Bernarda Cutiño: The Singer at the Card Table
This essay discusses Juan Rulfo’s The Golden Cockerel in full, including its ending.
At Santa Gertrudis, the gambler Lorenzo Benavides strikes Bernarda Cutiño and tells his rival Dionisio Pinzón that this filthy witch is responsible for everything he has won. Dionisio continues shuffling the cards. Then years pass, and Rulfo leaves him shuffling in the same house, in the same place, with Bernarda seated a little behind him in the same chair.
The cut in The Golden Cockerel carries a whole marriage across one uninterrupted gesture. Dionisio, once a poor town crier, has become a wealthy gambler; Bernarda, the traveling singer known as La Caponera, wears pearls where she once wore colored beads. Her expensive dress and jewelry register the passing years, while the repeated word same holds her position still. Rulfo immediately specifies that she is obliged to remain there.
Calling Bernarda a witch gives her an extraordinary power, yet the scene also shows how easily a man can strike her. Dionisio’s belief that she brings him luck will make her presence indispensable to his gambling, and this supposed power becomes a reason to keep her within reach. The singer’s changing place in the story is measured through what others want from her: first songs, then attendance beside the cards.
A voice among the wagers
When Dionisio first encounters La Caponera, singing fills the intervals between cockfights. Her performance belongs to the fair’s working rhythm: the birds fight, money changes hands, and the musicians supply something that can hold an audience until the next contest. Asked about her, a man describes traveling the world as her occupation. Bernarda’s movement already has a practical explanation.
Rulfo gives her enough room on the page for us to hear how she occupies these gatherings. Songs interrupt the narration; she advises Dionisio about bets, produces money, recognizes cheating, and returns to perform. Her talk and singing cross the boundary between the audience and the gamblers. The woman later placed behind Dionisio’s chair once participates in deciding what he should stake.
Her first substantial portrait preserves the physical effort and social force of this life. She has a rough voice, colorful skirts, a silk shawl, flowers braided into her hair, and a body that resists unwanted touching. The voice’s roughness belongs to her successful years as well as her decline. Alcohol, too, is present long before Santa Gertrudis becomes a place of confinement; drinks arrive from admirers and circulate among the musicians.
At Cuquío, her song rises over a roulette table but partly disappears into the crowd and the open shelter. Rulfo makes the difficulty audible before her career fails: singing must compete with the gathering it helps sustain. Bernarda has lost the cockfight engagement to another singer because she arrived late, so even this vigorous woman depends on available work, timing, and other people’s decisions.
Her mother had traveled the fairs before her, taking Bernarda along from childhood. After the mother dies in a tent fire, Bernarda joins itinerant musicians. The road carries a family history of making a living before Dionisio ever calls her his source of luck. By the time we meet her, she has inherited both a profession and its exposure to sudden loss.
A house with walls
In the middle of the Cuquío gathering, Bernarda explains why she left Lorenzo Benavides: he wanted to shut her inside his house. Dionisio suggests that its size might have made the arrangement worthwhile. She replies, “Yes, but it has walls.” A musician beckons with his guitar, and she returns to sing.
The exchange ends with an appointment she can keep. Bernarda belongs to musicians who need her to perform, people who have gathered to listen, and places she can leave afterward. Those relations have demands of their own, but they allow her to choose her next destination. The immense house offers possessions while threatening the movement through which she earns, meets lovers, and keeps company.
Dionisio initially seems compatible with that life. His appetite for winning takes him from fair to fair, and Bernarda expects it to keep him traveling as long as there is another cockfight. He thinks of her as a magnet for good luck. Their motives differ, but for a time they can follow the same route.
When Rulfo returns to the marriage negotiations after the abrupt leap across years, Bernarda’s earlier words expose what Dionisio has abandoned. She chooses the men she wants and leaves them when she wishes; she expects a partner who will answer for their shared decisions. She initially accepts staying home after their daughter’s birth, then disputes the arrangement as the child grows. Eventually she leaves with the girl, and Dionisio finds her again by following a song toward a crowd.
The narrative’s backward movement matters here. We have already seen Bernarda immobilized in the chair when we hear the conditions under which she agreed to marry. Her spoken terms arrive inside the account of their violation. That surviving argument prevents the later silence from appearing to be the life she always wanted.
When singing no longer pays
Away from the house, Bernarda’s voice can no longer fill the cockfight arena. She still sings in cantinas and at smaller stalls, and Dionisio’s messenger reports that she does not seem unhappy. When her husband finds her, she insists on continuing to travel. She wants their daughter to inherit that way of living so that the girl will not have to submit to anyone.
For a while the family resumes its rounds. Then the mariachi leave. Bernarda drinks heavily, her voice has deteriorated, and too few people are eager to hear her; the musicians find another singer. She tries to persuade other players to accompany her daughter, but they calculate that the arrangement would also require them to support and care for the mother. Their refusal is blunt: “The business won’t support the singer’s mother.”
Through that calculation, Rulfo gives the change in Bernarda’s circumstances a material cause. Her daughter’s voice might prolong the family profession, but the musicians refuse the cost of keeping both generations on the road. Bernarda’s resolve outlasts the means by which she has sustained it. Her husband can now impose the conditions she had previously set herself.
Dionisio turns Santa Gertrudis into a gambling establishment, with enough food, wine, and comfort to keep the guests there for days. The money comes to his house. Bernarda first attends the games for company; when she grows bored and decides to stop, he violently orders her back. After a losing spell, he brings her to the room, and his winnings resume.
The coincidences keep the fable’s supernatural possibility alive. Bernarda may be his amulet, and Lorenzo’s accusation of witchcraft may name something the gamblers cannot explain. The domestic consequence is explicit regardless: Dionisio makes her sit there against her wishes. He can continue extracting what he believes she supplies after the musicians have judged what she can supply unprofitable. His success needs no audible performance from her.
What the players fail to hear
In the gambling room, the men gradually stop noticing whether Bernarda is awake, asleep, or thinking about anything. Her high-backed chair and black dress withdraw her into the shadows; she can see them, while they cannot make out her face. They require her attendance and scarcely attend to her.
The room’s sounds contract accordingly. Earlier, Rulfo prints songs and lets Bernarda speak across the games. Here the faint, monotonous handling of cards accompanies men who barely breathe. She drinks to dull her awareness, and the old habit, once woven through work and applause, now fills nights without singing. Both parents neglect their daughter, and Bernarda’s later distress over the girl’s life adds guilt to the exhaustion.
Rulfo tells us that Bernarda dies alone in her chair before the gamblers discover it. For several pages afterward, the game continues. A doctor is present, watching a wealthy player’s heart and taking part in the betting, while the woman whose attendance sustains Dionisio’s confidence remains unexamined. The delay lets the reader inhabit the dreadful interval between a death and the room’s acknowledgment of it.
During the losing game, the daughter’s laughter and singing reach Dionisio and recall Bernarda’s earlier voice. Yet he keeps treating his wife’s silence as sleep. Only after his losses become ruinous does he go to her, shake her, and tear the pearl necklace so that its beads scatter. The ornament that marked their prosperity comes apart before he understands that its wearer is dead.
After Dionisio’s suicide, their daughter leaves with her voice as her means of support and sings at another fair. The ending opens the gathering to sound again, but the mother’s history remains inside that apparent renewal. Bernarda had hoped to pass on a life without submission; she also passes on a livelihood that depends on listeners and musicians willing to pay for it. The daughter’s song gives the abandonment she has just suffered a public expression, while the next cockfight is already being announced. She returns to the work Bernarda wanted her to inherit, with the same need to make it pay.
Sources
Juan Rulfo, El gallo de oro, definitive text with an introduction by José Carlos González Boixo (Editorial RM / Fundación Juan Rulfo, ©2010; July 2011 printing), pp. 81–144. Principal passages: pp. 96, 105–10, 118–23, 126–33, and 136–44. All page references are to the printed edition. The two English quotations above are translated from this Spanish text for the essay.
Further critical context: José Carlos González Boixo’s introduction to the same edition, especially pp. 22–32, on Bernarda’s independence, mythical luck, and changing relation to Dionisio.
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