B0040702LQ EBOK (41 page)

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.

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.