The Obscene Bird of Night: unabridged, centennial edition

by José Donoso, Leonard Mades, Megan McDowell, Hardie St. Martin

Genres: Literary Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

Newly revised and updated by Megan McDowell, and with a new introduction by Alejandro Zambra: at last, the unabridged, centennial edition of Donoso’s terrifying masterpiece sees the light of day

Deep in a maze of musty, forgotten hallways, Mudito rummages through piles of old newspapers. The mute caretaker of the crumbling former abbey, he is hounded by a coven of ancient witches who are bent on transforming him, bit by bit, into the terrifying imbunche: a twisted monster with all of its orifices sewn up, buried alive in its own body. Once, Mudito walked upright and spoke clearly; once he was the personal assistant to one of Chile’s most powerful politicians, Jerónimo de Azcoitía. Once, he ruled over a palace of monsters, built to shield Jeronimo’s deformed son from any concept of beauty. Once, he plotted with the wise woman Peta Ponce to bed Inés, Jerónimo’s wife. Mudito was Humberto, Jerónimo was strong, Inés was beautiful—once upon a time... Narrated in voices that shift and multiply, The Obscene Bird of Night frets the seams between master and slave, rich and poor, reality and nightmares, man and woman, self and other in a maniacal inquiry into the horrifying transformations that power can wreak on identity.

Now, star translator Megan McDowell has revised and updated the classic translation, restoring nearly twenty pages of previously untranslated text that was mysteriously cut from the 1972 edition. Newly complete, with missing motifs restored, plots deepened, and characters more richly shaded, Donoso’s pajarito (little bird), as he called it, returns to print to celebrate the centennial of its author’s birth in full plumage, as brilliant as it is bizarre.

 

Read more

Release date: April 30, 2024

Publisher: New Directions

Print pages: 493

Sample

1

Misiá Raquel Ruiz (Mistress Raquel Ruiz, that is) shed many tears when Mother Benita called up to tell her that Brígida had died in her sleep. Then she calmed down a little and asked for more details.

“Amalia, the little one-eyed woman who was a sort of servant to her, I don’t know if you remember her …”

“Why, yes, Amalia …”

“Well, as I was saying, Amalia brewed Brígida her cup of tea, very strong, the way she liked it at night, and Amalia says that Brígida went right off to sleep, as peacefully as ever. It seems that before she went to bed she’d been darning a lovely nightgown, cream satin …”

“Oh, my God! It’s a good thing you mentioned it, Mother! I’ve been so upset, it slipped my mind. Have them wrap it for me and tell Rita to hold it in the vestibule. It’s my granddaughter Malú’s bridal nightgown, she just got married, you remember how I was telling you all about it. The nightgown got caught in the zipper of her suitcase during the honeymoon. I used to like to take Brígida a little needlework, to give her something to do and make her still feel like part of the family. There was no one like Brígida for delicate work like that. How good she was at it! …”

Misiá Raquel took over the funeral arrangements. A wake in the chapel of the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnación, the retreat house at La Chimba where Brígida spent the last fifteen years of her life, with High Mass for its forty women inmates, three nuns, and five young orphans, as well as Misiá Raquel’s own children, daughters-in-law and granddaughters who attended the service. Since it was to be the last Mass celebrated in the chapel before it was deconsecrated by the Archbishop and the Casa was torn down, it was sung by Father Azócar. Then, burial in the Ruiz family’s mausoleum, as she’d always promised her. Unfortunately, the mausoleum was very crowded. But, with a few phone calls, Misiá Raquel arranged things so that, by hook or by crook, they’d make room for Brígida. The blind faith the poor old woman had had in Misiá Raquel’s promise to let her too rest under that marble enabled her to live out her last years in peace: in Mother Benita’s archaic but still touching rhetoric, her death became a little flame that flickered out. One of these days, of course, they’d have to see to the weeding out of some of the remains interred in the mausoleum—all those babies from a time when they hadn’t even found a cure for diphtheria, some French governess who died far from her own country, old bachelor uncles whose identities were fading—in order to store that miscellany of bones in a small box that would take up only a little space.

Everything went according to Misiá Raquel’s plans. The inmates spent the entire afternoon helping me put up the black hangings in the chapel. Other old women, close friends of the deceased, washed the corpse, combed her hair, inserted her dentures, got her up in her finest underclothes and, lamenting and whimpering as they tried to decide the best way to dress her for the last time, finally chose her Oxford gray jersey dress and her pink shawl, the one Brígida kept folded in tissue paper and wore only on Sundays. We arranged the wreaths, sent by the Ruiz family, around the bier. We lit the candles … It’s really worthwhile being a servant like that, with an employer like Misiá Raquel. Such a good lady! But how many of us women have Brígida’s luck? None. Look at Mercedes Barroso, only last week. A public welfare truck came to carry off poor Menche, and we ourselves, yes, it’s hard to believe that we ourselves had to pick a few red geraniums from the vestibule court to dress up her coffin, and her former employers, who, over the phone, kept promising poor Menche the sun, the moon and the stars … wait, woman, wait, have patience, better wait till summer, no, better still when we get back from the summer holidays since you don’t like the beach, remember how the sea air always gives you a windburn, when we come back that’s when, you’ll see, you’ll love the new chalet with its garden, it has a room over the garage that’s ideal for you … and, you see, Menche’s employers didn’t even show up at the Casa when she died. Poor Menche! What hard luck! And she was so good at telling dirty jokes, and she knew so many of them. Who knows where she used to dig them up. But Brígida’s funeral was something else again: she had real wreaths, with white flowers and all, the way funeral flowers ought to be, and with calling cards too. The first thing Rita did when they brought the coffin was to run her hand under it to check if that part of the box was well polished like first-class coffins in the old days. I watched her purse her lips and nod approval. Such a fine job was done on Brígida’s coffin! Misiá Raquel even kept her word about that. Nothing disappointed us. Neither the hearse drawn by four black horses bedecked with caparison and tufts of feathers nor the Ruiz family’s gleaming cars lined up along the sidewalk, waiting for the funeral procession to start.

But it can’t start yet. Misiá Raquel remembers, at the very last minute, that she has a bicycle stored at the Casa that’s a bit damaged but, with a little fixing here and there, will make a perfect gift for her gardener on the feast day of St. Peter and Paul … go Mudito (I was Mudito to everyone because I was mute), take your cart and fetch it for me, my chauffeur can put it in the back of the station wagon and

save an extra trip.

“Aren’t you coming back to see us any more, Misiá Raquel?”

“I’ll have to come when Inés gets back from Rome.”

“Have you had any news from Misiá Inés?”

“Not a word. She hates writing letters. And now that the famous business of the beatification fell through and Jerónimo signed the chaplaincy of the Azcoitías over to the Archbishopric, she must be hiding her head and she’s not even going to send postcards. If she stays in Rome much longer, it’ll be a miracle if she finds the Casa still standing.”

“Father Azócar’s been showing me the plans for his Children’s Village. They’re lovely! You should see all the glass windows! The drawings made me feel a little better about … this being the last Mass in the chapel.”

“One of Father Azócar’s tall tales, Mother Benita. Don’t be so naive! He’s the worst kind of scheming priest. This property Jerónimo signed over to the Archbishop is very, yes, very valuable. The Children’s Village! I’ll bet anything they divide all this into lots after they tear the Casa down and sell it, and the money will go up in in smoke. Mudito’s taking long, Mother, and with Brígida waiting for us to bury her! What can be holding him up? Of course the Casa’s so big it takes all day to make your way through all the passageways and corridors that lead to the cell where I keep my stuff, and Mudito’s so thin and sickly. But I’m tired, I want to go bury Brígida, I want to get away, this whole business is too much for me, I’m burying a whole life, poor Brígida, only a couple of years older than I, my God, and, to keep my word, I gave up my vault in the mausoleum for her to start rotting in my place, keeping it warm for me with her remains so that when they take them out mine won’t get numb, won’t be afraid, giving up my vault to her for the time being was the only way to keep my word, now that even relatives I haven’t so much as said hello to in years come around claiming—I don’t know what makes them think they have a leg to stand on—that they must be buried in the mausoleum, but I’m not afraid that they’ll steal my place now, she’ll be there, holding it for me, heating it with her body like in the days when she used to turn down the covers and slip a good hot water bottle under them, for me to go to bed early when I came in exhausted from running around on business errands in winter. But when I die she’ll have to move out of my vault. What can I do? Yes, Brígida, yes, I’m going to hire lawyers to strip those relatives of their rights, but I doubt that we’ll win the lawsuits … you’ll have to get out. It won’t be my fault. I won’t have to answer for it anymore, Brígida, no one knows what they’ll do after I’m gone. You can’t say I haven’t been good to you, I’ve done everything you told me, but I’m afraid because when they take you out I don’t know what they’re going to do with your bones, nobody will give a damn … who knows how many years from now I’ll die, fortunately I’m in very good health, imagine, I haven’t spent a single day in bed this winter, not even a chill, Mother Benita, not a thing, half of my grandchildren down with the flu and my daughters calling me up to please go over and help them because even their servants are sick …”

“How lucky! Almost all the orphans here came down with it. But then, the Casa’s so cold, and coal is so expensive …”

“Imagine! The nerve! All this talk about a Children’s Village, and look at the miserable conditions they keep them in. I’m going to send you a little contribution next time I go out to the farm. I have no idea what’s left over from this year’s crops, but I’ll send you something so that you’ll all remember poor Brígida. Were you able to get the bicycle in, Jenaro?”

The chauffeur sits next to Misiá Raquel. They can get underway now. The coachman climbs into the

driver’s seat of the hearse, Misiá Raquel’s daughter-in-law puts on her perforated driving gloves, the black horses stamp, tears fill the eyes of the old women who go out on the sidewalk muffled up, shivering, coughing, to see the procession off. Before Misiá Raquel gives the order to get underway, I go over to her window and hand her the package.

“What’s this?”

I wait.

“Malú’s nightgown! My God! If this poor little man hadn’t thought of it, I’d have forgotten, and he’d have had to pull the cart back here again for me … Thanks, Mudito … no, no, wait … have him wait, Mother … here, Mudito, for cigarettes, for your little vices, go on, take it … Blow the horn, Jenaro, get the procession started … Well, goodbye, Mother Benita …”

“Goodbye, Misiá Raquel …”

“Goodbye, Brígida …”

“Goodbye …”

When the last car disappears around the corner, we go in—Mother Benita, I, the old women who mumble as they slowly scatter to their courts. I bolt and lock the outside door. Rita closes the inner one with its rattly glass panes. Straggling behind, one of the old women picks up a white rose from the tile floor of the vestibule and, yawning and tuckered out from all the excitement, pins it on her bun before disappearing into the passageways to look for her friends, her bowl of watery soup, her shawl, her bed.

---

IN A NOOK in one of the corridors, they stopped before the door I sealed off with two boards nailed crosswise. I’d loosened the nails, to make it easy for them to pry off the boards and go up to the next floor. The orphans pulled out the nails, took the boards off and helped Iris Mateluna go up … Get a move on, chubby, I’m scared, these stairs don’t have a railing, some of the steps are gone … hey, fatso’s so heavy everything’s creaking under her … They take their time going up, studying where to take each step so the whole works won’t collapse, looking for solid places so as to get Iris to the next floor. Ten years ago Mother Benita had me board up those doors so as to forget about that section of the Casa once and for all and not have to think about cleaning and keeping it neat, because we just don’t have the strength to do it anymore … Mudito, better let it go to pot and not lose any sleep over it … Until the five little girls, bored with wandering around the Casa with nothing to do, discovered that they could open this door and go up to the cloistered galleries on the next floor that surround the courts … let’s go up, kids, don’t be scared … scared of what, when it’s still light out, let’s go see what’s there … like what, nothing, filth, same as all over the Casa, but at least it’s fun because no one’s allowed to roam there because they say it might cave in … Eliana warns them to watch their step and make sure nobody sees them from downstairs but it’s not too risky today because they’re at the doorkeeper’s, seeing Brígida off. Still, they’d better not take chances, Mother Benita’s in a nasty mood … make yourselves useful, you little pests, pick that up, help with this pile of spoons and plates, they have to be left clean, now that they’re going to hold an auction, fold the napkins, count them, sweep, get some washing done, wash your own things at least, you’ve been going around filthy as pigs, don’t spend all your time playing … shshshshshsh, kids, shshshshshsh … careful, or we’ll get punished …

They round one court and then another, until they come to a door Eliana pushes open. A room with twenty rusty iron bedsteads, disassembled, others crippled—missing rollers, patched-up springs—but set up in two rows against the walls, like beds in a boarding school. Twin windows: high, narrow, deeply recessed, their glass painted a chocolate brown up to a person’s height so that no

no one can see anything outside except the dark clouds veiled by chicken wire and iron bars. I also loosened the nails with which I myself sealed the two windows. The orphans already know how to open them and they did it in time to wave goodbye to Brígida’s hearse led by the four plumed horses followed by nine automobiles. Eliana counts eight, Mirella nine … no, eight … no, nine … and when the procession disappears the little neighborhood children take over the middle of the street again, scrambling after the soccer ball … Good pass, Ricardo! Kick, Mito! Quick, after it, Lucho, pass it, now, kick, there, goal, goooooal … a shrill scream from Mirella, who cheers her friends’ gooooooooooal and applauds and waves to them.

Iris has stayed behind, at the back of the dormitory, sitting sleepily on an innerspring. She yawns. She leafs through a magazine. The orphans make faces at people going by, talk in shouts to their friends, sit in the window recess, laugh at a woman passing by, yawn. When it begins to get dark Iris calls Eliana.

“What do you want?”

“You promised to read me this one with Pluto the dog and Popeye the sailor man.”

“No. You owe me for two readings.”

“I’m going to get together with the Giant this evening and play yumyum. I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

“Then I’ll read for you tomorrow.”

Eliana presses up against the window bars again. The street lamps begin to go on. A woman in the house across the street opens her balcony window. As she combs her long jet-black hair, looking into the street, she turns on a radio … ta-ra-tat-tat-tatatat-tat-tatat … syncopated piercing sounds from electric guitars and twanging voices pour into the dormitory, the orphans rouse Iris from the bedsprings and get her to stand up in the aisle between the two rows of beds when they hear babalú, babalú ayé … hey, do a little dance for us, Gina, they urge her, come on, do your stuff … tossing her neck back like a mare, she twirls her long wavy hair, swaggering down the aisle, a look of ecstasy in her eyes half-closed like those of actresses in cheap illustrated love stories … I don’t feel lazy anymore, I’m not yawning, I want to get out and dance like Gina, the actress who lived in a convent run by bad nuns in the love story Eliana read to me … Iris stops. She digs in her pockets. She smears her lips with a purplish lipstick, the horrible dark color turns her childish flesh to unbaked dough … Come on, Gina, do your stuff, dance down the aisle for us, shake it, that’s it, that’s it, more, more … At the window, Eliana’s lighting two candles she stole from the chapel where Brígida lay in state; all she can do is set the stage, she’s too young, the youngsters in the street don’t call up to her, they want Iris, Eliana doesn’t have breasts to show off or thighs to put on display. She shoos the other orphans over to the farther window and helps Iris climb up on the window recess.

“Look, Gina, the Giant’s here.”

“Yell down to him that I’ll go out as soon as the old ladies are in bed.”

“The guys want you to dance for them.”

She’s the only one left at the lighted window. She grinds her hips. Sticking out her breasts, she smooths her sweater with a long caress that runs the whole length of her body and ends with her hiking her skirt to show her heavy thighs that are a quivering mass, while her other hand piles up her hair and she puckers her lips as if she were about to give someone a madly passionate kiss. The group

gathering under the streetlight cheers her on. The woman combing her hair in the window across the way turns up the music, resting her elbows on the railing to get a good look. Iris begins to move very slowly, only rubbing her thighs together at first, then shaking her whole body to the wild beat of babalú, whirling, hair flying, arms outstretched, hands open as if searching for something or someone, whirling again, again, bending, stretching; she tosses back her head and lets all her hair spill forward, her gyrating body moving to the rhythm of rock, the frug, anything, as long as she can rotate and show her thighs and her filthy panties and her bouncing breasts, her tongue hot and searching like her hands, as she dances at the window so that the people in the street will applaud and egg her on and yell up to her … come on, give it up, Gina baby, give it all you’ve got, good-lookin’, shake those tits, shake your ass, burn down the Casa, burn us all … And the Giant, with his enormous papier-mâché head, steps into the middle of the street and dances as if he were dancing with Iris, Iris sways, grinds her hips, gyrates, shakes and screams from her candlelit cage that seems to hang from the side of the Casa as she dances like a Virgin Mary gone berserk in her niche. The Giant stands on the sidewalk in front and calls to her: “Gina, Gina, come on down so we can play yumyum, hey kid, yell up at her, she can’t hear me because I’m shut up inside this stinking head.”

“He says for you to come down, Gina!”

“Hey, Eliana, ask him what kind of present he’s brought me today. Otherwise I won’t go down.”

“Not money, he says, but he’s got five love story magazines for you and a lipstick that’s not new but’s real good and comes in a gold case.”

“It must be gold-plated, gold ones are very expensive.”

“Don’t settle for any of his junk, Iris, don’t be stupid. You gotta get money out of him so you can pay me for the readings.”

“If you don’t read to me Mirella will, so who cares.”

“But you like how I read because I explain the story, otherwise you don’t understand a thing. I’ve got you where I want you, Iris Mateluna, right where I want you, because if I don’t read and explain the love stories and Donald Duck you get bored to death here in this shithouse …”

Iris hangs on to the bars to get a look at him … it’s him with his eyes that are as big and round as saucers and his laugh that’s always the same because he never gets mad, he’s good, we play yumyum real nice and when he calls me Gina he raises his eyebrow and the wrinkles on his forehead hold up his silly little hat … it’s him, he wants to marry me because he likes the way I play yumyum, he’s going to take me to see movies that show real live actresses so that pain-in-the-ass Eliana won’t have to read anything to me, the Giant’s going to take me to one of those tall buildings downtown so I can dance in a contest and win the prize, a makeup kit they say they give to the girl who dances best, and afterwards her picture comes out in the love story magazines and that moron Eliana and Miss Rita and Mudito and Mother Benita and the girls and all the old bags will see my picture in the magazines.

“What are you gonna pay me with if the Giant doesn’t give you money today?”

Iris shrugs.

“Because you’ve got to pay me before you get married, you hear, or else I’ll get the cops after you, the same ones who carried off your old man, to make you pay up, and if you don’t pay they’ll drag you off to jail too. I’ll settle for the lipstick and two of the magazines the Giant’s going to give you today.”

“Do you think I’m stupid? One magazine and you can use the lipstick twice, and that’s it …”

“It’s a deal. But you’ll have to give me the lipstick case when it’s all used up.”

“It’s a deal.”

---

MOTHER BENITA REMAINS very still for a second in the vestibule, her hands together and her eyes closed. Rita and I wait for her to move, to open her eyes, and she opens them and motions me to follow her. I know very well that, stooped and rickety or not, I have to pull my little cart as if I were her idiot son pulling a toy. I know why she wants me to follow her. We’ve done it so many times: to clean up what the dead woman left behind. Misiá Raquel told her to divide Brígida’s things among her friends. No, among her mates is what she said, as if this were a finishing school. I don’t want to look at Brígida’s room, Mother, for God’s sake, I don’t want to, I don’t want to go over anything or look at anything, no, there can’t be anything of value so I don’t want to look at anything, I tell you, you can do what you like with her things, Mother Benita, give them away, these old women are so poor they’ll be happy with anything they can remember Brígida by, she was so well liked here at the Casa.

I follow her down the corridors, pulling the platform on four wheels. I put brooms, buckets, rags, feather dusters on. In the court where the kitchen is, a group of old women forming a circle around Mother Anselma peel potatoes into a huge pot … what a lovely funeral Brígida had! … Misiá Raquel’s princesse overcoat, they say they’re coming back … the coachman had a mustache, I’m not sure it’s right to let coachmen who drive first-class hearses wear a mustache, it’s a sort of lack of respect … the funeral would keep tongues wagging for months … another group of old women farther over have already forgotten about it, they’ve forgotten Brígida, they’re playing cards on a sugar bin … Watch out for that step, Mother, it’s a step, not a shadow, and we come out into still another court that’s not the one where Brígida lived, so we have to go down other passageways … One, then a second empty room, rows of vacant rooms, more doors, some open, some closed, because it’s all the same if they’re open or closed, more rooms to cross, shattered windowpanes coated with dust, the semidarkness sticking to the dried-up walls where a hen pecks at the centuries-old adobe, hunting for specks of grain. Another court. The laundry court where no laundry’s done anymore, the nuns’ court where no nuns live anymore because only three of them are left now, the court with the palm tree, the one with the linden, this court without a name, Ernestina Gómez’s court, the refectory court no one uses because the old women prefer to eat in the kitchen, endless courts and cloisters connected by corridors that never end, rooms we’ll never try to clean again even if up until a short time ago you used to say, yes, Mudito, one of these days, the first chance we have, we’re going to clean everything out with brooms and dusters and rags and pails and soap powder because it’s such a filthy mess … Watch out, Mother, I’ll give you a hand, let’s step around this rubble, better walk down this corridor that leads into still another court that’s on a different level because of the now-forgotten purposes it once served, and opens onto rooms where sounds are softened by cobwebs and onto galleries where the echoes of forgotten comings and goings linger, or perhaps it’s mice and cats and chickens and pigeons chasing one another among the ruins of this wall no one ever finished tearing down.

I walk ahead of Mother Benita. I stop next to a cluster of shacks made of tin, boards, cardboard, branches—shacks as flimsy and gray as though they were built with the well-worn cards the old women use for playing their age-old games … You’ve tried so many times to convince them to sleep in the rooms. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, good, spacious, all vacant … pick the ones you like in whatever court you like, Mudito and I will make them comfortable for you … no, Mother, we’re afraid they’re much too big and the ceilings are too high and the walls too thick and someone may have died or spent her life praying in those rooms and that’s enough to scare anybody, they’re damp, bad bad for rheumatism, they’re enormous and gloomy, all that space when we’re not used to living in rooms with so much space because we’re servants used to living in cubbyholes crammed with all kinds of things, in the back part of our employers’ houses, no, no, Mother Benita, thanks just the same, we prefer these rickety shacks that are sheltered by the long balconies, because we want to be as close to one another as possible so as to hear someone else breathing in the shack next door and smell stale tea leaves and listen to another sleepless body like our own tossing and turning on the other side of the thin wall, and the coughing and farts and intestinal rumblings and nightmares; who cares about the cold coming in through the cracks in the badly fitted boards as long as we’re all together, in spite of the envy and greed or the terror that shrivels our toothless mouths and makes our gummy eyes squint, we’re together and toward evening can go to the chapel in groups, because it’s terrifying to go all by yourself, we can cling to one another’s rags, through the cloisters, down passageways like tunnels that never end, ...