The Adventures of China Iron

by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

  The nation needed the land to be conquered, Hernández went on, explaining the bones that surrounded the estancia, those savages didn’t give it to us for free. And now we are conquering a workforce for the nation, just look at my gauchos. And yes, we could see them. The married ones had cottages with more than one room, the whole family can’t share, said Hernández and I guess he was right. Did all of them like it? No, some needed a good hiding to see reason, others the stocks, various others needed to be whipped and some escaped never to return, fed up with being denied a daily ration of caña and their own money. Didn’t he pay them? No, the little money that comes in I invest in the schoolmistress, the school, the chapel and homes for the new families. And in my cattle and my house as well, since they are the life blood of the estate, the spearhead of the nation, they are progress penetrating the desert.

  A Bunch of Short Dark Hapsburgs

  Hernández was showing us the man of the future, which he embodied: I am paved roads, I am steam power, I am economy of the pampas, I am seed of civilisation and progress in this fertile and brutish land, untouched by the plough, only galloped over by savages who seem to have no sense of history other than as ghosts and thieves, a mere puff of smoke with no notion of anything except sowing vandalism left right and centre; they seem to float above the ground, if it weren’t for the fact that they rob and burn everything the white man’s work puts in front of them, you’d think they didn’t exist, that they’re a folk tale like the El Dorado our ancestors went after. The gauchos, who are usually a mixture of Indian and Spaniard, didn’t even inherit their European grandfathers’ dreams of piles of gold. Nor did they inherit the Indians’ way of going about, always treading as lightly as hares. Nothing. They were good soldiers for the nation, that’s for sure, gauchos are brave, but now there aren’t any wars except the ones to conquer the frontier yard by yard with the slow weapons of agricultural work. And they’re just not interested. They haven’t the least notion of construction, they live all hugger-mugger in mouldy hovels. They have no taboos; if they don’t lie down with their mothers it’s only because they prefer them young, although you can’t even be sure of that, I’ve had three cases, no, wait a minute, Hernández consulted his ledger, four cases of men having relations with their mothers: you should see how their kids turned out, stunted, bow-legged, with skinny arms, one of them even squired son-brothers with underbites, a bunch of short dark Hapsburgs, illiterate, and toothless by the age of thirteen, that’s what I get in return for giving those little brutes food, work and schooling, the Colonel exclaimed, roaring with laughter. And I had to train them using harsh methods because school or no school, you can’t spare the rod. Have you seen Miss Daisy? I brought one of those gringa schoolteachers that President Sarmiento is so keen on down here to teach, and only three or four gauchos learnt anything at all, the others couldn’t even write their names after a whole year. Anyway, she got raped by five of them all at once, they whipped her until one of her lovely little sky-blue eyes popped out, they knocked three of her teeth out and pulled out half her hair. I had seen her in passing, yes, a lame cross-eyed and half-bald gringa. I didn’t ask about her limp, what was the point. I’d also sent those men to the other school and I have to give them credit for trying to improve the race: the little half-gringo bastards they produced turned out to be better workers; there’s no point pretending otherwise, said Hernández eyeing up Liz so lecherously it was as though he had the stiff cock of a dog on either side of his nose. That gringa is tough, she was in bed for a week, and she was clever enough to insist on keeping her position as their teacher and on asking me to spare the men’s lives, imagine my dear, I was in such admiration of her mercifulness. As soon as she could stand, she got up bright and early and went to where the gauchos were, the gauchos for whose lives she had wept in my arms. You can’t imagine how much she had changed in just a few hours; barely overnight, where those blue eyes used to be she now had a gash on one side and a fountain of hate on the other, her remaining eye isn’t even blue anymore, it turned the colour of eternal ice, it’s terrifying, try and catch a glimpse when you see her. She got the men out of their cell and ordered that the five of them be stretched out between stakes on the ground. She formed a star shape with their bodies and left them to roast in the sun; hours later, maybe fourteen hours later – and this was in the height of summer – she had some buckets of water thrown over them, and as night fell she let them have some water to drink. In the sky the fluffy red clouds looked like ticks, thousands of blood-sucking ticks bunched up there against the emerging colours of orange and hot purple, and that fateful sky really should have told us what was coming but no, the gauchos asked her for forgiveness, por favor, Miss, we’re sorry, we didn’t mean to, it’s just that you’re so pretty and we’d drunk so much caña, we want to marry you, Miss, all five of us, we want to be your servants, forgive us. Miss Daisy ordered that they be given something to eat, some mush and a drop of caña, the gauchos took hope, thank you Miss, gracias, we will always be grateful to you Miss, and, feeling encouraged, they even smiled, and the Miss in question looked at them through the frozen nothingness of her empty eye and her full eye without saying anything. She sat down in the middle of the star shape made of men and asked to be brought a stout branch and a knife, and there she sat, sharpening the stick while they watched her and became less and less capable of speech, and more and more pale, more and more prone to sobbing, and their mothers and women and children gathered round to sob too, and even their horses seemed to be crying at what they had coming to them, the unleashed fury of Miss Daisy. Even I weakened slightly in my resolve to allow her to choose their punishment; there are some things you just don’t do to a man, whatever the crime, but I had given my word that I would respect the fate that she had chosen for her aggressors. I thought that she would choose mercy; how wrong a man can be, even a man of my age and experience! The other gauchos looked like they would protect the men, I had to get in the middle with my shotgun and all my officers had to stand in their way, all eleven of us were armed and we had to intervene, it was the closest we have ever come to a mutiny here at Las Hortensias. What can I say? I didn’t fire a single shot because the gauchos were in the right. They kept still until the gringa got tired and went back to her sick bed. Then we lowered our weapons and the gauchos went to get the bodies of the dead men, so encrusted in their own shit and dried blood that they had to be dragged out of the muck and scrubbed clean in order to be able to put them back in the ground again. If only they’d been that clean, white and cold in the first place, they’d have avoided ending their days as dirty, hot-blooded darkies. I myself wept that night.

  Liz nodded while he spoke, from time to time she would rest her hand on his shoulder, she called him a hero and said you’re a true patriot, and she kept filling his glass because if the Colonel had pricks where other people have eyes, he also had ten thirsty camels where other people have mouths, his mouth was basically an end point, a pool of whisky where all his pricks drowned. Well handled! said Liz. She had Hernández wrapped around her little finger. What have you done with the degenerates and their mothers? she asked him. I am forcing them to learn in the tough part of the school, which I was telling you about, where we beat it into them, Miss Daisy’s school. She runs both schools but I have a feeling that the fear she inspires in them means those darkies will never learn anything, ever. And where is the other school? Over there behind those trees, Hernández said, pointing to a flat patch of ground cleared of scrub. He called out and one of his clean and coiffed gauchos appeared. Hernández ordered him to escort the ladies, which made the gaucho snigger. Hernández sniggered too at which point I drew my knife and he said to me no, no my lad, no offence, I’m not calling you a señora; what I meant was your sister is lady enough for two, and he sent us to visit the school for disobedient gauchos.

  The blonde woman and her bastard twins were in charge there. The boys had turned out fierce and quite white and it was exactly for that reason – becau
se nothing was right unless it was like their mother – that they hated gauchos. They imagined what they could have been if it hadn’t been for those five men killed in a bloody and shit-filled star. They wanted to go back to the United States with their mother and be cowboys in Minneapolis. Let’s go back home, momma they would say to her, as if there was any back for them to go to beyond Hernández’s estancia.

  The Whip and the Rod

  No door was closed to us. Hernández showed us everything with patrician pride. Stiff and drying out like hides in the sun, skin cracked, eyes shut, faces contorted in pain: that’s how we found the gauchos in Campo Malo, the place that Hernández kept for outcasts. Being sentenced to death was primarily for deserters and murderers, the worst crimes that could be committed at Las Hortensias. Everything else, including stealing, was considered a minor offence, punishable by spread-eagling between four stakes, by the stocks, or by whipping with knotted, wetted reins. What you couldn’t do was leave. Or kill. The death sentence that awaited murderers was to be put inside the hide of a freshly slaughtered cow, a method they called the beef roll. The poor wretch would be rolled in the cow’s skin, stitched inside it and left outside in the blazing sun: slowly the hide would tighten, smothering him as it dried, hour after hour, until he was dead.

  After being punished – unless the punishment was death – each gaucho was squeezed into a small space containing only hides and dirt then bound hand and foot, like cattle snagged with bolas, so that the damned idlers couldn’t just lie down to sleep. The Little Daisies explained their methods to us, they were only about fifteen, but every bit as tough as their momma: they would cover the men’s eyes with blinkers and gag them with bridles, then throw them to the ground, and lash their bodies with whips. The men were bloodied bundles, speckled black and blue from all the flies they couldn’t swat, and they were kept like that because they do not want to learn. They were kept in punishment boxes after their day in the stocks, or the stakes, and were left to do a week of penance so that they would be reformed. Then they were allowed to go, and off they went, like this stupid nigger, for example – the taller of Miss Daisy’s offspring kicked the skinned head of a gaucho on flesh so raw it hurt to see it – who ran off to his mother’s house, so that he could suck the tits of that whore of a witch who was his mother and wife in the same body. And we had others, a couple of them managed to escape from us, like that bone-idle man who sang instead of working, and who learnt his letters so he could write down his songs and then went around saying that the bossman had stolen his poems and we gave him a taste of the whip and the rod and then we gave him a bit more and he wouldn’t stop saying that the songs were his, and we had him ready to be broken in, you know ma’am, a horse in front to pull him one way and a horse behind for the other way, and we were going to have one horse run towards Great Britain and one towards Indian Territory, but that scumbag larva escaped. We knew he was a worm because he wriggled free somehow. It doesn’t really matter if we find him or not, what do we care about that Indian piece of shit and all these damn Indians? they said, spitting on the men, and there was something so menacing about them, they were so full of themselves, so proud of what they were showing us, whereas I just wanted to get out of there, to get out of earshot of the pleas for mercy uttered by the weak voices of the dying men. Liz congratulated the boys, she told them that if she was their mother she would be so proud of them, what good boys, muy bien, hardworking and with such lovely English manners. The Little Daisies were thrilled; they stopped hitting and swearing for a while and they saw us to the door of Campo Malo.

  On the rest of the estancia – the Campo Bueno was it called? – work seemed to bring happiness to everyone. The world is like a woven cloth, Liz began, what is brilliant here is like a weave that only shines because it has a warp of flesh and blood, which is Campo Malo, and that’s the way it’s always been, and that’s the way it will remain until we all know our place in the weaving process. In this particular pattern, the gauchos and the chinas – who didn’t do gymnastics because at that time of the morning they were giving breakfast to their children – worked with dedication from eight in the morning until eight at night. They would sing ‘See our beloved flag that waves/its emblem is our beacon/Oh Argentina fought so braaaaave/to give us all our freedom!’ and would do their work by parts. What I mean is that no one did a whole job, no one finished what they started. The washerwomen, for example, sat at the sides of huge basins, the first ones soaked and soaped the clothes. They would pass them down the line to the next group of women who would scrub them with brushes. They in turn would pass them along to be rinsed. And finally the white shirts, shining like the sun, would be hung out to dry by dark-skinned women. It was the same at the furnace: one man would stoke the fire, another would heat the metal until it was soft enough, one would hammer it into the desired shape and plunge it into cold water and another would take it out all sleek and shiny and put it up on a stand. In just one day I saw hundreds of horseshoes being made using this formula: the Colonel wanted to invent a new speed on the pampa, he’d been to Great Britain and the United States of America and he wanted for the Argentines something of the forceful zeal of the Anglos. Only men worked in the furnace and, when the foreman was out of earshot, these men sang songs as they stared at the chinas: ‘A cap the girl frog was a’knitting/to give to a boy frog one day/Well mind how you go little girl frog/For this frog needs a roll in the hay’.

  The Colonel held another huge dinner that night and ended up blind drunk on wine again. The patriarch’s head hadn’t even hit the table before Liz sprang from her chair and led me, practically shoving me, to her bed. It wasn’t that I minded, I was merely trying to ask, trying to understand why she was acting so queer with me, she had been so different during our journey. But you like it, don’t you? she interrupted, giving me one last shove. I fell onto the bed with a bounce and she rushed to get my clothes off like she was rushing to put out a fire. She took her clothes off as well and continued with my education: this time she began gently, stroking my whole body, front and back, with her hands, her mouth, her tongue, her nose and she even stuck her nipples into all my holes. I was lost for words, even though this woman had taught me so many of them as we crossed the desert, inside the wagon, by the fire, under the ombú trees, and drinking caña with Rosa. The chinas knocked at the door and came in, I hid while they filled the tub with hot water, Liz asked them to bring some tea, which they did, and then they went away. She grabbed me all over again and stuck me in the bath and got in herself, and then she did something no one had ever done to me: she turned me round, sinking her breasts onto my shoulder blades, biting me hard on the back of my neck like a dog carrying its pup across a river, she never once let go of me, with one hand she began to rub my nipples and with the other my cunt, she parted my buttocks, and leaning there, she grabbed my hand and taught me to touch myself, she sucked my fingers, she put them on my clitoris, using my hand as if it were hers until I found my own rhythm, she opened my arse a bit more and then penetrated me with her fist while she bit me harder and harder and kept squeezing my breasts. I stopped touching myself, I grabbed the sides of the tub with both hands and allowed myself to be filled up with this new pleasure, almost stinging, a pleasure made of needles and pins, she made me howl like an animal in her arms. I came in my arse, pledged her eternal love, and then sucked her till I nearly drowned.

  That Strange Gaucho Who Fancied Himself as a Writer

  Oh, do tell us about that strange gaucho who fancied himself as a writer! The one who ran away, Liz launched straight in over breakfast, right after the formal good mornings, which were becoming less and less formal, to my delight and alarm: even before the first rays of sun came into the bedroom I’d woken up practically drowning with Liz’s cunt in my mouth and her rubbing herself against my face, my breathing syncopated with her secretions, she made me breathe in and out to her rhythm as if she were breaking me in. That was what she was doing whether I realised it or not, how better
to tame an animal than by forcing it to breathe when you choose? Now she was kissing the Colonel on the cheek. He always looked grey in the mornings but nevertheless he was up and about at the crack of dawn. Hernández was a tamer too, a tamer of hangovers who could even muster a smile when she looked at him or addressed him in any way. Do you see, darling? There are sparks of genius here in the countryside, as I always say when people ask me what the folk on the pampas are like. A semi-illiterate gaucho learnt something here with Miss Daisy, and now he says I stole his songs. Oh, yes, quite an odd fellow, by the sound of it? Yes, yes, though he does have a point: I didn’t steal them, but when I heard him sing I relieved him of his ploughing duties so that he could entertain the men while they worked. What a generous man you are, Colonel! If you say so, my little Gringa, then I must be. The truth is, I realised that it made them happier, and a leader, a Colonel like myself, a landowner, has to know how to handle his troops and keep them happy. It has to be carrot and stick, especially when there are a thousand of them and only twenty-one of us military men, me and my officers; if I count the gauchos who believe in progress, there are two hundred of us. I’d rather not be put in the position of having to test their loyalty, just in case I’ve backed the wrong horse and they decide to bolt. I have to stable them, do you see? I have to make them feel they belong here, that it’s their home territory. And it is partly theirs: the land a man works is always partly his. Not always . I said partly, my dear, don’t worry, I haven’t been bitten by the communist bug, the plague that all these starving peasants are trying to bring over from Europe like a swarm of locusts, just as our grandfathers flattened us with their smallpox; I have to laugh, Gringa, everything is so flat here, they paved the way. Just imagine, darling, one day the gauchos will realise that they far outnumber us, and although they know – because they do know, they’re not completely daft and some of them have been around a fair bit – that the Argentine Army is behind us, and therefore also partly behind them but mainly behind us – here we’re all in it together but not to the same extent, some of us are completely in it and others only partly, perhaps I’m not being clear – as I say, one day they’ll realise, and then before the first battalion can arrive, they’ll already have slit our throats, as they are so fond of doing when they get the chance – you should hear them sing along while a dying man pirouettes in a pool of his own blood! So the long and short of it is, I gave the gaucho writer a job as a performer and sometimes I’d listen to that brute singing and you should have heard the lines he came up with. That ruffian was actually, how shall I put it, a real poet of the people. I did stick a few lines of his poetry into my first book; he wasn’t totally wrong about that. I also put his name in the title, Martín Fierro is the name of that peasant poet, who’s capable of churning out rhymes all day long, it’s practically a kind of vice with him, though he’s good at it. He never appreciated what I did for him by taking some of his songs and putting them in my book. I took his voice, the voice of the voiceless, do you see, to the whole country, to the big smoke Buenos Aires which is always ripping us off. The city sponges off us, charging us huge amounts for exporting grain and cattle through its port. And not letting us build another big port anywhere else.