Tierra del Fuego

by Francisco Coloane

  But Schaeffer continued scrabbling away, now with his knife, now with his nails, like a frightened mole seeking refuge. He only stopped to wipe away the sweat, taking advantage of these moments to sift through the sand in his hand. In the end he had to admit failure, and he flung it away with a despondent cry of “Pure iron oxide!”

  Midway through the afternoon, not being hungry and not even aware that noon had passed, he started moving more of the ribs, but the results were the same. Already exhausted and irritable, he tried a smaller one. The sun, still advancing between patches of clear sky and banks of cloud like the soul of man, cast light and shade over the whole area.

  Tired, and with his nerves in shreds, he sat down again on a rib he had put down as a bench. He felt as weak as he had the night the bullet had gone through his leg. He looked at his leather coat, as crumpled as an old rag—exactly the way he himself felt, inside and out. But then, recovering, he again kneeled and started scrabbling, as if his life depended on it.

  The great gold nugget of the sun was starting to retreat to the black sands of night when its last long rays converged on a few little points of yellow light in the palm of Schaeffer’s hand. They were specks of gold, caught in his wrinkled skin when he blew away the darkness of the iron oxide!

  He looked at them for a long time, until the suspiciously transparent drop still hanging from the tip of his nose became distended and fell, melting on the flakes of gold. He rubbed his eyes, no longer to stop seeing visions, but because there were tears in them. It was a long time since those eyes had wept.

  The sun, as it went down, also left great nuggets of gold on the edge of the pan of the horizon—the golden cumulus that lit the ever-changing phantasmagoria of the Fuegian twilight.

  But Schaeffer did not see the sunset. For him the sun was still in his hand, it was the same color, the color of the most coveted and malleable of metals.

  Julius Popper may have invented his famous gold harvester, yoking the gold of the sea to his own ingenuity, but, out there on that remote rim of Tierra del Fuego, nature had also devised its own harvester.

  It is a natural phenomenon of Tierra del Fuego that, whereas in other places the nuggets and flakes of gold are torn them from their beds of quartz and swept along by the rivers, on the Fuegian coast they are torn from the ocean bed and from the cliffs at high tide and swept along by the force of the waves.

  Thanks to another phenomenon typical of the eastern edge of Tierra del Fuego, the land had risen and the sea receded, leaving the whale skeleton embedded in the middle of the beach. But before that, for how long nobody knew, the framework of bones, with its ribs and its fissures between the vertebrae, had acted as a strange kind of conduit and washer of gold.

  With this unexpected find, the lives of the two men underwent an abrupt change. The first nuggets and flakes made it possible for Novak to go south to the port of Río Grande and buy tools to replace those that had been abandoned after the defeat in the Beta arroyo. He also stocked up with food and tobacco, a change from what nature provided for them, and bought a horse complete with Malvinas harness and gear for Schaeffer, which he used to transport the load.

  But the breath of humanity started moving out of their hearts . . .

  “According to custom, you get a third,” Schaeffer said, when, with the tools brought by Novak, they organized the work and divided up the first gold they had obtained.

  “Why?” Novak asked, surprised.

  “Because I found the deposit . . .”

  “You call that a deposit? A few whale bones that collected the gold the sea threw up on the beach!”

  “That’s as may be, but it’s mine. I was the one who found the skeleton, so the bones belong to me, and so does everything under the bones. You can have all the rest of the beach, and we can share the work on it, but not this. What if,” Schaeffer continued, unusually talkative, “what if tomorrow you were walking along and you came across a gold nugget, and I was walking behind you, would you share it with me? Would you?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It is . . .”

  Novak looked him up and down. He was more than six feet tall, and his square face, prominent chin and dark, childlike eyes gave him a sad, pensive look.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Schaeffer said, with a smile that was half sly, half cruel. “‘I saved your life, and this is how you repay me!’ Well, I can give it back to you if you like, how much will you pay me for it? But that’s how gold is divided up.”

  “Life can’t be bought and sold,” Novak yelled, more in bitterness than in anger, “especially the life of a rogue like you!”

  “Yes, you’re right, life can’t be bought and sold. But gold can.”

  Novak wanted to leave then and there, and would have if his military training hadn’t taught him to think before acting. You couldn’t just abandon the field to the enemy like that. That would have been just what Schaeffer wanted—to have the gold all for himself! So he stayed, but the breath of humanity never came back into their hearts.

  They did not spend much time together now in the cave, which Schaeffer had provided with a decent shelter from the wind and rain, using whale ribs with seal skins stretched over them, just as he had conceived it. Like two mistrustful beasts, they devoted all their energies, from morning to night, to the task of washing the gold. They would look at each other suspiciously, even when they were carrying water for their pans, and only talked to each other when they had to, beneath that sealskin awning between the rocks.

  At the end of every day, they weighed the gold on a pair of scales they had made out of two small sticks, threads of guanaco fiber and two trays of dried guanaco hide, and divided it up in the proportions agreed on by Schaeffer. If occasionally the old warm breath touched the two men, this weighing and division of the gold soon blew it away.

  Within a few weeks, the area had been completely dug up, the earth moved, and the bones pulled apart vertebra by vertebra. There was not a handful of sand or gravel that had not been sifted through the pans. One evening, as they finished their work, Novak said, “I’m getting out of here. There’s nothing more to be had.”

  “You’re right,” Schaeffer said. “There’s nothing more.”

  They both stood there for a while, looking with surprise at all the gravel and sand they had dug up and at the heavy whale bones they had taken to pieces and moved.

  “We turned over almost the entire beach!” was Schaeffer’s final comment, before they walked away.

  That same evening, in the cave, they weighed all the gold they had obtained.

  “There must be nearly a kilo!” Schaeffer exclaimed, feeling the weight of his leather bag in his hand, his eyes shining with greed.

  “Not bad at all,” Novak said, depositing his own bag under the guanaco and seal skins he used as blankets.

  Meanwhile, Schaeffer put his bag in one of the large pockets of his leather coat, and casually walked out through the tent of whalebones and sealskins.

  Schaeffer always did the same after they had divided up the gold at the end of a day’s work. He would leave the cave, linger on the pampa for a while, then come back, take the dark leather bag from the pocket of his coat and throw it down ostentatiously on his blankets, the ends of which overlapped Novak’s in the narrow cavern under the rock.

  The wild geese and bustards had already started to gather in large groups on the flat grasslands. One morning, both men watched with a certain dismay as one of the female birds suddenly rose and, forming a great triangle, with three males at the front to guide her, set off on her migratory flight to other distant regions. She had already raised her chicks in the tussock grasslands and was taking them with her, her instinct having told her that the first autumn blizzards were approaching.

  “Now that the geese are going we should go, too!” Novak said.

  “Where would you go?” Schaeffer asked coldly.

  “Same place they’re going. North. That’s where life is.”
r />   “But this is where they come to find it,” the old man said, looking down at the ground and smiling.

  “I’ll cross the Straits of Magellan and take the first ship that leaves Punta Arenas. Doesn’t matter where it’s going, as long as it’s north.”

  Schaeffer sighed. “Me, I’m going to Río Grande. I want to get off this island, too. I’ve done all I can here.”

  A heavy silence fell over the two men on the eve of their departure. They sat down together by the fire, the way they had once done, and ate roast guanaco jerky and drank mate. It had been a while since they had last had any goose or seagull eggs. Something had come between them, something that would not let them talk, or even sit closer together. The fire was a meager one, more ash than coal, made from black scrub, a useless bush with weak, hollow branches and a dry heart as porous as cork, which somehow survives in the Fuegian wasteland.

  As twilight fell, they went back inside the stone cave in silence, as they did every night. The old man was soon snoring peacefully, but Novak could not get to sleep.

  Dark thoughts started crowding into his mind. They came and went, and each time they returned they were darker still. To dismiss them, he thought back over the steps that had led him to this remote corner of the planet. He remembered them as all men do when they lie awake in the dark, groping about uncertainly in the past and occasionally catching glimpses of the hidden reasons that have led them here to roam the dense sea of forgetfulness.

  He had come from Europe as an artillery sergeant, entrusted with a battery, a product of Krupp’s, intended to compete with Schneider and other armaments manufacturers on the outskirts of Buenos Aires for an Argentinean government contract. He had always had a somewhat childlike imagination, the kind that can be useful when it comes to military strategy, and on this particular occasion he had thought of a trick to make sure his cannon and shells were more competitive. During the night, he hosed down with kerosene the targets intended for him. The following day, at the trials held by the military authorities, his shells not only hit the targets but also set them on fire.

  A compatriot of his made him a tempting offer, the post of manager on a cattle ranch at Las Heras, in Argentinean Patagonia, and he came south to apply military discipline to the raising of cattle. But it was only a small ranch, not enough to satisfy the ambitions of Sergeant Fritz Novak, who had imagined himself living like a king in his own dominions, like the managers of the great English-owned estates. But he was a German, and the Germans always lagged behind the English when it came to colonial enterprise.

  Around that time, something happened on the coast to the south of the ranch where he worked. A seal-hunting cutter, sailing off the long, low coastal shelf of Patagonia looking for the eastern mouth of the Straits of Magellan, was caught in a storm and ran aground on the shore of a cape that Ferdinand Magellan had named the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins. The survivors, digging a well in search of water, found that the muddy soil contained abundant particles of pure gold. From being a disaster, the shipwreck became a stroke of luck, and news of the find spread throughout the world. From every corner of the earth, adventurers arrived in search of the precious metal. Overnight, the place, called Zanja a Pique because of the high walls separating the pampa from the Atlantic shore, became a makeshift camp for men of every nationality. But one stood out from the others for his know-how and daring. That was the Romanian engineer Julius Popper—“Don Julio” as they started to call him once they became familiar with his personality. Popper had been on the banks of the Yangtze when he heard about the find, and like a swallow from Salang had ­immediately flown all the way from ancient China to virgin Patagonia.

  Sergeant Novak, too, left his ranch and made the short journey from Las Heras to Zanja a Pique. The latter yielded a fair amount of gold, but not enough that they did not later have to defend their holdings with bullets.

  Julius Popper looked beyond the Straits of Magellan and with his engineer’s eye saw that the eastern coast of Tierra del Fuego, just opposite Zanja a Pique, had the same geological formation as Patagonia.

  From among the adventurers he sought out the boldest and most determined—their later rebellion confirmed how well he had chosen them—and organized an expedition to Tierra del Fuego. They were the first white men to cross the Onasin, as the Ona Indians called their land, and they crossed it in blood and fire, leaving many native corpses behind them as a mark of the Indians’ first contact with civilization.

  Immediately he discovered gold in the Páramo, and with the experience of Zanja a Pique behind him, Popper put together a private army and placed at its head the German ex-sergeant Fritz Novak, who seemed to have been predestined for such an important position.

  What had Novak gotten out of it all? Only a life full of conflict and danger, watching his master’s back! No sooner did Popper have his own army than he turned into the self-styled King of the Páramo. Whereas he, Novak, who had virtually been Popper’s second-in-command, was now hiding out in the rocks, like a cornered rat!

  In his mind’s eye, he had a clear image of the Romanian—his broad forehead, his blue-white face, his red beard and mustache, his straight, rather flat nose, and his green, snakelike eyes with their cold, sharp expression. An imperious voice added to the impressiveness of his tall, robust figure.

  He could still hear that voice, and see that gleam in his eye, as Popper harangued his troops, Novak standing to attention at their head, the perfect commander. “Soldiers! The two driving forces that motivate human society are hunger and prison, just as a piece of meat and a stick motivate a dog. That’s what it boils down to, gentlemen—we need to feed ourselves, we need to defend our lives, we need to take women for procreation! Hunger forces man to eat, and prison forces him to work so that he doesn’t have to steal his food! If you dig deep enough, you always find an empty stomach, the basis of all effort! But man also needs to surpass himself, to find his own salvation! Look at that flag, the white of justice that guides our weapons and the blue of the sky that protects your steps! Your heroic deeds will remain when all material wealth has ­vanished!”

  Whether or not they understood what he was saying, like the Italian phrases he hung around the necks of deserters, the fact was that everyone, including Novak, felt dominated by the man’s presence as well as by his words.

  “Of course,” Novak thought now, lying there beneath the rocks in the dark, “it was a very good philosophy for him. His men performed the heroic deeds, surpassing themselves so that he could grab all the wealth! The bastard!” He remembered how he had unsheathed his saber after the speech and in unison with his troops had answered his master’s harangue. “With you we have lived, and if you die we will die!”

  He repeated the words, created by Popper himself, which he had had to teach the soldiers to repeat like an oath. “With you we have lived, and if you die we will die!” He gave a deep sigh of anger and self-pity. He had been a stupid fool, only there to put the fear of God into other men who were even bigger fools than he was! The Romanian had used him just like one of those straw puppets he himself had made to deceive the Indians and the riff-raff! Did life have to be like that—hunger and the threat of prison to stop man from stealing, to force him to work and produce? Was an empty stomach really the basis of all effort?

  In the middle of the night, the west wind started to blow hard. It howled between the whale bones at the entrance to the cave, and one of the seal skins came loose and started to thump dully like a drum between the ribs of the cetacean.

  The thumping made Schaeffer stir in his sleep. He moaned, turned over on his rickety old bed, and after a while resumed snoring.

  Life was the same everywhere! Novak thought, continuing his silent conversation with himself in the darkness. Hadn’t he once served the same function in another, larger army, suppressing the poor by force of arms whenever they tried to wrest ill-gotten gains from the rich? Weren’t other commanders on other shores also used like puppets by a few clever masters who
made speeches to deceive people? How simple things seemed all of a sudden. A piece of bread and a stick to teach a dog to behave! Was man any better than that? Why had he never seen it that way before? Why had he never perceived it as clearly as Popper had said it? He had to admit the man was clever! He had mastered nature, putting it at his service, and in the same way he had mastered men to make himself rich! Except that in taming the sea he had used his own ingenuity, whereas to tame men he had used gallows and puppets of straw and of flesh and bone.

  And the gold of the Páramo was the same everywhere! Everyone lusted after the yellow metal because it let you eat without having to work or go to prison, and it bought you love and power. You only had to look at how men changed once they had it in their hands . . . Hadn’t the greedy old man snoring beside him proved that? No sooner had he held a bit of gold in his hands than he had turned into a little Popper, clinging to his gains! He, Novak, had saved both men’s lives, and both of them had turned on him and treated him the way they had.

  He suddenly stopped criticizing others and turned his silent anger on himself. Hadn’t he also lusted after gold? Hadn’t he once shot Ona Indians and cut off their ears to sell to the ranchers who were starting to settle in the tussock grasslands of Tierra del Fuego? He’d received one pound sterling for every pair of ears! He remembered the massacre on the slopes behind Cape Domingo. He had joined the Indian hunters—he remembered as if to justify himself—because someone had suggested it, when he was drunk in a brothel in Rio Grande, and had told him it would be an adventure. If he hadn’t been drunk, he would never have done it. The Onas were on their way back from the shores of the cape with their wives and children, laden with cormorants and penguins, when the men had swooped down from the hills and attacked them without mercy. He had shot four or five of them himself, one of them a little girl. He remembered her beautiful naked body, because as she tried to escape her guanaco cape had fallen, but he couldn’t remember her face—he hadn’t dared look at it as he cut off her ears . . . Again, he cursed himself for this act, the worst thing he had ever done in his life. He had hidden it deep in his consciousness, and had gone on a bender for several days, spending the pounds sterling he had earned.