The
Decapitated Chicken, by Horacio Quiroga
All day long the four idiot sons of the couple
Mazzini-Ferraz sat on a bench in the patio. Their
tongues protruded from between their lips; their eyes were dull; their mouths
hung open as they turned their heads.
The patio had an earthen floor and was closed to
the west by a brick wall. The bench was five feet from the wall, parallel to
it, and there they sat, motionless, their gaze fastened on the bricks. As the
sun went down, disappearing behind the wall, the idiots rejoiced. The blinding
light was always what first gained their attention; little by little by little
their eyes lighted up; finally, they would laugh uproariously, each infected by
the same uneasy hilarity, staring at the sun with bestial joy, as if it were
something to eat.
Other times, lined up on the bench, they hummed for
hours on end, imitating the sound of the trolley. Loud noises, too, shook them
from their inertia, and at those times they ran around the patio, biting their
tongues and mewing. But almost always they were sunk in the somber lethargy of
idiocy, passing the entire day seated on their bench, their legs hanging
motionless, dampening their pants with slobber.
The oldest was twelve and the youngest eight. Their
dirty and slovenly appearance was testimony to the total lack of maternal
care.
These four idiots, nevertheless, had once been the
joy of their parents' lives. When they had been married three months, Mazzini
and Berta had oriented the self-centered love of man and wife, wife and
husband, toward a more vital future: a son. What greater happiness for two
people in love than that blessed consecration of an affection liberated from
the vile egotism of purposeless love and -what is worse for love itself- love
without any possible hope of renewal?
So thought Mazzini and Berta, and, when after
fourteen months of matrimony their son arrived, they felt happiness complete.
The child prospered, beautiful, radiant, for a year and a half. But one night
in his twentieth month he was racked by terrible convulsions, and the following
morning he no longer recognized his parents. The doctor examined him with the
kind of professional attention that obviously seeks to find the cause of the
illness in the infirmities of the parents.
After a few days the child's paralyzed limbs
recovered their movement, but the soul, the intelligence, even instinct, were
gone forever. He lay on his mother's lap, an idiot,
driveling, limp, to all purposes dead.
"Son, my dearest son!" the mother sobbed
over the frightful ruin of her first-born.
The father, desolate, accompanied the doctor outside.
"I can say it to you; I think it is a hopeless
case. He might improve, be educated to the degree his idiocy permits, but
nothing more."
"Yes! Yes...!" Mazzini assented. "But
tell me: do you think it is heredity, that...?"
"As far as the paternal heredity is concerned, I
told you what I thought when I saw your son. As for the mother's, there's a
lung there that doesn't sound too good. I don't see anything else, but her
breathing is slightly ragged. Have her thoroughly examined."
With his soul tormented by remorse, Mazzini
redoubled his love for his son, the idiot child who was paying for the excesses
of his grandfather. At the same time he had to console, to ceaselessly sustain
Berta, who was wounded to the depths of her being by the failure of her young
motherhood.
As is only natural, the couple put all their love
into the hopes for another son. A son was born, and his health and the clarity
of his laughter rekindled their extinguished hopes. But at eighteen months the
convulsions of the first-born were repeated, and on the following morning the
second son awoke an idiot.
This time the parents fell into complete despair.
So it was their blood, their love, that was cursed. Especially their love. He, twenty-eight; she, twenty-two;
and all their passionate tenderness had not succeeded in creating one atom of
normal life. They no longer asked for beauty and intelligence as for the first
born -only a son, a son like any other!
From the second disaster burst forth new flames of
aching love, a mad desire to redeem once and for all the sanctity of their
tenderness. Twins were born; and step by step the history of the two older
brothers was repeated.
Even so, beyond the immense bitterness, Mazzini and
Berta maintained great compassion for their four sons. They must wrest from the
limbo of deepest animality, not their souls, lost
now, but instinct itself. The boys could not swallow, move about or even sit
up. They learned, finally, to walk, but they bumped into things because they
took no notice of obstacles. When they were washed, they mewed and gurgled
until their faces were flushed. They were animated only by food or when they
saw brilliant colors or heard thunder. Then they laughed, radiant with bestial
frenzy, pushing out their tongues and spewing rivers of slaver. On the other
hand, they possessed a certain imitative faculty, but nothing more.
The terrifying line of descent seemed to have been
ended with the twins. But with the passage of three years Mazzini and Berta
once again ardently desired another child, trusting that the long interim would
have appeased their destiny.
Their hopes were not satisfied. And because of this
burning desire and exasperation from its lack of fulfillment, the husband and
wife grew bitter. Until this time each had taken his own share of
responsibility for the misery their children had caused, but hopelessness for
the redemption of the four animals born to them finally created that imperious
necessity to blame others that is the specific patrimony of inferior hearts.
It began with a change of pronouns: your sons.
And since they intended to trap, as well as insult each other, the atmosphere
became charged.
"It seems to me," Mazzini, who had just
come in and was washing his hands, said to Berta, "that you could keep the
boys cleaner."
As if she hadn't heard him, Berta continued reading.
"It's the first time," she replied after a
pause, "I've seen you concerned about the condition of your sons."
Mazzini turned his head toward her with a forced
smile.
"Our sons, I think."
"All right, our sons. Is that the way you like
it?" She raised her eyes.
This time Mazzini expressed himself clearly.
"Surely you're not going to say I'm to
blame, are you?"
"Oh, no!" Berta
smiled to herself, very pale. "But neither am I, I
imagine! That's all I needed...," she murmured.
"What? What's all you needed?"
"Well, if anyone's to blame, it isn't me, just
remember that! That's what I meant."
Her husband looked at her for a moment with a brutal
desire to wound her.
"Let's drop it!" he said finally, drying his
hands.
"As you wish, but if you
mean..."
"Berta!"
"As you wish!"
This was the first clash, and other followed. But,
in the inevitable reconciliations, their souls were united in redoubled rapture
and eagerness for another child.
So a daughter was born. Mazzini and Berta lived for
two years with anguish as their constant companion, always expecting another
disaster. It did not occur, however, and the parents focused all their
contentment on their daughter, who took advantage of their indulgence to become
spoiled and very badly behaved.
Although even in the later years
Berta had continued to care for the four boys, after Bertita's
birth she virtually ignored the other children. The very thought of them
horrified her, like the memory of something atrocious she had been forced to
perform. The same thing happened to Mazzini, though to a lesser degree.
Nevertheless, their souls had not found peace.
Their daughter's least indisposition now unleashed -because of the terror of
losing her- the bitterness created by their unsound progeny. Bile had
accumulated for so long that the distended viscera spilled venom at the
slightest touch. From the moment of the first poisonous quarrel Mazzini and
Berta had lost respect for one another, and if there is anything to which man
feels himself drawn with cruel fulfillment it is, once
begun, the complete humiliation of another person. Formerly they had been
restrained by their mutual failure; now that success had come, each,
attributing it to himself, felt more strongly the infamy of the four
misbegotten sons the other had forced him to create.
With such emotions there was no longer any
possibility of affection for the four boys. The servant dressed them, fed them, put them to bed, with gross brutality. She almost
never bathed them. They spent most of the day facing the wall deprived of
anything resembling a caress.
So Bertita celebrated her
fourth birthday, and that night, as a result of the sweets her parents were
incapable of denying her, the child had a slight chill and fever. And the fear
of seeing her die or become an idiot opened once again the ever-present
wound.
For three hours they did not speak to each other,
and, as usual, Mazzini's swift pacing served as a motive.
"My God! Can't you
walk more slowly? How many times...?"
"All right, I just forget. I'll stop. I don't do
it on purpose."
She smiled, disdainful.
"No, no, of course I don't think that of
you!"
"And I would never had
believed that of you...you consumptive!"
"What! What did you say?"
"Nothing!"
"Oh, yes, I heard you say something! Look,
I don't know what you said, but I swear I'd prefer anything to having a father
like yours!"
Mazzini turned pale.
"At last!" he muttered between clenched
teeth. "At last, viper, you've said what you've been wanting to!"
"Yes, a viper, yes! But
I had healthy parents, you hear? Healthy! My father didn't die in delirium! I
could have had sons like anybody else's! Those are your sons, those
four!"
Mazzini exploded in his turn.
"Consumptive viper!
That's what I called you, what I want to tell you! Ask him,
ask the doctor who's to blame for your sons' meningitis: my father or your
rotten lung? Yes, viper!"
They continued with increasing violence, until a
moan from Bertita instantly sealed their lips. By one
o'clock in the morning the child's light indigestion had disappeared, and, as
it inevitably happens with all young married couples who have loved intensely,
even for a while, they effected a reconciliation, all the more effusive for the
infamy of the offenses.
A splendid day dawned, and as Berta arose she spit up
blood. Her emotion and the terrible night were, without any doubt, primarily
responsible. Mazzini held her in his embrace for a long while, and she cried
hopelessly, but neither of them dared to say a word.
At ten, they decided that after lunch they would go
out. They were pressed for time so they ordered the servant to kill a
hen.
The brilliant day had drawn the idiots from their
bench. So while the servant was cutting off the head of the chicken in the
kitchen, bleeding it parsimoniously (Berta had learned from her mother this
effective method of conserving the freshness of the meat), she thought she
sensed something like breathing behind her. She turned and saw the four idiots,
standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the operation with stupefaction.
Red...Red...
"Senora! The boys are
here in the kitchen."
Berta came in immediately; she never wanted them to
set foot in the kitchen. Not even during these hours of full pardon,
forgetfulness, and regained happiness could she avoid this horrible slight!
Because, naturally, the more intense her raptures of love for her husband and
daughter, the greater her loathing for the monsters.
"Get them out of here, Maria!" Throw them
out! Throw them out, I tell you!"
The four poor little beasts, shaken and brutally
shoved, went back to their bench.
After lunch, everyone went out; the servant to
In the meantime, the idiots had not moved from their
bench the whole day. The sun had crossed the wall now, beginning to sink behind
it, while they continued to stare at the bricks, more sluggish than ever.
Suddenly, something came between their line of
vision and the wall. Their sister, tired of five hours with her parents, wanted
to look around a bit on her own. She paused at the base of the wall and looked
thoughtfully at its summit. She wanted to climb it; this could not be doubted.
Finally she decided on a chair with the seat missing, but still she couldn't
reach the top. Then she picked up a kerosene tin, and, with a fine sense of
relative space, placed it upright on the chair -with which she triumphed.
The four idiots, their gaze indifferent, watched
how their sister succeeded patiently in gaining her equilibrium and how, on
tiptoe, she rested her neck against the top of the wall between her straining
hands. They watched her search everywhere for a toehold to climb up
higher.
The idiots' gaze became animated; the same
insistent light fixed in all their pupils. Their eyes were fixed on their
sister, as the growing sensation of bestial gluttony changed every line of
their faces. Slowly they advanced toward the wall. The little girl, having
succeeded in finding a toehold and about to straddle the wall and surely fall
off the other side, felt herself seized by one leg. Below her, the eight eyes
staring into hers frightened her.
"Let loose! Let me go!" she cried,
shaking her leg, but she was captive.
"Mama! Oh, Mama! Mama,
Papa!" she cried imperiously. She tried still to cling to the top of the
wall but she felt herself pulled, and she fell.
"Mama, oh, Ma-----" She could cry no more.
One of the boys squeezed her neck, parting her curls as if they were feathers,
and the other three dragged her by one leg toward the kitchen where that
morning the chicken had been bled, holding her tightly, drawing the life out of
her second by second.
Mazzini, in the house across the way, thought he
heard his daughter's voice.
"I think she's calling you," he said to
Berta.
They listened, uneasy, but heard nothing more. Even
so, a moment later they said good-by, and, while Berta went to put up her hat,
Mazzini went into the patio.
"Bertita!"
No one answered.
"Bertita!
He raised his already altered voice.
The silence was so funeral to
his eternally terrified heart that a chill of horrible presentiment ran to his
spine.
"My daughter, my
daughter!" He ran frantically toward the back of the house. But as
he passed by the kitchen he saw a sea of blood on the floor. he
violently pushed open the half-closed door and uttered a cry of horror. Berta,
who had already started running when she heard Mazzini's anguished call, cried
out too. But as she rushed toward the kitchen, Mazzini, livid as death, stood
in her way, holding her back.
"Don't go in. Don't go in!"
But Berta had seen the blood-covered floor.
She could only utter a hoarse cry, throw her arms above her head, and, leaning
against her husband, sink slowly to the floor.
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden