We should have been drinking a blood-red wine to toast the reunion. A glass foaming and red. In that way we might have rounded off the day with a flourish, before it ended up like something perfectly organized, and not like the result of passion.
We were in your house and you were moving around like a rooster in its cage. I didn’t recognize those gestures that went a different way from your words.
I thought to myself, while you were pacing with the jug of water insisting I have some, that the eyes of a rooster aren’t made to look but to squint, bore into you and fix there; the eyes of a rooster are stony. Three glasses of water you poured me and waited for me to drink them. But you didn’t have any.
Your eyes didn’t watch me; mine could have followed your hands while they made strange journeys. We had put off this moment as long as possible. Two months had gone by since our father’s death and we hadn’t seen each other once, both living in this city where we are all neighbors.
Roosters don’t fall in love, they mount; they don’t kill, they dismember; they don’t eat, they swallow. We’d grown up surrounded by roosters and something of their blind unconscious life had infected us. Our father raised the fighting cocks more as a calling than a business. And there you were, strutting from your room to the kitchen where you had me sit down, expounding upon your important place in society since you’d become a doctor. I heard you out in silence, very quiet, with the patience I had adopted ever since the day we agreed upon for the will.
But it had never crossed my mind that you might show up with a revelation so shameless: there was nothing to divide—our father had arranged it that way, in gratitude for your having upraised the family name to heights unmatched by any of our forebears, and much less so by those who had dishonored the family. My case as a shoemaker—irremovable blot upon the family name—was mired between your intonation and your smile. When I reminded you there were things that couldn’t be divided up and which we would have to sell, you smiled wide and told me that there was cutlery, made up of plates and pots without any two pieces the same, because I could use them, and some amulets for good luck, which was nothing to snuff at. You had laid aside for me, too, some photos of people we didn’t know, and which Dad liked to have over the sideboard, as if ensuring thereby the unity of the family. Remember, my dear fellow—concluded my brother with the affectation he’d picked up in his time studying—that I tried my best with what I know of law with our father’s documents. And he would sign whatever I put in front of him.
The blade for cutting leather, which I had brought strapped with a rubber band to my left leg, entered in the middle of your chest, just at the moment in which a smile was approving of the skill with which you’d made your showing. After my steel, your eyes were left staring sightless, wide open, glassy, like the eyes of a rooster.
Trad. Wesley Schantz
Wesley Schantz nació 31 julio 1987 en estado de Maryland, Estados Unidos.
Estudió en Washington College, también en Maryland. Graduado en 2008 con BA en Español. Proseguirá estudiando por un MA en humanidades, en St John's College, en Maryland. Participa en el Programa Fulbright, visitando liceos públicos y profesores de ingles en formacion (en el CeRP y IPA) de Uruguay.