Weiyu Chiu

It’s a story called the piggy bank from Juan Carlos Onetti. The following is the story The woman always wore black and smiled as she dragged her rheumatism from the bedroom to the living room. There were no other rooms, but there was a window that opened onto a small dun-colored garden. She looked at the timepiece that hung around her neck and thought that the boys would arrive in a little more than an hour. They weren't hers. Sometimes two, sometimes three arrived from the run-down houses past the small plaza, across the wooden bridge over the gully, now dry, which rushed with water during the winter rains. Even though school had started, the boys always managed to escape from their houses or their classrooms at the calm and lazy hour of the siesta. All of them, all two or three of them, were dirty, hungry, and physically distinct. But the old woman always managed to find in them some feature of her lost grandson; sometimes Juan had his eyes or the frankness of his eyes and his smile; at other times she found these things in Emilio or Guido. But no afternoon passed without her finding some gesture, some expression of her grandson's. She went slowly into the kitchen to prepare the three cups of café con leche and the crepes filled with quince jelly. That afternoon, the children knocked on the glass of the front door rather than ringing the bell on the street. Some time passed before the old woman heard the knocks, which continued insistently and with the same intensity. Finally, because she had gone into the living room to set the table, the old woman heard the noise and made out the three silhouettes that had climbed the stairs. Sitting around the table, stuffing their jowls with the sweetness of the jam, the children repeated their habitual banter, accusing each other of failures and betrayals. The old woman didn't understand them but watched them eat with a frozen smile; that afternoon, after observing closely so as not to make any mistake, she decided that Emilio was reminding her of her grandson much more than the other two. Especially the way he moved his hands. While she was washing the dishes in the kitchen, she heard a chorus of laughter, then the whispering of secrets being shared, then silence. Some furtive steps, and she couldn't hear the dull thud of the iron on her head. Then she no longer heard anything, her body swayed then lay still on the kitchen floor. They rummaged through all the drawers in the bedroom and looked under the mattress. They split up bills and coins and Juan suggested to Emilio: "Hit her again. Just in case." They walked slowly in the sunlight and when they reached the plank that stretched across the ditch, each returned separately to his impoverished neighborhood. Each one to his shack, and Guido, when he got to his, which was empty as usual in the afternoon, picked up clothes, scraps, junk from the box he had next to his cot and pulled out the filthy white piggy bank where he kept his money; a plaster piggy bank shaped like a pig with a frog on its back. The piggy bank, Juan Carlos Onetti