With no reason to stay together now, the men disbanded. João Pedro went up the Paraná as far as the logging camps, where he worked for a short time, with no major troubles—for him at least. And we stress this last detail, because when a while later João Pedro escorted a surveyor into the depths of the jungle, he concluded his report of the trip in this way, and in this frontier mixture of Spanish and Portuguese:
“Then we had a falling out . . . And of the two of us, only one came back.” (Después tivemos um disgusto . . . E dos dois, volvió um solo.)
For several years after that he took care of a foreigner’s cattle, off in the pastures of the sierra, with the sole object of getting free salt to bait pit-traps and attract jaguars. The owner finally noticed that his heifers were dying as though sick by design in places strategically suitable for hunting jaguars, and he had hard words for his foreman. João Pedro didn’t answer at the time; but the next day the settlers found the foreigner on the trail, horribly thrashed by machete blows, as though pounded like yerba with the flat of a stick.
This time too our man’s comment was brief:
“He forgot that I was a man like him . . . And I flattened the Frenchman.”
The rancher was Italian; but it made no difference, since the nationality assigned to him by João Pedro was at that time generic for all foreigners.
Years later, and lacking the feeblest motive that might explain his change of locale, we find the ex-general heading for a ranch by the Iberá whose owner was famous for his curious way of paying peones who asked for their wages.
João Pedro offered his services, which the rancher accepted in these terms:
“You, nigger, for your kinky hair, I’m going to pay two pesos and cake-sugar for mate. Don’t forget to come and collect at the end of the month.”
João Pedro left, looking at him over his shoulder; and when he went to draw his pay at the end of the month, the ranch owner told him:
“Hold out your hand, nigger, and grip hard.”
And opening the drawer of the table, he fired his revolver at him.
João Pedro took off running with his boss behind him firing away, till he managed to plunge into a pond of putrid waters, where, by slithering under weeds and floating islands, he was able to reach a mound of clay that rose like a cone at its center.
Taking shelter behind it, the Brazilian waited, peeking out at his boss with one eye.
“Don’t move, darky,” yelled the other man, who had run out of ammunition.
João Pedro didn’t move, for behind him the Iberá was gushing toward infinity. And when he stuck out his nose again he saw his boss coming back at a gallop, clutching his Winchester just above the sight.
Then began a tedious chore for the Brazilian: his assailant rode back and forth trying to get a good shot at the black man, who at the same time circled around the mound, evading fire.
“There goes your pay, monkey,” yelled the rancher at a gallop. And the peak of the mound blew to pieces.
The time came when João Pedro couldn’t hang on any longer, and at an opportune moment he sank back into the pestilent water, extending his lips to the surface teeming with mosquitoes and floating islands, so he could breathe. The rancher, his horse walking now, circled around the pond looking for the black man. Then he finally withdrew, whistling softly, with the reins lying slack over his horse’s withers.
In the middle of the night the Brazilian got to the bank of the pond, swollen and shivering, and fled from the ranch, apparently not very satisfied with his boss’s payment, since he stopped in the woods to talk with other escaped peones, who were also owed two pesos and sugar for mate. These workers led an almost independent life, in the woods by day and on the roads by night.
But since they couldn’t forget their ex-boss, they decided to cast lots among themselves for the collection of their wages, and this mission fell to João Pedro, who set out once again for the ranch, riding a mule.
Providentially—since neither of them shunned the meeting—the worker and his boss came together, the rancher with his revolver on his hip, João Pedro with a pistol in his waistband.
They both stopped their mounts at twenty meters.
“All right, darky,” said the boss. “You come to get your wages? I’m going to pay you right away.”
“I’m here to get rid of you,” answered João Pedro. “You fire first, and don’t miss.”
“That’s fine, monkey. Hang onto your kinks then . . .”
“Fire.”
“Ready?”
“Ready,” agreed the black man, pulling his pistol.
The rancher took aim, but the shot missed. And this time again, of the two men only one came back.
II
Another colorful type who lived down to our day was also Brazilian, as were almost all the first settlers of Misiones. He was always known as Tirafogo, and no other name he might have had was ever learned by anyone, not even the police—on whose threshold, by the way, it was never his lot to tread.
This detail warrants mention, because even after soaking up more alcohol than three young toughs can stand, Tirafogo always managed, drunk or sober, to evade the arms of the law.
The revels brought on by caña—the local rum—at binges in the Upper Paraná are nothing to joke about. A woodsman’s machete, given life by a flick of the wrist from a contract laborer, can split the skull of a boar down to the knob of its spinal cord; and once, across a counter, we saw such a machete, with such a backhand stroke, shatter a man’s forearm like a stick of sugarcane, after cutting cleanly, in its flight, through the steel of a rat-trap that was hanging from the ceiling.
If in pranks of this sort, or others more trifling, Tirafogo was sometimes a player, the police were unaware of it. In his old age this fact made him laugh, when he remembered it for whatever reason:
“I was never in the police station!”
The most important of all his activities was that of mule-tamer. In the early days it was customary to take skittish mules to the logging camps, and Tirafogo went along with them. At that time there were no open spaces to break them but the cleared areas by the riverbank, and Tirafogo’s mules would quickly take off for the trees and crash into them, or tumble into gullies with their rider underneath. His ribs had been broken and repaired countless times, but for that the tamer didn’t hold the slightest grudge against the mules.
“All the same,” he would say, “I like to struggle with them!” (¡Eu gosto mesmo de lidiar con elas!)
His distinctive quality was optimism. He always found opportunities to show his satisfaction for having lived so long. One of his vanities, which we used to recall with amusement, was his place among the veteran settlers of the region.
“I’m an old-timer!” he’d exclaim, laughing and stretching his neck forward unrestrainedly. “An old-timer!”
During the planting season he could be recognized from afar for his habits when it came to hoeing manioc. In the full heat of summer, and sometimes down in hollows where not a breath of wind can reach, this work is done normally during the first hours of morning and the last of the afternoon. From eleven till two the solitary landscape is scalded in a steam of fire.
These were the hours a barefoot Tirafogo chose for hoeing manioc. He would take off his shirt, roll up his pants above his knees, and—with no protection but his hat, with its fringed brim and band of corn-shuck cigarettes—bend over and conscientiously hoe his manioc, his back glistening with sweat and reflected sunlight.
When the peones went back to their work again, taking advantage of the now breathable atmosphere, Tirafogo had already finished his. He would pick up his hoe, take a cigarette from his hat, and go off smoking and self-satisfied.
“I like to turn the weeds feet up in the sun!” he would say. (¡Eu gosto de goner os yuyos pes arriba ao sol!)
III
At the time I arrived there, we used to run into a very old and skinny black man, who had difficulty walking and always greeted people wit
h a shaky “Goodday, boss,” humbly doffing his hat to anyone at all.
It was João Pedro.
He lived in a hut—the smallest and most deplorable of its kind you can lay eyes on, even in a logging region—at the edge of some land below the flood line and belonging to somebody else. Every spring he sowed a little rice—which he lost every summer—and planted the few maniocs he needed to survive, which it took him all year long to care for, dragging his ancient legs.
That’s all his strength would allow.
By this time Tirafogo wasn’t hoeing for the neighbors anymore. And though he still accepted an occasional order for leather straps, which it took him months to deliver, he no longer bragged about being an old-timer in a region now totally transformed.
Indeed, the customs, the population, and the very appearance of the country were as far as reality from a dream from those of the early virgin days, when there was no limit to the size of clearings, and these were created by and for everyone, under the cooperative system. Unknown in those days were money, and the Rural Code, and gates with padlocks, and breeches in place of the usual baggy bombachas. From the Pequirí to the Paraná, it was all Brazil and the mother tongue, which was used even with the “Frenchmen” of Posadas.
Now the country was different; new, strange, and difficult. And the two antiguos, Tirafogo and João Pedro, were now too old to feel a part of it.
The first had reached the age of eighty, and João Pedro was older still.
João’s stiff joints, and the chills of Tirafogo—whom the first cloudy day would lead to scorch his hands and knees by the fire—made them finally remember, in those hostile surroundings, the sweet warmth of the mother country.
“Look,” João Pedro would say to his countryman, as they both protected themselves from the smoke with their hands: “We’re far from our homeland, seu Tirá . . . And one of these days we’re going to die.”
“That’s right,” Tirafogo would agree, nodding his head in turn. “We’re going to die, seu João . . . and far from home.”
Now they called on each other frequently, and drank mate in silence, rendered speechless by that belated thirst for the motherland. Some memory, usually trivial, would now and then rise to the lips of one or the other, aroused by the warmth of the fireplace.
“We had two cows at home . . . ,” said João very slowly. “And I even played with my daddy’s pups . . .”
“For sure, seu João . . . ,” confirmed Tirá, keeping his eyes—where there smiled an almost childlike tenderness—fixed on the fire.
“And I remember everything . . . And mamae . . . My mama when she was young . . .”
In this way the afternoons went by, with both of them hopelessly estranged in bright new Misiones.
To make things stranger still, in those days the labor movement was getting started, in a region that retains from its Jesuit past only two dogmas: the slavery of work, for the native; and the inviolability of the boss. There were strikes of peones waiting for Boycott, as if he were a figure from Posadas, and demonstrations headed by a bolichero1 on horseback carrying the red flag, while the illiterate laborers sang the “Internationale,” crowding around one of their number so they could read the text, which he was holding up for them to see. There were arrests for reasons other than rum, and even the death of a sahib.
As one of the local folk, João Pedro understood even less of all this than the bolichero with the red cloth; and, numbed by the cold of an autumn already well on its way, he took a walk toward the banks of the Paraná.
Tirafogo had also shaken his head in the presence of the new events. And, affected by these and by the cold wind that blew back the smoke of their fire, the two exiles finally felt their memories of home take plainer shape—memories which came into their minds with the ease and transparency of those of a child.
Yes, their distant motherland, forgotten for eighty years. And which never, never . . .
“Seu Tirá!” said João Pedro suddenly, with tears flowing freely down his ancient cheeks. “I don’t want to die without seeing my homeland! . . . It’s a very long time I’ve lived . . .”
To which Tirafogo replied:
“Just now I’d planned to propose to you . . . Just now, seu João Pedro . . . I saw our house in the ashes . . . and the speckled chicken I looked after all by myself . . .”
And with a pout as liquid as the tears of his countryman, he stammered:
“I want to go there! . . . Our homeland is there, seu João Pedro! . . . The mother of old Tirafogo . . .”
In this way the trip became a certainty. And never in any crusader was there greater faith and enthusiasm than in those two almost senile exiles, on the road to their native land.
The preparations were meager, for meager as well were what they were leaving and what they could take along.
They had no plan, really, except to push on persistently, at once blindly and beaming from within, like sleepwalkers, thus day by day getting nearer and nearer to the motherland they longed for. Their childhood recollections occupied their minds to the exclusion of the hazards of the moment. And as they walked, and especially when they camped at night, they would bring forth bits of memory that seemed to be sweet new happenings, judging from the tremor in their voices.
“I never told you, seu Tirdá . . . Once my youngest brother was very sick!”
Or else, from beside the fire and with a smile that had already come to his lips a good while before:
“Once I dropped my daddy’s mate . . . And he beat me, seu João!”
They went along like that, overcome with tenderness and fatigue—for the central sierra of Misiones does not favor the passage of exiled old men. Their instinct and knowledge of the woods provided them with their sustenance and the route to follow, by way of the least rugged trails.
Soon, however, they had to move into the trackless bush, since a period of rains had begun—of those heavy rains that swamp the forest in mists between one downpour and another, and turn the trails into roaring gutters of reddish water.
Though beneath the virgin foliage, no matter how severe the deluge, the water never flows above the bed of humus, the squalor and prevailing humidity by no means further the welfare of those who walk through it. So there came a morning when the two old exiles, laid low by consumption and fever, couldn’t get on their feet.
From the crest where they found themselves, and at the first ray of sunlight, which broke through the fog very late that day, Tirafogo, who had a bit more life left than his comrade, lifted his eyes and recognized their native stands of pine. Far away in the valley, through the tall conifers, he saw an old clearing whose lush greenery was bathed in light amid the somber araucarias.
“Seu João!” he murmured, barely propping himself up on his fists. “It’s our homeland you can see there! We’ve arrived, seu João Pedro!”
When he heard this João Pedro opened his eyes, fixing them steadily on the void for quite a while.
“I’m already there, meu compatricio . . . ,” he said.
Tirafogo never took his eyes off the clearing.
“I saw our homeland . . . it’s there,” he murmured.
“I’ve arrived,” the dying man persisted. “You saw our homeland . . . And I’m already there.”
“The truth is . . . seu João Pedro,” said Tirafogo, “the truth is that you’re about to die . . . You never arrived!”
João Pedro didn’t answer this time. He had finally arrived.
For a long time Tirafogo lay extended face down against the wet ground, now and then moving his lips. At last he opened his eyes, and his features suddenly broadened into an expression of childish delight:
“I’ve arrived, Mama! . . . João Pedro was right . . . I’m going with him! . . .” (¡Ya cheguei, mamae! . . . O João Pedro tinha razón . . . ¡Vou con ele! . . .)
Note
1 Proprietor of a country store (boliche).
Van-Houten
One fiery day at siesta time, a hundred
meters from his hut, I found him caulking a guabiroba he had just finished making.
“You can see,” he told me, brushing his wet forearm across his still wetter face, “that I made the canoe. The wood is aged timbó, and she can carry a hundred arrobas—more than a metric ton. Not like that one of yours, which can hardly hold up under you. Now I want to enjoy myself.”
“When Don Luis wants to enjoy himself,” added Paolo, changing his pick for his shovel, “you have to let him. He leaves the work for me then; but I just get paid for what I do, and get along by myself.”
And he went on shoveling the rubble of the quarry, naked from the waist up, like his partner Van-Houten.
Paolo was a man with the arms and shoulders of an ape, whose only worry had always been never to work under anyone’s orders, not even by the day. He got so much per meter of flagstone slabs delivered, and here his duties and privileges ended. He bragged about it at every opportunity, to the point that he seemed to have adapted the moral norm of his life to this independence in his work. And he had the peculiar habit—when he came back from town on Saturday nights, alone and on foot as always—of calculating his earnings out loud along the road.
Van-Houten, his partner, was a Belgian of Flemish origin, sometimes called What’s-Left-of-Van-Houten, since he was missing an eye, an ear, and three fingers from his right hand. The whole socket of his vacant eye was burned blue by blasting powder. For the rest he was a short and very sturdy man, with a bristly red beard. His fiery hair fell in constantly sweaty tufts over a very narrow forehead. His shoulders dipped in turn as he walked, and above all he was very ugly, in the style of Verlaine, whose homeland he almost shared, for Van-Houten had been born in Charleroi.1
The Exiles and Other Stories Page 14