B0040702LQ EBOK (43 page)

Dona Catalina was still talking and when she was in that
loquacious, gallinesque mood, Cervantes wanted only one
thing. He wanted to leave that village. To go as far away as
possible. For the present, they wouldn't let him go to the
Indies, but he would have liked at least to go to Andalusia or
even to Old Castile, to Valladolid, where the court was.

The cleric started to look askance at Cervantes for one
of the following reasons. Because he had found out that
Cervantes had an illegitimate daughter by the actress Ana
Franca with whom he had had an affair: a daughter whom
Cervantes loved and who was called Isabel de Saavedra. Or
because he himself regretted having married his youngest
sister to a converted Jew or to the son or the grandson of
converted Jews, a man twenty years her senior and with only
one good hand. Or because he had found out that, before
Cervantes went to Italy, he had killed a man in a duel, for
which reason he was condemned to ten years in exile and the
amputation of his right hand, a sentence that, fortunately, was
never carried out. Or simply because he was suspicious of the
interest Cervantes had frequently shown in those young vines
in Seseiia.

At any rate, the cleric behaved in an honest manner - so
said Dona Catalina - for when Pigeon died, he immediately amended the marriage contract. No other part of the
assets listed in the contract had been altered or touched by
Cervantes, not even the reams of paper that had tempted him several times when he was considering writing the second
part of Galatea.

The other priest, the one from Esquivias, was a devout,
silent man and rather greedy too, but only as regards canonical
matters. He never let a peasant off paying his tithes nor would
he miss an opportunity of getting something out of his richer
parishioners. At first, he had had high hopes of Cervantes, but
when he saw that Cervantes wrote poetry, he raised his eyes
to the roof beams in his abbey and made a chewing motion,
four or five times, with his mouth empty. It was a gesture he
made in moments of great discomfiture. He chewed the way
goats chew, with nothing in his mouth.

The priest from Esquivias wanted to feel good about him-
self,just like anyone else. The ecclesiastical profession brought
with it honours and certain privileges. One evening, after a
few glasses of wine - Dona Catalina was drinking mead - he
wanted to know what right Cervantes had to be addressed as
Don Miguel. When he found out that Cervantes' mother had
been of noble blood and Cervantes himself a soldier of rank,
he said to himself that Cervantes was merely an impoverished
gentleman and therefore worth less than a farmer with sixtyfour hectares of land. He expunged him from any hopes he
might have harboured.

One day, the priest made an allusion which rather alarmed
Cervantes. He was talking about those who preferred to use
oil rather than pork fat when frying eggs. Then he asked
Cervantes if Ana was a Jewish name and what it meant.
Cervantes knew that Ana meant `here', `present', `now', but
he merely said that he was not as well versed in the humanities
as Don Francisco de Quevedo and that in Salamanca he had
studied only canon law and grammar. Besides, Ana was the
name of the actress by whom he had had his daughter Isabel.

Cervantes kept silent, but he felt rather uneasy thinking
about Dona Catalina's metamorphosis. Whenever the priest
visited the house after the `Ana' incident, he behaved as
if Cervantes wasn't there, and the barber did the same,
although he did so with a rather more rustic, vulgar lack of
consideration.

The only person who never bothered Cervantes was his
brother-in-law, but his scrupulousness over the details in the
marriage contract - adding and subtracting chickens - was
somehow slightly offensive.

The moment came when Cervantes would willingly have
left the house and Esquivias empty-handed just to feel free
again. Lying in bed at night, with his wife now entirely a
chicken, an enormous chicken, perched on the bedhead, he
was tormented by the idea that Dona Catalina might have
spoken to her brother about the vines in Sesena.

He could no longer talk to her, that is, he could only understand her very approximately and with great difficulty.

Nevertheless, Cervantes wanted to know once and for all
whether or not he could dispose of the vineyards, and that
day, on the terrace, he asked her:

`Have you spoken to your brother about what I asked you,
about the vineyards?' She gave a kind of half-answer:

`Don Caracalla and the papaparish pppriest and my brother
are cococonsidering it and frmnowuntilthenovthear ...
frmnowyuntil the end ovtheyear ... frmnow ...'

She did not complete the sentence because Caracalla, who
was scratching at the ground and taking two steps forward and
one step back as if engaged in dancing a minuet, discovered
the inevitable worm and called to the chickens with his gor-
gogoriaerr ... And Dona Catalina herself leapt over the handrail and ran to him. But she was too late because Draggle had
got there ahead of her. Then Dona Catalina returned to the
terrace and said by way of an excuse:

`She's incococobating.'

It wasn't just that she was imitating the chickens, she was
forgetting her own language. She had said `frmnowuntilthenovthear' instead of saying `from now until the end of the year':
and `incococobating' instead of `incubating'. Everything in
her was retreating, just as her skirts were retreating above her
parson's nose.

Cervantes drew one hand across his forehead, sighed sadly
and went into the house. At that moment, he met Don Alonso
who had just arrived, even though it wasn't a Sunday. He was carrying a book in his hand, a small book by Luis de
Avila entitled Spiritual Garden, a paraphrase of Sem Tob's
Zohar - Sem Tob means Good Man. Cervantes was greatly
surprised. At the time, apart from the Talmud, the Zohar was
the most important book in Jewish religious writing, the
creme de la creme of Hebraic thought in which it was said
that David had been a kind of jester to God. David who
had danced naked for his servants and who was not afraid
to appear absurd or grotesque because he knew that the
invulnerable and inviolable divinity was far above even man's
most shameless clowning, far above the sublimely ridiculous
and the pettily grandiose. Far above the gentleman who had
advised them to write down the number of chickens and had
got beaten up on a road, far above even the wife turned
chicken.

Cervantes felt that he understood Don Alonso with all his
contradictions, even his noble silences and his laughable
pronouncements. And Cervantes left Esquivias that same day
and never went back. He left without the vineyards. He went
to Andalusia to gather supplies for the expedition on the
Invincible, which was defeated shortly afterwards. Everyone
knows the sonnet he composed later on, mocking the Duke
of Medinasidonia and the sonnet that he dedicated to Philip
II. Cervantes was justifiably proud of those two sonnets, he
who put so much effort into writing poetry.

As for Dona Catalina, we have been unable to find
out anything further about the life she lived after the transformation we have described. A pity.

© Ramon J. Sender Trust, San Diego, California

Translated by Margaret full Costa

Ramon J. Sender (Chalamera [Huesca] 1901- San Diego,
USA, 1982) left home when he was seventeen and went
to live in Madrid where he worked as a journalist until he
was sent to Morocco for his military service. He based his
first book Iman (1930) on his experiences there. He was imprisoned for his anarchist views and fought for the Republicans in the Civil War. When his wife was killed, he went into
exile with his two children, finally settling in the United
States, where he taught Spanish literature at the University of
Southern California. He wrote over forty novels, as well as
essays, newspaper articles, biographies and eight collections of
short stories. His best-known works are: Mr Witt en el Canton
(1935), El verdugo afable (1952), Requiem por un campesino
espanol (1953) and his fictionalised autobiography Cronica del
alba (1942-66). This story is taken from Novelas de otro jueves
(1969).

The man looked at death and swore gruffly. His hands were
tied tightly behind him. His body still smelled of the wild, and
there were bits of plant-life caught in his tangled, almost
virgin hair. The hunt had been a long one. So he looked
at death and spat. Behind him was a low wall across which
darted swift, electric lizards that grew suddenly still in the sun.
And the sun was that outrageous explosion of light that blinds
or that dissolves the visible world. The sun was like hard metal
cutting the eyes, slicing through the very root of one's gaze.
The man was standing in front of the low wall against which
the hard, useless bullets would ricochet, the bullets that he
would not retain inside his trapped animal body, which was all
there was to destroy.

So, he said to himself, this is the moment. He peered at the
soldiers in the firing squad where they stood against the sun,
at the officer who had beaten him until he bled and who was
now conducting the great concert. So, this is the moment.
He realised that the plot had run its course and that he was
nothing but a taut thread stretching from the overheated
barrels of the rifles to his own heart. And his heart was beating
like a many-winged creature. A taut thread, he said. If only
someone could cut it!

Suddenly, he noticed that beneath the bonds bruising his
flesh his whole being was becoming unexpectedly flexible.
Slowly, carefully, he began to wriggle himself loose, as if disguising the movement beneath his apparent rigidity. A command rang out and the firing squad mechanically took up its
foolish stance ready for the grand finale. But the man felt as if
he could now slip free not only from the grip of the ropes, but
also from his own skin, his broken bones, the rags sticky with
blood clinging to the sweat-matted hair on his chest. He made one last effort. He felt a different blood flowing through him,
subject to a different thread, and he saw before him his own
feet, his battered boots, gutted, vanquished, and next to his
boots, before his own rigid, erect body was himself, like a large
green lizard and, he realised, another thread now bound him
to the everlasting centre of the earth. Then came the obscene
sound of shots fired. The lizard ran, magnetic, invincible, over
the broken wall and saw his human body standing, rigid, not
fallen, but victorious, like a statue, in defiance of the grand
finale, while the firing squad fell back uttering an opaque cry,
like a second volley of shots, a cry of terror.

© Jose Angel Valente

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Jose Angel Valente (Orense, 1929) studied Romance languages at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and
Madrid, and later taught at Oxford for three years. From 1958
to 1980 he lived in Geneva and now divides his time between
Almeria, Geneva and Paris. He is known mainly as a poet and
has won the Spanish Critics' Prize twice, in 1961 and 1980,
the 1988 Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature and the
1993 Spanish National Poetry Prize. He has also translated the
poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Kavafis into Spanish.
The book from which this story was taken, Elfin de la edad de
plata was first published in 1973, and reprinted in 1995 following the publication to great acclaim of a French translation in
1992.