And as she perched on his bedhead, the night became one long nightmare for Cervantes.
During the day, the priest would look at his sister, but say nothing. For when Dona Catalina was dressed and wearing a shawl over her head, she hid her condition fairly well.The worst thing was when she had to talk, for she almost always got lost in a tangle of sounds, unable to articulate more than the occasional isolated word and never managing to say anything concrete. She could communicate her state of mind, for example, happiness, sadness, love or hatred, more by tone of voice than through words. (Although, as regards hatred, she had no call to hate anyone.)
Cervantes wondered if he should consult the priest in the village - he didn't dare talk to his brother-in-law - but he was still suspicious and he felt uneasy whenever he thought about the Inquisition. The problem, therefore, grew worse and on some days it was particularly oppressive.
Luckily, the falcon escaped and Cervantes never saw it again. It must have found its parents because the bird of prey that used to pass at night shrieking, weeping, never came again. And Cervantes thought: `At least the falcon is safe, thank God.'
When Dona Catalina knew that the falcon had flown, she stayed in her room for two whole days cackling and repeating garbled sentences. Her voice, however, was no louder than that of the other chickens even though she had a far greater thoracic capacity than they. And Cervantes still could not sleep. He had not slept for seven nights and he remembered that only with great difficulty can a human being survive more than ten nights without sleep. After that period of resistance, a person's health declines rapidly; he felt genuinely alarmed. During the day, he came and went, but he was unsteady on his feet.
Dona Catalina, on the other hand, installed once more on the bedhead, slept very well. It must be said in her favour that she did not carry with her the smell of the chicken coop and that she never did her business anywhere except in the toilet. Of course - and I hope the reader will forgive these sordid details - she no longer peed, as she had remarked to her niece one day, some time before.
There was another grave setback. The cook announced that she wanted to leave. Cervantes was afraid she would broadcast the news to the world, but the priest, perhaps harbouring the same fear, convinced her that she should become a nun in a closed order; that was a happy solution to the problem and avoided the need for any talk of chickens.
Things were becoming difficult for Cervantes and not only because of Dona Catalina's metamorphosis. Some were beginning to think that Cervantes did nothing inside or outside the house. It's true that he was still in that honeymoon period when life outside comes more or less to a full stop, but both the cleric and Dona Catalina took every opportunity to speak in glowing terms of other relatives who made good money. After talking about one of them and describing their many abilities, Dona Catalina always said the same thing:
`He's worth a fortune that one.'
She said it with great conviction and in an emphatic tone that rather wounded Cervantes. On that occasion, she was talking about a relative who was a collector of taxes and, as if that weren't enough, the cleric added:
`He doesn't spend his time writing plays.'
And Dona Catalina said what she always said:
`He's worth a fortune that tax collector.'
But Cervantes felt that in order to do such a job he would need money and guarantees.
One morning, very early, there was a great racket in the farmyard and Cervantes went out and saw a huge cat running away, one of those old cats, well-fed and adventure-loving, who patrol other people's farmyards. The cat shot off as if the Devil himself were after it, but it took no prey with it. However, it had apparently wounded a chicken and its victim was squawking and dragging one bloodied wing.
`It was the vulture,' said Dona Catalina.
Cervantes hated the falcon being called a vulture. He said that he had seen a very large cat running off, as big as a small tiger, and that the falcon was not to blame at all.
Then Dona Catalina said lightly to her brother that Cervantes had seen a tiger in the farmyard and the cleric exclaimed:
`Good heavens, there have never been any tigers in this part of the world.'
She insisted that her husband had seen a tiger.
For the moment, things remained as they were, but on Sunday, Don Alonso turned up again to play cards and, shortly afterwards, he was joined by the barber and the priest. They all discussed whether or not there were tigers in Spain. A majority were against the idea. Cervantes tried to say that tigers lived in Asia and that there were none in Africa either, as he well knew because he had spent six years in Algeria. But whenever he started to speak of far-off lands, they looked at him suspiciously as if they were thinking: `Does he think he's better than us because he's been in Africa, in Cyprus and in Italy?' The barber, meanwhile, was thinking something else entirely. He was thinking that, despite having travelled in far-off lands, Cervantes clearly hadn't made any money.
That evening, Cervantes tried to draw out Don Alonso. The cleric defended Don Alonso's silence, although Cervantes had merely asked him how he spent his considerable spare time during the week. When the cleric said that, in his day, Don Alonso had traded with certain chicken-breeders in Valdemoro, who had stalls in the market at Medina del Campo, Dona Catalina intervened on her uncle's behalf, but her gallinaceous pronunciation meant that she could not be understood.
Don Alonso, in his role as constable of Castile, had once been a good agent, buying eggs and other poultry supplies for Dona Catalina's grandfather. Once, when he found out that a muleteer was going to Pinto with a wagon and that he was bearing a letter from his brother, the priest, to a man who bred chickens, Don Alonso asked the cleric to give him the sealed letter and he wrote on the back: `I'll be on the Valdemoro road on the fifteenth. If you've got any grit, come out and meet me on the road.' And he signed it.
He meant that he wanted him to come out and sell him some grit for the chickens, but the man misunderstood and instead came out and gave Don Alonso a good beating. That unfortunate incident, told in good faith by Dona Catalina, made Cervantes laugh. His laughter proved infectious, and his wife, with her lace cap on and her shawl covering half her beak, cackled loudly, to the amazement of the two priests.
But Don Alonso, concentrating on his cards, said:
`It was a misunderstanding, that business of the grit.'
Cervantes was seriously considering leaving Esquivias as soon as possible. When he managed to stop laughing, he asked:
`What happened then, Don Alonso?
The village priest, arranging his cards in his hand, replied on Don Alonso's behalf
`He retired.'
Seeing again that dual quality of grandeur and misery in the old man, Cervantes didn't know quite what to think.
They talked again about the disturbance in the farmyard and, since there were no tigers and because it seemed odd that an ordinary cat would be so bold, there was a tendency to hold the falcon responsible. Cervantes' opinion, even though he had seen what had happened, was not taken seriously. `They know,' he thought, `that I'm an interested party and that I would defend the falcon even if it were to blame.'
The others' obsession troubled him a little, though. And the tremor increased in his atrophied hand.
On another day, from his usual position on the terrace, where he was sitting with the niece, he saw all the chickens crowding round to peck at the bird that had been wounded by the cat. The victim was still on its feet, but it was having a hard time fleeing its colleagues who, as they usually do in such circumstances, had decided to kill it. Dona Catalina announced from the window:
`Before they kill it, we'd better cut off its head and take it to the kitchen.'
The little girl said sadly: `Those chickens are awful, they're just a lot of tittle-tattlers and nosy parkers.' Cervantes liked the way the girl spoke. He took the same interest in words as children did in sweets or gamblers did in cards.
Cervantes looked at his
hand, destroyed by the wounds of war, and remembered the wound in his chest. He thought he found some similarity in the attitude of the people there towards him. He too had wounds that rendered him vulnerable.
His wife, when she got undressed to go to sleep - and she still insisted on doing so in Cervantes' room - would stand there naked, covered in feathers, as much a chicken as any other chicken, but so huge it was almost frightening. As I said before, she always kept her cap and shawl on, though quite why one doesn't know. Cervantes didn't dare to ask her, but he imagined that she did so in order to disguise the change, at least as regards her face. A woman's vanity.
And, as usual, she leapt onto the bedhead and immediately fell asleep, only to wake towards midnight, when the cockerel began to crow. Since she weighed as much as a normal adult, any movement on her perch, however slight, shook the whole bed, and Cervantes, who was asleep, would wake up startled and turn onto his other side only to have the same thing happen again shortly afterwards.
Sometimes the bed vibrated with Dona Catalina's heartbeats. Finally, out of sheer exhaustion, Cervantes learned to sleep despite everything.
During the day, he continued pondering what had happened in the farmyard with the wounded chicken. It did not take much thought to realise that in the house, and possibly in life as well, the same thing was happening with him. Because he lacked a hand, they perhaps wanted to make him aware of his vulnerability.
It was not long before they learned that Cervantes sometimes avoided eating pork, though not all pork. For example, he liked a bit of well-cured serrano ham when there was a leg of it hanging in the larder; on winter evenings, a slice of ham with a little preserved tomato, a piece of bread and half a glass of wine was a pleasant, cheering snack. Afterwards, sitting by the fire for an hour, not doing anything, just dreaming and dozing, was a real delight.
His wife, in her chicken state, watched him. His brother-inlaw did too. On Sundays, Don Alonso and the priest from Esquivias would also spend an unusual amount of time studying Cervantes, albeit less intently and, out of politeness, more surreptitiously. Cervantes would then withdraw to his room to write. The fact that he left the room in order to write did not, however, seem to them to justify his existence. One day, when Cervantes said he was going to his room `to work' rather than saying he was going `to write', there were sideways glances and ironic remarks.
That evening, the cleric said to Don Alonso: `My brotherin-law Don Miguel de Cervantes comes from a family of converted Jews.' Cervantes was fair-haired, with a broad brow and an open expression. It's true that he had a sharp, hooked nose and full, prominent lips, although his mouth itself was small. In any case, Cervantes' rather solitary, evasive nature was very different from that of other writers who were not descended from converted Jews, for example, Lope de Vega. Nor did Lope de Vega have an aquiline nose or prominent lips, that same Lope whom Don Catalina had applauded in a play at the Principe theatre.
It seems that Lope was jolly, sociable, carefree, with something of the deceptive spontaneity of all good actors and aristocrats. When you looked closely at Cervantes, there was something peculiar about him.
The Sunday cardplayers began to look at Cervantes in the same way that the chickens looked at the hen that had been attacked by the giant cat. Cervantes didn't know whether it was because he came from a family of converted Jews or simply because he had an injured hand and a wound in his chest. These doubts troubled him.
Cervantes remained uneasy, for he was extremely sensitive and could read people's secret thoughts, especially when he perceived in them some hostile intent.
That unease was still not serious as yet. Cervantes was not a man to be easily alarmed; indeed, as he had shown on more than one occasion, he was, by nature, steadfast and calm. But he felt uncomfortable when he sensed that the ground beneath him was becoming slippery. This was what was beginning to happen in that house. On the other hand, it seemed that Don Alonso also came from a family of converted Jews, although he was perhaps more distantly related.
In the farmyard, the wounded chicken was close to death. The others spent the whole day tormenting it, and when Cervantes saw it resting on its breast on the floor, with one leg stretched out behind and its head swaying from side to side like a pendulum, he said to himself that it must have only a few hours to live. Dona Catalina, who was watching as well, seemed to hesitate for a moment; then she gave a sudden, discordant cry, went into the kitchen, emerged with an axe and, going over to the chicken, she carried it to the wooden sink in the shed and cut off its head with one blow.
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.
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