Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  Don Gamelindo encouraged his mount with a soft cluck of the tongue.

  “I heard about that,” he said. “The war between the Jews and the Nazis. War is impious. God preserve us from wars and revolutions, eh, Señorita?”

  By luck, Daria’s horse made a bound forward, so she didn’t have to answer him.

  * * *

  The sierra was becoming more and more torrid; the lake gleamed like molten metal in a crucible. They rode through the fiery monotony without talking, without thinking, without dreaming, with no sensation other than the furnace above them. The plantation came into view, an oasis of green. They entered the enclosure, a wall of rough stones. They saw a man in white standing under a cluster of big, smooth-barked trees nearly bare of leaves but sprouting white flowers. Hands on hips, he was overseeing the work of two half-naked Indians as they shoveled earth from a trench. From behind Daria’s eyes floated the memory of an illustration from a childhood book or perhaps a propaganda manual: “The Planter and His Slaves.” The planter turned toward them. He raised a hand in greeting. A floppy palm-fiber hat obscured much of his face. Not until they were three steps apart did Sacha and Daria recognize each other, and the look they exchanged was so fraught with apprehension that they had to feign joy at seeing each other, force themselves to smile while shaking hands as though they had parted the day before. The presence of Don Gamelindo, far from being an encumbrance, made it easier for both of them to put the right face on things.

  Bruno Battisti’s first thoughts were: Why is she here? To kill me? Unlikely after all these years. I sank into obscurity, I kept quiet. To escape herself? Then she’s probably being followed. Women are never rational enough about covering their tracks. It’s her they’ll be after, but they’ll throw us in for free. Nothing could be easier, in this place … Accustomed to ordinary, everyday dangers, but long out of the habit of those mysteriously organized threats that close in out of nowhere to ensnare you, he shuddered. “Is it really you?” he said to Daria. “What a happy surprise …” “Sacha, I’ve run away,” Daria whispered, aware of his fears, yet ecstatic — as if a cup of joy, downed in one draft, was going to her head. “Don’t look at me like that, there’s nothing to be afraid of …” (Not that assurances made any difference!) His gray eyes brightened the way they used to. He shrugged his shoulders; older, stronger, sunburned.

  “That’s magnificent, my friend. Here you’ll be safe. Life. The desert. See how beautiful it is.”

  From the height of his velvet-and-silver-decorated saddle, Don Gamelindo, framed in sunlight and by looming green shrubbery, smiled down at them like a grinning Chinese mask. To Daria, back in her picture book, he was the image of their master: “The Foreigner, the Planter, and the Great Cacique.” Banana trees bent their fronds over tumescent fruit. Coffee bushes climbed the slopes. At the end of the avenue of greenery appeared a plain white house surrounded by slender palms. “Please, don’t say anything upsetting in front of Noémi. She’s very vulnerable,” said Bruno Battisti.

  “Please dismount, Don Gamelindo, and come see my improvements! We’re piping water in, and building a reservoir …” All that could be seen of the two men digging the trench was their bronze backs, gleaming with perspiration. Spadefuls of ferrous earth, as if tinged with blood, landed noiselessly at the horses’ feet. Daria, in her sad ecstasy, thought of a grave. An Indian led the horses away. Don Gamelindo was saying, “You should finish that reservoir. The rains are coming and the earth is parched. There were clouds over El Águila just now … A good sign.”

  He crushed tender coffee leaves between his fingers and smelled them, raising a connoisseur’s eyebrow.

  “Healthy plant, that, and the right species of Uruapan … Did you hear, Don Bruno, about what happened at Pozo Viejo the other week? Basilio Tronco killed young Alejo Reyes … That’s more trouble in the making. The Troncos have sent a calf to the chairman of the town council.”

  “Ah,” said Bruno simply.

  “And in San Blas, the youngest Álvarez girl has got engaged to the son of the lawyer Carbajo. You’re invited to the fiesta.”

  “Please thank them for me. I’ll do my best to attend.”

  Don Gamelindo took a moment to reflect on what further news was worth sharing.

  “Yes … Sunday’s cockfight, you know old Tigre, well he killed the other one in seven minutes flat. I was eleven pesos the richer for it! I knew to bet on the old bruiser, even if he’s only got one eye. He’s crafty, that’s what it is. Not a cock to match him in the country. The loser was Dorado, Don Arnulfo’s little strutter. Evil-tempered, I always said so, but no good at pacing himself, too impetuous on the attack … You’ve got to be able to tell if a young cock’s got the brains, haven’t you, same as with a growing lad, true or not true?”

  “True.”

  “The fountain’s dried up in the square. People are fetching water from the lake, and there’s sickness about. At least I’ve got my well, though it cost me an arm and a leg.”

  “Of course.”

  All the news having been told, they fell silent. Great big black-and-yellow butterflies were flying in pairs through the warm air.

  Noémi came toward them on the terrace. She had hardly changed: calm, the eyes perhaps a little larger, the sockets deeper; wearing a white embroidered Indian shift. She gave Daria a hug.

  “I knew you’d come. Bruno didn’t believe me, he never does.”

  “How could you have known, my love?”

  “Through Doña Luz. She knows secrets. I don’t trust anyone else … We should be afraid right now, because she is, I can tell … I’m always afraid and I’m happy, would you believe it?”

  * * *

  The question was hanging so obviously in the air between them that Bruno Battisti gave voice to it himself: “So, what has become of me?” His eyes narrowed. He raised his hand and pointed to the contours of the lake and of the mountain. He began: “Listen to me, my friend. The plantation lives by the rhythm of seasons different from those of Europe. Our one earth has many faces. Here life is ruled by two primordial divinities: Fire and Water, Sun and Rain. They are the true mother-deities. The ancient brown race once adored them with a robust sense of reality. The Indios still bow to the maize on entering the field they are about to harvest, and I know they sometimes fertilize the soil with human semen. In the past, they used to regale the gods with their own flesh, their own blood, something which made unimpeachable sense: one nourishment for another, and all nourishment is terrestrial … They drowned small children in this lake so that the god of the water would allow for a plentiful crop. They tore out the hearts of prisoners and offered them up, still beating, so that a fortified sun would be sure to prevail over the darkness. You’ll note that the Nahua were not terribly confident of the power of the sun, whereas they lived in awe of the destructive forces, harboring an exaggerated respect for them rather like ours in some ways … They lived in an unstable cosmos, as we live in an unstable humanity armed with cosmic powers … I subscribe to a modern meteorological service whose bulletins are useless, for they always arrive too late. My real weatherman is Lame Pánfilo, a fellow who can read the path of storms and predict the coming of the rains … When he’s too drunk, I patiently await what no one can change.

  “There’s the dry season, when the highlands become a yellow desert. During that time, only the cactuses survive, thanks to their bitter energy and what scarce moisture is condensed by the night … Proof that a humble, resistant victory is nearly always possible, even if it amounts to little more than holding out. There’s the rainy season, when huge clouds gathered over the Pacific suddenly burst open, raining tempests and lightning down over the thirsty land, fertilizing it with magnificent violence. Torrents spill gleaming down the mountain, the lake overflows its banks, life begins to ferment in the soil — where it was only suspended — and in the rocks themselves, if you believe your eyes. The storms calmed and the downpours spent, the green season arrives. From here to the farthest peaks, the
country is nothing but an empire of rising sap. Every bit of basalt has its crown of greenery and flowers sprung from lifeless aridity. It’s the miracle of resurrection, like when the snows melt in our cold countries … For months there was nothing to see but a dried-up desert; who could guess that beneath the calcined ground, millions of invincible seeds were concealed, ready to germinate. We observe that the true power is not that of darkness, of barrenness, but of life. All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never despair, for true death does not exist.

  “The fire in the sky first blesses the sap, the loves of insects and birds, the euphoria of the herds, the darting quickness of tadpoles in the ponds … Then the fire in the sky turns to a burning hardness, as though the gods were reminding creation that no euphoria can last and that existence is not just the exultation of being; existence is also ordeal, courage, blind tenacity, hidden resourcefulness. The heavens’ severity becomes an outburst of angry luminescence, a vast fierce rapture insensible to being, destructive of beings, sufficient to itself, blazing, mindless, and superb.

  “The herds graze the last yellowed grasses, which rasp their throats … Here at the plantation, the perennial problem is water. I drilled a well. The streams dry up … When all else fails I have to get water from the lake, an exhausting job for my peons. You see, the earth is dying of thirst at the water’s edge. And yet we’ve accomplished the miracle of rescuing this small piece of it. After the coffee is picked, I climb into my old Ford and go into town. I make just enough to live on and to order a few books from New York … I could easily get rich, like others do, lending to the poor against the next harvest and stockpiling maize and sugarcane against the inevitable rise in prices. The idea made me ashamed, and I chose instead to pass for a fool. Living among wolves, it would be reasonable to learn how to howl and bite like the wolves, but I preferred another fate, a more dangerous one I suppose because here as everywhere, a kind of sentence weighs upon the man who tries to be a bit more human than the general lot … I won’t pretend I wasn’t tempted to overcome this repugnance and make money so as to return to Europe when Europe is once again the continent of the most amazing germinations. These must come after the desert seasons. We shall see ideas, forces, men, and works sprouting up from the graveyards, no matter the rot and decay … Well, either I’ll never go back, or I’ll go back penniless and old, which is worse, to end in the midst of beginnings.

  “Tropical countries are full of aging men who still remember having followed dreams, wanting to become artists, scientists, discoverers, revolutionaries, reformers, sages! But one day they said to themselves: Let’s make some money first, otherwise we’re powerless. And it was all the easier because it was diving into another powerlessness. They became wealthy; disillusioned with themselves and hence with everything, they frittered their lives away in gilding their cages, while a cynical bitterness grew within them. The best of them keep up subscriptions to high-minded journals of literature or theosophy, as a reminder of extinguished passions … They play bridge and continue to speculate in real estate and commodity values, largely out of habit … I know some of these men. We’ve smoked sad cigars together in good restaurants, pontificating about the war — not without flashes of insight. I’ve stopped seeing them, because some of them stupidly admire a dead revolution. They depend on it like an injection to prolong their final breathing.

  “I work my peons and pay them well; they steal from me well too, but within reason; they’re aware that I know about it, but not that I judge them to be in the right. If I paid them any more, they’d lose motivation and the local powers would brand me a public menace … I’m up at sunrise, the dawns here are as fresh as the first day of creation. I supervise all the work … In the evening I lie in my hammock with a few books and newspapers, the papers several days old but it makes no difference, filled as they are with layers of lies and nonsense … In books, though, you may still encounter living men. I don’t much care for the literary fabrications in vogue today: they too often feed on baseness, cultivating a false despair. Genuine despair would disdain royalties. Why write, why read, if not to offer, to find, a larger image of life, an image of man as deep as the problems that make up his greatness? I prefer reading scientific works, they have more imagination, they induce in me a sense of dizzying precision.

  “I miss everything and that’s another form of captivity, the only one I consent to, the only one that is a healthy part of our nature. I am the owner of this plantation, lush and overgrown as a patch of jungle, and despite this, sterile for me. I tend it with a kind of love. And thus I fulfill an instinctive duty toward the earth, the dead, and the defeats which are great temporary deaths … Thanks to this, I don’t have much time for conscious regret; the other is always present. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the enchantment of plants, but animals are for me more eloquent. I see a big amber scorpion go by, and I think of him as a sort of ancestor to so many creatures in this world, a survivor of Paleozoic ages. The wild ducks come down in droves; as they skid onto the lake, I see an Indio marksman hiding behind the calabash stalks; the birds take off as soon as they see him — a war of ruses between them and the hunter; but they don’t mind me, they know I’m unarmed. I fling a stone at them, they laugh at men: Learn that men are bad! … Or perhaps I’m reading, and a rattlesnake slips over for a look. He rears his fine stylized head, flicks a tongue like a living black needle, shakes his tail, which rings agreeably, decides that I’m a creature like him, a solitary, no worse than he is, sketches a little dance, and goes coolly on his way. He is very beautiful, the rattlesnake … I know the hours when the hummingbird comes flitting among the flowers like a butterfly. The frailest of birds, tiny, dark, and iridescent, with a life experience limited to searching for pollen, making love, and fleeing before huge, incomprehensible dangers from which its tininess protects it; this tiny spark of intelligence has enabled it to weather more than one geological upheaval … I watch for the ungainly flight of the pelican, a bird which seems to me ugly because it belongs to an aesthetic of nature from very ancient times … Such are my daily encounters, full of meaning.

  “People are somewhat more dangerous. Crescenciano, the blacksmith, has taken a few shots at me — from a safe distance it must be said, and with no intent to harm. We are on cordial terms, so I assume he was high at the time, maybe on something other than alcohol. It’s so tempting to hold someone else’s life at the end of a barrel, to play with it a bit, it makes you feel powerful, you might even feel good. Crescenciano is a good man, because I’m still alive. A mournful man and a contemplative one — if contemplating is what he’s doing when he squats under the moonlight in his sarape and doesn’t budge for hours. Then he resembles the small black vultures you see all over like perpetually famished monks. His wife assures me he meant no offense and was in fact distressed at the possibility of hitting me, unless it happened to be God’s will (and how to know whether it is His will or not except by pulling the trigger?). All he wanted was to play a good joke on me, shoot a hole in my hat brim. I went over to Crescenciano one night during fiesta; we hung our best hats on stakes in the ground and shot at them, laughing uproariously (that is to say sound-lessly). It was one of my ideas; after that, I felt a little safer … I treat the children’s illnesses. Pancho’s have amoebas, Isidro’s suffer from glands. I administer light doses of sulfa and so am reckoned to be a bit of a sorcerer, even if nothing prevents them from buying the stuff themselves at Don Gamelindo’s … The real sorceress, Doña Luz, knows I haven’t a clue about the secret arts; just as the friendly rattlesnake knows that I have no venom whereas he does. I treat young Ponce when he falls down dead drunk. He also gets epileptic fits, which Doña Luz cures better than me — by letting them run their course, not without burning herbs and powdered bone … Her medicine beats mine by a few centuries, for she is the repository of a knowledge that goes back to Neolithic cultures. Doña Luz has cured me of fevers I couldn’t even identify. She is very good for Noémi.


  “You know Noémi’s transparent eyes, their ephemeral, indecisive attentiveness, their luminous panic … Noémi is calm; she pretends, especially to herself, to have forgotten everything, not to know about the war; she pretends she has overcome the fear of fear. She reads the same books over and over, line by line, and I believe she’s not so much reading as abandoning herself to the reveries engendered in her by the words on the page. She does the housework singing to herself. Sometimes she doesn’t recognize me anymore or thinks I’m someone else. She laughs like a child: ‘You think you’re fooling me! You play him very well! I don’t hold it against you … ’ I think I do play my characters very well indeed, and that no one should hold it against me. Then she changes, and sees me again. ‘Ah, there you are again, I’m happy!’ But there is a note of resentment in her tone. I believe Doña Luz keeps a double of me, a magic doll, and does to it whatever is required to bring me back from the most mysterious journeys.

  “Noémi can sense the approach of earthquakes, which are frequent and harmless. She says, ‘My bones are cold, the earth is going to shiver … ’ She wakes me in the night and says, ‘Listen … ’ I light the candle, we look at each other and smile, alert as one body to the trembling of the mountain and the whispers of the lake. Her eyes are seldom as beautiful as at these times, and these are precious moments between us … If the earth begins to roll and pitch more, we go out into the garden, stumbling against each other; because I don’t really trust this old roof and the open air is safer. Out under the great stars, we have the sensation of walking on floating ground. Branches whip to and fro, and the birds, alarmed, fill the air with wingbeats and cries. I think of the rattlesnake, who like me must have ventured from his lair, like me reassured to observe that while the firmament seems a little wobbly, the pattern of its brilliant specks remains the same. The great comet we expect in our heart of hearts does not appear. Noémi leans her head against my shoulder … Once she said afterward that the planet must twinkle beautifully in the sky when it shakes like that. In any case, it’s a poetic thought …