Another Dalton Trevisan humdinger featuring a husband and wife at war. This time it is seventy-year-old Onofre, a man completely without morals, a man who would “spend every day drunk and after drinking he would settle down to beating his wife.” His wife, Sofia, flees yet again to her daughter’s house. Onofre sends word he needs her to come home to take care of a hog he has decided to butcher.
Sofia does come back and Onofre starts beating her between swigs from his bottle and then grabs his whip. She runs outside and realizes the hog he decided to butcher is her.
Since Onofre can’t find his wife at the moment he takes a break, sits on a bench and drinks a few more swigs from his bottle. He stands up and starts cracking his whip again. At this point daughter Natalia arrives on the scene -
“What’s going on, Papa?”
“That old woman stole my shotgun and ran away.”
Sofia rose up behind the wall.
“I didn’t run away. Here I am."
Onofre stomps back and forth across the yard cracking his whip. The shotgun goes off. The old man falls to the ground. He calls out: “Help me, old woman. I’m dying. I’ve been shot.”
Here are Dalton final words:" His eyes bulging, he stretched out on the ground. He asked for a drink of water. Sofia brought the jug. He was silent, the bottle in one hand and the whip in the other, quite still, so that he heard the chirping of the sparrows as they predicted rain."
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