Woodcocks
Winter gives way and the frozen mist melts in the beechwood forests of Asturias, where witches and owls build their nests.
That’s when the woodcocks sing from their high perches. The cocks call to the hens and the hens respond. It’s still dark when the song-soaked dance begins. Red faces, white beaks, black beards: the woodcocks and the woodhens sway like tiny carnival masks.
Hunters crouch in the forest, trigger fingers at the ready.
It’s not easy to catch woodcocks, tucked away as they are in their hiding places, safe from all danger. But the hunters know that the birds become blind and deaf for the duration of this fiesta, the mating dance.
Spiders
Step by tiny step, thread by tiny thread, the male spider approaches the female.
He offers her music, playing the web like a harp, and he dances for her while he caresses her bit by bit until her velvet body faints.
Then, before embracing her with all eight arms, the male wraps the female in his web and ties her up tight. Otherwise, she will devour him when the lovemaking is over.
The male spider loves and leaves before the prisoner awakens and insists on breakfast with the bed.
Who can fathom the fellow? He tied her to get astride her, escaped without dying inside her, and now he misses his darling spider.
Serpents
Logs ablaze, sausages spitting juices; roast meat emitting the most sinful aromas. In front of his big stone house in the Sierra de Minas, deep in the forest, Don Venancio was throwing a barbecue for his friends from the city.
They were about to tuck in when the youngest son, still a boy, announced, “There’s a snake in the house.”
Raising a stick, he asked, “Shall I kill it?”
He was given the go-ahead.
A little later, Don Venancio went inside to check on the boy’s work: it was a job well done. The head, now crushed by blows, still bore the mark of a yellow cross. It was a cross-snake, and a big one, measuring two yards, maybe three.
Don Venancio congratulated his son, served the meat, and sat down. The barbecue went on at length with seconds and thirds and much wine.
At the end, Don Venancio raised his glass to the matador, offering him the skin as a trophy, and he invited all to come and see. “It was enormous, the bitch.”
But when they entered the house, the serpent was gone.
Don Venancio gnashed his teeth and said there was nothing to be done. “Her companion must have carried her off to their cave.”
It’s always that way, he said. Whether male or female, the widow or widower always comes for the dead.
Then everyone went back to the table, to the wine and the chatter and the jokes.
Everyone, except Pinio Ungerfeld, who told me this story. He could not. He remained in the house a long while, staring at the dry black stain on the floor.
Afterlife
The sun is setting behind the cypresses when Aurora Meloni reaches the cemetery of San Antonio de Areco. They had phoned her. “We need the space. You understand, so many people dying.”
An employee says, “Good afternoon, señora. That comes to three hundred pesos. Here you are.”
And he hands her a plastic bag, the kind you use for putting out the garbage.
An enormous car is waiting.
The driver, dressed in black from cap to shoes, drives in silence.
She appreciates the silence.
On the other side of the window the world flows by. In a field some boys play soccer. Aurora can’t bear their insufferable joy, and she turns away. She watches the back of the driver’s neck. She does not look at the bag, which is riding on the floor.
Who is inside the plastic bag? Is it Daniel? The boy who used to sell homemade cheese and custard with her in the streets of Montevideo? The one who swore he’d change the world and ended up in the gutter on a road like this one with thirty-six bullets in his body? Why didn’t anyone warn them that it would all be over so quickly? Where are the words they never got to say? What about the things they never got to do?
The gunmen, the murderers in uniform, are still there, right where they were. But where is she? In this never-ending car ride, this rented funereal float? Is she here? Is she this woman who bites her lip and feels her eyes stinging? Is this a car? Or is it a phantom train that one day jumped the tracks and carried her off to nowhere?
Time Plays Tricks
Squatting on the bed, she gazed at him, her eyes sliding over his nakedness, from head to toe, slowly, as if scrutinizing each freckle, and she said, “The only thing I’d change is your address.”
From then on they lived together and enjoyed fighting over the paper at breakfast and cooking crazy concoctions and sleeping wrapped around each other.
Suddenly half of all that was gone.
Now this mutilated man, this he without she, tries to recall her as she was. As any of the many women she was, each with her own grace and power, because she had the astonishing habit of being reborn.
But no. Memory refuses. He can’t remember anything but an icy body empty of all the women she was.
Unibody
With the help of their white canes and a few drinks, they groped their way through the narrow streets of Tlaquepaque.
It seemed they were about to fall, but no. Whenever she stumbled, he righted her; whenever he swayed, she steadied him. They walked as a duo, and as a duo they sang. They always stopped at the same spot in the shade of the portico, and with strained voices they sang old Mexican tunes about love and war. They used some instrument, maybe a guitar, I can’t recall, to compound the racket. And between songs they’d rattle the bowl in which they collected coins from their faithful public.
Then they’d head off. Preceded by their canes, they would push through the crowd and be lost in the distance, a ragged, battered pair, each huddled tightly against the other, together as one in their shared patch of darkness under the sun.
The Kiss
Antonio Pujia randomly picked out one of the blocks of Carrara marble he’d been buying over the years.
It was a tombstone, from a grave that lay who knows where. He hadn’t the slightest idea how it had ended up in his workshop.
Antonio laid the tombstone down on a support base and set to work. He had a vague idea of what he wanted to carve, or maybe he had none. He began by erasing the inscription: the name of a man, the year of his birth, the year of his death.
Then the chisel entered the stone. Inside Antonio found a surprise waiting for him: the vein of the marble took the shape of two profiles meeting, eye to eye, something like two faces joined at the forehead, nose, and mouth.
The sculptor obeyed, carefully excavating until the encounter within the stone emerged.
The next day he figured his work was done. And then, when he lifted the tombstone, he saw what he hadn’t seen before. On the back of the stone was another inscription: the name of a woman, the year of her birth, the year of her death.
The Oldest Man in the World
It was summer, and Don Francisco Barriosnuevo had been there for countless summers past.
“He’s a glutton for years,” said the woman next door. “Older than a tortoise.”
The neighbor was scaling a fish with a knife, flies were rubbing their legs in anticipation of the feast, and Don Francisco was drinking guava juice. Gustavo Tatis, who had come from far away, shouted questions into his ear.