The threads of the heart, p.12
The Threads of the Heart, page 12
From that point on, the olive grove man had only one thought.
His will hitched itself to his desire and worked on it relentlessly.
The red rooster
Clara was more than a year old the day my mother discovered the red egg.
Clara was a year old and the olive grove man had just snagged his coat on the window of the woman who had faded on her wedding day.
The hens were moving, intrigued, around the ridiculous object that one of them had just laid.
Alerted by his wife’s cries, José came running into the henhouse. He tore the scarlet egg from her hands and forbade her to destroy it, which was what she had wanted to do, convinced as she was that nothing good could come out of such a shell.
“Look at the color of your son’s hair before you open your mouth!” he grunted, and gave a dismissive shrug.
She ought to keep her mouth shut anyway, he would deal with this thing personally! He would build it a little box and keep it at the right temperature in his forge, close to the fire, until it hatched. My mother did not insist and watched with a sigh as her husband walked away.
During the days that followed, José never let the red egg out of his sight, and when the children brought him his meals he would tell them the same story repeatedly:
“You’ll see, from this red egg a red chick will emerge, as red as fire, a scarlet chick, a chick I will make the finest fighting cock in Spain. This egg will change our lives. It’s written that I won’t die a wheelwright and that, however many of them there are, my daughters will all find good husbands.”
He had never before spoken so much to them.
My mother was worried at this new fad of his, if the egg did not hatch, how long would her husband wait like this before he admitted that it was empty? As for the children, they feared that some dragon might emerge from the shell to devour them all. Didn’t hens sometimes give birth to snakes?
While Clara took her first steps, arms stretched towards the sun, José sat on his egg.
One afternoon, José came out of his forge gesticulating wildly, so excited that he could not express himself normally. Blanca would have to come immediately, hot water needed to be got ready, the neighbors had to be informed: the red egg was hatching.
Making sure the news did not spread, Frasquita put on a little water to boil—she could always drown whatever was coming out, she thought—while all the children rushed after their father into the forge, where the blood-colored shell was starting to move. With a few thrusts of its beak, the little red thing destroyed its shelter and found itself in the open air, its down all sticky, with six pairs of eyes staring at it.
From the red egg, a red chick had emerged, a red chick José would make the finest fighting cock in Spain.
Struck dumb with emotion, he watched as his fortune got up on its legs and shook itself.
Should it or should it not be given a welcoming bath? Should it be introduced to its fellow birds? Was it hot? Was it cold? What would they call it?
When Blanca came as she did every day to see Angela, she immediately asked, jovially, for news of the egg and was told that José had given his own name to the red chick it had contained. My mother, exasperated, was making the soup for the next morning in silence, and Blanca burst into broad laughter that shook the house and made José come out of his lair.
“Blanca, come and take a look at my miracle! A magnificent bird! A real marvel! Fierce and loud, a real dragon, the children are saying! No rooster will ever dare face this champion, we’ll set off on the roads of Spain to make our fortune. You’ll see, this rooster will be our goose that lays the golden egg!”
“Are you sure it really is a little rooster and not a common pullet?” asked Blanca.
José laughed. “Oh, yes, it’s a male all right! I’ve spent enough time with hens to tell the difference! I’m going to finish the work I have in progress in the forge and then I’ll devote myself to training him. Look! He follows me everywhere, he must think I’m his mother!”
“So this is him, is it? His feathers really are a strange color. You aren’t having us on, are you? You haven’t dipped them in blood?”
“Blood isn’t that color! Red like that doesn’t exist!” Then, directly addressing the tiny thing cheeping on the ground: “You and me, my chick, we’re going to conquer the world.”
The chick scurried after José as he wandered about the room, raving. On several occasions, the man narrowly missed the little beast, unaware of the danger his fortune was running as he walked up and down without looking where he was putting his feet. As she watched, Frasquita hoped with all her heart that he would crush it.
It was the time of the first swallows. Outside, the shadows of the birds flecked the white walls with brief dark patches then spurted off in all directions like sparks from a fire. José wanted his chick to live with its own kind and find its place among them. But he was unable to shake it off in the henhouse: the creature stayed right behind him, seeing nothing but the big shoes it kept following. Several times, José took his chick to the backyard and tried to leave it there, but the little red thing simply stuck to his heels. For the first time, Frasquita opposed her husband’s wishes: she refused to let the chick sleep between José’s shoes at the side of the marriage bed.
“How do you want this thing of yours to become a fighting cock if it has no idea what it looks like?” my mother said, unceremoniously throwing the tiny red ball out of the room. “You have to leave it out there with the others, then if it survives, it may know how to fight!”
My father followed his wife’s advice and went down to sleep among the hens. He huddled on his bench while the chick curled up against his old leather shoes.
Early in the morning, Frasquita found her man lying full length beside the bench. She dislodged his champion from the shoe in which it had huddled and shoved under the half-asleep José’s nose the droppings with which it had lined the inside of its nest.
“I’ll walk barefoot if need be,” José screamed, as red as his rooster. “Just don’t come and provoke me with any more of your stupid remarks!”
My mother did not dare make the slightest comment. She watched in silence as the shoes died a death and her husband pampered his chick more than all his children put together. In a few weeks, the young animal had liberated itself from its two adoptive mothers—the mud-caked shoes—and begun to face its life as a fowl.
The sumptuous scarlet and crimson plumage that fascinated men did not impress its brothers—not until the massacre.
By the time the day came for it to conquer its territory, the young rooster’s spurs, sharpened by its master, were already of a decent size and the wattles with which its head was adorned gave it the air of a wild beast.
Little Angela, then aged six, who already knew many things her parents did not, would wake up every morning with the crowing of the old rooster and, after making sure that nobody was watching, enter the world of the birds.
That morning, in the half-light of a gray dawn, she froze at the sight of the slaughter.
The old king of the backyard had doubtless crowed once too often. That peaceful daily song must have disturbed some delightful dream in the mind of the Red Dragon. Seized with a sudden rage, the young rooster found no opponent of its own caliber and sacrificed its male fellows one by one, beginning with its father, knocking him off his throne of loose stones and droppings from which he had just given his last cry.
Alerted by the hens’ almighty racket, Frasquita and José came to see the aftermath of the massacre, which marked the beginning of a new era in the backyard. Nobody would ever again challenge the power of this fighter that had been born by chance in the midst of these harmless domestic animals. It had killed its brothers to make sure of this victory, attacking their carcases over and over until the last breath had gone from them.
After the slaughter, when the backyard was carpeted with bloodstained feathers and the corpses of the defeated, it slowly walked through its territory and let out a long cry to announce itself to the living. The hens started at it with their round eyes. Now their sole master, it flung itself on them, its head and spurs still red with its father’s blood, to satisfy that violent desire that had overwhelmed it in the morning, marking the dawn of the mating season.
“I absolutely must cut off your appendages,” Jose said. “They’re too easy to catch hold of and they put you at a disadvantage! Look at this! The blood is dripping down and half blinding you! Coxcomb, barbs, earlobes, everything has to go! They may look impressive, but they’re too fragile and they don’t serve any purpose. Any opponent that gets hold of you there would kill you easily. But what anger! No need to teach you to hate your fellows, you carry that hatred in you!” He turned to his wife and daughters. “Come on, girls, to work! We have to pluck them all! What we can’t eat, we’ll sell. As for you, my darling, no question of making you a common king of the backyard, your master has other plans for you!”
Some time later, the wheelwright turned cockfighter took the young prince from its kingdom and, armed with a simple pair of scissors, cut off its scarlet wattles. He did it clumsily, the amputated bird gave a brief cry of pain and José panicked at the sight of all the blood his hero was losing. He called for help, his hands, clothes and face all spattered with blood.
Without a word, Angela approached the man and his animal and stopped the bright red shower raining on both of them by applying a few downy feathers to the wounds. Then she went back to help her mother.
The young rooster was saved.
The warrior bird drew the men of the village to the Carasco house. They came back time and again to share José’s enthusiasm and to witness the training of the phenomenon, the exercises, the massages, the rubbing, the cleaning, all the care and attention its master lavished on it. The bird would be made to sit for long periods on a trapeze, trying to maintain its balance, and the children took turns in running with it to develop its breathing, speed and resistance.
The house and yard echoed until late into the night with the voices of men. Jose was jubilant. He would engage in heated debate, his rooster sitting peacefully on his knees, and, as he spoke, he would distractedly smooth its feathers.
When his champion was ready and raring to go, no other bird capable of fighting him could be found in the village. Nobody in Santavela wanted to commit his own rooster to a battle that everyone considered lost in advance. Truly, the Red Dragon was a fine-looking bird: Jose had cut his feathers the way he had once seen a little nomad bird breeder do.
The day José decided to set off in search of an opponent for his rooster, Clara, his youngest daughter, was almost two.
Clara was almost two and the olive grove man had not forgotten the woman who had mended his soul.
The first fight
The whole village accompanied José and his rooster to the muddy lane that led over one hill after another in the crumpled landscape before descending toward the world. He had tied his donkey to our handcart, which was filled with provisions and gifts for the road. The Red Dragon moved about in its cage as the villagers embraced this man, one of their own, who was setting off alone beyond the horizon to seek fame and fortune.
“I’m going to come back rich!” he cried excitedly. “From the red egg came a scarlet chick I’ve made into the finest fighting cock in Spain! And this rooster will be our goose that lays the golden egg!”
In the middle of the crowd, he could barely see his children, who were standing on the tips of their frozen little toes and waving to him.
He disappeared around a bend in the road.
But there, someone was waiting for him.
On the road a man was standing, stiff and dark in his fine mended coat. At his feet, beside his shadow—it was young still, his shadow, small and tender as a shoot, a child’s shadow—a fearsome rooster, motionless and still gray with the dust of summer, was dozing in an openwork box.
The olive grove man had an opponent to propose: this wild rooster he had discovered on his lands, no doubt a runaway from some gypsy caravan that had come from the East.
“And who would bet on this ugly, plucked beast?” asked José with a sneer.
“Me!” replied the man, his voice oddly childish at times. “I’ll gamble alone against everyone if need be. The match will take place in the village before you leave. That way we’ll all be able to see your bird fight. You can go off on your journey afterwards . . . ”
They came to an agreement: José would not bet money, Heredia did not want any, he preferred to leave money matters to others. Between the two of them, there had to be something more personal. They decided that the stake would be the Carasco house on one side and half of Heredia’s olive grove on the other. The fight would take place in a week in the village square.
Halted in his travels a mere hundred yards from Santavela, José wrapped himself in a thick blanket, settled himself in a fold in the ground to have a bite to eat, and started daydreaming.
An olive grove! He who had never owned any land other than the backyard where he kept his poultry! An olive grove that employed the villagers during the winter! That olive grove for which their ancestors had built a village on the edges of the world, deciding to stop there and instead of hiring themselves out as day laborers and work only for the Heredias, their olives, their animals, their cornfield, their vines on the southern hills. That forest of loose stones concealed riches to which he had never had access, and now this young madman was offering it to him on a whim, just to keep him in the village and see his rooster fight! A few pieces of furniture against land planted with wild trees that brought in a good income!
Sated with bread and daydreams, José retraced his steps, full of confidence and happy to announce young Heredia’s challenge to all and sundry.
The men of Santavela were delighted by what the young madman had promised. Heredia himself invited them that very day to the old mill in the olive grove, from which he had cut the sails long ago to make it his headquarters, and they were all able to watch the opponent in his enclosure. The pitiful beast, tied to a post by one foot, completely indifferent to their amused stares, was scratching at the icy ground in a vain search for insects.
“Where did you find this champion of yours?” the men asked.
“On the hills. I’ve been chasing him for a long time. I finally trapped him using another rooster that I’d hobbled as a bait. God alone knows where he’s from, but I might as well warn any of you who might come along later and accuse me of deception, don’t trust the way he looks, he’s a nasty beast who doesn’t like either his fellow roosters or men. He wounded me when I tried to free him from the trap.”
“And have you given this chicken of yours a name?”
“No. Call him whatever you like.”
“José has given his rooster his own name, but we all call him the Red Dragon. Your animal is black and lives among the olive trees. Why not just call him Olive?”
By the time they got back to the village, the men had all chosen the same champion, there being no doubt in their minds as to the victory of the Red Dragon. Young Heredia was clearly out of his mind to commit his fortune this way to a fight he was bound to lose. But of course, when you were rich . . .
For two days, olive picking was neglected so that the men could build a little arena in the fountain square, some ten feet in diameter, raised on a platform and surrounded by a wooden fence low enough to allow the spectators to watch the fight. The only villager who did not want to bet on either of the two roosters was appointed the referee. The priest had refused to take on this role. He would watch the fight out of curiosity, he said, but they shouldn’t count on him for anything else. No, he wouldn’t bless any rooster, not José’s or any other! No, he wouldn’t say a mass to boost anyone’s chances! No, God would take no part in it!
The shoemaker, who could write, was given the task of noting down the bets, and he was kept busy.
José, on his side, was methodically preparing his bird for the flight. He loved that rooster: he had raised it since the first day, he knew every muscle in its body, had cut every one of its feathers. On the eve of the great day, he fed it raw meat and garlic, checked its spurs to make sure they were as sharp as bronze spikes, and rubbed it down for a long time.
The local men had started drinking to warm themselves up and had gathered around the little plaza. All these male voices raised quite a din. There was no doubt as to the outcome of the fight, but they placed bets on how long it would last. Olive would be killed in thirty seconds by a blow to the brain from the Dragon’s spur! It was what they expected, but all the same, the fight had to last a little while, they had to have a bit of fun! They hadn’t built all this for nothing! Oh, as long as they were fleecing Heredia, it was worth being here! It was certain that there was more to be plucked from the man than from his animal! What’s more, his three brothers were also coming to play against their own blood. Would Heredia be able to reimburse everybody if his brothers got involved? Yes, to the village he had wagered money, but his brothers were only interested in his land. When the wild rooster lost, the little general would only have his coat, his horse and his donkey left with which to go back to the city forever! Everyone remembered the mountains of lost knucklebones . . .
Now they had their revenge.
Heredia arrived carrying his rooster in a solid hessian sack. He had great difficulty in extricating the bird, pulling it out roughly at the last moment, avoiding as best he could the vigorous thrusts of its beak. The animal and its master hated one another, that much was plain to see.
He remembered the iron grille that day she had first appeared to him. The window. The burning air. The hour without shade.
José was holding the Red Dragon by its body. In its master’s hands, the rooster seemed perfectly calm.
