Читать книгу A Book of Common Prayer - Joan Didion - Страница 15

THE NEXT TIME I SAW CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS SHE GRABBED up a chicken on the run and snapped the vertebrae in its neck. I had taken her to the annual picnic for the children of the workers in the Millonario groves and the men were killing chickens with machetes but Charlotte’s kill was clean. There was no blood. She killed this chicken as efficiently and reflexively as she had field-stripped the cigarette at the Capilla del Mar.

“All the children have red shoes,” she said to me and Elena as she handed the dead chicken to the man who had been trying to catch it. She had only smiled vaguely at the man’s attempt to congratulate her. She seemed entirely unaware that for a guest of the dueña to kill a chicken with her hands was at Millonario an event worth remark. Even Elena had forgotten her sulky pique at being in Millonario and was staring at Charlotte, speechless.

“Red cardboard patent-leather shoes,” Charlotte said. “All of them. Why do the children wear red shoes?”

“That chicken,” Elena said.

“I mean you see them all over the tropics. Those red shoes.”

“How exactly did you kill that chicken?” Elena said.

“Not the right way at all, actually.” Charlotte’s expression did not change. “Actually they’re better if you bleed them live. Marin wanted a pair of red shoes once. When she was six. She cried, I wouldn’t buy them.”

Charlotte looked away and lifted the hair off her neck.

“I did have a baby who had red shoes,” she said after a while. She stood up then and rinsed her hands in a ditch and when she straightened up she dried her hands on her skirt and gazed for a long time at the men still killing chickens with machetes. “You ought to tell them, chickens are better if you bleed them live. There was no reason not to buy Marin those shoes.”

Nationality NORTEAMERICANA.