Cockfight

by María Fernanda Ampuero, Frances Riddle (Translator)

Overview

This Ecuadorian short story collection explores domestic horrors and everyday violence, a "grotesque, unflinching" portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America (Publishers Weekly).

“Ampuero’s literary voice is tough and beautiful at once: her stories are exquisite and dangerous objects.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936932825
Publisher:	Feminist Press at CUNY, The
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	227,291
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

María Fernanda Ampuero is a writer and journalist, born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1976. She has published articles in newspapers and magazines around the world, as well as two nonfiction books: Lo que aprendí en la peluquería y Permiso de residencia. Cockfight is her first short story collection, and her first book to be translated into English.

Frances Riddle is a writer and translator based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her recent book-length translations include Not One Less by María Pía López (forthcoming, Polity Press); Plebeian Prose by Néstor Perlongher (Polity Press 2019); The German Room by Carla Maliandi (Charco Press 2018). Her short story translations, essays, and reviews have been published in the White Review, Electric Literature, the Short Story Project, and Words Without Borders, among others.

Read an Excerpt

Monsters

Narcisa always said we should be more afraid of the living than the dead, but we didn’t believe her because in all the horror movies the people we were afraid of were the dead, the ones that had returned from beyond, the possessed. Mercedes was terrified of demons and I was terrified of vampires. We talked about it all the time. About satanic possessions and about men with fangs that fed on the blood of little girls. Papa and Mama bought us dolls and fairy tale stories and we recreated The Exorcist with the dolls and made believe that prince charming was really a vampire who woke Snow White up to turn her into an undead. During the day everything was fine, we were brave, but at night we asked Narcisa to come upstairs with us. Papa didn’t like for Narcisa—he called her the help—to sleep in our room, but it was inevitable: we said that if she didn’t come up we’d go down to sleep with the help in her room. That terrified her. And so Narcisa, who must’ve been about fourteen years old, pretended to protest, saying that she didn’t want to sleep with us, that we should be more afraid of the living than the dead. And we thought it was ridiculous because how could anyone be more afraid, for example, of Narcisa than of Reagan, the girl from The Exorcist or more afraid of Don Pepe, the gardener, than of the Salem vampire or of Demian, the son of Satan, or more afraid of my papa than of the Wolfman. Absurd.

Papa and Mama were never home, Papa worked and Mama played cards, that’s why Mercedes and I were able to go every afternoon, after school, to rent horror movies at the video store. The boy who worked there never said a word. Of course we knew that on the box it said over sixteen or eighteen, but the boy never said anything to us. His face was covered in zits and he was super fat, he had a fan always pointing at his crotch. The only time he ever talked to us was when we rented The Shining. He looked at the box, he looked at us and said:

“There are some girls just like you in here. Both of them are dead, their dad killed them.”

Mercedes grabbed my hand. And we stood there like that, holding hands, in our identical uniforms, staring at him, until he gave us the movie.

Mercedes was a huge scaredy-cat. Pale, wimpy. Mama said that I ate up everything that came down the umbilical cord because she was tiny when she was born: a little worm and I, on the other hand was born like a bull. That’s the word they used: bull. And the bull had to take care of the worm, who else was going to do it? Sometimes I wished I could be the worm, but that was impossible. I was the bull and Mercedes the worm. I’m sure Mercedes would’ve liked to be the bull sometimes, not always just tagging along behind me, in my shadow, waiting for me to talk so she could simply agree.

“Me too.”

Never me. Always me too.

Mercedes never wanted to watch horror movies, but I insisted because a girl from school said I wasn’t brave enough to watch all the movies she’d seen with her big brother since I didn’t have a big brother, only Mercedes, the famous scaredy-cat and I couldn’t stand it so that afternoon I dragged Mercedes to the video store and we rented all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and that night and every night thereafter we had to tell Narcisa to come up to sleep with us because if Freddy gets in your dreams he kills you in your dreams and no one knows what’s happening because it just looks like you had a heart attack or you drowned in your own drool, something normal, and so no one ever finds out that you were killed by a monster with fingers made of sharp knives.

Having siblings can be a blessing. Having siblings can be a curse: we learned this from the movies. And one sibling always saves the other one.

Mercedes started having nightmares. Narcisa and I did everything we could to keep her quiet, so Mama and Papa wouldn’t find out. They would only punish me: horror movies, it’s all the bull’s fault. Poor little worm, poor little Mercedes, to have such a beast of a sister, a girl so little like a girl, so wild, what a cross to bear. Why aren’t you more like little Mercedes, so sweet, so quiet, so docile?

Mercedes’s nightmares were worse than any of the movies we’d seen. They were about school, the nuns, the nuns possessed by the devil, dancing naked, touching themselves down there, appearing in the mirror while you were brushing your teeth or taking a shower. The nuns like Freddy, taking over your dreams. And we’d never rented a movie about that.

“And what else, Mercedes,” I asked her, but she didn’t say anything, she just screamed.

Mercedes’s screams penetrated my skin. They sounded like howls, gashes, bites, animal things. She opened her eyes but she was still somewhere else and Narcisa and I hugged her so she would come back but sometimes it took her a long time to come back and I thought, once again, just like when we were in Mama’s womb, I was stealing something from her. Mercedes started to get really skinny. We were identical, but less and less so, because I was more and more like a bull and she was more and more like a worm: sunken eyes, hunched, bony.

I never had much love for the Sisters at school nor them for me. What I mean is, we hated each other. They had a radar for unruly souls, that’s the phrase they used, but I didn’t mind, I liked the sound of it. I hated their hypocrisy. They were bad people dressed up as good ones. They sent me to erase all the blackboards in the school, to clean the chapel, to help the Mother Superior give alms, which was just handing out what other people had given, our parents, to the poor people, the middle woman keeping a big pinch for herself, eating expensive fish and sleeping on a feather mattress. It was punishment after punishment for me because I asked why they gave out rice to the poor while they ate sea bass and I said that the lord wouldn’t have liked that because he made the fish for everyone. Mercedes squeezed my arm and cried. Mercedes knelt down and prayed for me with her eyes closed tight. She looked like a little angel. While she said the Hail Mary I wanted to make everything stop dead because I felt like my sister’s prayer was the only thing worth anything in this sonmavbitch world. The nuns told my parents that my sister would be perfect as part of their congregation and I imagined her locked away in that life, in a prison of horrible clothes and giant crucifixes like shackles: I couldn’t bear it.

That summer we got our period. First Mercedes, then me. Narcisa was the one who explained to us what to do with the pad because Mama wasn’t there and she laughed when we started walking like ducks. She also told us that our blood meant that, with the help of a man, we could now make babies. That was absurd. Yesterday we couldn’t do an insane thing like create a child and today we could. That’s a lie, we told her. And she grabbed us both by the arms. Narcisa’s hands were very strong, big, masculine. Her fingernails, long and pointy, could open sodas without a bottle opener. Narcisa was small in size and just two years older than us, but she seemed to have lived four hundred more lives. Our arms stung as she repeated that now we would have watch out more for the living than for the dead, that now we really would have to be more afraid of the living than of the dead.

“You are women now,” she said. “Life isn’t a game anymore.”

Mercedes started crying. She didn’t want to be a woman. I didn’t either, but I’d rather be a woman than a bull.

One night, Mercedes had one of her nightmares. They weren’t nuns anymore, but men, faceless men who played with her menstrual blood and rubbed it all over their bodies and then from everywhere little monstrous babies appeared, like little rats, to gnaw her to death. I couldn’t calm her down. We went to look for Narcisa, but the garage door was locked from the inside. We heard noises. Then silence. Then noises again. We sat in the kitchen, in the dark, waiting for her. When finally the door opened we threw ourselves at her, we needed her arms so badly, her hands that always smelled like onion and cilantro, her healing words saying we should be more afraid of the living than the dead. A few inches away we realized it wasn’t her. We stopped, terrified, mute, frozen. It wasn’t Narcisa who had come in through the door to our garage. Our hearts ticked like bombs. There was something foreign and familiar in that silhouette that filled us with a physical sensation of disgust and horror.

I was late to react, I didn’t have the chance to cover Mercedes’s mouth. She screamed.

Papa slapped each of us across the face and then walked calmly up the stairs.

Neither Narcisa nor her things were in the house the next morning.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Auction

2. Monsters

3. Griselda

4. Nam

5. Pups

6. Blinds

7. Christ

8. Passion

9. Mourning

10. Ali

11. Coro

12. Bleach

13. Other

Editorial Reviews

01/20/2020

Ampuero’s grotesque, unflinching English-language debut looks at women’s experience of trauma and survival in an unnamed South American country. In the title story, a young woman covers herself in rooster blood and intestines to drive away older men who try to take advantage of her. In “Pups,” an unnamed woman returns to her stifling hometown and visits a man she’d grown up with who forced her to perform oral sex when she was 12 and he was 13. Back in his apartment years later, voluntarily reenacting the experience, she crunches a cockroach under her knee and notes that the man “smells like an abandoned elderly person.” In “Mourning,” the collection’s standout, teenage Marta takes beatings from her father to protect her sister, María, who in turn faces gang rape at the hands of their older brother by men from the neighborhood after they discover she’s not a virgin. In retaliation, Marta and María poison their brother. After he dies, the sisters’ joyful dance comes as welcome relief from Ampuero’s nearly relentless violence and nightmarish imagery. While some of the stories are drowned by horrific details, such as the ratlike babies in “Monsters,” others offer a glaring view of the impact of misogynistic violence and oppression. This will appeal to fans of unrepentant feminist fiction. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Ampuero leads the international wave of Ecuadorian writers.” —New York Times en Español

“Ampuero writes with steely nerves and an ear for the beauty of simple, concrete language—not a word feels out of place.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Grotesque, unflinching. . . .This will appeal to fans of unrepentant feminist fiction.” —Publishers Weekly

“Deftly written with spare, exacting prose, Cockfight. . . .presents searing portraits of family life.” —Latino Book Review

“Wielded like a righteous cudgel against exploitative power, this Ecuadorian debut makes no bones about its intentions from the get-go. . . . Ampuero fights dirty and, frankly, that’s just the sort of writer we need.” —Center for the Art of Translation

"Through sparing prose and exacting detail, with no time for decoration or pomp, Ampuero delivers timeless feminist fiction that packs a punch and sticks with you like tar." —Sounds and Colors

“Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it.” —Independent Book Review

“Ampuero’s literary voice is tough and beautiful at once: her stories are exquisite and dangerous objects.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

“This is true literary horror that doesn’t tip into slasher territory, with confrontational, vivid characters.” —Mslexia

“Brutal! Very intense.” —Mariana Enríquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

“María Fernanda Ampuero’s voice is urgent, intimate, lyrical while never forgetting to cast humor during the darkest of violent moments. This is a writer of great power that the entire Americas will have to deal with for decades to come.” —Ernesto Quiñonez, author of Bodega Dreams

"The stories in Ampuero’s Cockfight vibrate with a singular voice, building a fictional universe dominated by violence and explorations of both power dynamics and exploitation. Ampuero’s brutal and animalistic prose haunted me. I can’t stop thinking about this book." —Cristina Rodriguez, Deep Vellum Books

From the Publisher

2020-03-02
Some say home is where the heart is, but in Ecuadorian writer Ampuero’s English-language debut, a collection of brutal and brutalizing stories, home is not a place of love or refuge.

Instead, home is a place where women are often abused, neglected, or tortured by those they know best. The 14-year-old maid in “Monsters” tries to warn the twin girls she watches of this fact, telling them that they “should be more afraid of the living than the dead.” She keeps repeating this line, though only at the end do we understand exactly what, or who, she is trying to protect the girls from. In “Mourning,” two sisters suffer, first at the hands of their father, who beats them, and then at the hands of their brother, who brands María, one of the sisters, a whore for masturbating and exiles her to a shed. The story, which catalogs in uncomfortable detail the ways that María’s body is violated, drives toward its point that “cruelty would always triumph over helplessness.” Love, when it is present at all here, is tainted by incest, dysfunction, and poverty, and God has gone missing. At least that’s what the little girl in “Christ” comes to believe after her baby brother dies; neither medicine nor miracles saved him. These stories, none longer than 14 pages, are like tiny, bitter pills. They’re not pleasant, but who said literature needs to be? Instead, they are antidotes against forgetting the myriad forms that violence takes and its psychic costs on those who manage to survive. Ampuero writes with steely nerves and an ear for the beauty of simple, concrete language—not a word feels out of place.

Reading these stories won’t make you happy, but discovering this talented new writer will.

Kirkus Reviews