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.
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
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