The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy

by Margaret Jull Costa

`Don't pay any attention to my uncle, he's a bit reesty.'

  Cervantes didn't know what Dona Catalina meant.

  `Reesty?'

  `He's always had my best interests at heart,' she added, still in a low voice, `but he is a bit cockieleekie.'

  That explanation wasn't particularly clear either, nor did it clarify her previous one.

  Dona Catalina had run together those three words, `a bit cockieleekie', and it seemed to Cervantes that, in the staccato way she said them, there was an allusion to the clucking of chickens.

  From the day that Cervantes signed the marriage contract, he began to see in Dona Catalina's profile a vague similarity to that of a bird. One day, he discovered that she could look to the side with one eye, without turning her head, and that her eyes were becoming flatter, like the eyes in Egyptian paintings, and could move independently of each other.

  This observation inclined him to presentiments which he himself dismissed at first, but to which he returned later as if, in them, lay the solution to a mystery. Despite these observations, Cervantes genuinely loved Dona Catalina, otherwise they would not have got married. That is one point on which everyone agrees.

  In the birth of that love, various factors came together, as they usually do. Cervantes was not a man to fall in love at first sight; indeed he distrusted such things, although, naturally, the naked call to the senses played its part in the arousing of the attention that necessarily precedes love. Dona Catalina was very young, almost a child, yet she had been the one to initiate the relationship that so swiftly carried her to the altar. It is worth remembering precisely what happened because there was something odd about it, almost like something out of a novel.

  Two years before, Dona Catalina and her brother had gone to Madrid and, contrary to her brother's wishes, she went to see a play by Lope de Vega at the Principe open air theatre. In the play, the title of which I cannot now recall, the heroine declared her love to the leading man and then placed him in various equivocal situations in order to win his heart and to put him in the dilemma of either marrying her or gaining the reputation of a cad. The young woman came and went dressed as a man and became embroiled in exploits as dangerous as any experienced by some of Calderon's heroines. All this struck Dona Catalina as unusual and daring, but perfectly possible since it happened in the theatre and was applauded by the audience.

  Dona Catalina did not go quite that far with Cervantes. Nevertheless, emboldened by Lope's play, she wrote Cervantes a love letter. The letter, however, was anonymous and unsigned. Cervantes received the letter, for which he had to pay the postage - not the first time that this unlucky circumstance had obliged him to put his hand into his own pocket - read it with a smile and said to himself `It's a shame I don't know who this young woman is, nor where she lives, because she does seem to be truly innocent and truly in love.'

  From the experience of many years, Cervantes knew that, generally speaking, he only attracted two sorts of women: the stupid and the mad. Sometimes he had wondered if the same thing happened to all men and that perhaps there were only two sorts of women in the world, whom only sweet maternity would one day redeem from their madness or stupidity. But he couldn't quite work out from Dona Catalina's letter which she was. She seemed neither stupid nor mad. She seemed merely rather outspoken and a little frightened by her own boldness. Twice in the letter she declared herself to be a maid.

  Cervantes took a long time to realise that the letter had been written by Dona Catalina. In fact, he didn't find out until after they were married.

  For her part, the young girl who had written the letter spent a year waiting for a reply. She couldn't understand why her beloved did not answer. She forgot that she hadn't signed the letter and that she hadn't given a return address. How could he respond? And the days and the nights passed without her receiving a reply, which made her feel humiliated and ashamed. Nevertheless, she found a way of meeting Cervantes and making advances that were half-coquettish, half-shy. Cervantes noticed and, like any other man, took the bait. His bride's embarrassment, or rather her feeling of frustration, lasted for some time, until Cervantes found out what had happened and said, laughing: `How could I answer, if you didn't put your name at the bottom of the letter?' And he showed her the letter, which he had carefully preserved.

  By then, Dona Catalina had already begun to cease being a woman. That is, while still continuing to be a woman, her transformation into a chicken had already started. And no one could do anything about it.

  Some readers may find it odd that I should write these pages about Cervantes' wife, but I think the moment has come to tell the truth, the truth which was hidden in vain by Rodriguez Marin, Cejador and others who wished to preserve the decorum of the Cervantes family. There was always a mystery about Cervantes' conjugal relations, which no one denies. Why was his wife never seen living with him in Madrid or in Valladolid? It is as if he wanted to hide her away in the rustic gloom of the village. Why did he not take her with him? Some Cervantes scholars know why, but they still keep it a secret. I believe the moment has come to reveal that secret. It is because his sweet wife was turning into a chicken, although even she did not realise it, especially not at first.

  Cervantes also took a while to accept the metamorphosis which was less a misfortune than what might be termed an unfortunate miracle. Cervantes did not know what to think. One night, she did seem to be aware of what was happening and she said, after looking at herself in the mirror:

  `I look a bit of a birdbrain, don't you think?'

  The writer smiled and laughingly called her his little chick; as everyone knows, lovers often give each other animal names and there are those who see in that tendency the satanic nature of sexual desire. Being a birdbrain was not so bad; that is, it was better than being a chicken. Cervantes began to observe her closely and noticed that her head was getting smaller and her legs thinner. Her chest and hips, on the other hand, seemed to be merging to form one large bulge.

  One day he decided to go off to Madrid to try and sell a play, but Dona Catalina didn't want him to go and Cervantes postponed the journey twice. On another occasion, when he got a letter from an old comrade from the battle of Lepanto, who was writing to him from Bogota - the city that was later to become the political centre of Gran Colombia - she said, stuttering a little:

  `From Bogota? A letter from Bobobogataaa?'

  And it sounded as if she were clucking the way chickens do after laying an egg. A little girl, who was Dona Catalina's niece, thought that when they laid an egg, chickens were saying: `putputputputputputput!', thus reminding people that they had a right to the corn that was given them. The little girl did a very good imitation of a chicken.

  Cervantes was fond of the little girl. One winter's day, the writer carved her a dog out of the ice on the terrace. It had snowed, and the water dripping off a walnut tree had frozen, and Cervantes, occasionally blowing on his fingers, made a sculpture from it for the little girl. She, with her thick mittens on, played with the ice dog and even gave it a collar made out of pink ribbon. Then she left it on the floor of the terrace and later, when the sun came out, the ice dog melted. The little girl looked for it in vain and very sadly went to tell Cervantes:

  `The little dog has peed himself to death.'

  The stain left by the water stayed on the floor.

  Time passed pleasantly. Cervantes laughed with the little girl and had affectionate talks with his wife, and when Don Alonso de Quesada made one of his rare visits, Cervantes did not argue with him when the good old man insisted that there was no heroism or merit in wounds caused by an arquebus, since the shot was fired from a distance, and that only wounds inflicted by the sword or the pike had any true merit. Don Alonso himself always dragged around with him a huge sword, which he wore on a goatskin baldric to save his bad back.

  Cervantes, who had lost the use of his left hand after being wounded by a shot from an arquebus and bore the scar of another on his chest, realised that Don Alonso wanted to b
elittle his glory as a soldier on land and sea. The old man had some very odd ideas. For example, he would not allow his name to be spoken at night because he saw in that fateful circumstance untold dangers that all had to do with Urganda, the unknown. He used to read books about chivalry and when, one day, Dona Catalina's brother, who was by nature impatient and a bit of a busybody, asked the gentleman what exactly he was doing in Esquivias, he smoothed his drooping moustaches and replied:

  `I'm waiting, that's what I'm doing, waiting.'

  `And what are you waiting for?'

  `I am awaiting the ineluctable end.'

  He sometimes spoke rather strangely.

  Dona Catalina did not understand what Don Alonso meant. The priest understood very well and so did Cervantes. But Cervantes had lost any respect he had had for Don Alonso, with his illnesses and aches and pains and his haughty presence, and thought to himself that a man who could refer to his death as `the ineluctable end' did not deserve much pity and that to speak in such rhetorical terms about death, with words lifted straight from some chivalresque novel, made him almost unworthy of it. Cervantes was unconsciously revenging himself for Don Alonso's views on arquebus wounds.

  The discovery of the uncle's eccentricity, the cleric's meanness and, above all, the accelerating speed with which Dona Catalina was becoming a chicken made Cervantes think about one day leaving Esquivias.

  He stayed there, though, fora while longer.

  Life was pleasant there in the spring. The terrace looked out on the farmyard, and Cervantes, who remembered the marriage contract with its details of the dowry and the number of chickens, looked at the chickens sometimes and even passed the time counting them, half-amused, half-sad.

  Sometimes he saw a sparrowhawk flying above and thought to himself that if that bird of prey swooped down and took a chicken, there would only be twenty-eight chickens left, not twenty-nine, and he felt a little anticipatory shame thinking that he might be blamed for that diminution in the family assets. For he was sure the cleric occasionally counted the chickens, or that the maid did.

  One evening, seeing that there were gypsies nearby, Cervantes went to bar the gate to the farmyard, just in case. He realised afterwards that taking that precaution was a debasement of his will, his consciousness and, above all, of his imagination.

  But he stayed on for another month or so, watching what was happening to Dona Catalina.The girl's face was becoming more angular, her little snout sharper, more pronounced, her nose pointed, and her ears were growing smaller beneath her hair. One day as he was caressing her, Cervantes discovered two feathers; he tried to pull them out and Dona Catalina squealed. They were deeply embedded in her skin. Two long feathers like flight feathers or tail feathers.

  There were other incidents too, one in particular which, though apparently trivial, was heavy with drama. Even years later, in his old age, Cervantes could never think of it without a shudder.

  One day, Cervantes happened to be out walking with the barber and the village priest - another priest, not Dona Catalina's brother, who was priest in Seseiia where he rode on an old nag - and they found amongst the rocks in a ravine a young falcon apparently fallen from its nest. It was not yet fully fledged and, like all young birds of prey, was ugly.

  Cervantes picked it up with the excitement you feel whenever you take in your hands a small wild creature, a creature of God which, because injured, is entirely at your mercy. He looked at it and said to himself `Oh, king of the air with your terrifying, hooked beak, with your wings which, when outspread, are twice the length of your body, what are you doing down here? You could easily have been killed by a dog or by some innocently cruel child. But I will take care of you and feed you until you can fend for yourself and then you will fly to the heights which are your rightful kingdom.'

  Naturally, Cervantes did not say this out loud nor did the falcon reply. Cervantes simply thought it. The others merely commented that the bird could be made into a good hunter and trained to hunt partridges or wood pigeons. Cervantes said that it would be unjust to make a slave of a bird whom God had made free, and when he went home, he fed it on small pieces of raw meat. He felt responsible for the young falcon's life.

  The bird was allowed to live freely in the house. It hopped after Cervantes and would perch happily on his knees, enjoying the warmth of his body.

  At first, Dona Catalina seemed quite fond of it, although she did complain about the mess it made everywhere. She watched warily when it was given meat to eat, but, as a friendly gesture, she put down some water for it in a bowl.

  `Don't bother,' said Cervantes, `falcons don't drink. They get enough water from the meat they eat and so they don't need to drink, at least not when they're chicks.'

  When the cleric saw the falcon, he made a face and asked:

  `Who brought that wild creature into the house?'

  He said that such birds were not edible and there was therefore no point in taking them in. At the same time, Dona Catalina kept saying that the bird, which she called a vulture and not a falcon, was making a mess of the house.

  When Cervantes went to Madrid to try and sell his play, he did not return to Esquivias for ten or twelve days, and when he did, he immediately asked about the bird.

  `Oh,' said Dona Catalina, `the wretched vulture tried to escape and it almost did too, because its wings have really grown quite a lot, but I managed to clip them and now it can't fly at all and it hops after me like a frog.'

  Dona Catalina seemed to take a special pleasure in watching the falcon trying vainly to climb the three steps in the kitchen, hopping up and falling back again. Cervantes swallowed his anger and said in a loud voice, once again, that it was not a vulture, but a falcon.

  Cervantes thought that the clipped feathers were the creature's final feathers and he watched the bird in silence, filled by a deep, dark anxiety. The bird fluttered its wings, trying to fly, but, each time, was bitterly disappointed. Dona Catalina had turned it into a frog.

  That night, Cervantes was thinking about the falcon and feeling guilty.

  Seeing the falcon, that lord of the air, walking behind him and trying vainly to go up the steps in the kitchen, with one wing folded and the other dragging, Cervantes thought:

  `Why did my wife Dona Catalina do something so cruel?'

  Then it occurred to him that the progressive chickenization of Dona Catalina was perhaps at a critical stage and that her decision to clip the falcon's wings represented the more or less conscious intention of a vengeful chicken. For falcons are the age-old enemies of chickens.

  Cervantes thought that, whether knowingly or not, Dona Catalina was trying to avenge her sisters, the chickens. And he lay awake all night thinking about it. His wife was in amorous mood, but Cervantes was not interested. The falcon had trusted him, it had come to love him and to follow him, it came up to him opening its wings and flapping them as if to say: `Soon I'll be able to fly.'

  But Dona Catalina had clipped its wings. The poor falcon fluttered them in vain. Without its flight feathers it would never be able to soar. It seemed such a terrible misfortune that Cervantes even considered it might be better to kill the falcon than condemn it to an earthbound existence. He felt desolate every time he saw the bird trying to clamber up the kitchen steps and fall back again with one wing open and the other folded, but both equally useless.

  The falcon had been given a life of twenty-five or thirty years amongst the clouds, lording it over the north winds and the mountains with their glaciers and green woods. But there it was, unable to climb even two steps.

  There were other reasons for Cervantes' melancholy. He had not managed to sell his play to anyone in Madrid, and the failure worried him. He did not know what to do with himself that day, so he went out onto the terrace. He stood there counting the chickens. They were all there. The falcon was perched on his shoulder. The bird sometimes whooped and chirped, and the chickens, recognising the cries of a carnivorous bird, grew frightened. They all remained absolutel
y motionless for a moment and stared up at the falcon.

  When Cervantes saw that there were still twenty-nine chickens, he remembered that they did occasionally eat a chicken, thus upsetting the number, and yet there were always twenty-nine, and one day he noticed that, whenever a chicken was killed, his brother-in-law, the cleric, had them buy another one so that the total number in the chicken run was complete according to the marriage contract.

  It was a courtesy that made Cervantes laugh, but his laughter did not stop him worrying about the twenty-nine chickens. The fact that he had to be grateful for that courtesy left him feeling fatigued and perplexed.

  Meanwhile, Dona Catalina continued her transformation from woman to domestic fowl. The worst thing was that, as his wife was gradually turning into a chicken, Cervantes did not know what to think of her or of his brother-in-law or of old Don Alonso who came on Sunday evenings to play cards with the cleric and the priest from Esquivias. Sometimes he didn't even know what to think about himself, was it possible that he was married to a chicken? It must be, there was no possible room for doubt.

  Dona Catalina was not getting any smaller. If she did turn entirely into a chicken, she would be an enormous one, with a vast beak and comb and wings. And Cervantes watched her, although not too closely. Some changes were more revealing than others.

  Dona Catalina's way of talking remained the clearest indication. That is, not her way of thinking or of communicating her ideas, but the tone and timbre of her voice. There is a considerable difference between the voice of a human being and that of a chicken. There are birds like the parrot, the crow and the magpie that can imitate our voice, since the size of their tongue and the concave lower part of their beak allows this. But chickens usually only squawk or cackle with a tone of voice completely sui generis and quite unmistakable.

  One day, sitting at the table, she said to Cervantes, without turning her head: