B0040702LQ EBOK (39 page)

Naturally, Cervantes did not say this out loud nor did the
falcon reply. Cervantes simply thought it. The others merely
commented that the bird could be made into a good hunter
and trained to hunt partridges or wood pigeons. Cervantes
said that it would be unjust to make a slave of a bird whom
God had made free, and when he went home, he fed it on
small pieces of raw meat. He felt responsible for the young
falcon's life.

The bird was allowed to live freely in the house. It hopped
after Cervantes and would perch happily on his knees, enjoying the warmth of his body.

At first, Dona Catalina seemed quite fond of it, although
she did complain about the mess it made everywhere. She
watched warily when it was given meat to eat, but, as a friendly
gesture, she put down some water for it in a bowl.

`Don't bother,' said Cervantes, `falcons don't drink. They
get enough water from the meat they eat and so they don't
need to drink, at least not when they're chicks.'

When the cleric saw the falcon, he made a face and asked:

`Who brought that wild creature into the house?'

He said that such birds were not edible and there was therefore no point in taking them in. At the same time, Dona
Catalina kept saying that the bird, which she called a vulture
and not a falcon, was making a mess of the house.

When Cervantes went to Madrid to try and sell his play, he
did not return to Esquivias for ten or twelve days, and when
he did, he immediately asked about the bird.

`Oh,' said Dona Catalina, `the wretched vulture tried to
escape and it almost did too, because its wings have really
grown quite a lot, but I managed to clip them and now it can't
fly at all and it hops after me like a frog.'

Dona Catalina seemed to take a special pleasure in watching the falcon trying vainly to climb the three steps in the
kitchen, hopping up and falling back again. Cervantes
swallowed his anger and said in a loud voice, once again, that it
was not a vulture, but a falcon.

Cervantes thought that the clipped feathers were the creature's final feathers and he watched the bird in silence, filled by a deep, dark anxiety. The bird fluttered its wings, trying to
fly, but, each time, was bitterly disappointed. Dona Catalina
had turned it into a frog.

That night, Cervantes was thinking about the falcon and
feeling guilty.

Seeing the falcon, that lord of the air, walking behind him
and trying vainly to go up the steps in the kitchen, with one
wing folded and the other dragging, Cervantes thought:

`Why did my wife Dona Catalina do something so cruel?'

Then it occurred to him that the progressive chickenization of Dona Catalina was perhaps at a critical stage and that
her decision to clip the falcon's wings represented the more
or less conscious intention of a vengeful chicken. For falcons
are the age-old enemies of chickens.

Cervantes thought that, whether knowingly or not, Dona
Catalina was trying to avenge her sisters, the chickens. And he
lay awake all night thinking about it. His wife was in amorous
mood, but Cervantes was not interested. The falcon had
trusted him, it had come to love him and to follow him, it
came up to him opening its wings and flapping them as if to
say: `Soon I'll be able to fly.'

But Dona Catalina had clipped its wings. The poor falcon
fluttered them in vain. Without its flight feathers it would
never be able to soar. It seemed such a terrible misfortune that
Cervantes even considered it might be better to kill the falcon
than condemn it to an earthbound existence. He felt desolate
every time he saw the bird trying to clamber up the kitchen
steps and fall back again with one wing open and the other
folded, but both equally useless.

The falcon had been given a life of twenty-five or thirty
years amongst the clouds, lording it over the north winds and
the mountains with their glaciers and green woods. But there
it was, unable to climb even two steps.

There were other reasons for Cervantes' melancholy. He
had not managed to sell his play to anyone in Madrid, and the
failure worried him. He did not know what to do with himself that day, so he went out onto the terrace. He stood there
counting the chickens. They were all there. The falcon was perched on his shoulder. The bird sometimes whooped and
chirped, and the chickens, recognising the cries of a carnivorous bird, grew frightened. They all remained absolutely
motionless for a moment and stared up at the falcon.

When Cervantes saw that there were still twenty-nine
chickens, he remembered that they did occasionally eat a
chicken, thus upsetting the number, and yet there were always
twenty-nine, and one day he noticed that, whenever a chicken
was killed, his brother-in-law, the cleric, had them buy
another one so that the total number in the chicken run was
complete according to the marriage contract.

It was a courtesy that made Cervantes laugh, but his
laughter did not stop him worrying about the twenty-nine
chickens. The fact that he had to be grateful for that courtesy
left him feeling fatigued and perplexed.

Meanwhile, Dona Catalina continued her transformation
from woman to domestic fowl. The worst thing was that, as
his wife was gradually turning into a chicken, Cervantes did
not know what to think of her or of his brother-in-law or of
old Don Alonso who came on Sunday evenings to play cards
with the cleric and the priest from Esquivias. Sometimes he
didn't even know what to think about himself, was it possible
that he was married to a chicken? It must be, there was no
possible room for doubt.

Dona Catalina was not getting any smaller. If she did turn
entirely into a chicken, she would be an enormous one, with a
vast beak and comb and wings. And Cervantes watched her,
although not too closely. Some changes were more revealing
than others.

Dona Catalina's way of talking remained the clearest indication. That is, not her way of thinking or of communicating
her ideas, but the tone and timbre of her voice. There is a
considerable difference between the voice of a human being
and that of a chicken. There are birds like the parrot, the crow
and the magpie that can imitate our voice, since the size of
their tongue and the concave lower part of their beak allows
this. But chickens usually only squawk or cackle with a tone
of voice completely sui generis and quite unmistakable.

One day, sitting at the table, she said to Cervantes, without
turning her head:

`Any more correspondence from the captain in Caracas?'

In that repetition of the syllables `co' and `ca', in different,
slightly fractured tones, he again heard the voice of the
chicken: `Any more correspondence from the captain in
Caracas.' But the letter had come from Bogota not Caracas
and Dona Catalina, perhaps guided by her chicken instinct,
had made a mistake and chosen Caracas because it best suited
her cackle.

Cervantes told her that it wasn't Caracas, it was Sante Fe de
Bogota and she, raising her elbows and moving them up and
down like someone trying to fly, laughed at her own mistake,
and her laughter was frankly and unequivocally the cackle of a
broody hen. She said: `From Bobobobogotaaaa.' And she said
it so loudly that the whole house shook.

Cervantes wondered what would happen if she became
pregnant; when her time came, would she give birth as a
woman or as a chicken?

On another occasion, Cervantes heard his wife talking to
her niece. They didn't know that Cervantes was listening and
Dona Catalina was saying something slightly indelicate:

`I don't pee any more, you know. I never pee like you and
like other people. Now I only pooh.'

The niece went to tell Cervantes, who was sitting on the
terrace reading his own book Galatea and wondering sadly
whether or not the Inquisition would intervene should his
wife's metamorphosis continue.

With the clip-winged falcon on his shoulder, Cervantes
was looking out over the yard. The chickens came and went.
Again he counted them and there were twenty-nine plus the
cockerel.

`My wife and my brother-in-law,' he thought, `take great
care keeping count of the chickens. They obviously don't
want to cause me any worry.'

The strange thing is that Dona Catalina knew all the birds
in the farmyard. That very afternoon she came out and started
talking to her husband about the chickens, giving each one a different name. Cervantes listened to her in sorrow and
amazement.

`That one,' said Dona Catalina, `is Broody, the one with a
ribbon tied round its leg, and the one scratching under its
wing with its beak is Chick, the sister of Chickadee, next to
her, who was born from the same clutch of eggs. You see that
one having a little drink and lifting its head so that the water
goes down into its crop? That's Dapple, who lays eggs with
little green and yellow freckles on them, like a partridge egg.
Then there's Pouter, she's standing next to Pigeon and the
one we call the little Widow Lady.'

`Who calls her that?' Cervantes ventured, slightly timidly.

`Why, everyone in the house. Even Don Alonso.'

Cervantes didn't dare to respond and Dona Catalina went
on:

`That one's called Cockette, because sometimes, even
though she's a hen, the silly creature tries to get on top of
another hen to cover her, and over there is Craw, the one who
sleeps to the right of the cockerel. To the left sleeps Bib who,
along with Craw, is the plumpest. Until recently Pigeon was.
The chickens that sleep beside the cockerel are always the
fattest in the chicken run and are heavier than the other birds,
even if only by half an ounce. Then there's that naughty one
we call the Parson, because its parson's nose is almost bald and
set unusually high. Do you see?'

`Do you know them all?'

`Well, I've been here so long, with nothing else to do but
say the rosary on Saturdays - but here comes Scrabble, always
dancing back and forth, and then Leghorn, who's a different
breed altogether, my grandfather had nearly six hundred of
them when I was a little girl and he sold them all for breeding
to various buyers from Valdemoro.'

Dona Catalina was clearly pleased by that sale of six
hundred Leghorns and the memory was a source of family
pride.

`And there in a circle are China, Egg and Patch, the one
without many feathers on her chest. There's another one we
call Paunch, but you mustn't get them muddled up, because although they're both very plump-breasted, Patch's breast is
almost bald. Caper is behind her, the one that looks as if she's
wearing one of those shiny cloaks women in Galicia wear,
and there's Panache, who's clucking because she's just laid an
egg, the beauty. She's next to Clutch, who's the best mother
of them all, always looking for eggs to hatch, her own or
another's. Behind her is Pip, who was ill a little while ago, and
the one hopping out of the wicker basket is Coop, who takes
care of the chickens, once they've had their second moult,
until we chop their heads off. She's a very good friend of
Draggle, who feels the cold and is always drawing one foot
up into her stomach feathers. She's related to Thistle, who
also feels the cold, and then there's Dewlap (before eating a
worm, she always swallows and regurgitates it two or three
times), Bounce, who can walk both backwards and forwards,
especially when the cockerel's looking at her, Crest, Socks and
Rochet. And that's the lot, may God preserve and increase
them. Ali yes, I forgot about that one, Dumpy, who looks as if,
like me, she's wearing petticoat, underskirt, slip and chemise.'

Cervantes listened to all this with amazement and compassion, and Dona Catalina mistook his amazement for
admiration. She took the same pride in her Sunday best as
some birds do in their feathers, for she was still lovely in her
youthfulness even though the metamorphosis was now far
advanced.

That evening, the two priests and the barber were playing
cards with Don Alonso. Cervantes' wife had given them a jug
of wine and some peppers on a plate, to quench their thirst.
Cervantes did not want to play because, apart from the fact
that the group of four was complete, he preferred to amuse
himself with the falcon on the terrace. Watching it vainly
fluttering its wings, he believed himself responsible for the
bird's misfortune. Now fully-fledged and, by its very nature,
free, the falcon would sometimes look up at the sky and it
must have felt bemused by its inability to follow its instincts as
a high-soaring bird.

Cervantes loved the bird and stroked the crop feathers
beneath its beak with his finger. Sometimes the falcon would give Cervantes' finger a playful nip, entirely without malice,
and Cervantes would laugh. The bird seemed to laugh too,
but it was more like a shrill whoop, a shriek. When the
chickens heard it, they stopped eating and looked round,
alert.

On some afternoons, as the sun was setting and it was
nearly night, a falcon or gyrfalcon flew high above the village,
emitting a sharp cry, as if of lamentation. A cry of pain, though
not necessarily physical pain. Hearing it, Cervantes would
wonder if perhaps it was not the falcon's father or mother.
And he felt sad for himself, for the falcon and for the bird that
flew by overhead, keening. On those occasions, he looked at
Dona Catalina in a cold, distant manner, yet still without
rancour.

He could feel no enmity for that woman, despite everything, as he watched the mournful bird fly across the skies.
And he thought: `I too would weep sometimes if I were not
afraid of seeming ridiculous.'

That same day, when Dona Catalina came out onto the
terrace, they were talking about their usual things. For
example, Cervantes mentioned that they had eaten two
chickens and yet there were still twenty-nine of them in the
yard. She hastened to remind him of her brother's respect for
the matrimonial agreement which was, after all, part of the
sacrament. But Cervantes wasn't listening, intent on the cry of
the sparrowhawk flying by overhead.