Languidly Your Spirit
(For Spanish translation click here)

We had a pious age, when my father ordered our entrance into school. Priest of love, one rainy afternoon in February, mother served food of oration in the kitchen. In the corridor below, they were sitting at the table, my father and my older brothers. And my mother was seated near the same hearth-fire. They rang the bell.

—The doorbell is ringing!—my mother said.

—The doorbell is ringing!—my own mother said.

—The doorbell is ringing!—said all of my mother, touching her bowels to infinite rays, above all the heights of those who come.

—Walk, Nativa, daughter, to see who comes.

And without waiting the maternal permission, it was Miguel, the son, who went to see who came in this manner, placing himself in direct contradiction with us.

A time of roads held my family. Mother left, advancing inversely
and as if she might have said: the parts. She made it to the patio outside. Nativa cried during one of those visits, of one of those patios and of the hand of my mother. Then, and when, pain and relish, they covered our fronts with a roof.

—Why did you not let her go to the door?—said Nativa, the daughter, —you’ve thrown Miguel to his duck.

What imperfect protection, the light hand of father revealing the man, the small bones befitting the child. He could give his consent to the adventure the man would want later on. Nevertheless:

—And tomorrow to school—argued father like a magistrate before the public of every week, his sons.

—And such, the law, the reason of the law. And also the life.

Mother should have cried, she was scarcely grieving like a mother. Now no one wanted to eat. In the lips of father lips, to leave breaking, a fine spoon that I know. In the fraternal mouths, the amazing bitterness of the son was left totally finished.

Much later, unexpectedly, he left the sewer of rain and from the same patio of the bad visit, a hen, not abhorrent nor laying eggs, but brutal and black. In my throat there rose a cluck-cluck. It was old hen, maternally widowed from chickens that had not hatched. The hen, whose origins were forgotten, at this moment, was widowed from her children. All the eggs were found empty. Afterward the clucking had the verb.

No one scared her. And no one, because they were frightened stopped cooing for the great maternal indisposition.

—Where are the children of the old hen?

—Where are the chickens of the old hen?

Poor little ones! Where could they be!