Cockfight by Maria Fernanda Ampuero

Author:Maria Fernanda Ampuero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

MOURNING

For the first time in her life, Marta sat at the head of the table, and her sister, clean, dressed in white linen and anointed with perfumed oils, sat to her right. She brought out more wine before the carafe was empty, and without saying grace, she devoured the chicken, the fat drumsticks with crispy skin, caramelly, delicious, that had never ever been for her. She looked at María, who looked like a barbarian scraping her teeth against the chicken breast, thigh, wing, and she let out a slow laugh. The laughter of wine and freedom. Laughter that signaled no one else would again stand up from the head of the table and eat the golden fatness of the chicken and behold the beautiful María: her face dirty, her hands greasy, gripping the cup to take a long drink of wine, her mouth overflowing. Wine. A pair of libertine women. She wanted to say to María, Look at us, look at us, how unlike ourselves, so full of pleasure, today, when we should still be in mourning, today, when the house should be shrouded in black. We’re alone now, my sister, more than alone—without a man in the house—and you’d think we’d be trembling like kittens that’ve lost their mother.

But Marta didn’t say anything, just smiled. And María returned the smile with teeth covered in pieces of dark meat. They ate their fill and continued eating just to see what would happen, and, their bellies bulging, they went out into the yard with their arms around each other. The night was starry. The animals were asleep, the servants too. The entire world slept a snoring, drunken sleep. They had food, they had water, they had land, they had shelter. Marta could almost smell the sea like on vacation that one time, when their parents were alive, when he wasn’t him, but just another one of them: three children running on the beach and returning every now and then, Look Mama a shell, look Papa a crab. Good times, yes—the air smelled like the good days, back when Papa didn’t come home bitter, when he didn’t lash out at anyone who got in his way with that thin leather switch that quietly ripped open flesh, like it was nothing, until blood sprang up like a red surprise and stung with pain. He started with Mama, moved on to their brother and then to Marta, who managed to protect María from the switch. Papa had turned them into other people, another family. Perhaps that sacred word, family, shouldn’t even be used. Those days Papa stank, reeked of fermentation, and they hid under the bed while Mama screamed, and sometimes he traded the switch for a whip, which warned them of the coming pain with its tchas, tchas, tchas in the air.

Marta hugged her sister María tighter, looking at her childlike face, aged now but so pretty nonetheless, with those strange eyes, so green, so disturbing. She kissed away María’s tears and told her that she loved her and asked her sister to forgive her.

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