“Cain’s Feast” reads simultaneously like a biblical tale of love and infidelity and a chronicle of a murder. A devastated lover’s past and present collide as he invokes both heaven and hell upon his beloved in the same breath. A tone of ominous prophecy roves through the text; the writing follows pace, and heedlessly disrupts temporal and spatial narrative conventions. Published first in Giramondo Publishing’s HEAT magazine and written by the Mexican writer Aniela Rodríguez, “Cain’s Feast” is an anachronistic story of doomed lovers, in a translation dense with the rhythm of another language and place.
– Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights
In memoriam
To my beloved Nacho, since this feast
is more yours than mine
The shot Jocinto delivered him that day was enough for the priest to realize that heaven is a shitty invention: the futile drivel of the missals and leaflets matrons dispense when proclaiming the blessedness of Our Lord. First light was enough for us to find ourselves leaving church singing hallelujahs and giving thanks to God, for the sky to blacken and the organ to be struck dumb due to some fault in its moving parts or an anomaly in the hearts of men. Jacinto went rigid at the door. He wasn’t going to try anything, by God he didn’t want to shoot him. He had backed out of it to start with. To forget, he stepped inside the cantina, where he tossed back the bottle of whisky that was set down in front of him; it didn’t obliterate his shame, but it did give him the courage to grab the pistol his mother kept in the chest of drawers, second from the top behind the photograph of his dead father and the little socks from when he was a newborn. He was such a beautiful infant, people said, he would smile every time he was blessed, how could we have expected such a thing from the boy Jacinto when he was so good. May God be with that poor child and may He have mercy on his soul.
The day Jacinto found out Francisca was pregnant, the sky closed over and the rain pelted down in a way nobody had seen around those parts for years. The clouds blackened and the gale’s howling turned into a bald-faced silence, for the girl had been carrying the fruit of her wrongdoing in her belly for three whole months and not a soul had noticed. At the end of the day, he had done all he could to set her on a new path. They had known each other since they were kids, but when she was fifteen she had gone to the capital in search of work to support her family. And for what: it was enough to stumble across a pimp who sent her to work in La Doblado and pocketed a third of her takings. When Francisca started to get a name for herself, the son of a bitch asked for half her earnings; that was when things blew up and she came home. Nobody goes back to the place they were born with their luck all bent out of shape, but there she was: fucked over, her hair unkempt, looking to patch up her life through any new turn of events. So every now and then she slipped on her Sunday outfit and the heels one of her clients had given her and went to the main square to salvage her lost youth, though nobody approached her out of disgust, though everyone thought she stank and God had reserved a special place for her in the furnaces of hell, a woman tossed in the trash, may the peace of the Lord have mercy on your ailing soul.
How to believe in a God who brings suffering into the world and grants us peace without considering our sorrows, thought Jacinto, tottering like a small child. In one hand he held a half-empty bottle of rum and in the other the revolver he took from his mother. More than thirteen years had passed since his father died; in all that time he had never felt as alone as today, when Francisca confessed to him on her knees that the child wasn’t his and she was carrying a monster in her belly.
The woman knelt, and, gazing at her from above, the man went over every word ever invented to describe what he felt in his chest. Jacinto stopped listening; he was thinking of his father’s face the day he said the word cancer and sat down in the cane chair to await death. It arrived three months later with no cry of pain: he simply rolled over in bed and noticed the slug of phlegm in his throat that was getting harder to swallow, that was making his skin stiffer and stiffer, till the minute he stopped feeling anything and hung his head like a chicken about to die. How to believe in a God who watches on as the priest strokes your woman’s leg and croons in her ear the beatitudes of Christ. May God forgive all your sins and drag you by one foot to hell and may you be greeted by legions of demons screaming your name and pawing the cauldron where your flesh might be scorched, your eyes might fill with tears and your perversions might be noted. For fuck’s sake, Francisca, fuck all the whores in the world who fake tears and stand around with their hands in their pockets. Fuck the hopes of old and ailing men who die deprived of the consolation of a woman in their bed, may God forgive you today and forever, may He wash your wounds and bless you with a healthy child.
Since the day she arrived back in town, Francisca hadn’t slept without seeing beasts with enormous maws. She hid her longing to fall apart, but nobody could relieve her of the weight of all the women she had been those nights in the capital. Without giving it much thought, she awaited her turn in the confessionary of the town cathedral. She went in without the slightest care and, standing before the priest, let drop a string of heresies that would make anybody’s hair stand on end.
The priest nodded at all of Francisca’s secrets and for penance gave her fifty Our Fathers and twenty-five Hail Marys to be intoned aloud in perfect solitude. From the depths of his being, he pardoned the woman who confessed to having slept with more than fifty men. He was obliged by his faith to console the faithful and so let his fingers, wettened with holy water, graze her forehead, and that was when he started imagining all the caresses that had begun with the simple brush of her fingertips. He dried the girl’s tears and started to think about the way Francisca’s lips parted to receive the communion of carnal love. Only Jacinto knew of the infected sore of his marriage, a stain that would never be scrubbed away even with a change of clothes or towns. Believe in God above all else and fortune will rain down, said Jacinto, not moving. He kept drinking from the bottle while in the background the guitarrón strummed one of the many songs repeated from bar to bar. A man in the corner of the cantina racked his brain for the song lyrics; unable to remember, he swayed above the empty beer bottles and, like a fly stunned by a newspaper, fell unconscious to the table. I liked that you left in December, the other drunks kept singing, till the silence grew heavier and there was nothing to be heard but the thumps of the glasses on the bar. Nobody said a word now, they all stopped and listened to how Jacinto’s tears thundered to the beat of the booze. María, the bartender, rubbed his head. She tucked the bill into his hand and sent him home with four bruisers who didn’t have enough money to keep drinking themselves stupid. Amid the voices sounded the toasts and the songs that quickly spread the name of Jacinto, the picture of betrayal, who at the first opportunity got up and left the cantina to the patrons’ chorus: I’m not starting the new year with a love who does me wrong.
He had to walk for almost an hour to get to the jacal built on the highest part of the ridge. Hot stones worked their way through the holes in his shoes. The man on whom Jacinto intended to offload his anger was wearing a straw sombrero about to fall to pieces. You would be don Pancho, wouldn’t you? You got that right, the other replied, lifting the brim on the right side to squint at him. He looked at him as only tough guys do, withered by the glare of the sun and the plough. I don’t get what you’re doing here, why not take off to the city. Jacinto took a cigarette from his bag and sat on the curb: what you don’t get, don Pancho, is that it’s like having a splinter buried in my chest. The other didn’t bat an eyelid. He turned and blew smoke in his face. The sun announced midday and the lizards started emerging from their holes. The town was covered in a dense sheet of dust that stretched to the horizon. Now I really don’t get you, kid. One day you come looking for your father and the next you’re obsessing over a whore, what do you want me to do? Show me how to shoot this fucker, Jacinto smiled, still holding the ash-filled stub between his fingers. Straight away don Pancho recognized the boy’s locked jaw, same as his father’s so many years ago. He asked no more questions. He took the revolver from the table and let a bullet escape into the dust cloud. It slipped through and was lost like a coral snake between the huisaches. There was nowhere to hide. The bullet drew an unsteady line, like Jacinto’s gait. The organ kept playing a good while, till an out-of-tune note brought it to a halt. The screams of the choir rang out, as did those of the lectors and the altar boys who, still clutching the thurible, ran to help the fallen man. Jacinto remembered his wife’s confession as if he had lived it too. Between saints and hallelujahs, the priest had put his hand on her leg, just like that, uninvited. Despite her reluctance, he took her in silence to the priory, where he spoke very softly about the unmentionable. They didn’t come back out after that; poor Francisca was spreadeagled on the floor like a cat, enduring the holy onslaught of the priest. Fucking hell, Francisca, if only you had been a cat and not Jacinto’s woman. He wasn’t going to try anything, by God he didn’t want to shoot him. He would be a fool to want to kill a priest, but nobody knows what is to come: I started out as a goddamn carpenter’s assistant, I got five hundred pesos a week, barely enough for essentials. I told you, Francisca, stop despairing, someday you would find a job that would get us out of poverty and mean we could go back to the city, build ourselves a little house, forget the sidelong glances and the gossipy old women. I wanted to come home from work with a little box hidden in my jacket, get down on my knee and tell you the words you always wanted to hear, my Francisca, wanted to give you a ring as big and beautiful as the hills rising in the distance that we look at every afternoon when the sun’s rays get all tousled by those hills’ curves. Francisca turned around. Only Jacinto remembers the moment she stopped time to tell him she would follow the ways of the Lord, hitched up the ruffles of her skirt and tried to apologize for her neglect. She kept track of the men she had slept with and was sure that once again, just like on other occasions, she had fucked everything up. She also knew she was still very young and, if she wanted, she could ruin her life another seven times over. She didn’t say anything else to Jacinto. She wasn’t in love. She was going to have the baby because for some time now she had been tempting fate and getting away with it. Jacinto had started crying, cursing each of his ancestors for giving him the dog luck of getting tangled up with a backcountry whore.
Francisca turned around. She was careful about the sound her steps were making on the sidewalk. She remembered the furrowed brow of the priest when he told her that hell doesn’t have room for all that many souls. And if you’re careful, he murmured in her ear, you can have the best of both worlds, and Francisca took his hand, trying to understand the meaning of his words, and Francisca shut her eyes, pretending not to feel the cassock slide across her thighs, and Francisca squatted down. Only Jacinto remembers the thundering of his tears when they fell to the floor, when, swollen with rage, he stopped crying to take off his trousers and stare at the portrait of his father, who observed him from where he was nestled in one of the drawers between old underwire bras and shameless love letters. It was the only gravestone Jacinto had known, the only place where he could pay his respects to the private who smiled in a yellowing photograph, shouting, deep inside, the only word he had uttered since the day he closed the door and rolled over in bed. The charging bullet was enough to remind the priest what color the devil’s eyes are. He was slow to recognize the crackle of gunpowder in his guts. At first it was a coldness, like what you feel when you’re about to fall asleep and a jerk yanks you back into the world. Then, the wound began to grow so large that he noted very clearly how his limbs shrank. He looked at Jacinto, whose shirt was untucked and whose belt was dancing in its loops. Little was left of the smile that made Francisca quiver on the floor of that narrow room and turned her into a cat in heat.
The bullet penetrated his belly: at first it seemed cold and then like the hot horn of a bull. A fever started rising in him and as it did he wished he had never shown up to deliver the sermon that day.
The priest was overcome by thirst and in a few seconds his muscles grew heavy. In his head he recognized Francisca’s name. He had no time to regret anything; he looked at Jacinto’s left hand still holding the revolver. Jacinto paused a moment, with the need for who knows what. The priest remembered Jacinto as a boy running in the atrium, rolling around in glee beneath the altar while up there the crucified figure of Christ was trembling in anguish from the three nails. He squeezed the rosary and had no option but to listen to the last notes of the organ, while the choir of old ladies repeated in unison: Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord; that walketh in his ways!
Written by Aniela Rodríguez and translated by Elizabeth Bryer. Originally published in HEAT, in 2022, which describes itself as an Australian literary journal “renowned for its…commitment to publishing innovative and imaginative poetry, fiction, essays, criticism and the hybrid forms.”