Fragmento de Otilia Umaga, La Mulata de Martinica (Inglés)
On the same night that Captain Francis Guillot decided not to go back home, Blanca Conjetura, dishevelled, pale and with flaming eyes, entered the stable's eastern wing with her husband's riding crop in her hand.
There wasn't even a shining in the sky and the moon was hardly a thin thread without light.
The two black men that were on guard at the stable understood the order without a single word. They silently left, one after the other, with their straw hats in their hands and the hearts pumping in their chests, because they knew perfectly well that a disaster was about to happen. A thick candle on a stick in one of the stable's corners barely illuminated the scene.
The woman wore her sleeping attire, a white nightgown, long down to the floor, crossed by lace edging, and black long high leg boots with leather straps, silver fittings and five point spurs that shone with a metallic glitter in the twilight.
She walked towards Matamoros' corral on a firm step and hitting her thigh with the riding crop. Time and time again. The click of the hard leather on her flesh was the only sound under the thatched roof of the stable.
She stopped, legs open and hands on her waist, facing the carved half door, hitting her thigh without stop each time with more energy.
Matamoros drew his ears backwards and expanded his nostrils. Smelled hate, which reached him like a disgusting thick wave. She put a hand on the bronze bolt that locked the door and pushed it slowly forward.
The door hinges squeaked. Matamoros scrubbed the clean hay on the floor with a leg and reared back till he hit the bottom wall with his haunch. He was sweaty like after running a race.
The woman advanced another step, she again whirled around the riding crop against her thigh, and let go a long, very sharp whistle with her teeth locked. The animal went crazy with fear, like when he heard a snake hissing in the fields, he neighed and stood on two legs to scratch the air.
In that same moment she, with a precise movement, as if she had rehearsed it a thousand times because she had imagined it another thousand, drew from her boot a long sharp knife, and uttering a scream that sprouted from her stomach, she pounced over Matamoros. With strength bigger than that of two men together, stuck the knife with both hands and only once up to the handle into the stallion's chest. It went through muscles, broke two ribs and penetrated the centre of the heart opening it up in two almost identical halves.
This time she backed up, and jumped lithely backwards to avoid Matamoros from collapsing over her. She was panting.
Matamoros folded his forelegs, let go a rough neigh and fell sideways. He sank with a whine, his snout in the earth, a shudder shook his hind legs and he stayed motionless, with his eyes wide open. His blood fell over Blanca Conjetura's chest like a cascade and mixed with her own blood that came out from the wound in her thigh.
Blanca Conjetura went back to the house in the darkness and to her bed, and wrapped up in wet blood, slept without waking up all night for the first time in her life.