The maestro quickly brought the matanza to the point where the steer was about to be sacrificed.
After thanking the beast in a brief prayer, he drew out his sword and took its life. The animal made no sound and didn’t struggle, as if soothed by the maestro’s words. But the blood gushed out and spattered the maestro and the people who had gathered closest to him. The sight moved the small crowd, which let out a long, somber and collective “eeee!”
As the maestro tried to get everything under control, everybody stepped back a little and hushed.
The silence moved people to fill the void and speak up, but nobody dared be the first one.
Finally a woman spoke up.
“I want to say that now I finally feel free to unburden my soul. I’m thankful for the heavenly inspiration to wear new clothes and chinelas to this matanza because I feel like a new woman,” she said as if in rapture.
The people around her backed away to give her space to say more.
“You see, I’d been cheating on my beloved husband with a man from work. And while the experience was divine and could have lasted the rest of my life, I stopped it because I love my husband and father of my children. So I want to ask him in front of all our friends and family, to forgive me…,” she went on.
Everybody looked around for her husband, who had left her side and was retreating through the crowd.
“And I have asked Heaven to forgive me and renew my bonds with my husband and alight his path to forgive…,” she added.
By this point, the husband was nowhere in sight. Restrained at first in their gazes, everybody who could hear the woman craned their necks in every direction looking for him.
“And I have no doubt that Heaven will inspire us to deepen our love and envelope us in a much more powerful love than what’s bound us together until now,” she pontificated.
Suddenly, not too far away, a pickup truck gunned its engine and peeled away in a cloud of dust and flying grave.
“Chinelas! That was our ride,” a man and a woman in the crowd complained.
