Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  I can pity myself without wallowing in vain self-mortification so long as it isn’t humiliation before others I fear but only that I might exceed the degree of moderation which, without avarice, I accord myself. Acknowledging my own impassioned disposition, I must shun all stimuli that are contrived or deliberately pursued. There is no excuse when instinct has forewarned us but we do not heed the warning.

  It was the sun that drove me outside. Freed at long last from a succession of cloudy days that brought no storm, the sun burned white, conjugating its colorlessness, its fixed, blazing surface, against sand so blank that it induced visions. I could see a puma, like an ecstatic, unthreatening element of decor, sleek and without detail, as if it possessed neither claws nor teeth, as if the curves of its body were not menacingly coiled to pounce but expressed only docility and were gently inclined toward some caressing hand. This puma, which I did not see, led me to reflect on games that were terrible or that could turn terrible, not at the moment of play but before or after.

  I sought the leafy refuge of the stream-bed but was forced to hold back among the first line of trees; women’s voices were approaching, free and unsuspecting, excited by the water’s pleasures.

  Nevertheless, cloaked by the vegetation, I proceeded a bit farther, and for an instant saw naked bodies full-on, some black, some golden-dark, and one from the side, its face obscured. I made out only the nape of a neck, hair piled high above, but whether it was a white woman’s or a mulatta’s I did not know. I had no wish to go on looking, for the sight held me spellbound and it might be a mulatta and I must not even lay eyes on them so as not to dream of them and render myself susceptible and bring about my downfall.

  I fled. It was clear that they’d noticed me, though I was uncertain whether the racket behind me contained any note of rapture.

  My stride grew firmer; I sensed someone had set out in pursuit. Not a man: Men did not stand watch over the women’s bath. An Indian girl, or a mulatta, rather, given her speed, though she was off the path in dense undergrowth with tree trunks rising in her way.

  She had almost caught up and her determination warned me that she hoped to see my face and know who I was; such must have been her mistress’s command. Then it became clear that she was white. I stopped short, renouncing my retreat and my resolve to keep from learning who she was. I had to turn and confront whatever was to be: exposing her and exposing myself.

  That was impossible.

  All I could do was unleash the full force of my thwarted spirit upon this spy.

  Veering left, I pitched in among the trees and she was too startled to get away. Naked as she was, I took her by the throat, strangling her cry, and slapped her until my hands were dry of sweat, before sending her sprawling to the ground with a shove. She curled up with her back to me. Delivering a kick to her buttocks, I left.

  With me went my anger, already yielding to bitter self-reproach. Character! My character! Ha!

  •

  My hand may strike a woman’s cheek but it is I who will endure the blow, for I shall have done violence to my own dignity.

  Even if this were not so and all of it were no more than a moment’s disorderly conduct, I knew I had no justification for abandoning myself to wrath, or for extinguishing in another what I myself had engendered in her.

  3

  It was again the hour of siesta, which made my bed desirable yet dangerous. And that day, so soon after the day of the women’s bath, I did not want to spend another siesta in the countryside.

  It was the hour of siesta and a terrible man fell upon me in the empty street like a meteor out of the sun, destined by infallible powers for me alone among all mortals.

  He seized me by my garments as I sought to restrain him with a vigorous “Caballero!” He ignored this, calling me without pause for breath a “predator upon honest women” and a “filthy, gutless snoop.” Indignant and perplexed, I struggled to free myself amid the dawning realization that this was her husband and of who, then, she must be. He shouted, “There shall be a duel!” and strode off. He left me there, desperate to follow and give him a thrashing, even as I deceived and assuaged myself with the assurance of vengeance to come. He had stated that there would be a duel.

  There would be no duel. No one but a bitch in heat and her four-legged suitors were in the street to bear witness to his words and call him to account. No doubt his explosive declaration had sufficed in itself to relieve him of the impulse to ill-use me. And I—I had greater weaknesses for which to reproach myself.

  I swore that this would be the last of those weaknesses. I told myself that if I were reconciled to enduring such conduct, it was only because I understood the reason for his fury and knew myself to be guilty. One thing I objected to, even so: He should not have insulted me. “Filthy, gutless snoop”: Such words lodge in the mind and there is no forgetting them.

  Matters standing thus, and the loudly proclaimed duel likely never to take place, might I deduce that even the most brutish individual is capable of some moderation in the satisfaction of an offense? Or that a man who defends his wife with something less than zeal is not held back by fear but has his own secret reasons for not concerning himself overmuch—an obscure hatred, perhaps, or a faint aversion, or else a love gone extinct—though that fact be evident to none, not even the man himself?

  4

  The Gobernador remitted an incomprehensible case to me and I complied with the request as soon as he made it. I had no wish to question whether it lay within his authority to remove a man convicted of murder from prison and have him escorted to my office by a single guard in order to “offer an explanation of the matter,” so that I might ascertain “how and by what means to proceed to the dismissal of the charges.” It was of utmost importance that I attend to this prisoner without betraying an awareness of how he came before me, nor with what high recommendations or obscure designs on the part of the recommender. I had to keep diligently in mind my stability, my post and the duties attendant upon it, if I was ever to succeed in disencumbering myself of it—of the post, that is.

  I also had to hear the prisoner out, a thing that very shortly proved impossible. For it is not possible to attend to one who does not speak. When it came to the heart of the matter, that is, the story of his crime, he remained impenetrable, though his attitude was merely absent, not stony.

  With foresight, the guard obligingly alerted me from behind the prisoner’s back that we had reason to anticipate a fit of weeping or some other crisis of a sentimental order.

  This was not a fearsome individual, then, but a broken man.

  To spare myself the scene that my naked interrogation had perhaps provoked, as well as the irritability that soon overcame me, I left the prisoner alone with the guard, who seemed to view him not as a threat but as one in need of protection.

  In the interval, in the vague hope of changing my mood, I went to Ventura Prieto’s office and described the case of muteness I had left behind my door.

  I did not have occasion to regret this. With no hint of disdain, Ventura Prieto exclaimed, “That won’t do at all!” He requested my authorization to assist me and to address the prisoner.

  Offering a friendly smile—and he bore so little resemblance to a bureaucrat that he may well have seemed a friend—Ventura Prieto persuaded that sequestered spirit to deliver itself up, however tersely.

  Lowering his eyes, in a voice hoarse with sorrow, the once handsome boy, now prematurely withered, said, “I was always a great smoker. One night, in horror, I saw that a bat king had grown from me—”

  He broke off.

  This terse declaration had perturbed us such that we did not wish him to relapse into his previous silence. He did not. Noting that his words did not correspond entirely to his thoughts, he was mentally reviewing them in order to coordinate the two more precisely. After a long while, he began again, and made this speech.

  “I was always a great smoker. One night I fell asleep, cigar in mouth. I woke up, afraid to w
ake up, as if I already knew: A bat wing had grown out of me. Disgusted, I groped in the darkness for my biggest knife and cut it off. It fell to the floor and by daylight it was a woman with dark skin and I was saying I loved her. They took me to jail.”

  He said no more.

  We shared his silence.

  With my eyes I told the guard to take him away.

  •

  Ventura Prieto, too, said I must find a way to save him.

  He lamented not having seen the dark-skinned woman’s body. He wanted to know where the boy had cut her.

  5

  This engrossing interview had quieted the explosions that were set off within my bosom by two wide-spaced cannon blasts announcing the presence of a ship.

  It was my habit on such occasions to proceed directly to the wharf for immediate proximity to whatever news was to be had there and to the faces of the sailors and the few disembarking travelers. This time, the correspondence pouch had already been delivered to the Casa de la Gobernación before I could do so.

  The Oficial Mayor had conscientiously arranged the mail into stacks for each recipient, spread out across his table. There was nothing for Don Diego de Zama. Once again, my hands remained empty, as they would for a long while to come.

  The absence of news from Marta, my sons, and my mother plunged me back into the dejection I’d endured after the arrival of many another boat, a dejection that, as the tally rose over the course of what was now a residence of fourteen months, cast me ever further down.

  Leaving the office, I abstained from the alluring spectacle of another grand and tempestuously peregrine ship in the harbor.

  I confined myself to my quarters.

  I asked a slave for a light meal of hen’s eggs. This was out of the ordinary—I always took my meals elsewhere—and attracted the attention of the daughters of my host, Don Domingo Gallegos Moyano. Later, it prompted one of them to come to my quarters and offer me yerba maté. I accepted.

  I consecrated the second half of that day to a querulous and exhaustive epistle to Marta that the ship could bear back downriver.

  In my mind I followed the letter’s slow journey, by water to Buenos-Ayres, then westward overland for hundreds of leagues. And I was pained by the reproaches, now still fresh on the paper, to be read three or four months hence by my spouse, far away and without a man by her side—perhaps on a day when I was happy. But I changed nothing of what I’d written.

  In my room, as twilight began to fall, a visitor was announced.

  I was still unaware of what ship had come in and had not realized that its captain was my friend Oficial Indalecio Zabaleta, on whom I now bestowed a strong and affectionate embrace.

  I knew that if he’d come to me so quickly, setting aside the affairs that normally occupy a captain on the first day in port, he must have something for me. But before I could pose any question my attention was captured by someone else.

  Beyond the doorway, in the gallery that ran along the courtyard, stood a boy, stock-still, as if holding himself in check. No doubt he had come with Indalecio; he might even be his son. It was not this but the agitation of his noble features that transfixed me; his eyes were brimming with tears which, as the captain turned to him, overflowed.

  He ran to me and flung himself in my arms, sobbing convulsively with what I took for pleasure and enthusiasm.

  I was correct. Impressed and very likely well-pleased by his offspring’s transports, Indalecio explained. “During the voyage I told him who Doctor Don Diego de Zama was.”

  Doctor Don Diego de Zama, granted the unforeseeable and touching homage of a stripling of twelve. Such recognition was a counterweight to many days of slights and oversights.

  Doctor Don Diego de Zama! . . . The forceful executive, the pacifier of Indians, the warrior who rendered justice without recourse to the sword. Zama, who put down the native rebellion without wasting a drop of Spanish blood, winning honors from his monarch and the respect of the conquered. This was not the Zama whose administrative duties occasioned neither surprises nor dangers. Zama the Corregidor was arrogantly unaware of Zama the Asesor Letrado, while the latter strove to demonstrate not merely a family resemblance but an absolute and certain identity with the former. To the Corregidor he once was, the present Zama vaunted his councillorship, for across the whole breadth of the province he was second in rank only to the governor. But even as he did so, Zama the Asesor Letrado knew and could not conceal or deny that in this country, even more than in other regions of the empire, such a post does not deify, nor can a man be a hero without risk of life and limb, even if there is nothing to justify such a risk. Zama the councillor had to confess himself to be a Zama subjugated by circumstances and without opportunities.

  At this point in the duel, the waning Zama might begin to suspect that the fierce Zama was not so battle-hardened and tremendous as all that. An iron-handed corregidor can easily twist the will of slaves crushed by months of an oppression exerted by a force worse than violence: cruelty.

  I was that Corregidor: a man of the law, a judge. A light so high and pure could not be extinguished or denied, even if it did not shine quite so brightly as a hero’s. A man without fear, with the vocation and power to bring an end—to crime, at least. Without fear.

  “I told him who Zama was.” A flash of glory from my past existence could not compensate for the lackluster life I now led.

  Zama had been and could not modify what he once was. Should I believe I was predestined by that past for a better future? This boy, Indalecio’s son, demanded that of me with all the force of his admiration.

  But I—I saw the past as a shapeless, visceral mass, yet still somehow perfectible. It had its noble elements but among them I couldn’t help but recognize something—the main thing—that was viscous, unpleasant, and elusive to the grasp, like the intestines of a freshly disemboweled animal. I did not repudiate this element but accepted it as part of myself, possibly an indispensable part, even if I’d played no role in bringing it into existence. I hoped, rather, to be myself, at last, in the future, by dint of what I might become in that future.

  Perhaps I believed I was that man already, living in accordance with the image that awaited me further ahead. Perhaps this present Zama who claimed to resemble the Zama to come was built upon the Zama who once was, copying him, as if timidly venturing to interrupt something.

  •

  The aguardiente duly measured out between us, I learned that Indalecio had been in Buenos-Ayres with my brother-in-law who was overseeing my application to the viceroy for the transfer that was strictly my due and that I urgently required.

  Assurances had been offered, without mention of a specific date. But the signs were positive.

  In exchange for this promising augury, in which I had faith, or in which at least half of me had faith, given that I bore the scars of several failed reiterations of it, I confessed my requirements to the captain. I hungered not so much for a promotion as for a stable position in Buenos-Ayres or Santiago de Chile. My career was stagnating in a post that was, it had been implied from the start, only a temporary, stopgap appointment. And, too, there was this: Half the length of two countries and all the width of the second lay stretched between my wife and me.

  Perhaps because the boy was present I kept the full confession to myself: This great distance was a particular torture by reason of the rigorous and exclusive fidelity to Marta I maintained, though precisely why I was so faithful was something I could not explain even to my own conscience.

  •

  We dined at the tavern.

  On my return, very late, I marveled at the moon’s solitary lordliness, and in the ardor of alcohol felt myself prepared to match it, were I put to the test. The empty streets, lined with great houses and vacant, shadowy spaces, the rugged terrain that sloped down to the river—all of it seemed to promise some sudden event that my rapier would respond to unhesitatingly.

  That night I felt valiant and tremendously inclined to love.
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br />   I had my surprise, as if it were predestined, and a lovely young woman at my side in the bargain.

  As the hour was so late, I went in at the back of the house, using the gate to the vegetable garden that lay beyond the servants’ courtyard.

  I reckon that my unexpected presence in that place at that hour set someone’s plans awry. Before I came in, one party succeeded all too well in fleeing or hiding.

  But another, poorly concealed, remained. When this person belatedly attempted to escape, in the shadow of the house’s massive walls, I made out a woman, though without knowing who she was. With ten long, tactical steps I cut her off, while she, though irremediably intercepted, continued straight toward me without stopping. The instant I spent waiting for her to reach me may have taken deeper root in me than in her. I was full of optimism and audacity; hope rapidly sprang up within me.

  It was Rita, the youngest daughter of my host, Don Domingo. I discovered her identity with four varas of distance yet between us and in spite of the mantilla that barely dimmed the moonlight’s glow upon her face. Lunar woman, I murmured to myself, seeking to confer a poetic enchantment on the moment, but what thrilled my senses was delight of a different order.

  She took two more steps and fell to the ground. She had stumbled. I rushed to her, though she was already half up and required no help. But in my unbridled eagerness to profit I caught her from behind and finished lifting her, my greedy hands pressing against her breasts, which were soft, as though from much fondling.

  This was my reward for keeping silent about her nocturnal escapade! Without reservation I revealed my intentions. She paid no heed. Amiable and mild, her aplomb regained, she disregarded my embrace. Looking resolutely into my eyes she spoke a few hushed words of gratitude, as if in response to a great favor. Then she withdrew, dignified and cautious, to the sleeping quarters.

  I could be charged with neither impudence nor abuse. That she had understood immediately. For her part, she let me know she did not fear me.