The Decapitated Hen

All day long, sitting on a bench in the patio, were the four idiot sons of the Mazzini-Ferraz marriage. They kept their tongues between their lips, their eyes stupid, and turned their heads with their mouths open.

The patio was of dirt, enclosed on the west by a brick fence. The bench stood parallel to it, five meters away, and there they remained motionless, their eyes fixed on the bricks. As the sun hid behind the fence, at dusk the idiots had a feast. The blinding light caught their attention at first, little by little their eyes animated, they finally laughed boisterously, congested by the same anxious hilarity, looking at the sun with bestial joy, as if it were food.

Other times, lined up on the bench, they hummed for hours on end, imitating the electric tram. Loud noises shook their inertia likewise, and they would then run, biting their tongues and lowing, around the patio. But almost always they were extinguished in a gloomy lethargy of idiotism, and spent the entire day sitting on their bench, with dangling, quiet legs, soaking their trousers with glutinous saliva.

The eldest was twelve and the youngest, nine. In their entire dirty and helpless aspect, the absolute lack of a bit of maternal care was noticeable.

Those four idiots, however, had one day been the delight of their parents. Three months into their marriage, Mazzini and Berta directed their narrow love as husband and wife and wife and husband toward a much more vital future: a child. What greater bliss for two lovers than that honored consecration of their affection, freed now from the vile selfishness of a mutual love with no end whatsoever and, what is worse for love itself, with no possible hopes of renewal?

Thus Mazzini and Berta felt it, and when the child arrived, fourteen months into the marriage, they believed their happiness fulfilled. The creature grew, beautiful and radiant, until he was a year and a half old. But in the twentieth month, terrible convulsions shook him one night, and the next morning he no longer knew his parents. The doctor examined him with that professional attention that is visibly searching for the cause of the ill, in the diseases of the parents.

After a few days the paralyzed limbs recovered their instinct; but the intelligence, the soul, even the instinct, had gone completely; he had remained profoundly idiot, slobbering, hanging, dead forever upon his mother’s knees.

“Child, my beloved child!” she sobbed, over that frightful ruin of her firstborn.

The father, desolate, accompanied the doctor outside.

“To you it can be said; I believe it is a lost case. He may improve, educate himself in all that his idiotism permits, but no further.”

“Yes!... Yes!...” Mazzini assented. “But tell me: Do you believe it is heredity, that...?”

As for the paternal heredity, I already told you what I thought when I saw your son. Regarding the mother, there is a lung there that does not blow well. I see nothing else, but there is a somewhat rough murmur. Have her examined thoroughly.

With a soul shattered by remorse, Mazzini redoubled his love for his son, the little idiot who was paying for the grandfather’s excesses. He also had to comfort and sustain Berta unceasingly, wounded to the very core by that failure of her youthful motherhood.

Naturally, the couple placed all their love in the hope of another child. This one was born, and his health and the limpidness of his laugh rekindled the extinguished future. But at eighteen months the firstborn’s convulsions repeated themselves, and the next day he dawned an idiot.

This time the parents fell into deep despair. Then their blood, their love was cursed! Their love, above all! Twenty-eight years old he, twenty-two she, and all their passionate tenderness did not suffice to create an atom of normal life. They no longer asked for more beauty and intelligence as in the firstborn; but a child, a child like all others!

From the new disaster burst forth new flames of sorrowful love, a mad yearning to redeem once and for all the sanctity of their tenderness. Twins ensued, and point by point the process of the two older ones repeated itself.

Yet, above their immense bitterness, Mazzini and Berta retained great compassion for their four sons. It was necessary to wrench from the limbo of the deepest animality, not even their souls, but the very abolished instinct. They did not know how to swallow, change places, nor even sit down. They learned at last to walk, but collided with everything, for not realizing obstacles. When washed they lowed until their faces grew bloodshot. They animated only when eating, when they saw bright colors or heard thunder. They laughed then, thrusting out tongues and rivers of drool, radiant with bestial frenzy. They possessed, on the other hand, a certain imitative faculty; but nothing more could be obtained.

With the twins, the terrifying lineage seemed to have concluded. But three years having passed, they ardently desired another child again, trusting that the long time elapsed had appeased fate.

Their hopes were not satisfied. And in that ardent yearning that exasperated itself, by reason of its fruitfulness, they grew embittered. Until that moment each one had taken upon themselves the part that corresponded to them in the misery of their children; but the hopelessness of redemption before the four beasts that had been born of them, cast out that imperious need to blame the others, which is the specific heritage of inferior hearts.

They began with the change of pronouns: your children. And as to the insult was added the insidia, the atmosphere grew charged.

“It seems to me,” Mazzini said to her one night, as he had just entered and was washing his hands, “that you could keep the boys cleaner.”

Berta continued reading, as if she had not heard.

“It is the first time,” she replied shortly, “that I see you worry yourself over the state of your children.”

Mazzini turned his face a little toward her with a forced smile:

“Of our children, it seems to me?”

“Well; of our children. Do you like it that way?” she raised her eyes.

This time Mazzini expressed himself clearly:

“I suppose you are not going to say that I am to blame, are you?”

“Ah, no!” Berta smiled, very pale. “But neither am I, I suppose!... That is the last straw!...” she murmured.

“What is the last straw?”

“That if someone is to blame, it is not I, understand that well! That is what I wanted to tell you.”

Her husband looked at her for a moment, with a brutal desire to insult her.

“Let it be!” he articulated, drying his hands at last.

“As you wish; but if you want to say...”

“Berta!”

“As you wish!”

This was the first clash and others succeeded it. But in the inevitable reconciliations, their souls united with double rapture and madness for another child.

Thus a girl was born. They lived two years with anguish on the verge of their souls, always expecting another disaster. Nothing occurred, however, and the parents placed all their complacency in her, which the little girl carried to the most extreme limits of pampering and bad upbringing.

If even in recent times Berta still took care of her children, upon the birth of Bertita she forgot almost entirely about the others. Her mere memory horrified her, like something atrocious they had forced her to commit. To Mazzini, although in a lesser degree, the same thing happened.

Not for that had peace arrived in their souls. The slightest indisposition of their daughter now cast out, with the terror of losing her, the resentments of their rotten lineage. They had accumulated bile for too much time for the goblet not to remain distended, and at the slightest contact the poison spilled out. From the first poisoned quarrel they had lost respect for each other; and if there is something toward which man feels himself drawn with cruel friction, it is, once it has begun, to humiliate a person completely. Before they still restrained themselves by the common lack of success; now that this had arrived, each one, attributing it to themselves, felt greater the infamy of the four spawn that the other had forced him to create.

With these sentiments, there was no longer any possible affection for the four eldest sons. The servant dressed them, fed them, put them to bed, with visible brutality. They were almost never washed. They spent nearly the entire day sitting facing the fence, abandoned by every remote caress.

In this way Bertita reached four years of age, and that night, as a result of the sweets that it was absolutely impossible for her parents to deny her, the child had some chills and a fever. And the fear of seeing her die or remain an idiot reopened the eternal sore.

They had not spoken for three hours, and the reason was, as almost always, Mazzini’s heavy footsteps.

“My God! Can’t you walk more slowly? How many times?...”

“Well, I forget; enough! I don’t do it on purpose.”

She smiled disdainfully:

“No, I don’t believe you that much!”

“Neither would I, ever, have believed you that much... you little consumptive!”

“What! What did you say?...”

“Nothing!”

“Yes, I heard something! Look: I don’t know what you said, but I swear to you that I’d prefer anything to having a father like the one you had!”

Mazzini turned pale.

“At last!” he murmured through clenched teeth. “At last, viper, you’ve said what you wanted!”

“Yes, viper, yes! But I’ve had healthy parents, you hear? Healthy! My father didn’t die of delirium! I would have had children like everyone else’s! Those are your children, all four of yours!”

Mazzini exploded in his turn:

“Consumptive viper! That’s what I told you, what I want to tell you! Ask him, ask the doctor who bears the greatest blame for your children’s meningitis: my father or your rotten lung, viper!”

They went on with increasing violence, until a moan from Bertita instantly sealed their mouths. At one in the morning the slight indigestion had disappeared, and as fatally happens with all young couples who have loved each other intensely, at least once, reconciliation arrived, all the more effusive the more wounding the grievances had been.

A splendid day dawned, and as Berta got up, she spat blood. The emotions and the bad night she had spent were undoubtedly largely to blame. Mazzini held her embraced for a long time, and she wept desperately, but without either of them daring to say a word.

At ten they decided to go out, after having lunch. As they scarcely had time, they ordered the maid to kill a hen.

The radiant day had drawn the idiots from their bench. So while the maid was slaughtering the animal in the kitchen, bleeding it with leisure (Berta had learned this good way of keeping meat fresh from her mother), she thought she felt something like breathing behind her. She turned around and saw the four idiots, their shoulders pressed one against the other, staring stupidly at the operation. Red... red...

“Ma’am! The children are here, in the kitchen.”

Berta arrived; she never wanted them to set foot in there. And not even in those hours of full pardon, oblivion, and reconquered happiness could that horrible vision be avoided! Because, naturally, the more intense the raptures of love for her husband and daughter, the more irritable was her mood with the monsters.

“Let them out, María! Chase them out! Chase them out, I tell you!”

The four poor beasts, shaken, brutally pushed, ended up back on their bench.

After lunch, they all went out. The maid went to Buenos Aires, and the couple went for a walk through the orchards. At sundown they returned, but Berta wanted to stop for a moment to greet her neighbors across the street. Her daughter ran off home right away.

Meanwhile the idiots had not moved from their bench all day. The sun had already crossed the fence, it was beginning to sink, and they continued staring at the bricks, more inert than ever.

Suddenly, something came between their gaze and the fence. Their sister, tired of five hours of parental outings, wanted to explore on her own. Stopped at the foot of the fence, she thoughtfully looked at the top. She wanted to climb, of that there was no doubt. At last she decided on a bottomless chair, but that was still not enough. She then resorted to a kerosene crate, and her topographical instinct made her place the piece of furniture vertically, with which she triumphed.

The four idiots, with indifferent gazes, watched how their sister patiently managed to master her balance, and how on tiptoe she pressed her throat against the top of the fence between her taut hands. They saw her look in every direction and search for support with her foot to raise herself higher.

But the idiots’ gaze had come alive; one and the same persistent light was fixed in their pupils. They did not take their eyes off their sister, while a growing sensation of bestial gluttony changed every line of their faces. Slowly they advanced toward the fence. The little girl, who having managed to wedge her foot, was about to straddle it and fall to the other side, surely, felt herself caught by the leg. Below her, the eight eyes fixed on hers frightened her.

“Let me go! Leave me alone!” she screamed, shaking her leg. But she was pulled down.

“Mama! Oh, mama! Mama, papa!” she wept imperiously. She still tried to hold on to the edge, but felt herself ripped away and fell.

“Mama, oh! Ma—“ She could scream no more. One of them squeezed her neck, pushing aside her curls as if they were feathers, and the others dragged her by a single leg to the kitchen, where that morning the hen had been bled, holding her securely, tearing her life away second by second.

Mazzini, in the house across the street, thought he heard his daughter’s voice.

“I think she’s calling you,” he said to Berta.

They lent an ear, uneasy, but heard no more. Nevertheless, a moment later they said goodbye, and while Berta went to put down her hat, Mazzini stepped into the patio:

“Bertita!”

No one answered.

“Bertita!”—he raised his voice higher, already altered.

And the silence was so funereal for his ever-terrified heart that his spine froze with a horrible presentiment.

“My daughter, my daughter!”—he ran now desperately toward the back. But as he passed in front of the kitchen he saw a sea of blood on the floor. He violently pushed the ajar door and let out a scream of horror.

Berta, who had already rushed to run in her turn upon hearing the father’s distressed call, heard the scream and responded with another. But as she precipitated herself into the kitchen, Mazzini, livid as death, intercepted her, holding her back:

“Don’t enter! Don’t enter!”

Berta managed to see the floor flooded with blood. She could only throw her arms over her head and sink down the length of it with a hoarse sigh.