Giobany Arévalo > Gabriela Torres Olivares >Anuar Jalife - Literal

Both Vignettes
Eduardo Halfon
Translated to English by the author
The Sculptor
He grabbed a chunk of wet clay and while he worked it in his hands he told me that his mother had
been an expert in slaughtering chickens.
“We had a barn, near Fraijanes.”
I walked over to the big metallic coffee machine, like those found in an offi ce. I poured myself
some more. I remained staring at the plaster molds piled on a shelf.
“I don’t know why my mother had decided to breed chickens. I was very young. But I remember
she started with ten or twelve chickens and a spotted rooster and in no time at all she had fi lled up the
barn with chickens and was selling them everywhere.”
He was breaking off little pieces of clay and then sticking them to the sculpture as if they were
little pieces of dirty gum.
“My brother and I would accompany her on weekends. The rooster was our mascot. We had to
bathe it and feed it, supposedly, but always wary of his spurs. His name was Adam.”
He turned the sculpture, perhaps looking for a new angle or an incomplete detail.
“But what we liked most was to watch our mother slaughtering chickens.”
He became silent in the middle of the story. I also stayed silent, drinking my watered-down and
bitter coffee and contemplating his struggle to give form to that deformed something.
“My mother would sit in her little wooden stool in the middle of a patio fi lled with chickens, and
she’d start picking them up from the ground and putting them between her knees and she would then
break their necks with one solitary crack of her fi ngers. Like that. Quickly. One after another.”
I watched his hands pressing the clay. I imagined his mother’s hands pressing the neck of a
chicken.
“One day my father showed up.”
Again he dipped his hand in water. He shook-off the excess. He seemed to be caressing the
sculpture with his wet fi ngers.
“He said that that wasn’t the way to do it, that he would show us how to kill a chicken. And after
chasing it in the patio for a while, he fi nally caught a big white one.”
He kept caressing the clay, softly, almost tenderly.
“He placed the chicken on my mother’s wooden stool. The chicken was fl uttering and shaking
all over and I remember my father straining to keep it still. He tried to whack it on the neck with
a machete. But the machete kind of bounced off and only split open the poor chicken’s vein and
everything started fi lling up with red.”
His eyes were fi xed on one point of the sculpture that he was rubbing forcefully with his
thumb.
“Then my father just let out a scream, cursed at my mother, and stormed off in a rage.”
He was holding the sculpture with both hands, a sculpture that might have been a man fl ying, or
a naked woman on her knees, or a wild beast.
“My mother had to fi nish killing it.”
I watched how he washed his hands, how the water slowly turned a light shade of copper.
“The following week my father sold the barn.”
16 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2009