Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  “I’m afraid,” she was saying, and I was afraid, too, and wanted to tell her so but without the shame of words. With my hand I groped for hers and took it, and it was burning, which would have been a comfort if the suspicion had not come to me that my right hand was holding my left, or my left hand the right, I could not know.

  I could not know whether a woman was truly there, I could not know whether I was talking to anyone. I did not know, could not know whether all of it was happening or not.

  Amid this disorder and uncertainty, she seemed to throw herself into a desperate effort to erase what had just been said, to annul the chaos her rational analysis had established.

  She kissed me as if to inflict wounds upon me. She kissed me infinitely.

  With those kisses, she took all my strength.

  The sensuality of it was overpowering. It hollowed me out and left me so empty I no longer desired her.

  She took only my lips. Through her kiss, as if absorbing me, she seemed to take me beyond, to where I don’t know, to where nothing is, to where there is nothing. Everything was negated.

  Well before I could hope to make any show of will, my strength was running out. It was coming to an end . . . coming to an end, smoothly now, gently, quietly, coming to an end.

  And all was . . . a welcoming and expansive silence.

  34

  About the first week I confess myself unable to arrive at any judgment. About those that followed, I can say only that I don’t know if my capacity for understanding abandoned me or if I preferred not to understand.

  I left myself to exist in the bed next to the window. My eyes could reach through it as far as a palm tree and a meager clump of weeds. I consented to manioc soup, and occasionally to another kind, made of bone marrow, spooned solicitously into my mouth as if I were a child.

  At night, in that narrow place, I watched Emilia and Fernández lie together. Sometimes by day as well, they would lie together for a while, and afterward she would sing at her household labors. I did not always know that it was Emilia and Fernández, only that it was a man and a woman. That I perceived clearly.

  One afternoon when she was feeding me soup, I raised my eyes searchingly and she was so kind and free of anger that I dared say, “Emilia. . . .”

  But my voice, from long inactivity, I imagine, did not emerge, and she could see only my effort to speak and the certainty that I recognized her.

  She called to Fernández.

  He brought my child in his arms, and my child was clean and well-fed, and the summons appeared to have brought them in from a mutual diversion that had left its delight on their faces.

  Emilia and Manuel pondered me in low voices, fearful of raising their hopes prematurely, or so I believed.

  The cautious respect that prevented them from drawing nearer kept them from seeing the good tears in my eyes.

  •

  I shared their table. Virtuous meals: beans, manioc, cheese, polenta, mpaipig, mbeyú made of sweet corn.

  Their conjugal union was also virtuous. The sacrament was performed by the very priest who had almost administered extreme unction to me.

  My child, christened Diego, for me, and Luciernes, for the mother, now had a different name: Diego Fernández.

  •

  As a first attempt, I walked to the ravine. I managed to complete to my satisfaction the hardest test I set myself: to ascend to that high place where, one afternoon during the siesta, I had installed myself to observe the wretched poverty of my second family.

  I reached the hoary stump and, pleased with my accomplishment, used it to rest. I gazed down at the rancho.

  They, the two of them, were following my exploit with sober pleasure. Manuel had his arm across Emilia’s shoulders. She let him hold her, full of trust, and no one could have said she was an irritable sow of a woman. Five years older than Manuel, that much was true, she was laughing and would go on laughing.

  No other person, I told myself, can realize my love, my goodness, my sacrifice, but another can act on my behalf. Nonetheless, the fact that it pains me, without jealousy, to see Manuel has done just that, means I have lost neither my compassion nor my magnanimity.

  The next ordeal was more demanding: all the way to a remote street, a remote house in the north, near the pineapple fields.

  I made inquiries.

  Señor Soledo, his wife Misia Lucrecia, a mulatto, and a slave woman known as Tora had all left for Brazil some four or five weeks earlier.

  That was the inventory: only one white woman.

  •

  My depleted body could barely endure the return journey. It took so long that Emilia and Manuel could not go on waiting.

  I was holding myself up by the grille on a window, giving myself a rest before embarking on another stretch of the way, when I saw Manuel, who had undoubtedly come out looking for me. I didn’t try to go on. He would help.

  He was, even then, my secretary. I wanted to wave him on, urge him to make haste. I needed to know if he had set aside some message for me from Marta.

  1799

  VICUÑA Porto was like the river; he grew with the rains.

  Water poured down upon the earth from the torrid sky and the current would swell. Meanwhile, Vicuña Porto seemed to emanate from the diligently irrigated soil.

  If a cow got lost, the blame lay with the river that gluttonously licked up everything in its path. If a merchant died, eviscerated in his bed, Porto must have done it.

  With each year—and two had gone by—Vicuña Porto loomed larger. He was a multitudinous man and the city feared him.

  It lived in dread of him but without putting up a garrote. Until the conflagration that took one block, then two, then three. Every man listened to the fire consuming the doorposts as if they were his own bones.

  The city formed a resolution: It would hunt Vicuña down.

  But some said it was the season of his arrival, while others said it was the time when he left, and none could say whether he was in the city or not. A futile search was made within the city limits. Then an armed brigade was mustered to pursue Vicuña and his men, bring him to ground in his lair, and bring about his death.

  •

  I requested a place in that legion.

  No one knew why.

  No one had ever seen Vicuña or had any notion of where his tracks lay. He chose his own name; no one gave it to him.

  Vicuña . . . and a time long past. Vicuña . . . and the Corregidor. I knew his name. I knew his face!

  35

  The Gobernador, my hand in his, lingered endlessly over our leave-taking, incredulous as he was that I was departing for the north, precisely opposite the direction in which I had always yearned to go.

  With all the solemnity of his post radiating from his cheeks, he told me at last that “Su Majestad shall celebrate this return to arms, and even more than that: a victory he is well able to reward.”

  This was the necessary promise. It corresponded to the obvious fact that a daring feat of arms in the service of public order would place me in the monarch’s hand, to be set down in a position more to my liking.

  Triumph would come in a single round, amid great applause. Vicuña Porto could not disguise himself as a landowner, settler, or peon on a yerba maté plantation. Wherever we met him, I would know him.

  He had served me when I was Corregidor. Disloyal, he fomented rebellion among the Indians and instigated looting. He was never caught; the clamor of his exploits was hushed by his departure for other regions, and so the lands under my supervision were pacified.

  •

  The regiment’s officer in chief did not hand over command to me. He told me I would have full authority, but the squadron would have at its head an officer on active duty, taken from among the troops themselves.

  This was a mark of disdain, cloaked in respect. A mere precaution, he told me, to ensure my security and minimize certain concerns, given that soldiers encamped in the wild grow hostile and lazy.

&nb
sp; The two of us—the officer in chief, whose name was Capitán Parrilla, and myself—left the barracks with only a small escort. Most of the twenty-five men had marched ahead earlier that morning with a large herd of horses, ten relief horses for each man, and cattle for our sustenance.

  Hence there was no parade, march-past, or celebration of any sort to send us off, though I would have longed for one, perhaps so my Diego could see me.

  A restless cow with very long horns was energetically attempting to escape from the herd as four soldiers feigned powerlessness to subjugate her. They wanted an excuse to give rein to their horses and break out of the trudging march.

  That was our welcome: dust and partial disorder.

  We moved to the head of the column, Parrilla in ill humor.

  I swiveled around in the saddle to look back, wanting to give notice to the city that when I returned I would only be passing through. A head, Vicuña Porto’s, would be my ticket to the better destiny that neither civil merit, intermediaries, nor supplication had gained me.

  But between ourselves and the city were the soldiers and the herd. There was no option but to look forward.

  So, forward then.

  36

  After the flatlands—outer limit of the brief excursions on horseback that people from the city sometimes took—the forest began. We skirted past.

  The sun shone its torch in our faces. The forest seemed airy, welcoming, and cool, but remained over there, to one side of us, our margin as we were its.

  Then it seemed to follow us, ceaselessly flowing alongside.

  I was drowsy, falling asleep. Hipólito Parrilla was not a man for talk, or so his conduct indicated.

  This was not the case. Until we reached the freshwater lake, he hadn’t wanted to make himself thirsty with conversation. Dust gets into an open mouth.

  At the lake he had us drink. First men, then horses, then cows— the order of importance imposed by those who drank first.

  He permitted neither maté nor asado. He demanded that we devote our utmost efforts to the march while we were still fresh, our strength not yet drained.

  The soldiers chewed on ground-up charquí. I didn’t want to do that, not yet.

  •

  The captain had a most uneven character.

  By day he maintained a rigor so extreme that we were forbidden to break even briefly for some restorative stew. At nightfall, we settled among the ruins of Pitun, where an asado was prepared that he and I, served by one of the men, ate at a separate fire. His full stomach visibly protruding, he grew merry. I could not join in his mood— sleep was gathering me in—so he walked over to the troops.

  He sang with the soldiers and authorized aguardiente.

  In the morning, when the reveille sounded and I looked about me, a decline in the number of our men was apparent.

  A search was made.

  The men were lying in the deep trenches the Jesuit priests had made a century earlier to keep the Indians from fleeing into the forest.

  Parrilla ordered that all who were drunk be whipped. But very few were sober and the punishments were light and quick so as not to delay our departure.

  Once again I kept my distance from the soldiers, reluctant to witness this tedious and flagrantly unjust flogging, in punishment for what the jefe himself had authorized.

  •

  Before we entered Ypané, Parrilla stood up on his horse in the native fashion and harangued the troops, warning that if they repeated their disorderly conduct in the town they would be whipped not on their backs but lower down, and riding would become a torture.

  A speech imparting the plan for this expedition to the expeditionary force would, I thought, have been more in keeping with the situation. No one, it seemed, quite knew what that plan was.

  I was nonplussed. Parrilla—who could have been my comrade and, up to a point, my equal—took no interest in me. He was a man who did not know what he wanted, sometimes aloof, at other times expansive, and both to excess. I held apart from the troops and had not so much as exchanged a glance with a single soldier. I paid no attention to them, except for the four or five who appeared before me without my seeking them out: the one who served our food, the one who saw to my horses, a few others.

  •

  In Ypané, Parrilla grew obstinate in unjustified suspicions. It was patently obvious that Vicuña Porto could not have taken refuge in that town, so small, impoverished, and peaceful.

  The local priest and administrator claimed to have heard nothing but distant rumors of the bandit’s existence and to have neither seen him nor suffered from his misdeeds. Dissatisfied with their report, Parrilla ordered the entire population of whites and natives to gather in front of the church.

  It was the season for planting—what, I don’t know. Indians scratched the shallow surface of the soil with the bleached bone of a cow or horse; they had no better tools nor were they aware that such tools existed. Others, behind them, planted the seeds. Still others, following the almost imperceptible furrows, covered them over, also using the most primitive tools.

  But before these last could arrive, birds dived down to the earth in dispute with the men, to rob the seeds. Of every five seeds planted, three were left. And I foresaw that the three that remained would be eaten by insects and worms that came later, after farmers and birds of prey had both moved on.

  I asked one of the Indians we herded from the fields to the church about the yield of the harvests—his daily bread. He did not understand.

  I needed no answer from him.

  Ventura Prieto had given me the answer, years earlier, though he never spoke of it to me.

  37

  That afternoon, we entered the region of the Mbaya Indians.

  We could no longer ride in the vanguard. Parrilla sent a scout ahead of us. He went alone, as custom dictated, so there would be no conversation to distract him.

  I was thirsty. My mouth seemed filled with flour.

  Vegetation betrayed the presence of a marsh.

  I thought Parrilla would give order to disperse and drink. To the contrary, observing that certain of the relief horses were attempting to break from the herd and wet their mouths, he ordered them held back.

  To me, he deigned to explain. “These waters may be insalubrious.”

  An argument that might have persuaded one other than myself. But I harbored a suspicion that the captain was imposing greater sacrifices than were necessary in the aim of grinding down my resistance, and for that reason alone.

  Then came my provocation.

  I asked for his flask of aguardiente. I was not similarly equipped.

  I drank two swigs without returning it to him. Two more: four. Two more: four, five, six.

  My scalp began to sting. Waxing loquacious with the captain as he watched in annoyance, I told him this was caused by the sun.

  I asked whether his family had a heraldic emblem. He answered that it did. I told him that the tree and the tower appear in my family’s coat of arms. He made no comment. I then inquired as to whether there figured, in the Parrilla family coat of arms, the implement used for grilling meat, commonly known as a parrilla.

  Parrilla exploded with a lash of his whip to my mount’s croup. The horse was as taken by surprise as I was and gave two mighty bounds; the second threw me to the ground.

  Parrilla dismounted and reached me before I was able to stand up. My head was burning with rage and aguardiente.

  He took me by the shoulders, assisting me as I rose to my feet. I flailed in an effort to hit him in the face. In a tone both vehement and sincere, he said, “Can’t a man blaze up in anger and make a mistake, then repent and be pardoned?”

  •

  Behind us, some hundred varas away, the relief horses trotted. The soldiers followed.

  They could not know what had happened.

  Perhaps they thought it an accident or misstep, a sudden fit of nerves from the brute I was mounted on.

  One horseman can ride next to another a
t a trot, without either ever looking at the other’s face.

  38

  The sun, in the final quarter of the sky, halted in its transit.

  The grass would be our blanket that night.

  I helped trample down the ground. For the first time, I mingled with the soldiers.

  I was agitated and bitter. I tried to convince myself of my own lucidity, but in truth I was in such a daze that the men going to and fro with me at our task seemed to float in midair.

  •

  Flatten grass, and a viper that neither escapes nor is trampled to death by a horse, will attack, to defend itself.

  Not wanting to bite the pastern or fetlock, it climbed up the animal’s leg. I could have reached it after it passed the knee, as it uncoiled to bite the breast.

  But I was unaware of it until the horse bucked and I risked another humiliating spill.

  The reins slipped from me and I clung to the mane.

  Bitten, the horse broke into a gallop while the viper, losing its hold, dangled by a single tooth from the chest. The long body whipped at the victim’s flanks. The danger—the reason for my terror—was that it could break free, spiral through the air, and twine about my leg.

  The quadruped stumbled, I rolled over its head, and the men came to my rescue.

  •

  There was a threat of rain. A straw shack was built for Parrilla and me, which forced us into even greater unwanted proximity.

  Before sleeping, I went out into the dark to attend to my bodily needs.

  The guard dogs tracked me a moment, nostrils alert to any nearby wild beasts. They sniffed and let me by. I had been recognized; my scent would be the only watchword necessary for my return.

  I was in a position that would have made self-defense rather awkward when I heard the dry grass crunch at my back.

  Footsteps.

  A dampness at my temples.

  Footsteps, heavy ones, those of a large animal. I was nailed to the spot, absolutely defenseless, as if in a trance. It would pass in a second, I told myself, leaving me another instant for delay after that, for if I flee like this, they’ll see me arrive in a way that. . . . And the dogs behind me and . . . .