All of a sudden, as I parted the esparto grass, and right at the tips of my boots, I saw it. Against a dark background, no bigger than a plate, I saw it go by, just barely touching me.
Now there’s nothing longer, more eternally long in life, than one meter eighty of snake that goes passing by—in bits, we’ll say, since all I could see was what was allowed by the space opened up by the machete.
But as far as pleasure goes, a fine experience. It was a yararacusú the most imposing specimen I’ve ever seen—and this variety is incontestably the most beautiful of the yararás, which are, in turn, the loveliest of all snakes, except for the corals. Its body, jet black, but a velvety black, is ringed with broad diamond-stripes of gold. Black and gold; of course. And besides, the most poisonous of all the yararás.
My snake went by, and by, and by some more. When it stopped I could still see the end of its tail. I looked toward the probable direction of its head, and found it at my side, uplifted and staring at me fixedly. It had curved around and now was motionless, watching for any change in my stance.
Of course the snake had no desire for combat, for they never do against man. But I did, and a very strong one. So I came down with the machete, intending to only dislocate its spine, with the object of saving the specimen.
The blow was with the flat of the blade, and far from slight. The result? As though nothing had happened. The creature twitched violently in a kind of bolt of fright that moved it a half-meter away, and again assumed its motionless and watchful posture, though now with its head higher. Staring at me, how hard you can surely guess.
In open country that duel—a mental game of now-you-do-it-now-you-don’t—might have amused me for a moment longer; but deep in that underbrush, no way. So I struck with the machete a second time, in this case edge down, going for the vertebrae of the neck. With lightning speed the yararacusú went into a coil around its head, rose up in a corkscrew, flashing its pearl-white belly, and fell back again, slowly uncoiling, dead.
I took it home; it was a meter and eighty-five centimeters long, and every bit of that. Olivera recognized the species right away, even though it’s rare in the south of Misiones.
“Ah, ah! . . . Yararacusú! . . . That’s what I thought . . . In Foz-do-Iguaçu I killed a pile of them! . . . A pretty devil! . . . For my collection, something you’ll like, boss!”
As for the patient, at the end of four days she was walking, more or less. I’m inclined to attribute the happy outcome of the case to the fact that she was bitten in a spot not very rich in blood-vessels, and by a snake that two days earlier had partly emptied its glands on the fox-terrier. Nevertheless, I was a little surprised when I extracted the venom from the creature: from each fang it secreted twenty-one drops more, almost two grams of poison.
Olivera didn’t show the slightest displeasure at the girl’s departure. He just watched her go off through the pasture with her little bundle of clothes, still limping.
“She’s a good girl,” he said, pointing at her with his chin. “Someday I’m going to marry her.”
“Good for you,” I told him.
“And if I do? . . . You won’t need to go around pim! pam! with your revolver any more.”
In spite of the help Olivera gave to some of his comrades with no money, my worker didn’t enjoy much favor among them. One day I sent him to town to get a barrel, a job you need at least a horse for, if not a cart. When this was pointed out to him, Olivera just shrugged his shoulders and left on foot. The store I sent him to was a league from the house, and he had to go through the Jesuit ruins. Before he’d left town they saw Olivera go by on the way back with the barrel: in its sides he had nailed two nails, and fastened a double wire to them, to serve as a wagon-shaft. He was dragging the barrel along the ground, pulling it without a care in the world.
A scheme like this, and walking when you’ve got a horse, bring discredit on a workingman.
IV
At the end of February I charged Olivera with the complete clearing of the woodland where I’d planted yerba mate. A few days after he got started I had a visit from a stonemason, a German national from Frankfurt, with a cancerous complexion, and as slow to speak as he was to turn away his eyes once he had fastened them on something. He asked me for mercury to discover a buried treasure.
The operation was a very simple one: in the presumed location you dug a hole in the ground and put the mercury in the bottom, wrapped in a handkerchief. Then you filled in the hole. On top, at the surface of the earth, you placed a piece of gold—the mason’s watch chain, in this instance.
If there was really buried treasure there, the force of the treasure attracted the gold, which was then consumed by the mercury. Without mercury, there was nothing you could do.
I gave him the mercury, and the man left, though it cost him some effort to tear his gaze away from mine.
In Misiones, and in the whole northern region formerly occupied by the Jesuits, it’s an article of faith to believe that the fathers, before their flight, buried coins and other things of value. Rare is the inhabitant of the region who hasn’t tried at least once to unearth a treasure, a burial, as they say up there. Often there are definite clues: a pile of stones, in a place where the ground isn’t stony; an old lapacho beam, in some uncommon posture; a sandstone pillar abandoned in the woods, and so on.
Olivera, who was coming in from the clearing job to get a file for his machete, was witness to the incident. He listened with his little smile, and said nothing. Not till he was on his way back to the yerba field did he turn his head to say to me:
“The crazy German . . . The treasure’s here! Here, in the pulse!” And he clutched his wrist.
On account of this, few people have been more surprised than I was on the night that Olivera abruptly entered the workshop to invite me to go out to the woods.
“Tonight,” he told me in a low voice, “I’m going to dig me up a burial . . . I found one of them.”
I was busy with I don’t remember what. Still, I was very interested in finding out what mysterious turn of fortune had transformed a skeptic of that stature into a believer in burials. But I didn’t really know my Olivera. He looked at me smiling, his eyes wide open with the almost captivating light of a visionary, showing me in his way the affection he felt for me:
“Pst! . . . For the two of us . . . It’s a white stone, there, in the yerba field . . . We’ll share it.”
What could I do with such a guy? The treasure didn’t attract me, but what did was the pottery he might find, a fairly frequent occurrence. So I wished him good luck, requesting only that if he found a nice jar, he’d bring it back to me unbroken. He asked me for my Collins and I gave it to him. And on that note he left.
The chance to take a walk, however, was very appealing to me, since a moon in Misiones, penetrating the darkness of the woods, is the loveliest sight you can see. Also, I was tired of my chore, so I decided to go along with him for a while.
Olivera’s work site was about a mile from the house, at the southern corner of the woods. We walked side by side, I whistling, he silent—though with his lips pursed toward the tops of the trees, as was his habit.
When we got to his work sector Olivera stopped, lending an ear.
The yerba field—as we passed suddenly from the darkness of the woods to that clearing flooded with galvanic light—gave the feeling of a bleak plateau. The newly felled tree trunks were duplicated in black along the ground by the harsh slanting light. The little yerba plants, darkly shadowed in the foreground, and velvety ash-grey on the open plain, were standing motionless, glittering with dew.
“Now . . . ,” Olivera told me, “I’m going on alone.”
The only thing that seemed to worry him was the possibility of some noise or other. For the rest, he obviously wanted to be alone. With a “See you tomorrow, boss” he pressed on across the yerba field, so that I saw him for a long time jumping over the cut-down trees.
I went back, slowing down my pace along
the trail. After an oppressive summer day, when barely six hours earlier you’ve had photophobia from the blinding light and felt the pillow hotter at the sides than under your very head—at ten at night on that day, all glories are small compared to the coolness of a night in Misiones.
And that night was especially superb, on a trail through very tall, almost virgin, forest. All along the path, and as far as the eye could see, the ground was scored obliquely by beams of icy whiteness, so bright that where it was dark the earth seemed to fall away into a black abyss. Up above, at the sides of the trail, over the somber architecture of the woods, long triangles of light descended, collided with tree trunks, and flowed downward in trickles of silver. The lofty and mysterious forest had a wondrous profundity, fretted as it was by slanting light, like a Gothic cathedral. In these profound surroundings there broke out from time to time, like the peal of a bell, the convulsive lament of the night owl.
I kept walking for quite a while longer, slow to make up my mind to go home. Olivera, in the meantime, must have been tearing his fingernails on the rocks. “Let him be happy,” I said to myself.
Well now, this is the last time I saw Olivera. He didn’t appear the next morning, nor the one after that, nor ever again. I’ve never heard another word about him. I asked in the town. Nobody had seen him, and nobody knew what had happened to my laborer. I wrote to Foz-do-Iguaçu, with the same result.
And what’s more: Olivera, as I’ve said, was strict as can be when it came to money. I owed him his weekly wages. If he’d been seized by a sudden desire to change his habitat that very night, he’d never have done it without first settling his account.
But what became of him, then? What treasure can he have found? How come he left no trace at all in Puerto Viejo, in Itacurubi, in La Balsa, or anywhere else he might have taken a boat?
I don’t know yet, and don’t think I’ll ever know. But three years ago I had a very unpleasant experience, in the same yerba field that Olivera never finished clearing.
The surprise is this: Since I’d abandoned the estate for a whole year, for reasons irrelevant here, the growth of the underbrush had smothered the young yerba plants. A laborer I sent there came back to tell me that for the agreed price he wasn’t disposed to do anything, even less than what they usually do: it was almost as if the boss himself knew nothing about a machete.
I increased the price, as fairness required, and my workers got started. They were a team of two; one chopped down the trees, and the other stripped off the branches. For three days the south wind bore me the ceaseless and melancholy striking of the axe, doubled by the echoes from the woods. There was no respite, not even at noon. Maybe they took turns. If not, the arms and kidneys of the one who was swinging the axe were exceptionally strong.
But when that third day ended, the worker with the machete, the one I’d dealt with earlier, came to ask me to appraise what clearing they’d done, because he didn’t want to work with his comrade any more.
“Why?” I asked him, disconcerted.
I couldn’t get any definite response; but he finally told me that his comrade wasn’t working alone.
Then I understood, remembering a legend to that effect: he was working in yoke with the devil. That’s why he never got tired.
I made no objection, and went to appraise the work. No sooner had I seen his infernal collaborator than I recognized him. He’d often gone by the house on horseback, and I’d always admired the elegance of his—and his horse’s—trappings, considering he was only a laborer. He was also very handsome, with the oily, straight-haired locks of a slicker from the south. He always rode his horse at a walk, and never deigned to look at me as he went by.
But now I saw him from up close. Since he was working with his shirt off, I had no trouble understanding that wonders could be performed with an athlete’s torso like that, in the power of a fellow who was sober, serious, and superbly trained. The long hair and shaved neck, the horse’s provocative pace and the rest—all of it disappeared there in the woods, in the presence of that sweaty young man with the childish smile.
Such was the man—in his natural surroundings—who worked with the devil.
He put on his shirt, and I looked over the job with him. Since thereafter he alone would go on to finish clearing the yerba field, we covered it in its entirety. The sun had just set, and it was quite cold: the thermometer falls along with afternoon in Misiones. At the southwestern edge of the woods, adjoining the open countryside, we lingered a while, since I wasn’t sure how much trouble it was worth to clean out that acre or so, where almost all of the yerba plants had died.
I took a look at the great bulk of the tree trunks, and higher up, their branches. Then, up there, in the last fork of an incense tree, I saw something very strange: two long, black objects. Something like an oriole’s nest. They stood out very well against the sky.
“And that? . . .” I pointed out to the young man.
He looked up for a while, and then ran his eyes down the whole length of the trunk.
“Boots,” he told me.
I felt a shock, and instantly remembered Olivera. Boots? . . . Yes. They were hanging upside down, feet aloft, and caught by their soles in the fork of the tree. At the lower end, where the legs of the boots were open, the man was missing; that’s all.
I don’t know what color they might have been in broad daylight; but at that hour, seen from the depths of the woods, and standing out motionless against the livid sky, they were black.
We spent a good while looking at the tree, from top to bottom and bottom up.
“Can it be climbed?” I questioned my man again.
A little time went by.
“Impossible . . . ,” answered the worker.
There had been a time when it was possible, however, and this is when the man went up. Because it can’t be accepted that the boots were up there for no reason at all. The logical—indeed the only plausible—explanation, is that a man who was wearing boots climbed up to look around, to get a beehive, or whatever. Without noticing, he planted his feet too securely in the fork; and all of a sudden, for some unknown reason, he fell backward, hitting the nape of his neck against the tree trunk. The man either died right away, or later came to his senses but without the strength to pull himself up to the fork and free his boots. At last—after a longer time than you’d think, perhaps—he ended up hanging still, quite dead. Then the man rotted away, and little by little the boots emptied out, till they were completely hollow.
And there they still hung, close together, chilled as I was in the winter twilight.
We didn’t find the slightest trace of the man at the foot of the tree; that’s obvious.
Yet if we had I don’t think it could have been part of my old laborer. He was no climber, and especially not at night. Who was it who climbed, then?
I don’t know. But sometimes here in Buenos Aires, when at the onset of a day with north wind I feel my fingers itching for the machete, then I think that some day or other, unexpectedly, I’m going to meet Olivera; that I’m going to run into him, here in the city, and that he’ll put his hand on my shoulder, smiling:
“Hey old boss! . . . We did some great work, you and me, up there in Misiones!”
Notes
1 A type of palm tree.
2 A boliche is a country store that has a counter for drinks.
The Exiles
Like every frontier region, the province of Misiones—lying between Brazil to the east and Paraguay to the west—is rich in characters who are very picturesque. And the ones who’ve been born with spin on them, like billiard balls, tend to be remarkably so. They usually hit the cushions and take off in the most unexpected directions. To wit: Juan Brown, who, having gone there for just a few hours to see the Jesuit ruins, stayed for twenty-five years; Dr. Else, who was led by the distillation of oranges to mistake his daughter for a rat; Rivet the chemist, who went out like a light, too full of carburated alcohol; and so many others who, thanks to the
ir spin, reacted in the most unforeseen ways.
In the heroic days of logging and yerba mate, the Upper Paraná served as a field of action for several highly colorful characters, two or three of whom were still around for us to meet thirty years later.
At the head of these stands a brigand so nonchalant about human lives that he would try out his Winchesters on any passerby. He was from Corrientes, to the south, and the speech and customs of his native province were part of his very flesh. His name was Sidney Fitz-Patrick, and he was more learned than a graduate of Oxford.
To the same period belongs Pedrito, the crew-chief whose gangs of meek Indians bought their first trousers at the lumber camps. No one had ever heard a word in a Christian language from this chief with the not very Indian face, till the day that, as he stood by a man who was whistling an aria from La Traviata, the chief paid attention for a moment, and then said in perfect Castilian:
“La Traviata . . . I attended its premiere in Montevideo, in 1859 . . .”
Of course, not even in the gold or rubber regions are there very many of these romantically colorful types. But in the first outposts of civilization north of the Iguazú, some not at all sorry actors played their roles—when the logging and yerba mate camps of the Guayra were supplied by means of huge barges hauled by towline for months and months against a hellish current, and submerged to the gunwales under the weight of damaged merchandise, jerked beef, mules, and men, who for their part pulled like galley slaves, and sometimes came back alone on ten sticks of bamboo adrift, leaving the vessel in the enormous quiet of the wilderness.
Among these first contract laborers was the black man João Pedro, one of the characters from that era who lived down to our day.
João Pedro had come out of the woods at noon one day with his pants rolled up to his knees and the rank of general, leading eight or ten Brazilians in the same ragged state as their commander.
In those times—as now—Brazil, with every revolution, spilled into Misiones escaping hordes whose machetes didn’t always get wiped completely dry in foreign territory. João Pedro, a lowly soldier, owed his rise to general to his great knowledge of the wilderness. In these circumstances, and after weeks in virgin forest which the fugitives had nibbled through like tiny mice, the Brazilians blinked their blinded eyes before the Paraná, at whose waters, shining so white they caused those eyes to sting, the forest finally came to an end.
The Exiles and Other Stories Page 13