The Exiles and Other Stories

by Horacio Quiroga

  “There’s the well,” he indicated, so I wouldn’t doubt its existence. “To hell with it! I’m not working there anymore. The well you make . . . Don’t know what to do about your well, you don’t! . . . Not wide enough. What do we do now, boss?” And he put his elbow on the table, better to look at me.

  But I persisted in my weakness for the man, and sent him to town to buy a machete.

  “A Collins,” I advised him. “I don’t want a Toro.”

  The fellow got up then, thrilled to the bone.

  “This is really good! Nice, the Colin! Now I’m going to have me a real fine machete!”

  And he left happy, as if the machete were really for him.

  It was two-thirty in the afternoon, the crowning hour for apoplexy, when you can’t touch a stick of wood that’s been left in the sun for ten minutes. Woods, fields, basalt, and red sandstone—everything vibrated, washed in the same shade of yellow. The landscape lay dead, in a silence pervaded by uniform humming, as though from a single drum, which seemed to follow one’s sight no matter where it might be directed.

  Down the scorching road, with his hat in hand and looking from side to side at the tops of the trees, his lips pursed as if he were whistling—though he wasn’t—went my man to get the machete. From home to the town is half a league. Before an hour was gone I caught sight of Olivera from a distance; he was coming back slowly, engrossed in making lines on the road with his blade. Something in his walk, however, seemed to point to a specific task, and not just that of imitating lizard tracks in the sand. I went out to the roadside gate, and then saw what Olivera was doing: he was chasing along a snake, forcing it to go straight ahead of him by goading it with the tip of the machete—one of those snakes that hunt chickens.

  That morning he had seen me working with snakes—una boa idea, according to him (perhaps punning in Portuguese on boa “good” and boa “snake”).

  Having found the snake a kilometer from the house, it had seemed to him very useful to bring it in alive, “so the boss could study it.” And nothing was more natural than to force it along ahead of him, as you drive a sheep.

  “Nasty critter!” he blurted with satisfaction, wiping away his sweat. “Didn’t want to go straight . . .”

  But the most amazing thing about my laborer is that afterward he worked, and worked as I’ve never seen anyone do it.

  From quite a while back I had nourished the hope of some day replacing the five bocayás1 that were missing in the ring of palm trees around the house. In that part of the patio the iron-ore crops up to the surface of the earth in manganic blocks streaked with scorched sandstone and hard enough to repel a crowbar with a sharp and sudden clang. The worker who dug the original pits hadn’t gone any deeper than fifty centimeters, and at least a meter was necessary to get to the gritty subsoil.

  I gave the job to Olivera. Since here there was no mud that could spatter his trousers, I expected he’d find the work to his liking.

  And that’s how it was, in fact. He looked the pits over for quite a while, wagging his head at their deficiently circular form, then took off his jacket and hung it from the thorns of the nearest bocayá. For a moment he looked at the Paraná, and after greeting it with an “Oh, you wild Paraná!,” he straddled the mouth of the pit.

  He started at eight in the morning. At eleven my man’s bar-strokes still rang on, with unabated sonority. Whether it arose from indignation at the poorly done original work, or the urge to conquer those blue-black slabs that gave off splinters as sharp as bottle-chips, the truth is that I never saw such persistence in throwing one’s heart into every stroke. The whole meseta echoed with the muffled blows, since the bar was striking at a meter’s depth.

  From time to time I went up to see his work, but the man wasn’t talking anymore. Every now and then he looked at the Paraná, but seriously now, and then straddled the hole again.

  At siesta-time I thought he’d be loath to go on under the hellish sun. No such thing: at two o’clock he arrived at his pit, hung up his jacket and hat on the thorns of the palm again, and went back to work.

  I wasn’t feeling well after lunch that day. At that hour, apart from the sudden buzzing of some wasp on the veranda, and the monotonous, quivering murmur of the landscape smothered in light, it’s not common to hear anything at all. But now the meseta was resounding dully, blow after blow. Due expressly to the state of depression I was in, I lent a sickly ear to that reverberation. Each stroke of the bar seemed louder to me; I thought I even heard the man’s ugh! as he bent over. The blows had a very pronounced rhythm; but from one to another an age of time went by. And each new blow was stronger than the one before.

  “Here it comes,” I would say to myself. “Now, now . . . This one’s going to boom louder than the others . . .”

  And the blow would in fact ring out dreadfully, as though it were the last by a powerful worker flinging his tool to hell.

  But the anxiety would come back at once:

  “This one’s going to be louder still . . . It’s going to land right now . . .”

  And of course it did.

  Maybe I had a little fever. At four I couldn’t stand it anymore, and went to the pit.

  “Why don’t you lay off for a while, Olivera?” I told him. “You’re going to go crazy with that . . .”

  The man raised his head and looked at me with a long ironic stare.”

  So? . . . You don’t want me to do nothing by your pits?”

  And he kept on looking at me, with the crowbar between his hands like a rifle at rest.

  I got out of there, and as always when I felt listless, took up my machete and went into the woods.

  After an hour I returned, back in shape again. I came back by way of the brush behind the house, while Olivera was just finishing the cleanup of his pit with a metal trowel. A minute later he was coming to look for me in the dining room.

  I didn’t know what my man was going to say to me after the bit of work he’d done that awful day. But he took a firm stand in front of me and all he said, as he pointed at the palms with a somewhat disparaging pride, was:

  “There you got it for your bocayás . . . That’s the way a job gets done! . . .”

  And wiping away his sweat, as he sat down across from me and stretched his legs over a chair, he concluded:

  “Goddamned stone! . . . It ended up like softwood . . .”

  II

  This was the first stage of my relations with the strangest laborer I ever had in Misiones. He was with me for three months. When it came to wages he was very strict; he always wanted his accounts settled at the end of the week. On Sundays he would go to town, dressed in a way even I could envy—not that much was required for that. He made the rounds of all the boliches,2 but never drank a thing. He’d stay in a boliche for two hours, listening to the rest of the workers talk, and go from group to group, following changes in liveliness; he listened to everything with a silent smile, but never spoke. Then he’d go to another boliche, later another, and so on till nightfall. On Monday he always got to the house at the crack of dawn, rubbing his hands from the moment he saw me.

  We also did some jobs together. For example the clearing of the big banana grove, which took us six whole days, when it should have required only three. That was the hardest work I’ve done in my life—and maybe the same goes for him—on account of the heat that summer. The air at siesta-time in a banana grove almost as filthy as a chicken coop, in a sandy hollow where the earth burns your feet through your boots, is an extraordinary trial of a person’s resistance to heat. Up above, by the house, the leaves of the palm trees were coming to pieces, driven mad by the north wind—a wind out of an oven, if you like, but one that refreshes by making sweat evaporate. But working down in the hollow where we were, amid grasses two meters high, in an atmosphere oppressively close and shimmering with nitrates, bent double so as to swing our machetes close to the ground—that you’ve got to have a good strong will to endure.

  Olivera stood
up every now and then with his hands on his hips—his shirt and trousers completely soaked—and wiped off the handle of his machete, pleased with himself for the promise offered by the river, off there at the bottom of the valley:

  “Oh, what a bath I’m going to take! . . . Ah, Paraná!”

  III

  When that clearing job was done, my man and I had the only bit of trouble he ever gave me.

  For the last four months we’d had a very good servant girl at the house. Anyone who’s lived in Misiones, or Chubut, or anywhere else in the woods or open country, will understand how delighted we were with a girl like that.

  Her name was Cirila. She was the thirteenth child of a Paraguayan laborer, a devout Catholic since his youth, who at the age of sixty had learned how to read and write. He never missed a burial procession, always leading the prayers along the way.

  The girl enjoyed our total confidence. Beyond that, we never noticed her showing any weakness for Olivera, who on Sundays was a really good-looking young man. She slept in the shed, half of which was her quarters; in the other half I had my workshop.

  One day, though, I’d seen Olivera lean on his hoe and follow the girl with his eyes, as she went to the well to get water, and I happened to be passing by.

  “You’ve got yourself a good peona there . . . ,” he told me, extending his lip. “A fine girl! And the lass isn’t ugly either . . .”

  And with that said he went on hoeing, contentedly.

  One night we had to get Cirila up at eleven o’clock. She came out of her room right away, with her clothes on—as all those girls sleep, of course—but also with a lot of powder on her face.

  What the devil did the girl need powder for to sleep? We couldn’t come up with the reason, short of assuming an overnight flirtation.

  But then very late one night I got up to drive off one of the many starving dogs that in those days used to tear the wire-mesh fence with their teeth to get inside. As I went by the workshop I heard noise, and at the same instant a shadow came running out of the shed toward the gate.

  I had a lot of tools, a perpetual temptation for peones. And what’s worse, that night I had my revolver in hand, for I confess that seeing three or four holes in the fence every morning had finally left me out of joint.

  I ran to the gate, but the man was already dashing down the slope toward the road, trailed by the stones he kicked up as he fled. I could hardly see his shape. I fired all five shots, the first perhaps with a not very wholesome intention, but the rest of them in the air. This I remember very clearly: the desperate acceleration of his running, every time I fired.

  That was the end of it. But something had attracted my attention: the fact that the nighttime thief was wearing shoes, judging from the rolling of the rocks he dragged along. And up there laborers who wear boots or high-tops, except on Sundays, are few and far between.

  The next morning at daybreak our servant girl had a thoroughly guilty look. I was in the patio when Olivera arrived. He opened the gate and came on whistling, alternately, to the Paraná and the mandarin orange trees, as if he’d never noticed them before.

  I gave him the satisfaction of letting me be the first to speak.

  “Look, Olivera,” I told him. “If you’re so interested in my tools, you can ask me for them in the daytime, instead of coming to get them at night . . .”

  The blow hit its mark. My man looked at me with his eyes opening wide, and with one hand caught hold of the vine-arbor.

  “Ah, no!” he burst out, indignantly shaking his head in denial. “You knows right well I don’t steal by you. Ah, no! You can’t say that!”

  “But the fact is,” I insisted, “that you were inside the shed last night.”

  “That’s right! . . . And if you sees me someplace . . . you who’s a lot of man . . . you knows for sure I don’t stoop for to rob you!”

  And he shook the arbor, muttering:

  “¡Barbaridade!”

  “All right, let’s drop it,” I concluded. “But I don’t want visits of any kind at night. Do what you want at home, but not here.”

  Olivera stood there a while longer, shaking his head. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went to get the wheelbarrow, since at that time we were doing a job of earth-moving.

  Not five minutes had passed when he called me. He’d taken a seat on the arms of the loaded wheelbarrow, and as I came up to him he threw a hard punch into the dirt, half-seriously:

  “And how you going to prove I came to see the girl? Let’s see!”

  “I’ve got nothing to prove,” I told him. “What I know is that if you hadn’t run so fast last night, you wouldn’t be gabbing so much now instead of falling asleep at the wheelbarrow.”

  I left; but Olivera had already regained his good humor.

  “Ah, that’s for sure!” he exclaimed in a burst of laughter, getting up to work. “To the devil with the boss! . . . Pim! Pam! Pum! . . . ¡Barbaridade de revólver! . . .”

  And moving away with the loaded wheelbarrow, he added:

  “Quite a guy, you are!”

  To end this story: that same afternoon Olivera stopped beside me as he was leaving.

  “And you, then . . . ,” he winked at me: “For you I tell you, who’s Olivera’s good boss . . . With Cirila . . . Go right ahead! . . . She’s real pretty!”

  The fellow wasn’t selfish, as you can see.

  But Cirila by now wasn’t comfortable at the house. Besides, there’s no case up there of a servant girl who’s ever been dependable. On one whim or another, without any reason at all, one fine day they want to leave. It’s a tremendous and irresistible desire. As an old lady used to say: “They got it like the need to go pee-pee; it’s impossible to wait.”

  Our girl left too; but not on the day after planning it, as she’d have liked to—because that very night she was bitten by a snake.

  The snake had been born of a reptile whose shed skin I found between two logs in the banana grove right near the house, when I arrived there four years earlier. This yarará, or pit-viper, was surely just passing through, because I never ran across her; but more often than I cared to I did see samples of the offspring she left in the vicinity, in the form of seven little snakes I killed at the house, all of them in circumstances far from reassuring.

  The killing went on for three summers in a row. The first year they were thirty-five centimeters long; the third they got to seventy. The mother, judging from her skin, must have been a magnificent specimen.

  The servant girl, who often went to San Ignacio, had seen the snake one day lying across the path. Very thick, she said, and with a tiny head.

  Two days after this, my fox-terrier, going after a wild partridge in the same location, had been bitten on the snout. In seventeen minutes she was dead.

  The night of Cirila’s misfortune I was in San Ignacio, where I used to go now and then. Olivera arrived there on the fly to tell me that a snake had bitten Cirila. We rushed home on horseback, and I found the girl sitting on the dining-room step, moaning and holding her wounded foot between her hands.

  At home they had bound her ankle, and tried to inject permanganate right afterward. But it’s not easy to appreciate the resistance to the entrance of a needle offered by a heel turned to stone from edema. I examined the bite, at the base of the Achilles tendon, expecting to see the two classic little fangmarks very close together. But the two punctures, from which two thin streams of blood were still dribbling, were four centimeters apart—two fingers from one to the other. So the snake must have been a huge one.

  Cirila brought her hands from her foot to her head, and said she was feeling very sick. I did all I could: the enlarging of the wound, pressure, lIberál swabbing with permanganate, and potent doses of alcohol.

  At that time I didn’t have any serum; but in two cases of snakebite I had treated the patient with overdoses of rum, and had a lot of faith in its effectiveness.

  We put the girl to bed, and Olivera took charge of the alcohol. In half an hour
the leg was already a misshapen hulk, and Cirila—I like to think she wasn’t displeased with the treatment—was beside herself with pain and drunkenness. She kept screaming ceaselessly:

  “It bit me! . . . Black snake! Damned snake! . . . ¡Ay! . . . I don’t feel right . . . Snake bit me! . . . I’m out of my head with this bite!”

  Olivera, on his feet with his hands in his pockets, was watching the sick girl and nodding agreement with everything. Every now and then he would turn toward me, muttering:

  “¡E barbaridade! . . .”

  The next day, at five in the morning, Cirila was out of immediate danger, although the swelling lingered. From daybreak on Olivera stayed within sight of the gate, eager to report our victory to any and all who went by:

  “The boss . . . there’s something to see! He’s a man all right! . . . Lots of rum and pirganate! Learn yourself a lesson.”

  What worried me now, however, was the snake, since my kids often crossed that same path.

  After lunch I went to look for it. Its lair—so to speak—consisted of a hollow surrounded by stone, in which diluvial esparto grass grew up waist high. It had never been burned off.

  If it was easy to find the snake by looking carefully, it was easier still to step on it. And fangs two centimeters long are no delight, even if you’re wearing stromboots.

  As for heat and north wind, that siesta hour was as bad as it gets. I got to the right place and, separating the clumps of esparto one by one with my machete, began to look for the creature. All you can see down below, between one clump of esparto and another, is a little bit of dark and dry earth. Nothing else. Another step, another inspection with the machete, and another bit of very hard earth. And so on little by little.

  But the state of a person’s nerves, when he’s sure that from one moment to the next he’s going to find the prey, is not to be taken lightly. Every step got me closer to that instant, because I had no doubt at all that the creature was living there; and in that sun no yararci was about to come out and display itself.