Chicken

An excerpt from a coming-of-age memoir. [Warning: killing animals]

For ten weeks I had eaten the same meal of beans and rice with an egg for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But this Sunday was different. It was Edwin’s sixth birthday and we were having chicken.

“We’re going to eat the crazy hen, and you’re going to kill her,” Edwin’s dad, Paul, told me in Spanish as we sipped our morning coffee on the concrete patio, sitting in those plastic Coca-Cola chairs found wherever the wind blows.

“Ok, let’s see,” said the eighteen-year-old me.

It was the summer of twenty-fourteen and I was in Nicaragua on a youth expedition funded by the UK government and a sustainable development charity. We were a dozen well-intentioned albeit clueless volunteers, sworn to chastity and sobriety. Half of the group were gringos (as the locals called us British residents—even me, a brown kid) and the others were from Central America. The charity were paying families to host us in a remote mountainous community called La Muta: a verdant paradise only twenty miles from the border with Honduras, where there was little talk of the Contra War, except for the feint rumour of a fighter jet that crashed in a bean field.

Though I spoke Spanish, which was advantageous for mixing with the Latinxs, I was far from my natural habitat: the megalopolis of London, or more truthfully, its suburban limits. In La Muta, there was no plumbing, electricity, or paved roads. We were off all grids. To send an SMS you had to climb an acacia tree. The nearest cold drink was an hour’s walk away, along the winding river, where an old man with a generator sold soda, milk, and beer from his kitchen fridge. To see ice was an hour further.

After finishing my coffee—lightly brewed but loaded with sugar—I went to bathe with cold water I had drawn from the well at the bottom of the hill. I spilled exhilarating bowlfuls over myself, hiding behind a pink plastic sheet. The icy water felt soothing against my warm skin, especially between my legs where there was a lingering ache. By the well, I dressed carefully, avoiding the mud as I slipped into my beaten-up leather Sambas.

I was staying at our hosts Paul and Adelina’s family home with another young British volunteer, Sarah, who was rough around the edges but sweet on the inside, a bit like a kiwi, only white. Sarah was tall and strong, with thick black hair and a face that carried a certain sadness. Sometimes, I found it difficult to look at her directly, as if the weight of her lived experience had made its way to the puffy skin under her eyes and the droop of her lower lip.

I sat across from Sarah at the small wooden table Paul had built himself. Most structures in La Muta were built by the community using readily available materials like timber, concrete, and corrugated iron sheets. The community was largely dependent on subsistence farming, but many residents also worked as farm hands for a corporation that owned land on the outskirts of the village.

Adelina, our host mother, served breakfast with the novel addition of a few cubes of cotija, a homemade cow’s cheese, salty and slightly rubbery, not dissimilar from uncooked paneer. With a spoon, I mixed the rice, beans, and cotija, before taking my first bite. Sarah ate everything in her bowl except for the cheese. Then, she asked about my balls.

“Feeling any better down there?”

“Yeah, much.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. Well, thanks, and I’m sorry for keeping you up. I was in a lot of pain.”

“You’re alright, blue balls,” Sarah said in her coarse Lancashire accent with a wry grin.

I changed the subject. “Did you hear Paul wants me to kill gallina loca for Edwin’s birthday today?”

“What?”

“Yeah, wring its neck or some shit. I know it’s been acting mental, flapping about like crazy but I dunno about killing it. I guess it makes sense though. It wasn’t laying many eggs.”

“Brutal. Do you reckon you’ll do it?”

“I dunno. If I’m gonna eat it, I probably should.”

Would I really slaughter a chicken before losing my virginity? Maybe taking the animal’s life with my bare hands would prove my virility and boost my libido, making sex more likely. It was hard to know what to do. I felt responsible for the forthcoming execution because they had chosen the pesky chicken that bothered me the most. There were a total of seven or eight hens that would roam freely in the day, knowing not to stray too far before being lured back to the wire coop at dusk by Adelina and her daughter Rudy with guttural calls. These chickens were kept for their eggs and only when they stopped laying regularly were they used for their meat.

There was something visceral about chickens that unsettled me. Their beady eyes, flappy gullets, and jutting neck movements belonged to the devil. Gallina loca, or ‘crazy hen’, was the nickname we gave to the unruly black one who would chase me around the patio. She preyed on my fear and would flap onto the table while I ate. When I was a child, it was city pigeons that had me this way. Hypervigilant, I’d check under the table every few seconds if I ever sat outdoors. Would this be the day I exact revenge on all the filthy birds that ever made my skin crawl?

“Chayo!” Edwin, with his big bobbling head and miniature body, called out my name from the bottom of the hill where he was rolling a bicycle wheel with a stick.

“Edwin, ¡felicidades!” I went to the bedroom to retrieve a shoebox. The last time I was in town I had bought him some knock-off Adidas running shoes with two white stripes. They were tight but his parents insisted he put them on anyway. Edwin pulled me by the sleeve to play baseball in front of the latrine, which acted as the catcher; every time the tennis ball struck the laminated aluminium door was a strike. I pitched because Edwin liked to bat. After a few balls, Paul climbed out of the hammock to hug his son. They shared the same toothy grin and reflective brown skin. Paul was wearing a vest rolled up above his stomach. The mid-morning sun was hot already and this was how men in La Muta kept cool.

“Those noises you were making last night. All good?” Paul, a man of few words, turned to me and asked.

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” I said.

“You can tell me, with confidence.” Confianza is more like a trust. I told Paul that I had been suffering with some girl-related pain in my huevos. He showed me he understood by pressing his hand on my shoulder. “With confidence,” he repeated.

The girl in question was so beautiful it made me want to be sick in my mouth. In the community, they named her their little black princess—she handled it with grace though I wonder how it felt to be fetishised for her skin colour.

I hadn’t always been so infatuated with her. When we met at base camp, I thought she was cute, but the cynic in me found her too positive to fancy. She was an actual religious person. The sort who spent her Sundays giving out free hugs on the Southbank. No one could genuinely be that kind-hearted, could they? Or if they were, it must be for some ulterior motive, like getting in God’s good books to avoid eternal damnation.

Her name was Celina. At twenty-four, six years older than me, she was our team leader. We had become intimate friends in La Muta, where, insulated from the outside world, time stretched like dough. I enjoyed walking long distances by her side and listening to stories from her childhood on Cabo Verde, where, for her age, she was once the fastest girl on the island, maybe because her mother made her eat a raw garlic clove every morning.

I knew I was into her when she danced with another guy and smiled at him. I first felt the love a couple of weeks later at Sunday mass. A riverside house had been converted into a Catholic church with rows of wooden benches lined up on the creaky porch. The priest arrived on a dusty motorcycle to deliver the service. I stood in the row behind Celina. As she prayed, with her arms out and palms open, her slim, muscular body glowed warmer than gold. A halo of stars rippled from her taut skin that luminesced as my throat tightened and I swallowed saliva.

When I was with her nothing else mattered. She could do things I couldn’t, like believe in God and speak five languages. She could pick up chickens with her hands and make it look natural. I can’t even feign excitement when dogs run up to me in the park. But with Celina watching, I would have done anything. Once, I even let her pass me a live chicken. I held it tightly in my chest so as not to emasculate myself if it flapped out of my control.

One morning, I was walking down to the well when I spotted Celina bathing. Through a crack in the pink shower curtain, I accidentally caught a glimpse of her naked. Seeing her bare chest for just a second sent my head spinning. She looked up at me coyly with her black pebble eyes as if she could feel me watching her, and said hello. I said hi back and looked away, pretending I hadn’t seen a thing, my heart pounding.

The night before Edwin’s birthday, Celina invited me over after dinner. I ate hurriedly before rushing off to see her. I walked away from the house, looking back at the patio where Paul entertained his children with a flashlight. His calloused hands cast the shadow of a bunny rabbit whose twitching ears had Rudy and Edwin in stitches.

I can still remember the lump in my throat as I walked along the dirt path to Celina’s side of the valley. Bolero music played from a portable radio in the distance. Tonight is the night, I told myself. I hadn’t even properly kissed a girl. At school it never happened for me. I struggled with my weight and although I never saw myself as ugly, I lacked self confidence.

Celina was drinking coffee and eating sweet bread with the community elders, sitting on a wooden bench on their porch. I felt like I was in an old movie, showing up at their house to ask for permission to take their daughter out. Have her home by ten, kid, the father would say before shaking my hand and smacking me on the shoulder. We’d climb into my rusty Chevy convertible and go to a drive-in movie theatre where I’d run into my tormentor, Biff, Buck, or Chuck, who’d invariably ruin the night.

“I want to show you my hill,” Celina said to me.

She took my hand and led me to the top of the hill behind the house. We lay on the dusty earth and looked up at the heavens. She pointed out a cluster of five stars, all very close to each other.

“That’s my constellation,” she whispered in my ear.

“Oh yeah?” I said, taking note of the stars’ position before inching my body closer to her’s. She leaned her head on my shoulder.

“There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

“What’s that?”

“I got a text from my sister. She’s pregnant. I’m going to be an auntie!”

“Wow, that’s incredible news… Congratulations…”

I found it difficult to relate to life outside of La Muta. I felt cocooned by the green mountains, as if this were my new life and nothing from before—not even my family—mattered out here. I can’t remember the rest of our conversation—if we spoke at all—as we held each other tightly. The air was cool on the exposed hilltop, so I covered her with my arms, desperate to kiss her though my body wouldn’t let me. The temperature dropped further, so we came back down the hill to the bench. Everyone had gone to sleep. All you could hear were the crickets. We sat under a thick blanket, pressing our bodies against each other for what felt like hours. In that stillness, I thought, So this is how I lose my virginity. I imagined taking her clothes off at the foot of her bed. A surge of heat flowed through me. After a while like this, I developed an agonising pain in my balls from the pressure. I wanted to push past the hesitation, but something in me stayed frozen. The weight of my doubt was too heavy to shift, and as the pain worsened my breathing grew heavier.

“Are you ok?” Celina asked.

“I’m ok, I’m just a bit uncomfortable. I think I should get going.”

I said goodnight and left.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What had I done? As I walked back along the path in total darkness, each step I took made me wince—it was an acute pain unlike anything I had experienced. I climbed into bed under the mosquito net and lay on my back, grumbling to myself and hyperventilating. I think I woke Sarah.

“You alright? What happened?” she asked from her bed on the other side of the room.

“It’s really embarrassing. I spent the whole night hugging Celina and now I feel like I’ve been kicked in the nuts a thousand times.”

“You’ve got blue balls.” She told me matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, I guess so…”

“Take deep breaths,” she told me, reassuringly. Sarah was sexually experienced and had already had a number of boyfriends. It sounded like she knew what she was talking about. “Can I do anything to help you?” she asked. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that.

“Umm… sure.”

“I’ve got some ibuprofen in my bag. It should help with the swelling.”

“Oh great.” I responded, a little disappointed.

After lying in bed for some time, pouring my heart out to Sarah, the pain subsided enough for us both to get some sleep as the roosters began to crow.

Adelina was short with a wiry frame and two metal molars in her lower jaw. Born in a neighbouring village, she moved to La Muta when she married Paul at the age of fifteen. In the time I lived with them, not once did I hear her complain. She was almost always smiling, which is probably why I remember the detail of her teeth.

Later in the afternoon, neighbours would be stopping by for Edwin’s birthday. Adelina looked at me as if to say, it’s time.

“Come. I’m going to show you how to kill.”

Adelina and I walked over to the chicken coop behind the house. She climbed inside to fetch gallina loca and a white chicken.

“You’re taking two?” I asked.

“Yes. The neighbours will be hungry.”

Adelina held both chickens, one under each arm, and handed her daughter Rudy the black one, gallina loca. Rudy looked at me and said, “Scaredy!” This made everyone present laugh, except for Rosie and Darren, two British volunteers who had come to observe.

“Watch how I do it.”

Adelina held the white chicken’s feet tightly with her left hand and the top of its neck with her right. With the animal stretched out, flapping its wings frenetically, she pinned it to the table. In one strong movement, she twisted its neck with an audible snap. Then, she held the bird down in that position, its beak poking out through her fist. It continued to struggle for nearly a minute, the convulsions becoming more infrequent until it lay on the table motionless.

“Now, it’s your turn.” Adelina gestured towards me, taking gallina loca from Rudy and lying her across the table. I was due to come over and take her place.

Though I hate chickens, I do like eating them. Fuck it, I love KFC. Even still, I did not want to kill gallina loca, and not only because I was scared shitless. Maybe I could do it if Celina were watching or I had an axe. But Adelina does not chop off their heads with an axe, she skilfully breaks their necks with her hands. I looked down at my hairy hands, much bigger than hers, and yet soft.

“I can’t.”

I couldn’t do it. Just as I lacked the conviction to kiss Celina, I was too weak to kill the same animal I would later eat. What sort of man was I? Adelina looked at me kindly, then pulled gallina loca taught, in the same way as she did with the other one.

After slaughtering both chickens, she chopped off their heads and hung them by their feet to drain. Their blood stained the ashen soil, giving the earth a putrid, metallic smell. Then, she boiled a pot of water to pour over them and wash the blood away. The steam made their feathers easier to pluck. This was the point at which I helped out, my stomach churning. As the birds lost their plumage they began to look more like poultry in a supermarket than dead animals.

Fully prepped, the chickens looked petite, with bright yellow skin and fat deposits surrounding the lean meat. Their insides were full of countless yolk sacks. Adelina fed the heads and feet to the dog. Over the wood-fired stove, I helped her make a big pot of chicken soup with ears of corn and root vegetables, served with homemade bread rolls and thick tortillas. Neighbours, cousins, and the community elders stopped by for a bowl. I was hoping Celina would show up too, but she didn’t. The broth’s flavour was soothing, like a remedy for my lovesick malaise. The meat, however, was tough, although that didn’t seem to matter because the soup—or rather the act of sharing it—had brought us together. The adults ate while the children played until the sun began to fade over the hills of La Muta.