B0040702LQ EBOK

by Margaret Jull Costa;Annella McDermott

  `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.

  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 the
ir 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 tha
t 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.

  Cervantes was afraid that the chicken, once it had dropped asleep, would fall on top of him, since it could not in such a short time have become completely accustomed to the habits of birds.

  All the following day, he felt troubled and upset. Inside his head was a tune that he had heard being played on a flute in the street and he couldn't get it out of his mind; the melody repeated itself again and again. He had a slight tremor in his crippled hand.

  For three further nights, Dona Catalina continued going to Cervantes' room to sleep and she installed herself there as she had on the first night. When she took off her dress, she was naked, that is, dressed in her feathers. She would cover her head with a cap or a ruffled shawl, thus hiding the lower part of her face as far as her nose, that is, as far as her beak, because her nose had hardened first into cartilage and then into two separate bony parts. Her mouth disappeared. Although Dona Catalina seemed quite normal and in a way indifferent to the change, there was something in her that stopped her making any wifely advances.