Zama

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  They had venison, hunted that same day, and chicha made from carob. They contributed all of it to our voracity.

  After the meal, I was left a while longer with my hands untied, seated before a fire. Parrilla’s satiety granted me that.

  I tried to distinguish between the two camps: ours, with the militia’s habitual evening routine, and theirs, set apart and full of people who, without forcing themselves upon us, seemed to intermingle with us and with all that emanated from us.

  I preferred to view the other camp without compassion.

  They were victims of the ferocity of a Mataguayo tribe that had blinded them with red-hot knives.

  Their lineage had not been interrupted since that attack, some twelve years earlier, I calculated. Their children were not born blind.

  •

  A soldier gripped my knee.

  Wanting my attention, or perhaps to warn me of danger.

  I feared a treacherous blow from behind.

  This surreptitious informer directed me to look toward something. I saw no alarm in his face, only avidity and wild desire.

  I looked.

  An Indian man had mounted an Indian woman.

  They were in a pool of light.

  I thought I understood. They did not see, and so gave no thought to the gaze of others upon themselves.

  •

  Another Indian brought his igtacú-guá to the coals to warm up water.

  He knelt among us. He did not speak.

  He prepared maté.

  He passed the calabash around, for anyone who wanted to have some before he did. He said, “Fuerte.” The maté was strong.

  He spoke Spanish. He had done forced labor for the Spaniards before he was blinded, he said.

  He told the story of the Mataguayo invasion once more. By now all of us knew it well.

  I asked where they were headed.

  He didn’t answer. He smiled understandingly at the sound of my voice, to let me know I was naïve.

  I preferred not to acknowledge his refusal. Where, I asked, were their ranchos or huts?

  He told me something I had already guessed and something more that I might never have grasped on my own.

  When the tribe grew accustomed to carrying on without eyesight, it was happier. Each one could be alone with himself. Shame, censure, and recrimination no longer existed: Punishment was not necessary. They turned to one another out of collective need and common interest: to hunt a deer or put a roof on a rancho. A man sought out a woman and a woman sought out a man for love. Some of them, to isolate themselves even further, beat their own ears until the tiny bones within were crushed.

  But when the children reached a certain age, the unseeing ones knew their children could see—and were penetrated with unease. They found no rest. They abandoned their ranchos and wandered off into the forests, the meadows, the mountains. Something pursued them or drove them on. It was the gaze of the children who accompanied them that made it impossible for them to stop anywhere. Just a few, who were still adapting to a nomadic life, had yet to be overcome by this restlessness.

  45

  I was asleep.

  Beyond the walls of my dream, I was flooded with dazzling light.

  I opened my eyes. Impossible to see.

  For a second a flaming torch had been next to my face.

  My skin no longer felt its heat.

  I strained to look, now forewarned.

  Two, three torches were moving through the sleeping bodies.

  A verification.

  Stealth.

  I wanted to raise myself up. I could not.

  My feet were bound by a rope.

  When I lay down for the night, only my hands had been bound.

  •

  Early dawn made its way into the blind Indians’ existence, warning that soon they would again be visible to the eyes of others.

  They moved off from the encampment, leaving only us on the ground, all asleep, I imagined, except for me.

  No.

  There were three men standing up. Together they slowly approached each of those lying on the ground.

  They lowered a torch to the face; they spoke, and then, bending down, they seemed to slash at something.

  Then the man they’d approached would sit up, rub himself, and go into contortions I soon interpreted. He was stretching his limbs because, like me, he’d been tied up.

  They came to me, the three of them.

  One said I should join the captain.

  Another said I should not: In case of attack, I could kill as many Indians as the rest of them.

  The third voiced a peculiar opinion: It was thanks to me they had reached this place.

  The second man had the voice of Vicuña Porto.

  It was he, I think, who cut the rope around my feet.

  I could get up now.

  •

  All the others had their feet and hands free; but though I could walk, I still had my hands tied.

  The soldiers were eating cold grilled venison. I paused to watch.

  One of them—my companion at the campfire the night before? —untied me and gave me something to eat.

  No one objected.

  They ate in silence, as if holding back their thoughts for fear of an argument. There was something still to be done.

  Vicuña Porto put down the calabash without draining it.

  The others stopped chewing and set aside their meat.

  My benefactor, looking me in the face, said that was enough. Did he want me to tell him to bind my hands again? I couldn’t do that. Then he did it, without waiting for me to ask. He grumbled.

  Vicuña Porto left and the soldiers followed. I followed Vicuña Porto and the soldiers.

  They had taken Parrilla prisoner, and he was a fierce prisoner.

  He lay facedown on the ground, tied with many ropes.

  Those who had been his men surrounded him, contemplating him, as did I, though he may not have noticed me among them. He insulted them one and all.

  They moved away. This was a council to which I would not be admitted.

  I stood there, before the captain.

  “You said yes, too,” he said, and I thought that the other soldiers, aside from the first three, had said yes to something, but I hadn’t; they hadn’t asked me anything.

  I was about to explain this to Parrilla when it occurred to me that no explanation was necessary. Very soon Parrilla would no longer be with us.

  At that moment, it seemed as if no more than two men drew breath across the whole crust of the earth: the captain, tied up at my feet, and I, with my hands bound, observing him, as if he were not himself, as if feelings were not possible, as if the possible were not possible.

  One man grabbed him by the hair, others by different parts of the body.

  They had agreed to torture him, I thought. But no.

  Only in the final abuse, perhaps. They lifted him from below and carried him to the water’s edge.

  Twenty paces back, I went along. Alone.

  They threw him into the river.

  If he could swim underwater, I thought, he might save himself. Later I remembered that they hadn’t cut his ropes.

  46

  My protector restored my dominion over my hands. We rode as if to retake some site we had lost view of the day before.

  Not the forest of y-cipó. And not the bitter orange grove. It must be farther in.

  The undertaking, whatever it might be, did not appear to arouse joy or strong hope. No one spoke of it.

  To me it was flight, a flight into uncertainty.

  And it was then, I think, that uncertain though I was as to our goal, I became possessed of the certainty that my fate would be the same anywhere.

  I asked myself not why I was alive but why I had lived. Out of expectation, I supposed, and wondered whether I still expected anything. It seemed I did.

  Something more is always expected.

  My thinking mind had this thought, but when I dispense
d with thinking I fell into a brute inertia, as if my share in things were running out, and the world would be left unpopulated because I would no longer exist within it.

  47

  Around the evening bonfire they spoke of the cocos.

  They had accepted me as a witness. Something like a blind Indian, perhaps, or merely an inferior and disposable henchman.

  They sat in a circle around the fire. I sat outside the ring and back a little way. They sated their hunger, then extended a portion to me.

  Cocos.

  My erudition was perilous.

  They were under the spell of a story told by the blind ones. The blind ones heard explosions that the children, their children, who were not blind, could not discern with the same precision. The booming guided them to the mountain. It was a battle between Spaniards and Lusitanians, they imagined, and hoped to scavenge the abandoned victuals. But it was rocks, round rocks bursting open, that made the noise. They blossomed with precious crystals, the children said, the gems that white men were greedy for.

  I could disenchant them, tell them they would find only spar and other transparent minerals entirely without value, as other adventurers and sacrificial victims had learned in times as distant as the previous century.

  I could erase, from the heaven they sought, the bejeweled lightning bolt.

  Then the gratitude that had led them to keep me alive would be extinguished. The kind fellow who had spoken up for how useful I had been to bring them this far—so close to the treasure, that is— would bow his head without further argument.

  Death, then. My death, chosen by me.

  I mused that death was not a thing to enjoy, though going to one’s death could be, as a desired act, an act of will, of my will. To wait for it no longer. To hound it down, grow intimate with it.

  I asked them to listen.

  I was granted a place in the circle. They offered it as if fore-seeing that I had something to give that would put me on an equal footing.

  The cocos were an illusion, I said.

  They did not contradict me with incredulity or mistrust.

  I had said yes to my executioners, I knew.

  But I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No.

  48

  The gathering then turned its attention to another voice, not yet one of vengeance and ferocity, or so it seemed.

  A soldier said what he hadn’t managed to say before when a less risky and presumably more profitable scheme lay before them.

  He described in minute detail the journey that the Portuguese make to Mato Grosso and Cuiabá. He spoke as if he had witnessed for himself the fatigue and helplessness that burdened the men on the return, along with their prodigious loads of rich minerals.

  He proposed ambushing them at the Cuchuy river, or at the Tacuary.

  Once again, diamonds struck sparks in the eyes of these tattered mutineers.

  I seemed to see them sparkling in their beards, as well.

  Vicuña Porto may have glimpsed assent in my expression. He invited me to say as much.

  He and the others had faith in my scant knowledge of geography, which in fact supported the initiative.

  It was possible.

  A major undertaking. At a considerable distance from the power of Spanish arms.

  It was clear that everyone was waiting for Porto to approve before giving vent to their enthusiasm.

  Porto had yet to pronounce himself.

  He found a bottle of aguardiente, which may once have belonged to the captain. He held it up to the fire and saw that no more than two swallows were left.

  He drank one, holding the liquor in his mouth a long while, the better to savor it.

  With the palm of his hand he wiped the rim of the bottle. He held out the last swallow to me.

  I hesitated. To accept, I told myself, is to go on.

  To go on was to become one of these men, an adventurer, a criminal. To go on was also to live.

  I grasped the bottle in two hands and raised it to my mouth as if I were taking a bite out of it.

  That night when I lay down to sleep, I placed the glass bottle next to my skin.

  I sheltered it as if it protected me. I gripped it like a safe-conduct. It was a promise made by a son, a cherished bit of plunder.

  49

  An early riser brought an ostrich.

  He cut it open and I asked him for blood. He gestured me to bring a cup, and let a vein gush into it.

  As soon as the liquid covered the bottom I said, “That’s enough.”

  He looked at me, slightly amazed.

  I plucked a feather from the bird and went down to the hollow where the river was at its broadest.

  With my knife, I cut a point in the quill.

  I pulled out a slip of paper that had gone black along the edges. I smoothed it down against my leg. I wrote, “Marta, I haven’t gone under.”

  That last word may have been unclear. The ostrich blood had coagulated and was no longer of much use.

  I put the paper in the bottle, closed it up, and threw it in the river.

  After the splash, it floated off into the distance, bobbing.

  There was something there, something human, exerting an influence on the surroundings through me.

  I raised my eyes to the wall of the ravine.

  A soldier was observing me, impassive. He could have been posted there since ancient times, watching, incapable of surprise.

  I thought that the message was not destined for Marta or anyone out there. I had written it for myself.

  50

  All sixteen pronounced in favor of my death. Their faces were bare and they looked straight into my eyes.

  But Vicuña Porto’s single vote had more power. He said that being an informer merits the death penalty, and treachery deserves the same. No one can be executed twice. But, he said, a man can die before dying; he can endure a double death from a mutilation that annihilates him.

  •

  I reasoned that this was not true, that he was mistaken. Even without arms, without eyes, I could tear up roots with my teeth and roll toward the river like a sack. If they left me alive, I would still be able to choose between life and death.

  Porto knew that, too. He spoke shrewdly, concealing the mercy he meant to show me.

  Before the first cut, he whispered in my ear, “Bury the stumps in the ashes from the fire. If you don’t bleed to death, and you meet an Indian, you’ll survive.”

  •

  Someone said, “Do you want to live?”

  Someone was asking me whether I wanted to live.

  That meant my blood hadn’t all drained away. The Indian had come.

  So I might not die. Not yet.

  He ripped my garments.

  I felt tourniquets shackle my arms and knew that my fingerless hands were no longer spurting blood.

  Perhaps I dozed off, perhaps not.

  I came back from nothingness.

  I wanted to rebuild the world.

  I opened my eyelids as slowly as if I were creating the dawn.

  He was watching me.

  It wasn’t an Indian. It was the blond boy. Filthy, in rags, still only twelve.

  He was me, myself from before; I hadn’t been born anew. I understood that when I recovered my own voice and was able to speak. Smiling like a father, I said, “You haven’t grown. . . .”

  With irreducible sadness he replied, “Neither have you.”

  A NOTE ON THE COVER ART

  THE COVER photograph is by Guido Boggiani (1862–1902). Trained as a landscape painter, Boggiani left his native Italy to travel from 1887 to 1893 in the Southern Cone, where he was drawn to the study and representation of indigenous life. He returned to Paraguay in 1896, now equipped with a camera. Journeying through the interior, he took more than four hundred photographs on glass plates coated with gelatin. In 1901, he left Asunción on a new expedition into the Gran Chaco and disappeared. A search party sent out the ne
xt year found the bodies of Boggiani and his assistant, skulls shattered and heads severed by ceremonial axes. They seem to have been killed by members of the Tumrahá tribe, among whom Boggiani had lived on good terms several years earlier. In 1904, the Czech explorer Alberto Frič recovered most of Boggiani’s belongings left in Paraguay, including 175 negatives. These were later developed by Frič’s grandson and published in Guido Boggiani, Photographer (Czech Republic: Titanic Publishers, 1997).