Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  He was more compassionate, more humane, and more clear-sighted than I. The Indian woman, he said, was every bit as worthy of a surgeon’s care as the Easterner. To convince me of this, he described the curanderos’ capricious procedures: “Witchcraft. Treatments that are sometimes terribly cruel, always entirely ineffectual. For example: Against heavy bleeding, they prescribe the smoke of burning güembé leaves.”

  It wasn’t difficult for him to persuade me, though I regretted having allowed him into my confidence.

  He went so far as to tell me what he thought about my ruling in the case of the Adelantado’s descendants.

  An ancient document bearing the name of Irala was, he said, hardly sufficient cause to deprive one or two hundred natives of their liberty and put them to work on another’s behalf.

  Was he criticizing my decision in the old man’s favor or simply the regime of the encomiendas? I asked what title he would consider valid for obtaining an encomienda.

  “None,” he answered. “And certainly not some remote inheritance.”

  I contemplated him with smug superiority. His views were dangerous and he had grown overexcited, while I remained calm.

  Very deliberately I said, as if upon deep reflection, “Is it a Spaniard I address, then, or an americano?”

  His reply was reckless. “A Spaniard, señor! But a Spaniard who is astonished by all the americanos who try to pass for Spaniards and not be what they are.”

  Now I was furious. “You count me among them?”

  He hesitated an instant, then contained himself. “No,” he said.

  •

  Palos had exchanged the role of surgeon for that of inebriate. Even after he was extracted from the tavern, he would not consent to attend to anyone other than the Uruguayan, deeming the street an unworthy venue for “the consultations of science.”

  I left him with the colic sufferer and, followed by two house slaves, set forth in search of the woman to carry her to the servants’ quarters where the surgeon could see her without cost to his pretensions.

  She was no longer where she had been, and no one in the vicinity had noticed her, her condition, or her departure.

  Nor was it a simple matter to locate the dwelling of the curandera, in case she had gone there. The slaves explained something I’d never bothered about before, and which was confirmed by those nearby: The native “doctors” only came in from the countryside on feast days.

  There was one gûaigüí, an old woman, who did have an established residence and permanent practice.

  This I learned from Ventura Prieto when I went to the inn to regain strength. I was still so disoriented that my unease and remorse were visible, my guilt at neglecting a human being to whom I had promised my aid.

  Both americanos and Spaniards—and even Spaniards of the most exalted class—preferred a trained priest to a surgeon for the treatment of their ailments, and a curandero to a priest. There was, in any case, a proverb to the effect that death comes only to the old and to women in childbirth, not to soldiers or the sick. If there was any truth in this, its validity stretched no farther than the boundaries of the province, or those of its more civilized nucleus, where the natives did not predominate and human flesh was not habitually consumed.

  Thus my arrival caused no upheaval at the house of the médica. Two Spanish ladies waiting their turn feigned not to recognize me.

  The woman I was looking for was not to be seen. Perhaps she was inside, among a group that was consulting with the gûaigüí in privacy. After a while, I went in. Among those gathered there was a boy of about twelve, rawboned and fair-haired, who was passing cane vessels full of urine to the old woman for her diagnosis.

  Something about him brought to mind the little bandit who’d occupied my bed and unlatched my money box. But certainty was long in coming. Then, in a moment of reprieve from his task, he looked up at me calmly and smiled, almost familiarly. All doubt was banished: It was him.

  Without further reflection, I pushed through the cluster of patients and fell upon him, my heavy hand gripping his shoulder. For an instant, the whelp lost his composure. I made my accusation: “It was you, you little swine. It was you!” To force a quick reply, I seized him like a wolf that takes its prey in its jaws and shakes it from side to side, and accompanied the shaking with loud rebuke. “Pilfering brat, who sent you to rob me? Tell me!”

  The hubbub of women all about me like frightened hens so irked and distracted me that the brat, indomitable mongrel that he was, wriggled from my hands. Planting one foot firmly on the ground, he delivered me a hard kick in the privates with the other.

  I cried out in pain and he escaped. Damnation!

  The women scattered with no thought of coming to my aid. The old woman remained seated on the floor with a mystical, absent air, legs crossed beneath her skirt. I was bellowing, hands cupped over my member.

  When the pain subsided, I assailed the old woman with questions. All she would say was that some days earlier the fair-haired boy had brought her a gift, a bundle of the dried chilies she used as medicine. In exchange she’d allowed him to stay at her house. But she didn’t know who he was, or his name.

  She spoke with certainty and not a trace of regret. “He won’t be back.”

  12

  The afternoon was barely under way and yet the day had already brought such troubles that I was terrified to go on. But a man cannot renounce his life for half a day: There is either the rest of eternity or nothing.

  I could at least escape the city’s snares by riding out on my horse with no destination in mind. I vacillated between this prospect and that of paying a visit to Luciana, with uncertain results.

  I could not do so unless the Easterner accompanied me, but that gentleman lay pinned to his bed like a worm, twisting and turning without departing from a fixed point. He was perfectly useless to me and I contemplated him in silence. His death, I told myself, would not matter to me in the slightest.

  Nor would my own, I believed. I was overcome with a desire not to trouble myself over anything, not to return to my room or go back out into the dusty, burning street but to lie there, right where I was, even if it were upon the earth itself, and rest, rest.

  •

  Entering my host’s home from the back, I encountered the kitchen women. It was the siesta hour and they were preparing sweets, stewing peeled fruit in great metal pots in the open air.

  I was sweaty and decidedly more ruddy than usual. Earth, the red earth of the streets, caked my face. I wanted to plunge my body into warm water and commanded them to use their cooking fire to prepare me a bath.

  They placed a large tub in my room and scented the air with eucalyptus.

  A slave scrubbed my back with a wet cloth. I ordered him away.

  I remained seated in the water a long while, sedated and at peace. My imagination traveled to my distant home and then back to the immediate possibility of love, Luciana’s or that of any other comely, healthy woman. I needed physical love as badly as I needed to eat.

  •

  The bath brought me comfort. I was rosy with well-being and so unconsciously predisposed to do what I would do that a trivial episode decided the matter. As I left my room on my way into the street, I met my host, Don Domingo, paternal and indulgent. He said, “I’ve heard the news! You’ve had a tub bath, soaked your whole body!” I nodded at him and smiled, friendly and proud, then proceeded on my way, well satisfied by his remark.

  I was a man to command respect and to be given a proper reception. My host’s discreet compliments said as much. An old man come from his tub is no more than a clean old gent who must take care not to catch a chill. A freshly bathed man of thirty-five suggests something else altogether.

  •

  Such was my hunger for adventure and risk that I wanted the Easterner to remain prostrate, though I did go to the trouble of passing by once more to inquire after his condition. It was worrisome; a terrible fever had set in. I feared I was at fault for wishing him il
l.

  His situation and my uneasy conscience put some brake to my impulses, but then it occurred to me that I myself might die within the week from the same food and the same colic. I might die an ascetic, my blood burning, my mouth filled with self-reproach, leaving no woman in pain over having sinned for Diego de Zama. This same Diego de Zama, not having kissed a body other than his wife’s for years, knew himself to be alien to the purity that fidelity imposed, and urgently required that someone else participate in the bewilderment of his desires, the sharp bite of his reproaches.

  No. Beneath the blur of that evening sky, I was not going toward a luminous or happy love. With what certainty I knew that.

  •

  But that I was going to love I had no doubt. The strength of my resolve had led me to mistake my own appetite for an implicit assignation.

  I was partially disabused of this when I stood in front of the house without yet having devised a pretext for presenting myself.

  I asked to speak to the señora. Luciana was embroidering in the salon. She received me benevolently and without surprise.

  Both of us feigned great interest in all that concerned the Easterner. She deplored her husband’s absence and pledged to send him a message the next morning with a slave just come from the hacienda.

  She abandoned herself to confidences. “My husband is as much enamored of me now as at the beginning of our marriage. While he’s away, he assails me with tender missives.”

  I grew angry. “Señora, it aggrieves me to know that.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m jealous.”

  She parried, with spirit, “Nothing authorizes you to be.”

  A silence set in, but I was obstinate in my aims and no gentleman: I neither begged pardon nor withdrew.

  She softened, with an air of remorse. She told me that many women abhorred her for her independence, and that because she spent long periods alone, too many men were in error with regard to her conduct. She did not share her husband’s penchant for the hacienda and, moreover, felt stifled both in her house and in this country. She had little knowledge of any other, having come from Spain in her adolescence, but she reckoned that in larger cities people were less alone, for they didn’t all know each other so well.

  Alert for a word that would give me grounds to insinuate myself or advance, I had no wish to follow her in these reflections. She seemed more and more downcast, and I felt almost inclined to go on the attack. I scrutinized her severely, almost disdainfully. Why wasn’t she responding with more grace to what appeared so imminent to me? On closer analysis, her skull struck me as the opposite of beautiful, and I compared her jawbone, in its jutting protuberance, to that of a horse.

  She concluded with a murmured discourse that I paid no heed to and was unsure whether I should answer. Then she announced, as if pained at having to do so, “Diego, night is falling. It’s late. We mustn’t be imprudent.”

  She called me by my Christian name, intimately: Diego. She begged for prudence and this seemed to tie the knot of our complicity. Here was my triumph, a sudden triumph. I greeted it with foreboding, pleasure, and tremendous irresolution, for I did not know how and when I would be able to consummate it, or whether it fell to me to initiate that.

  I could only say, greedy, vehement, and abandoned to love— abandoned to love—as I clasped one of her hands, “Luciana, my Luciana.”

  She assented with a sigh, without saying a word, keeping her eyes lowered as she extracted the warm hostage from my grip. Her farewell gave me my orders: “Now, until tomorrow.”

  •

  In the end it had all been too simple, too easy. But I feared my good fortune.

  13

  Was it, in fact, Ventura Prieto?

  That night I gave no thought to the Easterner. In the morning a messenger came to the Gobernación with word from my protégé’s host that the gentleman’s affliction had taken an alarming turn for the worse.

  The messenger was a schooled manservant who employed such ceremony in his preliminary greetings and such painstaking abundance of detail in his report that passersby—I conferred with him in the gallery—slowed their pace to catch a few words. One of these was Oficial Mayor Bermúdez, who, authorized by my look of dismay, inquired whether I’d received calamitous news about a loved one.

  He spoke to me in front of Ventura Prieto and I could not keep the latter from overhearing my discreetly courteous and informative reply, nor from giving free rein to his habitual curiosity and questioning me—with courtesy, true—on my search for the woman stricken with heavy bleeding.

  Ventura Prieto was, in truth, far too involved in the matter; I had turned to him when I was unsure where else to turn. I answered that I’d been unable to locate the sick woman but had found the old médica he’d spoken of.

  “Then vuesa merced saw the mysterious blond boy?”

  How much that question revealed! Ventura Prieto was aware that the blond boy was with the médica, and it was he, Ventura Prieto, who’d sent me to seek her out. It was a sneer and an affront. Such were my thoughts. At last I could vent my indignation.

  Without further words, without warning or delay, I dealt him two hard blows. He staggered, astonished. Then he reacted, fixing me with a gaze of iron. He bent slowly forward, then flung himself upon me, hoping to clutch my neck and throw me to the ground. I parried his move and though he had hold of me I eluded the pincers of his hands by jerking my head energetically and making my neck so hard I could almost feel my veins rupturing: It must have been like grabbing a live tree trunk. We were sweating, body clutching body, but I knew myself to be the more powerful and the more driven of the two. I set out to pin him against a window. Step by step he yielded until he was pressed against the bars. I gripped his hair and hit his head against them three times. I didn’t want to smash his head in, nor did I have the strength for that. But I knocked him silly and while he was still blinded by the certainty of my dominance, I managed to draw my knife and slash him across the cheek.

  I sprang back and maintained my distance, expectant, knife in hand, alert for his reaction. Faltering and gasping, he stood there as if he didn’t want to see his own blood.

  Now that the fight was at an end, several spectators approached to lavish me with affection, congratulating me on my dexterity and my victory, hurling imprecations against Prieto and greatly concerned to assist me, were I in any way injured or debilitated.

  •

  Ventura Prieto was jailed.

  The Gobernador sent for me. No sooner had I entered than he declared, “I’ve stripped him of his post.”

  He requested a verbal report on the episode but gave me a foretaste of his perspective. “God help us! That we ourselves should be exposed to the assault of any passing oaf, here in the King’s own house!”

  I understood. The game was won, though Prieto was Spanish and I an americano. Solidarity of status had prevailed.

  Now I knew how to organize my account of the events.

  14

  I required sleep. Still, so as not to provide further grist to rumor, I ate my habitual lunch at the inn.

  A manioc soup was placed before me. It was all the same to me—I had no appetite—so I accepted it without complaint and was left with nothing solid in my stomach and the wine rising into my head.

  I absolved myself of the Easterner and went home to bed.

  But the Easterner was decidedly against me: He died. I was roused from my siesta so this fact could be communicated.

  His death, too, proved a seedbed of irritations. I was in charge of all the ceremonies and legal formalities and it would fall to me to conduct him to his tomb. Not only that, but should a complaint one day be lodged over some long-ago debt, I would be the one responsible for digging him up, putting him in a boat, and packing him off downriver.

  I consoled myself by calculating that my transfer would be secured long before such time. Though I also conjectured that destiny might play a joke and send, aboard the selfsame ship,
both my new appointment and a power of attorney from the dead man’s relatives requesting that I dispatch the corpse to them. In which case even then I would make my journey alongside the Easterner, a man addicted to my company as few have ever been.

  •

  Aside from its suddenness, the Uruguayan’s death was an event of the utmost normality: A man’s death was and is a common occurrence. But the message that followed upon that one struck me as anything but normal: Luciana sent a female slave to the door of Don Domingo Gallegos Moyano, my host, to inquire after the state of my health. Word of the altercation with Ventura Prieto had reached her and she was concerned.

  I felt a stir of alarm over Luciana’s deficient discretion, the casual way she made her interest in me a matter of public knowledge. At first I resolved to reproach her for it.

  But I was won over by my pride at seeing her so greatly seduced as to ignore all risk.

  •

  I did very little for the Easterner. I merely sent a priest to keep vigil over him and told the owners of the house where he lay that we would come the next day with a notary to take inventory of the clothing and money that had been his.

  I could not, for the moment, devote myself fully to these tasks; they would take time away from my reunion with Luciana.

  Furthermore, so as not to disturb her or dampen the happy spirit I sought to impart to our encounter, I did not inform her of the Easterner’s death. When she asked about the course of his illness I lied that he continued to suffer from colic. She told me to advise him to take thirteen swallows of aguardiente, and thus I learned that Luciana was quite ignorant, at least on certain matters.

  Still, I was at her side once more, and had acquired another debt of gratitude for her benevolence that kept me from judging her on such secondary matters. Deploring that morning’s fight, she lavished me with attention befitting a hero. She scanned my face for wounds I might not have noticed and even pressed her hands to my forehead to awaken any pain that might remain there.