B0040702LQ EBOK (42 page)

The oddest thing was yet to come. Dona Catalina left the
axe impaled in the basin; she tried and failed to get into the
chicken house and, when she realised that the door was not
wide enough for her, she gave up, squatted down in a corner
of the shed and laid an egg - an egg that was neither larger nor
smaller than those laid by the other chickens.

When she had done so, she clucked a bit, albeit rather
quietly and modestly, as if aware that what she had done was
not quite nice in a lady.

Cervantes felt distraught.

Before getting married, he had tried to find out about his
fiancee's family and he learned that her grandparents came
from Toboso. Like any fiance in his position, he was inclined
to dreaming. As with the names of many other Spanish cities
and villages, Toboso was a name made up of two Hebrew
words: Tob meaning good and oss meaning secret. Thus, in Hebrew, Toboso meant `the good secret' or `the hidden
good'. Cervantes remembered that, before getting married,
he had given Dona Catalina a name which seemed to him
both poetic and precise. Cervantes was a great admirer of
the Celestina and when he gave his fiancee this ideal name, it
occurred to him to do so in imitation of the names of Melibea
and Melisendra, the wife of the Infante Gaiferos. If they were
sweet as honey, then Dona Catalina must be sweet too. Thus
he called her Dulcinea and, in an allusion to her lineage, del
Toboso. Altogether, the name meant `Sweetness of the secret
good' - half-Spanish and half-Hebrew. No one knew that
Cervantes could read Hebrew He couldn't speak it or write it,
but he had felt curious about the semitic languages and had
learned a little of them during his long stay in Algeria.

Cervantes was also so familiar with the Old Testament that,
when he saw Don Alonso, the first thing he thought of was
the prophet Ezekiel. He didn't know why, but he couldn't
help it. Ezekiel lived after the great mass exodus of the Jews.

The names of that old gentleman - Alonso and Quesada -
seemed particularly suggestive to Cervantes. But Quesada
could equally well have been Quijano or Quijada, and it
occurred to him that by adding the pejorative suffix `ote', the
name was even more evocative. In Hebrew the name would
be Quichot, or quechote, which meant certainty, truth, foundation, and is a word that is always cropping up in the Jewish
scriptures.

Quesada was a name full of allusions to human grandeur,
and adding the suffix `ote' made it grotesque, but, although it
was both grandiose and grotesque, it was, above all, the truth.
A great Hebraic truth. Like Ezekiel and even more like David,
Don Alonso seemed at once mad, wise, grave and grotesque,
and Cervantes watched him from a distance and reflected.
That old man aroused in him feelings of admiration, respect
and amusement.

This was all very interesting, but it was nothing beside the
culminating event of those days: the metamorphosis of Dona
Catalina. When Cervantes saw her carry the dead chicken and
hand it to the cook, he wondered how she had managed to pick the chicken up, for her hands were no longer visible at
the end of her arms. Then he saw that at one end of the wings,
peeping out from her sleeve beneath the larger feathers, she
still had four small, almost atrophied fingers - the thumb had
already disappeared - with the same prehensile capabilities
they had had before.

Dona Catalina turned and was explaining something to
Cervantes about the dead chicken, but Cervantes was only
half-listening, concentrating as he was on discovering, amongst
the feathers at the end of her sleeves, her prehensile fingers.
With the dissonant, up-and-down intonation of a chicken,
she was saying:

`Dead yicken wa Pigeon.'

She said it once more in confused, laboured words. She
repeated her ideas again and again, forgetting that she had
already said them, and Cervantes was thinking: `She saved the
chicken to give it to us for supper. But by killing it with one
blow of the axe in the basin, Dona Catalina has done in a
moment what the other chickens have been trying to do for
the last few weeks.'

She was still talking about Pigeon.

`Gotta sprise to take tothe vetswife whos justada baby.'

`You mustn't do that yourself,' said Cervantes, `that
wouldn't be right in someone of your station.'

Cervantes wanted to avoid her going out into the street and
attracting attention. She was now a huge chicken. Her tail
stuck out beneath her petticoat and they'd had to sew an extra
hem on her dress to hide her thin chicken legs. She still wore
shoes into which she managed to cram her five gnarled toes,
but she walked very unsteadily and so, whenever she could,
she went barefoot. She walked better then, although she did so
with her legs apart, swaying her hips. Her almost floor-length
skirts discreetly covered her feet.

Dona Catalina was talking about Pigeon again, as if the
poor bird were a human being and Cervantes could not help
hearing in her words an allusion to his own one-handed
condition.

The truth is that all those who entered the house, that is, the two priests, the barber and Don Alonso, seemed to have
silently agreed to guard Dona Catalina's secret out of a kind of
discreet shame. They never talked about what was happening,
although they thought of nothing else. As for the maid, she
would soon be leaving for the closed order, but first, the priest
would warn the prioress that the woman was rather eccentric
and was apt to say rather strange things. Thus, if the cook
referred to Dona Catalina's transformation, no one would be
surprised at the convent and none of the nuns would feel
obliged to believe her.

As one can imagine, Cervantes was the person most bewildered by all this, but also the person who best concealed it. He
had not had intimate relations with Dona Catalina for some
time and she seemed not to miss it. She wanted only a little
tenderness, which seems natural enough, although there is no
evidence that chickens have any great need for affection.
Cervantes would occasionally say some kind, albeit rather
forced, words to his wife. He wanted to leave Esquivias as soon
as possible, but he didn't know how.

He had promised to make some financial contribution to
the family expenses and he had not yet managed to do so. He
didn't know where to get the money from. Cervantes was
quick to sign up for and to contract obligations that seemed to
befit his rank, but often he did not know how to meet them.

It was not easy talking to Dona Catalina because her speech
was becoming less exact and more nonsensical with each
passing day. Besides, Dona Catalina couldn't remember what
she had said from one moment to the next and so spoke in a
tangential fashion.

One day, Cervantes realised that Dona Catalina's transformation was less shocking to his friends than the growing
suspicion that there was Jewish blood in his family. Cervantes
wasn't Jewish, but he did come from a family of converted
Jews. It was of no real importance. We are all blood relatives.
All those who live on this planet. If we picked up a pencil and
started calculating the number of our grandparents, generation by generation, we would soon reach a time, still within
the Christian era, when the number of our blood relatives was ten times greater than that of the population of the entire
planet. This, like all numerical matters, is perfectly clear and
can be proven on paper.

Therefore, we all come from Jews, Moors and Aryans, from
Laplanders at the North Pole and from Egyptians. And we all
have amongst our ancestors saints and blasphemers, virgins
and whores, princes and hanged men - sometimes both in
one person. We all have emperors and beggars in the family.

Cervantes was extremely prudent. He never spoke ill of
anyone. If someone mistreated him, he might remark on it,
saddened, but his sadness was not irreversible. He appeared to
be burdened by a sense of guilt.

He was a good man, secretly good, and worthier than anyone of Dulcinea del Toboso, that is of `the sweet woman of
the secret good'.

Before leaving Esquivias, he first asked his wife if he could
sell the young vines in Sesena or offer them as a guarantee so
that he could set himself up as a tax collector. Dona Catalina
did not say no. She even promised to talk to her brother. But
did Dona Catalina's opinion carry any weight?

Cervantes had also thought seriously about leaving for the
Indies, a common refuge for the unfortunate. However, to get
authorisation he would need a certificate of purity of blood
because there was a great deal of fear and ill-feeling regarding
those suspected of Judaism and even those who had recently
converted. This was a new law.

Cervantes had asked for that authorisation, but the response
was a long time coming, and he was not very hopeful, because
withholding an answer is usually -a king's way of saying no.

On the day that Cervantes spoke to his wife about the vines
in Sesena, she started, with her usual volubility, to talk about
something else - having first said that, yes, she would talk to
her brother. She started discussing chickens. The world of
chickens seemed to interest Dona Catalina more and more
each day, which is hardly surprising, considering what was
happening to her.

That day was a Sunday and his brother-in-law, the cleric,
had ridden back from Sesena on his old nag. It was a rainy morning and the cleric was preparing to celebrate another
mass in his house. Cervantes used to help him, taking a certain
pride in the careful pronunciation of the Latin phrases in the
Gloria.

But the cleric, who was carrying his umbrella furled
because it had stopped raining, went up to the terrace and
opened the umbrella so that it would dry. As the ribs
expanded and the cloth stretched, the nearest chickens bolted;
but most frightened of all was Dona Catalina herself,
who, without realising it, spread her arms wide and took an
enormous jump backwards.

The cleric apologised in pained tones - it saddened him
greatly - and left the umbrella open on the terrace. Dona
Catalina approached Cervantes again, speaking in a sorrowful,
chicken-like warble in a minor key, and when she saw that the
cleric had gone into the house, she started talking again about
Pigeon. Cervantes listened and then, rather impatiently, said
to her:

`Dona Catalina, can't you talk about something else?

Then she changed the subject, remembering that Pigeon
had been eaten and she would not be taking her `sprise' to the
vet's wife who had just had a baby.

When she changed the subject, however, Dona Catalina
started talking about another chicken, the one called Draggle,
who seemed always to be cold and to be shrugging her
shoulders and fluffing up her feathers. She spoke about the
chickens as if they were people. According to Dona Catalina,
Draggle was from the same clutch of eggs as the late lamented
Pigeon, but from a different father, and she behaved quite
differently. She was timid and stubborn, yet she was always
first on the scene when the cockerel called them over when
he had unearthed a worm.

You might easily think that the cockerel preferred her,
because, sometimes, when he had the worm in his beak and
even if three or four other chickens came up to him, he
would only ever give it to Draggle. It's true that, recently, the
chicken had been sleeping on the cockerel's right-hand side,
which meant that she enjoyed his favour, and it was true that she had grown fatter and weighed a few ounces more than
the others.

Dona Catalina said all this as if she were recounting news
from the court about the royal family. Then she started talking
about the cockerel, in a barely comprehensible manner:

`No one like Caracalla frscratching the earth and finding,
finding, finding ... A great one for finding is Caracalla.'

Bored, Cervantes asked:

`So the cockerel has a name?'

Cervantes thought that Caracalla seemed a more suitable
name for a chicken than a cockerel. At the same time,
he remembered that he had been in Rome at the famous
Caracalla hot springs that were still used and to which all
kinds of people went, including some rather dubious types.

Lately, the sounds Dona Catalina made were increasingly
difficult to understand.

That morning, for example, she said:

`Don Caracallasalwiz pestring me, but sDraggle getsth-
worm.

Before, she used to use the names of saints and of God
himself in her exclamations, but she no longer did so.

All the time she was talking, she kept looking at the open
umbrella with a respect bordering on awe. Later, when her
brother the priest went to collect it, seeing that it was dry - he
used it in both sun and rain - he took it down and left it lying
loosely furled on the ground. Taking a step back, she said:

`Careful whatchyoudo, brother, the dead brolly looks like a
dead chicken now and Senor Caracaracaracalla will go all
shy.'

Hearing this, Cervantes said to himself: `There's Senor
Caracalla watching over his farmyard, lord and master of his
chickens, simultaneously arbitrary, despotic and generous.'
And seeing that Dona Catalina spoke of the cockerel with
respect, he added to himself: `I would like to be a Macrinus to
that Caracalla.' Macrinus was the man who assassinated the
Emperor Caracalla in the third century. Cervantes knew a
little Arabic and rather more Hebrew, although he was not
fluent in either language. He could read some passages from Ezekiel in the original, but that was not a virtue he could
boast about. And Macrinus meant butcher.

He would have had to be a Quevedo with relatives in the
royal palace and wearing the habit of Santiago before he could
declare in public that he could read Hebrew. There were
allusions to the oriental world in that murderer's name.
Macrinus was a Phoenician name, like the Macrina in Seville,
which was the mosque where the Arabs who prepared meat
for the market used to pray. Later, the mosque became the
sanctuary of Macrina or Macarena, and the Macarena Virgin
was believed to help bullfighters. History tends to repeat itself
one way or another.