Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto

I was granted access and assisted by a colored female slave whose appearance was African, though she communicated in a mix of Portuguese and Spanish, with occasional recourse to Guarani.

  Until the previous day, I had dwelt in absolute ignorance of her master’s existence, and that, along with the mysterious origins betrayed in the slave woman’s speech, made me feel as if I had arrived in a different country. Nothing else authorized that impression; these two things in themselves were sufficient.

  The slave left me alone with the damp and my things, which were like so many patient traveling companions, a pack of mules I had to drag along behind me rather than being drawn by them. She soon returned bearing a pitcher of clean water. When she withdrew for a second time, she closed the door to the courtyard behind her.

  Soon thereafter, I felt a need to visit the rear yard. I thought it unwise to intrude on the house on my own and waited a while longer, believing that the slave would soon reappear, sent by someone or of her own accord, in fulfillment of a courtesy that is entirely customary with a recently arrived guest.

  No such gesture occurred within the period I could endure without causing myself considerable discomfort. I rang the bell. The walls of my rooms absorbed the sound. There was no reaction beyond them.

  Again, louder.

  A long, steady, faraway silence.

  Again—and even more imperiously.

  A few light footsteps in the street—first distant, then stronger as they passed the doorway, then fading, fading, until nothing more was to be heard—emphasized the absence of all human sound within the house.

  I opened the door to the street. It was not yet nightfall. They could not have retired to bed already.

  Behind the door of the old storeroom I shook the bell hard, three times. At length and with long intervals in between.

  Birds, the few that were left, chirped in the courtyard trees.

  I opened the door a crack. Without going far, I stepped into the courtyard, half to show myself, half to look around.

  A rabbit was peeking out from between some potted shrubs—it may have been there for a while—and quickly hid when I looked in its direction. A hen was carrying out a thorough inspection of the ground, pecking at it as if her beak were a pair of scissors.

  These two creatures aside, nothing was startled into movement by my presence.

  All was quiet, apart from the indifferent hen: the plants, the evening, and I.

  I was on the verge of calling out. Amid the prevailing calm, that seemed excessive. Then I remembered I still held the bell in my hand. I looked around.

  From an isolated room near the end of the gallery across the courtyard, in the glimmer of twilight, through opaque glass panes, a young woman was gazing at me, impassive.

  I kept myself from giving the bell a shake and made as if to speak. Words rose to my mouth and my hand felt an impulse to join them, in chivalrous gesture. But the words did not come out; my hand remained fallen by my side. No invitation was made to speak to her or greet her. As if something would have shattered.

  I withdrew in consternation, shutting the door behind me.

  I sat a long while, calculating the slow birth of the night so as to proceed, under its cloak, to the rear yards.

  •

  I decided to take no more than two meals, one of them the light repast agreed upon with Soledo. In place of breakfast, maté; in the afternoon, maté.

  But in the morning no one knocked on my door to offer maté, or even a pavita of hot water. I made my way to the back of the house and discovered the kitchen.

  It lacked the bustling life that generally emanates from the kitchens of all houses with the arrival of the sun, or even earlier.

  I made so bold as to step across the threshold. The kitchen was abandoned, its ovens devoid of spark, its cooking vessels in scant supply and mostly worn through at the bottom.

  There was nothing there to exercise my stomach so I proceeded to the office.

  •

  Little mental effort on my part was required to understand that Manuel Fernández was a man to be trusted. He wouldn’t be entirely on my side, but more on mine than on the Gobernador’s, yes.

  As the first errand of his new career as secretary to the Asesor Letrado, I delegated him to keep watch over the parchment that pleaded on my behalf until he saw it taken aboard the ship.

  Thus was he given to understand that I placed greater trust in his conduct than in that of the Gobernador. I knew he was grateful for this, deep down, though he gave no sign of it.

  •

  At nightfall and in early morning, the void of activity around my rooms remained the same, so it appeared that the time to request the light repast—light and therefore cheap or perhaps free—was lunch.

  I shook off my timidity and went into the courtyard to call out and make the bell sing.

  From some corridor toward the front of the gallery, approximately in the region of the parlor window where I had detected the young white woman, a young colored moza emerged. She approached me.

  She was sad, as if long abused and long resigned to it.

  She wasn’t the one who’d waited on me when I came. I asked about that one.

  “Sumala?” she asked me, in turn.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She was of African appearance—perhaps Brazilian.”

  “Yes, Sumala,” she confirmed with a sigh. “Now it’s me.”

  It mattered little whether it was she who waited on me or Sumala. Even so, something prompted me to inquire further after Sumala.

  “She’s dead,” the moza stated.

  In my hands, a lump of coal had burst into flame.

  I wanted to separate myself from Sumala, the vigorous woman who had served me just once and then, quite likely, died only a few steps away. The previous evening’s silence and the abandonment of the kitchen were now easily interpreted, I thought.

  The colored moza offered to serve me. I gestured vaguely to indicate that I required nothing at the moment. She curtsied, about to withdraw, and I recalled that I myself had rung the bell to summon her.

  I asked for water. A full pitcher.

  •

  I ate at the inn, both lunch and dinner. I would request the light repast the following midday.

  •

  Tora, the colored girl, was obliging, large of body, strong, stubborn, and ungainly. Perhaps that was why they called her she-bull. The next morning she struck me as slow-witted, too. Obedient to my bell, she entertained my request for some hot water to prepare maté and said yes. But she might as well have said no or that she hadn’t heard me because she did not return.

  I peered into the courtyard, the dominion of wild birds that left their traces there and a few stray barnyard fowl. Tora was returning anew from the front of the arcade, a small kettle in hand.

  Watching her arrive from that part of the house filled me with an apprehension that was very likely stupid. All of them seemed to have retreated before my presence to huddle together in a single room. All of them were there: the elderly host, his daughter, the mulatto, and Tora. Perhaps also the lifeless body of Sumala. In one corner, the fire on which they cooked their stews.

  I questioned Tora about it. Why did she bring water from the living quarters rather than the kitchen?

  “We live over there, su merced,” she said, pointing with a finger, then extending the whole arm. Here was the explanation and she expanded on it without need of further inquiry from me. The house had another wing that a passageway connected to my courtyard.

  That was all it was. There was nothing suspicious there, nothing tortuous to unravel.

  Quickly accepting the news, I was free to suppose that I had not observed any funerary rites nor had any knowledge of the removal of a body because it had all taken place in another part of the building.

  •

  The light repast at midday was so very light as to seem wholly weightless: a slice of cheese and another of chipá, the manioc bread. Instead of wine, maté. />
  My stomach was left in agony that, by late afternoon, drove me early to the inn, where my tablemates were made aware of the meagerness of my lunch by the sounds emanating from my innards.

  “Pururú,” said one, and another smiled and nodded, both confident that I was ignorant of the indigenous term.

  Even if I had been unaware of it, pururú was what my guts were saying and I understood.

  •

  The next day I did things in reverse and took the large meal at lunch. Sleep will extinguish hunger I told myself, foreseeing the meager dinner Tora would bring.

  I correctly foresaw the dimensions of the meal but was mistaken as to the mitigating effects of nocturnal repose. I slept soundly for two hours or more and then my appetite returned with such force that it awoke me as imperiously as a command or an outcry.

  I drank a glass of water. The clamor was appeased. I could rest once more.

  But only for a few moments.

  Candle in hand, I made my way to the abandoned kitchen. I lit a fire, found my kettle, and prepared maté.

  I sipped it slowly, seated on a bench at the kitchen door.

  It was the sky’s own secret hour when it shines brightest because all humans are asleep and no one is watching.

  I was as clear and shimmering as the celestial universe.

  I thought of Marta without pain.

  The past was a small notebook, much scribbled-upon, that I had somehow mislaid.

  28

  The sun was docile and so was I.

  Emilia’s rancho was there among all the others. Viewed from above, they seemed to have fallen and scattered as randomly as dice spilled from a cup. My perspective was even loftier; I looked down from on top of a ravine that could not be said to intersect the street, for there was no street, but that intersected an imaginary line that might be traced from the rancho’s door.

  I was waiting calmly to see my son. Sheltered by a hat, I sat on a hoary tree trunk and smoked.

  I had supposed the little one would come outside as he’d done the last time I’d had him in sight, dragging himself along, fascinated by the yellow movement of a newborn duckling or a flashing fragment of glass. He would reach and try to grasp the shiny glass, clutching at it over and over until he cut his hand. Blood and wailing would then erupt. I hoped to witness all that and waited for his sobs, not because I wished him to suffer but so as to feel him there, alive and audible.

  Yet he did not appear.

  After a time, it may have been an hour or more, the mother came out with a bucket of slop. She flung it to the hens, which all dove upon it and fought to gobble it up. But the napping dogs also wanted their share and braved the stabbing beaks to reach the scraps. The risk brought no reward: There were vegetable peels but no meat of any kind.

  Or so I supposed, as I watched them slink away with not even a bit of bone to gnaw on.

  Alone, Emilia bore the burden of my son and of dire poverty. I understood that clearly, without remorse.

  The child remained within, perhaps sleeping. Better that way, I thought. Seeking sustenance, a famished hen will stab her beak as readily into the eye of a child as into a chewed-up beef bone, especially if the child is defenseless and crawls on all fours.

  I stood up from the tree trunk. At that moment, Emilia leaned from the kitchen doorway once more. Even at that distance, I caught the movement. She screened her eyes with a hand. Perhaps she recognized me. She threw more garbage into the yard, then went into the kitchen and closed the door.

  I walked back with slow steps. I smoked. I had eaten abundantly at midday.

  The tin box was empty. My purse held sufficient money to pay for ten more meals. The innkeeper would not bring out the stew without first seeing coins on the table. I put them down carefully as I took my seat.

  •

  I returned early to my quarters. The sun rode high in the sky but was sickly, as it had been throughout the day.

  I placed some books on the table and opened a few of them. I shook the bell.

  Tora arrived to inquire after my needs, then brought me a boiled egg with a slice of chipá.

  I ate it with pleasure, and yet an egg, after some minutes, leaves a memory in the mouth that we would rather not have. I wanted a drink to take the taste away. Pavita in hand, I set out across the courtyard to the kitchen. A white woman was passing through the opposite arcade, dressed in green and looking very serious, a high comb adorning the top of her head. Her feet made no sound on the tiles.

  She disappeared just where I thought the passageway must be, the perennially dark juncture of the building’s two wings.

  She did not see me. Her stroll down the gallery was timed so precisely that I may already have been at her back when I left my room.

  I deduced this without moving from my doorway. I hoped to the last that she would turn, that I would see her face and be able to greet her.

  The courtyard had recovered its usual deathly aspect—the woman’s presence had done nothing to alter it, I grant—and I resolved to have a look down that passageway and observe the other sector of the house where my host, with manifest discourtesy, had never escorted nor invited me.

  I was about to do so but something held me back. The atmosphere seemed, abruptly, to have grown so heavy as to constrain me from moving. I perceived that despite everything, I was not alone.

  I glanced toward where I knew I had to look, and from behind the same window as before a young white woman was looking out at me quietly, without staring, as if barely interested.

  Something, surprise or I don’t know what else, kept me from reacting naturally. I tried to recover my aplomb but had a sharp perception of how inelegant I was there, with the little kettle in my hand. I crouched to set it down by the doorway. When I rose, the young woman was gone.

  Immediately I was at pains to seize upon that vision, fearing it would flow from my head without leaving any clear or lasting impression. The thing was not palpable or real. It was . . . an absence. Yes. What was missing, behind the glass panes, was a pink dress. The young woman wore pink.

  The other woman, who had passed in front of me a moment earlier, was dressed in green.

  Therefore it was not the same woman. There had been no time for a change of clothes.

  I locked myself in my quarters. The thought of crossing the courtyard to the kitchen displeased me.

  That two white women should appear in that house in succession could not, on reflection, be considered a strange event. Soledo had informed me that there was only one, his daughter. But that was on a given day, and another woman could well have joined the household later, either as a permanent member or a simple visitor. She might be a housekeeper, her presence perhaps rendered necessary by Sumala’s death.

  Such reasoning led me to logical conclusions. Nevertheless, the episode obsessed me as an unnecessary piece of imposture. There seemed to be something elaborately false in all of it. My distaste focused on Señor Ignacio more than anyone else. Since the day of our negotiation he had cut off all contact with me.

  •

  Manuel Fernández proved himself qualified for at least half of his duties: A good secretary will keep his superior’s secrets while ably penetrating whatever secrets others have that may be of interest.

  He watched as the parchment was placed in a bag and the bag was transported onto the brigantine to be received and registered on the King’s behalf by a ship’s officer. He took note, furthermore, that the ship had brought a coffer from the royal treasury. He questioned those who bore it and learned that it was quite light. Perhaps, he told me, because the coins were of pure gold rather than any inferior substance.

  They were not gold and were destined for inferiors. The Gobernador exhorted those of us with more exalted titles not to indulge in idle talk that would be adverse to the King. The employees of lesser account, less zealous in the service of His Majesty’s honor, would receive what was theirs while we would await the next remittance.

  The governo
r suffered no ill effect from membership in this generic “we.” He had his own properties and rents within the province.

  •

  The innkeeper knew none of the details but had learned that the Casa de la Gobernación received funds that morning. He wanted his money, which is to say, mine.

  He failed to understand how some could have been paid and others not—a thing I, in turn, was unable to explain satisfactorily; to do so would have been to betray the Gobernador’s directive. Some of the clientele ceased their chewing the better to eavesdrop, as if this were an affair of state in which they, too, were implicated, if only via their ears. I saw how they hung on my words and on the owner’s responses, and I was enraged.

  The innkeeper withdrew, grumbling to himself. I gave vent to my emotions with a slam of my fist on the table, and at my loud “Accursed bumpkins” the innkeeper was back, launching an assault upon my person. He was restrained by two or three prudent individuals who placed themselves between us. I howled, I raised my fist, I vociferated about his idiocy, and no one dared restrain me or had the courtesy to appease me. The subject of my remarks—I called him a blood-soaked pig butcher—unleashed a barrage of “Let me at him,” to which a lean and bent man would respond, “You’ll end up in jail, Miguel.” And each “Dejadlo conmigo” was followed by another “Que te condenas, Miguel.” I slammed my fist once more, and he, held back by others, struggled once more to attack me. Then I left.

  My hand was sore and my legs trembled all down their length.

  •

  The tavern fare was unvarying and poor: sausages, carne asada, manioc soup, and manioc bread. The tavern was for drinking, of course, not for regular meals. Anyone who made a habit of taking his meals there paid just as much as at the inn.

  That night I ate matambre, carne asada, manioc bread, and manioc soup.

  Manuel Fernández was there, lingering with obvious pleasure over a small portion of wine.

  He saluted me respectfully but did not approach until I summoned him over. He brought his wine.