by Selva Almada
“Don’t go far,” her father called out.
Leni lifted an arm to indicate that she had heard him.
“And get off the road; if someone comes, there could be an accident.”
Leni laughed to herself. Yeah, or a hare might run her down. She turned her Walkman on and tried to find a station. Nothing. Only aimless static on the air. Steady white noise.
After a while she came back and leaned on the trunk, beside her father.
“Get in the car. This sun is fierce,” said the Reverend.
“I’m fine.”
She glanced across at him. He looked a bit downhearted.
“Someone will come, Father.”
“Yes, of course. We must have faith. It’s not a very busy road.”
“I don’t know. I saw a pair of guinea pigs up there. They went flying over the asphalt so they wouldn’t burn their paws.” Leni laughed, and so did the Reverend.
“Ah, my girl. Jesus has blessed me,” he said, and tapped her on the cheek.
This meant that he was very glad to have her with him, thought Leni, but he could never say it like that, straight out: he always had to get Jesus in there, between them. At another moment, that display of diluted affection would have irritated her; but her father seemed vulnerable now, and she felt a little sorry for him. She knew that although he wouldn’t admit it, he was ashamed of having ignored her advice. He was like a child who has messed up.
“How did it go again, that little verse about the Devil at siesta time?”
“What? A Bible verse?”
“No, just a verse, a little poem. What was it? Wait. It was funny.”
“Elena, you shouldn’t speak lightly of the Devil.”
“Shhh. Wait, it’s on the tip of my tongue. Okay, here we go. ‘Setting his traps / he’s gonna catch you / casting his line / he’s gonna hook you / loading his gun / he’s gonna hunt you / it’s Satan, it’s Satan, it’s Satan.’”
Leni burst out laughing.
“There’s more, but I forget.”
“Elena, you turn everything into a joke. But the Devil is no laughing matter.”
“It’s just a song.”
“Not one I know.”
“But I used to sing it all the time when I was little.”
“That’s enough, Elena. You’ll make up anything to torment me.”
Leni shook her head. She wasn’t making it up. That song existed. Of course it did. Then, suddenly, she remembered: she was sitting in the back seat of the car with her mother, in the parking lot of a service station; they were reciting the song and tapping their palms together like playmates, having some fun while the Reverend was in the bathroom.
“Look. There. Praise be to God,” cried the Reverend and took two strides to the middle of the road, where he stood waving his arms at the bright, glinting point approaching quickly through the heat haze rising off the boiling asphalt.
The truck braked and pulled up sharply beside the Reverend. It was red, with a chrome bumper and tinted windows.
The driver lowered the window on the passenger side and the sound of the cassette player burst out like an explosion; the shock wave of a cumbia forced the Reverend to take a step back. The man leaned out and smiled and said something they couldn’t hear. He disappeared back into the cool cabin, hit a button, and the music stopped. Then he reappeared. He was wearing reflective sunglasses; his skin was tanned, and he hadn’t shaved for a few days.
“What’s up, bud?”
The Reverend rested his hands on the window and leaned in to reply, still dazed by the music.
“Our car broke down.”
The man got out the other side. The work clothes he was wearing contrasted with the sparkling, brand-new vehicle. He approached the car and had a look under the hood, which was still propped open.
“If you like, I can tow you to the Gringo’s place.”
“We’re not from around here.”
“Gringo Brauer has a garage a few miles away. He’ll be able to fix it for sure. I’d take you into town, but on a Saturday, with this heat, it’d be hard to find anyone who could help you. They’ve all gone to Paso de la Patria or the Bermejito to cool off a bit. Me too: I’m going home to get my reel, pick up a few pals, and good luck to anyone who wants me before Monday.”
The man laughed.
“Well, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course not, bud. I’m not going to leave you out here in the middle of nowhere, on foot. Not even the spirits are out in this heat.”
He climbed back into his truck and drove it to the front of the car. Then he got out, took a steel cable from the back, and attached the car’s bumper to his tow bar.
“Let’s go, bud. In you get; it’s good and cool with the air-con.”
The Reverend sat in the middle; Leni sat next to the door. Everything smelled of leather and those little perfumed pine trees.
“Passing through?” asked the driver.
“We’re going to see an old friend,” said the Reverend.
“Well, then, welcome to hell.”
7
Leni’s last image of her mother is from the rear window of the car. Leni is inside, kneeling on the seat, with her arms and chin on the top of the backrest. Outside, her father has just slammed the trunk shut, after taking out a suitcase and putting it on the ground beside her mother, who is standing there with her arms crossed, wearing the sort of long skirt that Leni wears now. Behind them, over the dirt road of that anonymous town, a backdrop of dawn sky rises, pink and gray. Leni is sleepy; her mouth feels sticky and tastes of toothpaste—they left the hotel without having breakfast.
Her mother uncrosses her arms and wipes her forehead with one hand. The Reverend is speaking to her, but from the car Leni can’t hear what he’s saying. He’s moving his hands a lot. He raises an index finger, lowers it and points at her mother, shakes his head, and keeps talking softly. The way his mouth is moving, it’s like he’s biting each word before he spits it out.
Her mother starts walking toward the car, but the Reverend blocks her way, and she freezes. Like in statues, thinks Leni, who has played that game so often, in so many different yards, with different children every time, after the Sunday sermon. With one arm extended, palm out, the Reverend, her father, walks backward and opens the driver’s door. Her mother is left standing there, beside the suitcase. She covers her face with her hands. She’s crying.
The car starts and pulls away, raising a cloud of dust. Her mother runs after it for a few yards, like a dog dumped beside the road at the beginning of a vacation.
This happened almost ten years ago. The details of her mother’s face have faded from Leni’s memory, but not the shape of her body—tall, slim, elegant. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she feels that she has inherited her bearing. At first she thought it was just wishful thinking, wanting to resemble her. But since becoming a woman, she has caught her father, more than once, looking at her with a blend of fascination and contempt, the way you might look at someone who stirs up a mixture of good and bad memories.
The Reverend and Leni have never spoken of that episode. She doesn’t know the name of the town where they left her mother, although if they went back to that street, she’s sure she would recognize it immediately. Places like that don’t change much over the years. The Reverend, of course, must remember the exact point on the map where he left his wife, and must, of course, have struck it off his itinerary for good.
From that morning on, Reverend Pearson has presented himself as a widowed pastor with a young girl in his care. A man in such circumstances elicits instant trust and sympathy. If his wife has been snatched away by God in the prime of life, leaving him alone with a little girl, and he carries on, firm in his faith, burning with the flame of Christ’s love, he must be a good man, a man who deserves to be listened to attentively.
Tapioca’s memories of his mother are vague too. After she left him, he had to get used to his new home. What interested him most was t
he heap of old cars. The dogs and that mechanical cemetery were a comfort in the first weeks while he was still adjusting. He would spend all day among the car bodies: he played at driving them, with three or four dogs as copilots. The Gringo left him to it and approached the boy gradually, as if taming a wild animal. He began by telling him the stories of all those cars and the streets and roads they had traveled. Many had gone to faraway places: not just Rosario, like Tapioca’s mother, but Buenos Aires and Patagonia. Brauer dug out a pile of Automobile Club road maps, and at night, after dinner, he showed the boy the places where, according to him, those cars had been. He traced the routes with his thick finger, stained with grease and nicotine, and explained that the breadth and color of the lines on the map showed how important the various roads were. Sometimes Brauer’s finger changed direction abruptly, turning off the main highway to follow a barely hinted at track, a line finer than an eyelash, ending in a tiny dot. That, the Gringo would say, was where the driver of the car had spent the night, and the time had come for them to go to sleep as well.
Sometimes the mechanic’s fingertip skipped along a dotted line, a bridge built over a river. Tapioca didn’t understand about rivers or bridges, so Brauer explained.
Sometimes his finger moved slowly around the curves of a mountain road. Once it came to the edge of the map, and the Gringo spoke of the cold, a cold they would never know in Chaco, a cold that made everything white. The highway was covered with ice there in winter, and the ice made tires skid and caused fatal accidents. The thought of a place like that scared Tapioca, and he was glad they were high up on the map and not down there at the end of the world.
Gringo Brauer bought the cars from the provincial police. He had a contact. They sold them to him for scrap. Mainly they were cars impounded after accidents or fires. Every now and then they’d get a stolen one. The Gringo would check the mechanics; the police would supply new papers and license plates, and the car would be sold to the Gypsies. The police paid Brauer for the work, with a bonus for his cooperation.
Along with the stories about where the cars had been, the Gringo would tell Tapioca about how they had changed hands and ended up there at the garage. He re-created accidents, and Tapioca listened with wide-open eyes. In the first stories, the driver and passengers would climb out unharmed; the car was a write-off but the people were safe and sound. After a while, the Gringo thought it was time to get the boy used to death, and from then on all the endings were definitive and bloody. This gave Tapioca nightmares for a while. He saw his mother or Brauer himself or the few people he knew dying in wrecks of twisted metal, their bodies flying through the windshield or burnt to a cinder when the car burst into flames and they were trapped by doors that wouldn’t open. But eventually he got used to it and stopped dreaming about the scenes that the Gringo had described.
It’s not the cars’ fault, Brauer always told him. It’s the people who drive them.
Tapioca was in third grade when his mother left him. He could read, write, and do sums. The Gringo hadn’t finished school himself, so he didn’t see why the boy had to keep on with it. The nearest school was miles away, and it would have been complicated to take him there and fetch him every day. The formal schooling he’d received up to the age of eight was enough. From then on, Brauer decided, Tapioca would have to learn by working and observing nature. It might not be scientific, but nature and work would teach the kid how to be a good person.
God has given us words. Words set us apart from all the other creatures living under this sky. But beware of words, for they are weapons that may be wielded by the Devil.
How often have you said: What a good speaker this man is, what beautiful words, such a rich vocabulary; listening to him is so reassuring.
The boss comes and speaks to you with strong, dependable words, making promises for the long term. He speaks like a father to his children. After hearing him, you say to each other: How well he spoke; his words are simple and true; he speaks to us as if we were his children; he made it clear that if we stay with him and do as he says, he will always keep us safe from harm, like members of his family; he will never fail us; he said it plain as day, with simple words; he spoke to us as an equal.
The politician comes and speaks to you with fine-sounding words, as if there were music coming out of his mouth; no one has ever spoken to you with such beautiful words, so fluently, without ever running out of breath. And after such a flowery speech, so carefully written, so correct, with so many words from the dictionary, you are meek and docile. You go away thinking: He really is a good man; he’s thinking for all of us; he thinks what we think; he’s representing us.
But I say to you: Beware of strong words and beautiful words. Beware of the boss’s words and the words of the politician. Beware of those who say they are your father or your friend. Beware of these men who speak on their own behalf to further their own interests.
You already have a father, and that father is God. You already have a friend, and that friend is Christ. All the rest is words. Words that blow away in the wind.
You have your own words, the power of the word, and you must use that power. God doesn’t listen to the loudest or the most eloquent speakers; he listens to those who speak truthfully, from the heart.
Let Christ speak through your mouths, let your tongues move to the rhythm of his word: the one true word. Take up the weapon of the word and aim; fire at the charlatans, the liars, the false prophets.
Open yourselves to the word of God; let it rule, for it is powerful and alive and sharper than any double-edged sword, and it plunges deep into the soul and the spirit, into the joints and the marrow, and finds out the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Consider this and testify.
Praised be the word of the Father and the Son.
8
Tapioca removed the earphone and stood up slowly so as not to wake the girl. He took a few steps and shook the dirt off his trousers. Then he headed for the bathroom. He tiptoed past the Reverend, who was still dozing on his chair.
Tapioca emptied his bladder noisily into the toilet. Just as well the girl, Leni, was out of earshot, otherwise he would have been embarrassed.
When he came out again, drying his hands on the front of his shirt, the Reverend was waking up. He had taken off his glasses and was using his handkerchief to wipe his sweaty face and his scalp, with its few remaining strands of hair. He saw Tapioca and smiled.
“Take a seat, my boy.”
He patted the chair beside him. Tapioca looked at him with his head tilted to one side, like a dog that has been called. The stranger was making him nervous, and he hesitated for a while, trying to think of an excuse to get away. But in the end he sat down.
“They call you Tapioca, don’t they?”
He nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Tapioca.”
“That’s what they call you. It’s your nickname. But you have another name, the one you were given when you were born. Do you remember what it is?”
Tapioca rubbed his hands on his trousers.
“Josemilio,” he blurted.
“José. That’s a nice name. A very fine name. Do you know who José is?”
Brushing away a fly that was crawling on his face, Tapioca looked at the Reverend. This man was confusing him. He shrugged in reply.
“José was María’s husband, María, the mother of Christ. José was the man who raised him, like Mr. Brauer. He raised you as if you were his son, didn’t he? Do you know who Christ is?”
The boy wiped his face with his hand. He was sweating. It wasn’t so much because of the heat (he was used to that); it was nerves. He wanted to get away. But he was intimidated by the stranger.
“Have you heard of God? God is our creator. He created everything you can see. You are his work and so am I. Mr. Brauer has told you about God, hasn’t he?”
Tapioca looked at him. He remembered the years when he went to school, when the teacher asked him questio
ns, and he didn’t know the answer. It was like that now; he felt like crying.
“I have to take something to the Gringo,” he stammered.
“Wait. You can go in a minute,” said the Reverend, placing his hand on the boy’s arm. It was as soft as a woman’s hand. Although it was warm, it made Tapioca shiver.
He looked to see where Brauer was. The Gringo was bent over with his head under the hood of the Reverend’s car, more than a hundred yards from the porch where Tapioca was being detained, and completely unaware of his distress.
“Don’t worry. I’ll tell him we were having a chat.”
The man looked at him with a calm smile. It wasn’t the first time Tapioca had seen such light eyes; there were lots of gringos in the area. But these eyes seemed to be casting a spell on him. It was like what Brauer had said about the pygmy owl and its prey: the gaze of the owl was so powerful that its victims would faint before they were eaten.
Tapioca shook his head. It felt heavy. He didn’t have to look into those eyes.
“Hmm?” said the Reverend’s honey-sweet voice.
“What?” said the boy, almost irritably.
“So no one ever told you about Christ our Savior. Mr. Brauer is a good man. And you’re a good boy, José. Christ is waiting for you with open arms. We just have to prepare you to welcome him.”
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Christ and all that stuff. You come here and you start talking to me. My … my name is Tapioca, okay? You don’t know the first thing about us.
He would have liked to say something like that to end the conversation. But he didn’t dare; he sat there with his mouth shut. He looked all around to avoid looking at the Reverend, but his eyes couldn’t settle anywhere: they jumped from one of the dogs to the road, and then to the cars piled up in the sun, back to the tip of his sandals, to his hands, and finally stole a sidelong glance at the man sitting beside him.
The Reverend’s gaze, by contrast, was fixed on the boy. He was sitting now with hands clasped, in a beatific pose.