B0040702LQ EBOK (40 page)

Meanwhile, the chickens were going inside to roost. The
last rays of light glinted on the broken glass set into the dry
adobe on the top of the walls, defending the chickens from
possible attackers, for there was an encampment of gypsies
nearby.

Seeing the chickens going in for the night, Dona Catalina
said:

`You see. Not one of them dies a natural death. It's off with
their heads and into the pot.'

`And isn't that a natural death?' said Cervantes humorously.

And he laughed, but stopped when he noticed a look of
displeasure on her face. It was as if Dona Catalina found such humour dangerous, although no one would have dreamed of
chopping her head off.

Then pointing to the falcon, his wife said again:

`He does nothing and yet he eats his own weight in raw
meat.'

`How do you know?'

`Someone told me.'

`Who?'

She hesitated for a moment. She herself did not know who
had told her, but she clung to the idea. Cervantes thought:
`Perhaps she knows it by instinct.' That is, by her gallinaceous
instinct of defence and survival.

At that time, Dona Catalina's arms were becoming shorter
and the skin on them granular like chicken skin; sometimes
she would shake them as if they were wings.

Cervantes was growing more and more worried about it
all.

When they went into the house, the two priests, the barber
and Don Alonso were still playing cards. Don Alonso lifted his
nose, grave and aloof. Dona Catalina's brother, with a piece of
paper and a pen by his side, was greedily noting down each
hand as if, by that means, he could find out what cards the
others had. And the four of them sat in silence.

Don Alonso put a three of spades down on the table and
said:

`Draw'

By that he meant that he was forcing the others to put
down all their trump cards. This annoyed the barber and he
replied angrily with words worthy of some loutish gambler:

`Curse the man's arse.'

Cervantes laughed to himself again and thought: `The
barber is merely talking like the man he is, but will Don
Alonso tolerate such language?'

While they were playing, they often said strange things in a
rather mechanical manner, and the barber was really put out at
having to lose a trump card. He threw it down in the middle
of the table and said:

`Cuckolds have all the luck.'

Fortunately, Don Alonso was a bachelor and the other two
were priests. They were, therefore, invulnerable to such
insults.

Cervantes could still not understand how Don Alonso's
noble, decorative appearance fitted with the barber's vulgarities, although ever since he had heard Don Alonso himself
say that they should note down the number of chickens, he
really had no right to be amazed at anything. Observing his
wife's continued transformation, he said to himself. `Nothing
that happens around me seems in the least bit reasonable.'

Reasonable or not, that same week he noticed that his
wife's petticoat was sticking out a little at the back. This was
because her tail feathers were growing. At the same time, her
legs were getting thinner and appeared to be covered with
dry, scaly skin.

Dona Catalina's front now formed a single rounded mass
with her shoulders and her almost atrophied breasts. Her neck
was becoming scrawnier and her light, inquisitive head looked
warily from side to side. One afternoon, with a sideways
glance at the falcon, she said:

`That curved beak is meant for tearing flesh.'

Dona Catalina rarely spoke now, but she looked at the
falcon again and said, as if afraid:

`I certainly wouldn't carry him on my shoulder, the way
you do.'

She said this several times. The sense was the same, but the
words were always different, because they began taking on the
cacophonous tones of a poultry fowl. So, what she said the last
time was:

`I couldn't carry that cockatoo, he could kill you that
cockatoo could.'

`Why, are you afraid he'll go for you?'

When she said words that resembled a cackle - couldcarry-cockatoo-kill - her voice faltered. The illusion that she
was actually cackling was so precise that the players looked up
from their cards just as the chickens did when they heard the
falcon, although this time for quite the opposite reason. It
wasn't a falcon, but a chicken.

Nevertheless, only the niece dared to express her surprise. It
happened in a very roundabout way. Cervantes and the little
girl were up on the terrace, when she said: `My aunt says that I
take after her and that I'm already a little chick.' But the little
girl had spent the week pestering the adults about something
else which no one seemed to understand. She was going to a
school run by nuns and, in the morning, an old nun taught
them arithmetic and she would write the usual numbers on
the blackboard, from one to nine. She called them figures.

In the afternoon, another nun took the class and she also
called numbers figures, but she wrote the seven with a cross
through the downward stroke, like a belt or a tail. And
the little girl kept asking her great uncle what she'd asked
everyone else:

`Why does the seven have a little tail on it in the afternoon
but not in the morning?'

No one paid her any attention. Her great uncle, Don
Alonso, said to her one day:

`What little tail is that?'

`The seven grows a tail in the afternoon.'

When Dona Catalina saw how insistent the girl was, she
even feared that she might not be quite right in the head.
Dona Catalina had recently discovered that numbers were
of Arabic origin and had taken against them. They were
Moorish and therefore things of the Devil.

Cervantes also heard the little girl asking the question and
he was the only one who took any notice and tried to clear up
the mystery. When he realised what it was all about, he
laughed and even wrote something down on a piece of paper
and put it in his pocket. Then he said:

`Ask your teacher in the afternoon. What's her name?'

`Sister Circumcision of the Baby Jesus.'

Cervantes laughed even more and thought that perhaps
Sister Circumcision would circumcise the seven and then the
little girl's worries would be resolved.

But Cervantes did not often laugh. He would look at Dona
Catalina and say to himself `She doesn't realise. She probably
never will.' Perhaps out of a sense of family propriety, her brother the cleric said nothing and the others kept quiet too.
But the whole thing was beginning to seem like a terrible
outrage on the part of Fate.

However, Cervantes doubted that the barber and Don
Alonso had actually noticed. Dona Catalina continued to
dress like a woman and her clothes covered most of her body
and concealed the strange metamorphosis. When she noticed
these peculiar things happening to her body, she said to herself sometimes:

`I wonder if I'm pregnant.'

When she said the same to her husband, he stood there
breathless for a moment thinking that it wasn't pregnancy but
chickenization or gallinification. Even Cervantes, who was
usually so concerned with words, did not know the correct
term for it.

Dona Catalina no longer left the house. She wasn't really
aware of her true state, but her brother and the maid would
sense when she wanted to go out and stop her doing so. To
prevent her going to mass at the church, her brother would
celebrate it alone in the house where they had consecrated an
altar.

The day that they celebrated the first mass at home, Cervantes, deeply shocked by his wife's transformation, decided
to leave Esquivias. He did not dare to say so openly because he
feared that they would hurl themselves upon him and accuse
him of having brought witchcraft to the village from Salamanca, where he had been a student, or even from Algeria, the
land of the Devil.

One day after supper, the cleric said:

`Strange things are beginning to happen in this house.'

For the moment, he said nothing more, but then he exorcised the corridors and sprinkled them with holy water.

Cervantes was frightened, thinking: `Will he dare to speak
openly?' If he did, what would Dona Catalina's reaction be,
for, up until then, she had not admitted to herself what was
happening. What the cleric said that day was quite different.
He merely regretted the lacunae he had noticed in his good
sister's memory.

Cervantes said nothing, but he remembered a corporal he
had met in Algeria and how the poor man used to say the
same thing. Exept that the corporal would say: `There are
lagoons in my memory and there comes a point when they all
join up and there's just one big lagoon whose waters overflow
and flood everything. I don't know what to do. Perhaps
there's nothing I can do.'

Cervantes was worried because he believed that an obsession with gradually merging lagoons in the memory was or
could become a real obsession, that is, a fixed idea instigated
from outside by the Devil. When those ideas were instigated
from inside, it was not called obsession but possession. He
knew his demonology as did everyone else in those days.

Don Alonso came to the house less and less often. It seems
that the transformation of his niece Dona Catalina produced
in him a great silent unease. On the other hand, he would
never have dared to stop visiting her altogether.

Cervantes tried to forget about it, but, as you can imagine,
he couldn't. One afternoon, he was leafing through Galatea
and thinking about writing the second part, when Catalina
drew him from his thoughts with a question:

`How much did you get for that book? I mean how much
did the bookseller pay you in total.'

`I can't remember exactly. I think it was eight hundred
reals.'

Dona Catalina, who had never shown any interest in reading the book, uttered a kind of throaty tremolo, a flutter of
sound produced by alternating depressions and dilations of
her windpipe; then she said:

`My grandfather got far more than that for the six hundred
chickens he sold to the breeders in Valdemoro.'

And she went to the kitchen, unwittingly displaying,
beneath her skirts, her ever more prominent parson's nose,
and she did so now with a certain family pride.

At the time, Cervantes was thinking of writing the second
part of Galatea, in which the heroine, after escaping into the
countryside with the fortunate shepherd with whom she had
fallen in love, was sculpted by Pygmalion and left in marble form in the marketplace, revealing to the public all the secret
and more or less tragic weaknesses of its maker, I mean of the
artist who sculpted it.

But Cervantes did not know whether to write that
second part or not. If he did, he would have to put himself in
Pygmalion's place and offer up to the public his soul's most
delicate innermost feelings, expressed through the statue of
Galatea. Cervantes had his modesty and he hesitated. Besides,
in order to write it, he would have to make use of the reams
of paper in the house, which also appeared in the marriage
contract. He did not dare to do so.

Meanwhile, he saw Don Alonso coming along the road; he
was taller than the farmyard wall and his soldierly hat
appeared above it, betraying his presence from afar.

The falcon's wing feathers had regrown, to the great and
secret delight of Cervantes, who watched it day by day.

`He's growing fast,' he said with satisfaction.

Dona Catalina, looking askance at the falcon, took some
while to reply and at last did so in the most surly fashion.

`It's a parasite, that's what it is.'

As on other occasions, this got mixed up with other sounds
and she stuttered a little. A papapaparasite, she said. Cervantes
was watching her. When she tried to correct her stutter, she
merely stuttered more and took even longer to finish the
word. Cervantes said:

`It's just a young animal. Children are incapable of earning
their own living and therefore depend on their elders. So it's
not a parasite. When it can fly ..

`It will never be able to fly because I clipped its wings.'

`In a week's time it will be able to fly as high as its parents.'

She knew that, with its wings spread, the falcon could now
get up the three kitchen steps in one jump. Cervantes thought
he saw a look of disappointment on Dona Catalina's face
when she realised this. That made him wary. The idea that the
bird might escape provoked in his wife something akin to the
panic shown by the chickens in the yard, and her reaction was
one of strange, contained aggression.

Cervantes saw that he would have to protect the falcon and that the best thing would be to allow him to live outside the
house. Above the terrace, there was an opening between the
flat roof and the attic with its wooden beams. This place was
separate from the inside of the house. Cervantes put a few
handfuls of straw up there in order to make the place more
comfortable and to protect the falcon somewhat against the
cold - although its feathers were now a good defence - and
he took him there at night.

He was right to do so, since Dona Catalina could not sleep,
or so she said, for thinking about the falcon's sharp, curved
beak.

A few days later, something alarming happened. Dona
Catalina was now undeniably a fully-fledged chicken.
Cervantes had withdrawn some time ago to sleep in a separate
room in order to avoid any intimate contact and, since he did
so during Lent, both she and his brother-in-law thought it
was a question of abstinence, especially praiseworthy during
periods of official devotion.

But one night, Dona Catalina went into Cervantes' room
intending to sleep there, although not in the bed like a person,
but perched on the bedhead like a bird. Like an ordinary,
common-or-garden chicken. Cervantes couldn't sleep. On
her perch, Dona Catalina took little sideways steps, to the
right or the left according to Cervantes' movements in the
bed as he tried to avoid her. She, on the other hand, sought
him out.