respect he had had for Don
Alonso, with his illnesses and aches and pains and his haughty
presence, and thought to himself that a man who could refer
to his death as `the ineluctable end' did not deserve much pity
and that to speak in such rhetorical terms about death, with
words lifted straight from some chivalresque novel, made
him almost unworthy of it. Cervantes was unconsciously
revenging himself for Don Alonso's views on arquebus
wounds.

The discovery of the uncle's eccentricity, the cleric's
meanness and, above all, the accelerating speed with which
Dona Catalina was becoming a chicken made Cervantes
think about one day leaving Esquivias.

He stayed there, though, fora while longer.

Life was pleasant there in the spring. The terrace looked
out on the farmyard, and Cervantes, who remembered
the marriage contract with its details of the dowry and the
number of chickens, looked at the chickens sometimes and
even passed the time counting them, half-amused, half-sad.

Sometimes he saw a sparrowhawk flying above and
thought to himself that if that bird of prey swooped down and took a chicken, there would only be twenty-eight chickens
left, not twenty-nine, and he felt a little anticipatory shame
thinking that he might be blamed for that diminution in the
family assets. For he was sure the cleric occasionally counted
the chickens, or that the maid did.

One evening, seeing that there were gypsies nearby,
Cervantes went to bar the gate to the farmyard, just in case.
He realised afterwards that taking that precaution was a
debasement of his will, his consciousness and, above all, of his
imagination.

But he stayed on for another month or so, watching what
was happening to Dona Catalina.The girl's face was becoming more angular, her little snout sharper, more pronounced,
her nose pointed, and her ears were growing smaller beneath
her hair. One day as he was caressing her, Cervantes discovered two feathers; he tried to pull them out and Dona
Catalina squealed. They were deeply embedded in her skin.
Two long feathers like flight feathers or tail feathers.

There were other incidents too, one in particular which,
though apparently trivial, was heavy with drama. Even years
later, in his old age, Cervantes could never think of it without
a shudder.

One day, Cervantes happened to be out walking with
the barber and the village priest - another priest, not Dona
Catalina's brother, who was priest in Seseiia where he rode on
an old nag - and they found amongst the rocks in a ravine a
young falcon apparently fallen from its nest. It was not yet
fully fledged and, like all young birds of prey, was ugly.

Cervantes picked it up with the excitement you feel whenever you take in your hands a small wild creature, a creature of
God which, because injured, is entirely at your mercy. He
looked at it and said to himself `Oh, king of the air with your
terrifying, hooked beak, with your wings which, when outspread, are twice the length of your body, what are you doing
down here? You could easily have been killed by a dog or by
some innocently cruel child. But I will take care of you and
feed you until you can fend for yourself and then you will fly
to the heights which are your rightful kingdom.'