Now they pass the badlands of Hildako Lapur, where a band of marauders once burned a monastery to the ground while fifty monks were praying inside. It is said that, eighty years on, the town still smells of burning flesh, and visitors cannot walk its streets without a mask to keep out the stench.
Outside Pozemek, the train comes to a stop because of cows wandering on the track. An old herder on a donkey chases them off, waving his stick, and the train recommences its gentle chugging across the landscape.
He dozes. He wakes.
The train passes Aokigahara Forest, densely packed with trees, a famed suicide spot where the young and depressed come to speak with the ancestors, ruminating with the spirits of the dead. Through the thicket of trees, Nacho sees sunbeams pinned in thick diagonal wedges to the leafy earth, casting the massive trunks in silhouette.
And when the forest eventually ends, there on the brow of a hill in the distance Nacho makes out the shapes of three crosses. Golgotha in stark relief, three sinners roasting in the sun. Are they real or is he still asleep and dreaming?
‘What if Maria is right?’ he thinks. ‘What if I can’t find Torres? Or if the man won’t talk to me? Or maybe he is dead. This is wild country. Bandits and bears abound.’
He has never been to these parts before and the territory seems alien. ‘What languages are spoken here?’ he wonders. ‘What cries did those men on the cross utter before the buzzards picked out their eyes?’
He dozes again and when he wakes, he senses immediately the presence of others even before he opens his eyes. Jammed in by the window, he feels a child’s stare upon him, and the writhings of beasts, and the stillness of the very old. In his carriage are ten people, a dog and six chickens. An old man with a flat, brown face, wrinkled from the sun, and wearing a paisano’s hat, sits opposite, and on his lap, his granddaughter staring at Nacho with a quizzical look. The rest of the carriage is filled with a family of eight, the four boys looking like time-lapse versions of one boy from the age of six to sixteen, all identically dressed in working jeans and checked shirts, faces also browned by the sun.
In a cage besides Nacho’s feet the chickens are behaving impeccably. They occasionally nod their heads as if to acknowledge that, yes, they are in a train going from somewhere to somewhere and, yes, this is their predicament in life, this is exactly what they are supposed to be doing and they have no objections for now.
The sun is lower, beaming in on the carriage, and together with the heat of the passengers and the smell of the chickens, it makes the air thick, nauseating.
Nacho opens his bag and eats a hunk of bread and cheese. The little girl watches him so intently he wonders if she is hungry. He offers her the hunk of bread but she hides in her grandfather’s tunic and only resumes staring after several minutes. The grandfather smiles at Nacho.
Nacho feels relieved when the family gets off at Zabiják, leaving behind two chicken feathers which hover in the air then float under the seat. He looks again at the map and sees that Bieb ta ‘Niket is close, maybe thirty minutes or less.
Now he stares intently at the landscape in which he will soon find himself friendless. He will have to travel the last leg to Solitario in near-darkness, not knowing if there is a floor on which to rest his head. He has a blanket and a knife, a few provisions, but he understands he is entering the unknown, looking for a man who has chosen to disappear.
Outside, as the sun begins to wane, tiny hamlets and settlements with no name pass by. Nacho sees a circle of caravans, like some community of squatter-pilgrims frozen in midsiege against the barbarians. The only moving thing is a whorl of black smoke winding its way up the sky from a cooking fire in the center of the circle.
The temperature drops. Low hills curve on the horizon but the plains here are bare and vast. Small clumps of foliage rise from the land: catclaw and ratany, hopbush and jimson weed, and bulbs of cacti growing one on the other like tumors the size of human heads.
Nacho shivers and covers himself with the blanket. Maria lent it to him. She saw the moth-eaten rag he was taking and handed him a drape of Irish fleece. He thanked her without thinking, but now he is grateful.
He sees a painted sign on a wooden board: Bieb ta ‘Niket. The train slows and comes to a stop. He slings his bag over his shoulder, picks up his muletas from under the seat, and walks to the corridor. Two others get off at the station. He negotiates the steps slowly and feels the cold scythe through his jacket and the fleece as the last rays of the sun descend.
A ghost station. Nobody about. A low building, little more than a wooden cabin, stands beside the track. It bears a sign but written in hieroglyphs, some alphabet Nacho doesn’t recognize. He pushes at the door. Locked. He looks around for the two who arrived on the same train, but they have already melted into the dark. He sees another sign, runic, indecipherable, but one line looks like an arrow so he follows it. It leads to a gate in a chain-link fence, the exit. He ambles out, looks both ways, and goes left because there, under a cavernous star-flecked sky, he sees a faint glow of night-lights, perhaps a tavern or some place where he can negotiate a ride to Solitario.
He hobbles along a stone path, sees his breath a corkscrew of blue-white smoke in the frozen air. Flat land all around. No hills. Few trees. Heading toward the light, he stumbles a moment then retrieves his balance. The road is rutted, the shallow furrows of a four-wheeled cart, the light trough of a horse’s hooves. He has libros. He can pay for a ride to Solitario, but then will they take his money? Do they even use money? Many of the villages in the badlands still barter for goods. He never thought of this, and he has nothing to barter with except his knife, the fleece blanket and a little food.
As he approaches he sees that the light comes from a dilapidated farmhouse. The roof is patched up with thatch and plastic awnings and as he nears the building, he sees that the stone walls look close to collapse. He stops outside the door and listens. Nothing. Just the glow of a light from within. He turns, looks back along the path, and out to the distance. He sees nothing but the hazy outline of the station. With no other lights or signs of habitation, he knocks at the door.
A moment passes. He knocks again.
He hears a faint shuffling of feet. The door creaks open. And who is on the other side? Nacho raises his gaze and sees … himself. The hair unkempt and overgrown like a hedgerow in the barrens, the small-boned figure, barely a feather above five feet tall, the smooth skin of youth giving way to the first traces of middle-age, the same brown eyes and olive skin. They stare at each other for a moment. First the man sees his own face, then he looks down at the body, seeing Nacho propped up on his wooden muletas. The man’s eyes blink rapidly.
“Kdo jste?”
Nacho’s heart sinks. He doesn’t know the language. The man barks it the second time.
“Kdo jste?!”
Nacho looks him in the eye.
“Do you speak English?”
The man stares blankly at him, still taking in his mirror image.
Nacho tries again. “Spanish? Portuguese? French? German? Italian?”
“Co chceš? Co chceš?! Nemám žádnou hotovost.”
The man grimaces, but thinks to himself that this stranger is no threat—he’s too small, he’s a cripple, and he has the most trustworthy face in the world: mine. The vagabonds and madmen, the marauders and sicarios don’t knock gently on doors and stand two meters back. But nonetheless, whatever he wants is his problem. This is the hour when day turns to night.
“Proč si klepat na dveře? Tohle je můj dům.”
Nacho thinks fast. He remembers his days interpreting, traveling to foreign lands. Smile. Disarm the man. Find common ground.
“Solitario,” he says. “Solitario. I need to go to Solitario.”
He plays with the word in as many accents as he can. “Sow lee tario. So LIta RIO. Sore leetriow.”
Until the man repeats, “Solitario. Solitario? Ne.”
The man points to the wilderness.
“Solit
ario je támhle. Je to daleko odtud. Solitario je daleko.”
The man has stopped shouting at him.
“How can I get there?”
The man stares at Nacho. Looks at his boots. Gestures for Nacho to come inside.
“Pojd’ dovnitř domu.”
The interior is an impossible crush of objects lit by a fire burning in the hearth. In the flickering shadows, Nacho makes out only the miscellaneous shapes, a bazaar of the random and the lost: a matryoshka doll, a Javanese pot, a worm-eaten saddle, a leather suitcase with string handles, a set of British encyclopedias from 1926, a pair of stuffed parakeets in a cage. Something stirs and Nacho realizes there is a dog lying on the floor in front of him. It has the same lines, the same sharp angles, as a wolf.
There is hardly space to place his muletas as he traverses the room, but he somehow clambers over to a spare chair by the fire, where the man has directed him to sit. On the other chair, Nacho sees a half-finished plate of food and realizes the man had been eating.
The man picks up his plate and discards it on a side table. Now they observe each other, like figures in a hall of mirrors. Nacho searches for words, but before he can talk, the man speaks.
“Solitario. Solitario je daleko. Potřebujete koně.” He gestures a holding of reins. “Nemám koně,” the man goes on, pointing to himself, waving his finger, and shaking his head.
“I understand,” says Nacho. “I need a horse but you don’t have one. Then how can I get to Solitario? How? Como? What can I do?”
The man goes silent, squints at the fire. Nacho tries another tack.
“Torres. Torres?”
The man registers nothing. A few moments pass. Nacho peers at him, searching his features in profile to see if he and the man really are doppelgangers. Then he sees that the man isn’t squinting at the fire at all; his eyes are closed and his breathing has assumed the depth and regularity of sleep. His fingers are clasped on his lap in a gesture of perfect repose.
The dog stirs, shifts its position as the fire crackles. ‘How is it possible,’ thinks Nacho, ‘that a man lets a stranger into his house and falls asleep in midconversation?’
“Solitario,” he says, as loudly as he dares. Pleading.
The man wakes up with a start and looks across at Nacho. He gets up and finds a pen and paper and draws a horse and carriage.
“Stoller,” he says.
Nacho shrugs his shoulders.
“Johann Stoller.” He points at the horse and cart and gestures outside, his hands tracing twists and turns along a path.
The man puts on his boots and a black winter coat, says something to the dog, which gets up and pads to the doorway. Then he ushers Nacho out of the house, and walks with the dog at his side. They take the stony path, turning right and then left, making their way through the dark.
They reach a house and the man bangs at the door and shouts something in the same language he used before. An older man—large, rugged, and bearded—comes to the door. This is Stoller, his voice as deep as an ocean. He peers at Nacho.
“You want to go to Solitario?”
“Yes.”
“You have a horse?”
“No.”
“It’ll cost you one hundred libros. You have it?
Nacho pats his bag.
“Yes. I have it here.”
“You have somewhere to stay?”
“No.”
“You can sleep in the barn out back. We leave tomorrow at sunrise.”
“OK. I thank you. I’m looking for a man called Torres. Came here a couple of months ago.”
“I’ll take the money before we go. You change the deal, you pay double. You try to trick me, my sons will come after you. You have food?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll need it. Is that the thickest coat you have?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“I have a bearskin you can use. Here. Sleep under this. You’ll freeze otherwise and I’ll have to dispose of your body.”
Stoller closes the door with a nod. Nacho turns to thank his doppelganger, but the man is already disappearing into the gloom, his dog trotting at his side.
CHAPTER 17
Horse and carriage—The waste land—Journey to Solitario—A sea of ice—The screaming man—Conversation with Stoller—Imaginary sons—Nacho the hermit begins his search—Nights in the wilderness—Foraging—Hunger—Nacho eats a poisonous root—Horse and man seen upside down
IN THE MORNING, NACHO IS WOKEN BY THE SOUND OF STOLLER TALKING CALMLY TO THE horse in an alien language. It could be horse language for all Nacho knows. Stoller slides the shafts of the carriage through the tug loops and works the tugs until he can lay them flat on the shafts. As he attaches the trace to the carriage, the horse—magnificent beast, chestnut brown with a thick white stripe running the length of its head—whinnies gently and swishes its tail. Stoller pats the animal on the rump and climbs onto the carriage, reins in hand.
Nacho staggers to his feet and brushes the hay from his clothes. He drapes the bearskin over his shoulder and slips the muletas under his armpits. He struggles into the carriage, seating himself next to Stoller, hands over one hundred libros, and without a word the big driver clicks his tongue and the horse pulls forward.
In the light of day, the expanse of the wasteland yawns open, miles upon miles of nothingness. The path soon peters out, turning to rough ground, gorse and bracken, and vortices of dust lifted by the wind, pluming up like geysers. Ahead of them, a wake of buzzards circles in the air.
Stoller weaves the horse and cart around clumps of cactus, but the land is uneven and the cart jolts constantly. Nacho sits rigid, trying to give himself imaginary ballast so he will not be tossed out.
In the distance, from out of the morning haze, a mountain range looms into view. Its orange walls are streaked with horizontal strips measuring out time and erosion. The horse and cart moves parallel to the mountains, and they pass a rock formation that looks like a hooded nun.
Late morning, the weather turns cold. There is barely a trace of wind, but the temperature drops and the sky clouds over as if veiled with a sheen of ash.
Beyond the mountains now, they come to a frozen lake, a scratched plate of reflecting glass. Stoller steers the horse through the middle of it.
“The screaming man,” he says.
Nacho looks at him uncomprehendingly, then Stoller points down. They pass a man frozen under the surface of the lake. His face is trapped in midscream, hands raised, imploring. Nacho sees it momentarily, the image blurred by the thickness of ice, and he shudders.
The far side of the lake is ash. A gray flat plain. They pass the remnants of a buried town, the flaked and busted timbers of a hovel’s roof cracking in the sun, the spire of a church peeking out of the ash like the blade of an oversized knife. Stoller points at a peak in the distance.
“Volcano. Erupted a hundred years ago. Buried everything.”
They move on, no sound but the horse’s steady hoofbeats in the dust until, one hour later, the sky ripples, starts to crackle with electricity.
They are arriving at the end of the world. Stoller, bearish in his windcheater and hat, slows the horse and announces “Solitario” like some kind of tour guide. But there is nothing to see. A land without boundaries. No beginning or end.
“This is it,” Stoller says.
“How long can you wait?”
“Wait?”
“To take us back.”
Stoller looks at him blankly.
Then he says, “You want to return?”
And suddenly it dawns on Nacho that people come here to die. Or perhaps to renounce worldly life. From the land of ascetics and hermits, sannyasins and sadhus, there are no return journeys. Stoller takes people here and leaves them, turns his horse around, and expects never to see them again in this world or the next. Nacho wonders how many Stoller has brought here, but does not ask. Instead he says,
“I’m looking for someone. A man named Torres. I hav
e to speak with him and try to bring him back.”
“Are you insane?”
“I have no choice.”
“No one knows how big Solitario is. It may be one hundred miles, maybe one thousand. You can live here for years without meeting another soul. Somebody’s playing a joke on you.”
“Did you bring a man named Torres here? Maybe two months ago?”
“I’ve brought dozens of people here. I don’t ask their names and I don’t ask their reasons for coming. And I’ve never, ever brought anyone out of Solitario. At least not alive.”
“He was a big man. Big moustache. Maybe still wearing his military uniform.”
“I just told you. I don’t ask names. And I don’t have a head for faces.”
“Do you always drop people here?”
“Yes.”
“If you were a monk, where would you go from here?”
The man pauses, takes a deep breath. This is not his business. The little cripple looks at him imploringly.
“You need a water supply. You need shade. Something to build a fire. Wood. An elevated place to watch for animals.”
“Where could I find all those things?”
“I just told you. Solitario is hundreds of miles long. You want to look, you look. I’m turning around. I have to get home before nightfall.”
“Can you pick me up again in three days?”
“You are insane. How do I know you’ll be here? You’ll be dead. You don’t walk too good. How will …”
“If I pay you first.”
“What?”
“I give you the money. You just come back here same time of day in three days.”
“I can do that.”
“Then we do it. One hundred libros. Here. Take it. And if I bring Torres back he can go in the bed of the cart, right?”
“Right.”
Stoller looks at Nacho. Then he says, “What happens if I don’t return?”
“My sons will come after you.”
Nacho once knew a fisherman called Balzac. It was when he was living in Mangingisda where the waves sometimes reached fifty feet and whales would wash up on the beach. Balzac caught fish because he could think like a fish. Stooped and scrawny, he had terrible eyesight, was deaf as a brick, and barely had the strength to lift a barrel. But once in his ropy skiff, Balzac became part of the ocean, a fish among fish, leading them on, coaxing them in.
Damnificados Page 15