How could Edgardo have hunted an animal if he didn’t even know how to love, much less kill. He’d become a useless idler, sitting all day in front of the television set or on the computer raising cattle, setting up cities, conquering nations, stealing gold, feeding entire zoos while the yard was overrun by weeds. How could he have killed an animal if he only killed monsters and mutants by way of cables and a keyboard. But all of a sudden in real life, killing a creature as tough as that one? It was incredible.

He entered the kitchen drenched in sweat that morning very early and threw it on the table. The shell slid across the old Formica top, and he, changing his voice, imitating I’m not really sure who, said to me, “Here, woman, cook it up.” The animal had its eyes closed. I thought it was alive, and I screamed as soon as I saw it there on the kitchen table, loose dirt on its paws.

“Get that creature out of here,” I said angrily, but Edgardo, triumphant, playing the role of hunter, just laughed with his hands on his hips as if he were wearing two silver pistols, a cowboy like the ones he’d admired so much in his childhood. Or one of his electronic avatars that he dressed up to go out shooting in the alleyways of virtual cities. He was playing his part. Ha, ha, ha, he laughed falsely. I’d stopped screaming when he turned around, a cowboy who’d just won a duel, and returned to the yard to continue his battle with the weeds. He’d finally decided to clear the ground, to abandon his games momentarily.

In this game I was his opponent, and I’d lost. My punishment was the animal, hard as a battle tank, resting on the table. It was as if he’d said to me, Oh, didn’t you want to live in the country? As if he’d shouted at me, Didn’t you want to return to your hometown? Then I told myself that the duel wasn’t over, and I remembered Antonia’s stories as she’d prepared the animals that my dad brought in from the woods, so many years ago in this same house. Antonia’s large hands cutting their throats, removing their skin, ripping out their long intestines like an infinite piece of bubble gum. I played with that bubble gum and with the little hearts until one day it all started to disgust me. At a certain age we became aware that they were the bowels of the animals, the ones Dad used to kill by shooting, stabbing, or bludgeoning them. From then on I told myself that I’d only eat chicken breasts, meat butchered by other people, placed in white trays and covered in sheets of transparent plastic. Pink breasts, thin, soft, with all vestiges of blood and guts cleaned and boiled away. Any traces of savageness erased by bleach and hormones. My life in the city was a life of chicken breasts until they stopped selling them, or until we couldn’t buy them anymore, it’s the same thing. Edgardo lost his job, and I was too fat for the catwalk or photo shoots, no one remembered that I had almost won Miss Venezuela. Then began our decline. The punishment for having insisted on returning to this town was having to give up the fillets butchered by others or an imposed macrobiotic diet. Having to face this armored animal. 

The duel was not over, I told myself, and I took the horrible animal over to the sink. Determined to defeat him, I stabbed at it with the biggest knife in the kitchen, making it impossible to tell whether the poor creature showed signs of previous violence. How had Edgardo killed it if he didn’t have guns, or knives, or clubs, just a rusty rake and a machete that he barely knew how to use to cut back the brush?

I saw him go back to the end of the yard, near the ravine. I saw through the window that he’d abandoned his role of macho hunter and reassumed the role of farmer, rake and machete in hand. He disappeared from my view around the spot where we were supposed to build the shacks for the mushrooms or anything else we could sell. The idea had been to grow some crop and sell it, but with my drowsiness from the pills and his non-stop games the days passed quickly. Pills for sleeping, pills to wake up, to keep from eating, laxatives, birth control. Games of building, destroying, devastating, and killing. The blood spurted out, thick like oil, I remember. Black. The shell cracked much more easily than I thought it would. The little eyes remained closed as if nothing had happened. My hands were guided by my memory, by my images of Antonia cutting the throats of animals. The rest, I don’t remember. The guts and all that . . . Just the pleasure, the wet sensation of the meat inside. A warmth that took me straight back to my childhood. It wasn’t blood, no, it was the little hearts beating in the palms of my little hands.

I looked at the sink splattered with blackish red, and I wondered how, dear God, Edgardo could’ve killed an animal like this if he couldn’t even pull the weeds that threatened to strangle us all, his son who’d come for the weekend included. Toño had come under obligation. After a two-hour trip, his mother dropped him off with his little backpack. He got out of the car wearing headphones and that eternal look of disdain. Edgardo asked him to at least take off the headphones to say hello. He was thirteen, and he wasn’t at all pleased to be trapped in the country with us. He was bored.

“Let him help you in the yard,” I said.

“What are you thinking?” he said as if the suggestion was monstrous, as if the most natural thing would be for Toño to shut himself away with his games and messages. “I’ll find someone local,” he continued before going to the end of the lot where the abyss of the valley began. Why had that kid even come? He continued his routine of games and messages as if he weren’t even here, while his father broke his back clearing the ground.

The duel was not over, I told myself as I cleaned the purple meat. Yes, I’d wanted to come, to leave behind the mediocrity of Maturín, that rainy city that didn’t have anything to offer us, I told myself as I placed the meat in a white nest of salt and tried to remember the recipe. Edgardo had accepted without any objection: he thought growing mushrooms was the business opportunity of the century: all you needed was manure and some cold damp shacks. The weather would take care of the rest, the cold air that blew between the mountain and the valley. He didn’t think twice when I suggested we move here, and he immediately had the idea to grow mushrooms.

He’d never liked the town, it was true. In the pharmacy where I bought my pills they always had Pink Floyd playing as background music, and Edgardo thought that was a bad sign. In the movie that he directed in his head we were a couple of city folks who’d come to a godforsaken town. Soon blood would spurt from the faucets or things of that nature. It’s not normal, he’d said, that music and all the bottles of aspirin. Just because of Pink Floyd in the pharmacy and the pharmacist ready to sell us any kind of pills without a prescription, Edgardo began to presage our ruin. He put off the mushrooms. However, he hadn’t looked closely at that animal he’d found as he cleaned the leaves and brush. He hadn’t noticed that its little eyes were already closed. I’m certain that it was not killed by Edgardo’s hands, delicate hands accustomed only to the keyboard and the remote control.

I baked the animal in the oven and not like Dad would’ve done it, out there, on the grill that was now knitted with vines.

In the movie I’d begun directing in my head, the vines would knit itself around our arms and legs until we were no longer able to leave the house, also knitted over with green. We wouldn’t die of starvation but of withdrawal. Withdrawal from Lexotanil or some other tranquilizer; from Age of Empires or some other computer game. Knitted in. Toño wouldn’t even realize it thanks to his headphones, the messages he constantly sent and received, because he was capable of entering such a state of absorption that hunger or any other need could be ignored or even made to disappear. However, as soon as I called him to eat that day at lunchtime, he came running.

“The power’s out,” he said, and that explained everything.

The spot where the shacks for the mushrooms would be built had been halfheartedly raked, but Edgardo looked like someone who’d cleared an entire hectare with his bare hands. He was sitting on a rock continuously wiping away sweat with the sleeve of his shirt, his back curved and a vacant look in his eyes. The solitary cowboy had been stripped down, and he was now just solitary. I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t talk to me either, his exhaustion making him unable to speak. I handed him a bottle of water and laid the foundation for my victory: a tablecloth spread across the ground, the silverware, a bottle of juice, and in the center the trophy. The meat gleaming on the plate, along with rice and plantain. With my hands on my waist, as if in place of these wide hips I had a pair of silver pistols, triumphant, I said, “Come on, man, eat.”

I’d wanted land, yes. I’d wanted to return to the town where I’d been born.

The farmer, Edgardo that is, wiped the sweat off his forehead, stamped a grudging smile on his face and sat down. We looked like the happy couple inside the farm game. He began to eat with a hunger earned through physical labor. He’d never eaten like that, not even in his days as an accountant, not even in his nights as a strategic builder of civilizations. I’d never cooked with more zest, not even in my days as a bulimic or my nights as an anorexic.

I sat on his rock as he tasted the first bites. I looked at him without looking at him because, in reality, my eyes were seeing Antonia’s hands, her large frame walking this same lot, hanging clothes, butchering Dad’s animals, telling us stories all the while. Her stories weren’t about ghosts but about death, poisonings, abortions. Mom forbade us to listen to her, but it was impossible to pull ourselves away from her skirts. Antonia, her hands, her stories, and her recipes. When he was finally able to speak, Edgardo asked me if I was going to eat.

“I’m on a diet,” I said.

“You and your endless diets,” he said and continued eating.

I decided to leave before the illusion of the happy couple came crashing down again with one of my outbursts. I wanted to say, And you, you’re OK with your belly hanging out? but instead I said, “I’m going in. I have to give Toño his lunch.”

He wanted to say, What good do your diets do? but instead he said, “A boy I hired is coming to help me finish clearing.” Maybe he wanted to say what he said. Maybe it was true that I was always putting words in his mouth, sentences that he hadn’t even thought of. What was certain was that without the cowboy gestures Edgardo looked like a third-rate actor and anything he said would’ve sounded insincere.

Back inside, I served Toño a full plate. The power’s out, he said before sitting and eating his lunch in silence. The only thing on the table was his plate. Edgardo ate at the end of the yard; he’d probably already finished, and I wasn’t planning to try a single mouthful of that animal. Toño ate without asking what it was he was eating. So distracted that he probably thought it was pork as he took hasty bites so that he could return again to his world. He’d brought a load of batteries just in case, he said.

The sink still had blood in it, little droplets that had splattered here and there, that hadn’t been washed away by my initial cleaning. Blood wasn’t gushing from the faucets but from the animals found by chance. With a rag dipped in bleach I scrubbed away the hard, black blood. Time was a drop of coagulated blood, everything was still that day with the feel of something lying in wait, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me because that’s the way time was in the country. I’d always known that.

I’d defeated Edgardo and his animal. I’d gutted and cooked it, I’d erased the stains from the sink, I’d put the creature’s armor out to dry in the sun like Antonia would have. Toño finished eating and went back to his games or messages, his headphones, or his books. And I was debating whether to serve myself some of that meat or finish off a pack of chocolate chip cookies I had hidden at the back of the pantry, when a stranger came into the kitchen through the back door, which was always open. Covered in sweat, smelling like burnt wood, he shouted that Edgardo was dying, that we had to take him to the medic, fast. He barely paused between words, he could hardly breathe, his chest rose and fell violently. For a minute I couldn’t make sense of what I was hearing, I just asked myself who this man was, whether this might be a robbery, thinking that Toño with his headphones surely wouldn’t hear anything and they could kill me right here in the kitchen, take everything we have, and Toño and Edgardo wouldn’t hear a thing. The slamming door maybe.

The stranger tugged on my arm and repeated his rushed refrain. Suddenly the midday stillness was broken, my stomach closed up like a fist: no meat, no chocolate chip cookies. Run.

We ran to the cleared section of land. It was close to the house but it seemed so far away. Rocks, branches, and Antonia’s hands slowed me down. Words, warnings, the vine that quickly knitted itself around my legs. The stranger was much faster, agile, and he leaped over the uneven ground, the branches, the brush. Once near the rock beside which Edgardo’s body had fallen, he started to shout. He’s dead, I said to myself, and I stopped running. I looked down into the valley. The green bluffs, the disorderly orange trees, the mass of dry limbs.

The boy gestured for me to help him lift the body, shouted that we had to take him quickly, that it seemed like he’d been poisoned, to hurry.

“Come on, run,” he shouted waving his arms.

I couldn’t approach the fallen soldier, the cowboy slain by the poisoned arrow, the farmer attacked by wild animals. His body lying on the ground cleared for the mushrooms and the voice of Antonia warning my father: Only eat what you kill yourself. Don’t try to take advantage of death or of other people’s hunting.

How could Edgardo have hunted an animal if he didn’t even know how to love, much less kill. I should never have asked him to abandon his digital world and enter this land of dirt, shit, snakes, and weeds. I turned around instead of running to him. I thought of Toño, who no one would miss or look for in the house. He surely hadn’t heard the shouting, lost in his world. I wanted to find him, pull him from his room so he could help me with Edgardo, to save him, too. But my foot got caught, and I fell over the edge into the ravine, dragged down by the weight of the silver pistols.