Headache [Cuento] Read online

  We do not notice the dawn, toward five o’clock we tumble from restless dreams as our hands stir to life at the usual hour, lifting capsules to our mouths. There has been a knocking at the living room door for some time now, the blows increase with fury until the sneakers put one of us on and go creeping up to the keyhole. It’s the police, come to tell us that Chango has been arrested; they are bringing the sulky back, which they suspected had been stolen and abandoned. There’s a report to sign, all is well, the high sun and the great silence of the corrals. The police inspect the corrals, one covers his nose with a handkerchief, making like he is coughing. We tell them what they want to hear, we sign, and they take their leave almost at a run, they go far back from the corrals and look at them, and at us too, stealing a glance into the interior (which emits a stagnant odor from the open doorway), and they almost hurry off. It is very strange that these brutes didn’t want to poke around a bit more. They fled this place like the plague, scurrying along the side road.

  One of us seems to decide personally that the other will take the sulky and hunt up some feed, while the morning chores are attended to. We get going without enthusiasm, the horse is worn out because it has been driven relentlessly already, consequently we go along little by little and lingeringly. All is in order, so that means the mancuspias were not the ones that are making noises in the house, the roof tiles will have to be fumigated for rats, amazing the racket that one solitary rat can make in the night. We open the corrals, gather the mothers together but there’s barely any malted oats left and the mancuspias are fighting ferociously, ripping pieces from the back and neck. The blood sprays from them, and it takes the whip and shouts to separate them. In the aftermath, the little ones nurse with difficulty and imperfectly, we can tell the chicks are famished, yet some of them wobble over to us or support themselves leaning against the barbed wire. There is a male lying dead in the entrance to his crate, inexplicably. And the horse doesn’t want to trot, we’re already ten lots from the house with further to go, and his head is nodding and snorting. Dejected, we undertake the tour, seeing how the last remnants of feed are lost in one convulsion of violence.

  We’re not all that determined to go through with it, and so we come back to the veranda. There is a dying mancuspia chick on the first step. We lift it, we put it in the basket with straw, we want to know what it is dying of but it dies the obscure death of an animal. And the locks are intact, there is no way to know how this mancuspia got out, if its death was its escape or if its escape was its death. We put ten capsules of Nux Vomica in its beak. They remain there like little pearls, which it is unable to swallow. From where we are we can see a male fallen on its hands; trying to raise itself with a shudder, letting itself fall again as if praying.

  We seem to hear cries, so near to us that we look under the straw chairs on the veranda; Dr. Harbin has prepared us for brute assaults in the morning, but we didn’t imagine it could have taken the form of a headache like this. Occipital pain, so much that there is, now and again, an explosion of crying: Apis, pains like bee stings. We throw our heads back, or press them against the pillow (somehow we’ve managed to get into bed). Without thirst, but sweating; scanty urine, piercing cries. As if bruised, sensitive to the touch; once we shook hands, and it was terrible. Until that fades, little by little, and we are left with the fear of a repetition with a different animal, since we have already had the bee, maybe next time it will be the serpent’s image. It’s two thirty.

  We prefer to complete these reports while the light lasts and we are still all right. One of us should go into town now. If we wait until after the siesta, it will be too late to make the trip, and we will remain alone all night in the house, perhaps without the means to medicate ourselves ... The siesta stagnates in silence, the rooms are getting hot, if we go into the veranda the gleam of the chalky ground, the barns, the tiled roofs, drives us back. Other mancuspias have died but the remainder are keeping quiet, one must draw near to hear them panting in their boxes. One of us thinks that we can sell them, that we must go to town. The other is getting together these notes and he doesn’t think much about anything. No going anywhere until the heat breaks, and that won’t be ‘til night. We go out just before seven, there are still a few handfuls of feed left in the barn, a fine oaten dust sifts from shaking bags, we gather it up like treasure. They get a whiff of it, and the agitation in the crates is violent. We do not dare to release them, it is better to drop a spoonful of porridge into each crate, in this way it seems that more of them are satisfied, that the distribution is more even. Nor do we dare to remove the dead mancuspias, nor is there an explanation for ten empty crates, or for how some of the young ones came to be mixed in with the males in the corral. It can barely be seen, now that night is falling all at once and Chango has robbed us of the carbide lamp.

  It seems as if, in the road, there against the mountainous willows, there were people. If we are going to send someone to town, this is the moment; there is still time. Sometimes we wonder if they aren’t spying on us, the people are so ignorant and they don’t have much between their eyes. We prefer not to think and we close the door happily, retreating to the house where everything is more our own. We would like to consult the manuals so as to avoid a new Apis, or some other, still worse beast; we leave supper and read aloud, almost without hearing. Some phrases climb over the others, and outside it is the same, some mancuspias howl louder than the rest, keeping it up and repeating a piercing ululation. “Crotalus cascavella causes peculiar hallucinations . . .” One of us repeats the line, we’re glad we know Latin so well, crotalo cascabel, rattlesnake rattle, but it is redundant because cascabel, rattle, is equivalent to crotalo, rattlesnake. Maybe the manual does not want to alarm the ailing layman by naming the animal directly. Nevertheless it does present this name, this terrible serpent . . . “whose venom acts with horrible intensity.” We have to yell to make ourselves heard over the clamor of the mancuspias, once again we can feel them surrounding the house, on the roof, scratching at the windows, against the lintels. In a way it isn’t so strange, for lately we’ve seen so many open crates, but the house is closed and the light in the dining room enwraps us in its chill protection while we shout over the scratching. Everything is clear in the manual, direct unprejudiced language for invalids, the description of the symptoms: headache and great excitement, caused by the onset of sleep. (Good thing we won’t be doing any sleeping.) The cranium squeezes the brain like a steel helmet—well said. Something living roams in circles within the head. (In that case, the house is our head, we feel the roaming, each window is an ear shut against the howls of the mancuspias right outside.) Head and chest burdened by iron armor. A red hot iron driven into the vertex. We are not sure about that word vertex, a moment ago the lights flickered, dwindling little by little, we must have forgotten to start the mill this afternoon. When reading is no longer possible, we light a candle right next to the manual so we can familiarize ourselves completely with the symptoms, it is better to know in case, later on—Stabbing pains sharp in the right temple, it is a terrible serpent whose venom acts with horrible intensity (we just read this, it is difficult to make out by candlelight), something living roams in circles within the head, we read that too, it’s just like that, something living that roams in circles. We are not worried, it is worse outside, if there is an outside. We look at each other across the manual, and if one of us gestures at the howling that keeps getting louder and louder, we just go on reading as if we were sure all of this was in there, something living that roams in circles howling at the windows, at the ears, the mancuspias, dying of hunger, howling.

 

 

  Julio Cortázar, Headache [Cuento]

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