El sábado es por los gallos
Perú“¿Podrías estar listo a las cinco?” Carlos asked.
I looked at my watch – 4:30. A half hour turnaround? I had just arrived at Carlos’ apartment in Cajamarca. I was sweaty and dirty, hungry and thirsty. Normally, after a long bike ride like today’s, I’d spend an hour lying on my back, decompressing, scrolling through email, Instagram, and the New York Times, before even moving, much less unpack and clean up to go out. But Carlos, a former colleague of a friend of mine, was my incredibly gracious host this weekend. I was happy to be tagging along with him and his friends on a Saturday night, and not about to question the timeline.
“Si, por supuesto. ¿Dónde vamos?”
“La pelea de gallos. El sábado es por los gallos,” he told me enthusiastically.
I thought I knew what each of those words meant individually, but I looked them up after he left the room, just to be sure. Yup, we were going to a cockfight.
I didn’t know much about cockfights. I was pretty sure they were illegal in America. I was pretty sure they were widely considered immoral as well. But I didn’t have time to think about the morality of it all. I had to get showered and changed and out the door.
A half hour later, I was in Carlos’ old GM truck along with his younger brother and their friend, Jorge, on the way to my very first pelea de gallos. As they bantered in the car, I could understand their castellano (as español is called in Perú) when they spoke directly to me, but their conversations with each other ran too quickly and colloquially to follow. Unable to banter, I sat quietly, except when addressed or when I occasionally crafted a question out of the blue.
“¿Como conoces Carlos?” Jorge asked me.
“Un amigo de un amigo.”
“Un amigo de Carlos es un amigo de mío,” he assured me. I may be in the dark, but I was along for the ride.
We arrived at a fairly modern, purpose-built stadium outside of town. This wasn’t a hushed backyard meetup as I had pictured – rather, a legitimate business with ticket sales, security, concessions, and a restaurant. We filed into the elevated seating surrounding an illuminated, circular ring of turf. Below us, on the edge of the turf, people who looked to be the high rollers, mostly men, passed around bottles of pisco and casually walked across the turf to shake a hand or two.
But they all sat down when the gallos came out. A uniformed boy brought them in zippered cases, the same way you might see a professional bowler carry their ball. Except that when the zipper was opened, a creature emerged, writhing its neck furiously. I had never seen chickens like these. They were thin and lean, with magnificent plumage, especially on their crown, collar and tail. Their eyes shone with fury and thrill.
The owners of the gallos, or “galleros,” stood up from among those who had been seated turfside, and fondled the angry animals as they adjusted to their new surroundings. The galleros let the birds hop around on the ground for a moment, picking then back up when they wandered too far.
“Es su naturaleza.” Carlos explained to me that these types of roosters were naturally predisposed to fighting each other. But they were also specifically bred and trained to be vicious, strong fighters. He pointed to a couple of elderly men in the turfside seats. They were famous in the Cajamarca region for breeding the best gallos, he said.
A man wrote a number on a whiteboard hanging by long strings from the rafters. Arms in the stands vaulted, pointing left or right, indicating their bets.
“¿1,000 soles?” I asked Carlos incredulously.
“Si, mucha plata,” he said. That meant three hundred US dollars riding on each bet for this match.
As the galleros cradled their gallos, a chubby referee in jeans, T-shirt and a fannypack, brought them together to start the fight. The two men stretched their gallos toward each other, leaning from their toes, until the gallos were kissing distance. But instead of kissing, the animals pecked furiously at each other’s foreheads as the arms withdrew and advanced, back and forth, inciting fury in the birds, but not letting them harm each other quite yet. A few feathers floated to the ground in a premonition of what was to come. Once the gallos had fully recognized their enemy, the men dropped them to the ground and backed to the edge of the ring. The battle was on.
“¿Como termina?” I asked Carlos. “¿Con muerte?” Is one of these gallos about to die? I wondered.
“No siempre, pero frequentemente.” There was a time limit, he explained, which spared some of the losers.
Initially, the gallos glared at each other, the feathers on their necks unfurling like the crown of a cobra. I imagined them hissing but all I could hear was the shouts of the crowd. Then, with a blur of feathers, they clashed, beaks meeting necks in quaint but violent pecks. Occasionally, wings flapped furiously and the battle momentarily levitated a foot above the ground as the gallos tried to attack from above. The pot-bellied referee monitored the birds closely, but only intervened when one of the gallos used its claws to pin the other to the ground. He then tenderly pulled the two birds apart, to a fresh start. The use of claws broke the rules, apparently.
Meanwhile, the galleros screamed fanatically on the sidelines, as if the birds could hear their encouragement. As the two gallos struggled, one eventually started slowing its pecks. A disinterested glaze coated its eyes. The other kept pecking and pecking, pushing the weaker gallo backwards with each blow. Eventually, the referee blew his whistle and the owner of the stronger gallo threw his arms in the air, hugging his friends, while the losing gallero slumped back into his seat.
“Ha muerto?” I asked Carlos if the gallo, still standing, but motionless, was dead.
“Ya no. Pronto, possible.”
Sensing my concern over the fate of the dying gallo, Jorge assured me that its death was humane by comparing it to other regional cockfight practices. In Lima, he told me, they attach miniature knives to the claws of the gallos so that they can stab each other.
“Esto es cruel. Eso es normal, la naturaleza.”
Carlos gave his brother money to buy beer. He came back with one large bottle, and one small plastic cup. Carlos filled the cup for himself and handed me the bottle. He swallowed it in one gulp, dumped the remaining foam and backwash on the ground, then handed me the cup.
“¡Salud!” he said. This is how we drink beer in Perú, I guess. I repeated his actions and passed the cup to Jorge.
As the fights continued, somewhat similarly to my untrained eye, Jorge and Carlos debated particulars of each fight, each gallo, and each gallero. They argued about the best way to stabilize the gallo’s weak ankles – carbon rods or the spine bone of a certain fish? They commented on this gallero’s breeding prowess and that gallero’s misfortune. They occasionally threw up a finger in one direction with a bet and locked eyes with another spectator across the ring who had pointed in the opposite direction, to seal an informal wager. How can they tell which gallo is stronger? I wondered.
“Esto es un lugar donde la palabra es más importante que la plata,” Jorge told me, commenting on the trustworthiness of a stranger across the ring to follow through on his bet.
Moments later, beer was flying in the air over the turf as a group of men tried to pry a shouting, gray-haired borracho from a younger, well-dressed caballero. The commotion stalled the show for ten or fifteen minutes as all the men from the turfside seats shoved and shouted in an effort to solve which man had the right in whatever bet they had made.
“La pelea de personas,” Jorge observed.
Eventually, the old borracho was expelled from the turf and came up to sit near us in the stands. The remainder of the night, he shifted schizophrenically between shouting insults and apologies at the caballero on the turf who he believed had defrauded him, even trying to make another wager at one point. The caballero ignored all entreaties.
Gallo after gallo, my attention span waned since I wasn’t attuned like my hosts to the nuances of fighting technique or the local gossip surrounding the galleros. We left after midnight, having been there for over five hours. To my relief, we stopped at a late night kitchen for pollos a la brasa and Inka Kolas.
“Fútbol mañana a las nueve,” Carlos told me.
“Tal vez,” I said. All I could think about was sleep. I mumbled the excuse that I didn’t have shoes I could play in, other than my slick, rigid soled bike cleats.
He didn’t seem to accept my excuse, though, because I woke up to a text from him at nine the next morning, as promised.
“Hola Brian. Vamos a fútbol. Estamos abajo.”
I wrenched myself out of bed and pulled on my stiff bike shoes. Can’t say no when I’ve got a local host!
