His Flemish origin showed up in his phlegmatic capacity for putting up with misfortune. All he would do was shrug his shoulders and spit. He was also the most unselfish man in the world, never worrying a bit about getting back the money he’d lent, or that a sudden swelling of the Paraná carried off his few cows. He would spit, and that was that. He had just one close friend, and was seen with him only on Saturday nights, when they would set out together on horseback for the town. For twenty-four hours straight they would make the rounds of the boliches, one by one, drunk and inseparable. On Sunday night their respective horses, by force of habit, would take them home—and there the friendship ended. During the rest of the week they never saw each other at all.
I’d always been curious to know firsthand what had happened to Van-Houten’s eye and fingers. That day at siesta time, after insidiously leading him onto his own ground with questions about quarries, blasting holes, and explosives, I got what I was longing for, and it goes like this:
“The one to blame for it all was a Brazilian who made me lose my head over his powder. My brother didn’t believe in that powder, but I did, and it cost me an eye. I didn’t think it would cost me anything, because I’d already escaped alive twice before.
“The first time was in Posadas. I’d just arrived, and my brother had been there for five years. We had a comrade, a heavy smoker from Milan, with a cap and cane he never parted with. When he went down to work he’d put the cane inside his coat. When he wasn’t drunk he was a hard man in the pits.
“We agreed to dig a well, not at so much a meter as it’s done now, but for the whole well, till it gave water. We had to dig till we struck it.
“We were the first to use dynamite on the job. In Posadas there’s nothing but hard slate; wherever you scratch, a meter down the slate appears. There’s quite a bit here too, after you get through the ruins. It’s harder than iron and makes the pick bounce up to your nose.
“We were eight meters down in that shaft when one afternoon my brother, after setting a charge at the bottom, lit the fuse and climbed out of the well. My brother had worked alone that afternoon, because the guy from Milan was running around drunk with his cap and cane, and I was in my cot with the shivers.
“At sunset, chilled to death, I went to see how the work was going, and right then my brother started to yell at the guy from Milan, who had climbed the stone fence and was cutting himself on the glass fragments embedded along the top. As I approached the well I slipped on the pile of rubble there, and just barely had time to catch myself at the very edge of the hole; but one of my leather work shoes, which I was wearing without socks or laces, came off my foot and fell into the well. My brother didn’t see me, and I went down to get the shoe. You know how it’s done, right? With your legs apart on two walls of the shaft, and your hands to hang on with. If it’d been lighter I’d have seen the drilled-out blasting hole and the stone dust beside it. But I couldn’t see a thing except a bright circle up above, and farther down some sparks of light on the tips of the stones. You can find a lot of things at the bottom of a well, including crickets that fall in from the top, and all the humidity you like; but air to breathe, that you’re never going to find.
“Well, if I hadn’t had my nose blocked by the fever, I’d have smelled the odor of the fuse right away. And when I got to the bottom and smelled it well—the rotten odor of the powder—I knew for sure that between my legs I had a loaded and ignited charge of dynamite.
“Up above appeared the head of my brother, yelling at me. And the more he yelled, the more his head shrank and the well stretched and stretched till its entrance was a dot in the sky—because I had the shivers and a fever.
“At any moment the charge was going to blow, and I was above it, glued to the stone wall, and just as likely to fly off in pieces up to the mouth of the shaft. My brother kept yelling louder and louder, till he sounded like a woman. But I wasn’t strong enough to climb out in a hurry, and threw myself to the floor, flattened like the head of a crowbar. My brother figured out what was going on, since he stopped yelling.
“Well, the five seconds I was waiting for the charge to finally explode seemed like five or six years, with their months, weeks, days, and minutes, each hard after the other.
“Afraid? Bah, I had too much to do keeping my mind on the fuse that was burning down to the end . . . Afraid, no. It was a question of waiting, that’s all; waiting for every instant; now . . . now . . . With that I had enough to keep me busy.
“Finally the charge went off. Dynamite works downward; even hired hands know that. But the shattered stone flies upward, and after I sailed against the wall and fell face down, with a train whistle in either ear, I heard the stones falling back to the bottom. Just one fairly big one hit me—here on the calf of the leg, a soft spot. And besides, the jolt to my ribs, the putrid gases from the charge, and above all my head, swollen with throbbing jabs and whistles, prevented my feeling the shower of stones too much. I’ve never seen a miracle, and still less next to a dynamite charge. Yet I got out alive. My brother came down right away, I managed to climb out on shaky knees, and we took off at once to get drunk for two days running.
“That was the first time I escaped. The second was also in a well I’d struck a deal to dig. I was at the bottom, cleaning up the rubble from a charge that had gone off the previous afternoon. Up above, my helper was pulling up and dumping the shattered stone. He was a guaino—a young Paraguayan—skinny and yellow as a skeleton. The whites of his eyes were almost blue, and he hardly ever spoke. Every three days he had the shivers.
“After cleaning up, I secured the pick and shovel on the line above the bucket, and the youngster pulled up the tools—which, I think I said, were held by a hitch, not a real knot. That’s the way it’s always done, and there’s no worry about them slipping out, as long as the one who’s pulling isn’t a bugger like my laborer.
“What happened is that when the bucket got to the top, instead of grabbing the line above the tools to pull them clear, the poor devil grabbed the bucket. The hitch came loose and the boy only had time to get hold of the shovel.
“Fine. Listen to the size of the well: at that time it was fourteen meters deep, and only a meter or one-twenty wide. There’s nothing funny about that hard slate when it comes to spending extra time to make wide pits, and besides, the narrower the well, the easier it is to climb up and down along the walls.
“So the well was like the barrel of a shotgun, and I was down at one end looking up, when I saw the pick coming from the other.
“Bah! Once the guy from Milan lost his footing and sent me down a stone weighing twenty kilos. But the well was still shallow, and I saw it coming, straight down. The pick I saw too, but it came down doing flips, banging from wall to wall, and it was easier to see yourself already done in, with twelve inches of steel in your skull, than to guess where it was going to fall.
“At first I started to dodge it, with my gaping face intent on the pick. Then I saw right away that it was useless, and clung to the wall, like a dead man, very still and stretched out as though I were a corpse already, while the pick came down like a madman doing somersaults, and the stones fell like rain.
“Well, it hit for the last time an inch from my head and bounced aside to the other wall; and there it landed in a corner, on the floor of the well. Then I climbed out, with no grudge against the guaino who, yellower than ever, had gone to the rear with his hand on his belly. I wasn’t mad at the bugger, since I felt plenty lucky getting out of the well alive, like a worm, with my head full of sand. That afternoon and the next morning I didn’t work, since I spent the time drunk with the guy from Milan.
“That was the second time I escaped death, and both of them inside a well. The third time was in the open air, in a slab quarry like this one, and the sun was so hot it was cracking the earth.
“This time I wasn’t so lucky . . . Bah! I’m tough to kill. The Brazilian—I told you to start with that he was to blame—had never tried out his
powder. This I saw after the experiment. But he was a hell of a talker, and in the grocery he’d tell me his tales without a break, as I was sampling the new rum. He never drank. He knew a lot of chemistry, and a batch of other things; but he was a quack who got drunk on his own knowledge. He’d invented that new powder himself—he gave it the name of a letter of the alphabet—and he ended up making my head swim with his speeches.
“My brother told me: ‘All that is just talk. What he’s going to do is get money out of you.’ And I answered: ‘He won’t get a penny out of me.’ Then,’ added my brother, the two of you are going to fly through the air if you use that powder.’
“That’s what he told me, because he firmly believed it, and he even repeated it while he was watching us load the blasting hole.
“As I told you, there was a fiery sun, and the quarry was burning our feet. My brother and some other curious parties had stretched out under a tree, waiting for the event; but the Brazilian and I paid no attention, since we were both convinced we’d succeed. When we finished loading the charge, I started to tamp it down. Here, you know, we use the earth from clay mounds for this, earth that’s very dry. So down on my knees I started pounding with the tamper, while the Brazilian, standing beside me, mopped his brow, and the others waited.
“Well, at the third or fourth stroke my hand felt the jolt of the charge going off, but I didn’t feel anything else because I fell unconscious two meters away.
“When I came to I couldn’t even move a finger, but I could hear all right. And from what they were telling me I realized I was still beside the blast hole, and my face was nothing but blood and torn flesh. And I heard one of them say: ‘As for this guy, he’s gone to the other side.’
“Bah! . . . I’m tough. For two months I was between losing and not losing my eye, and they finally took it out. And I came out fine, as you can see. I never saw the Brazilian again, because he crossed the river that same night; he hadn’t been hurt at all. The whole blast was for me, and he was the one who’d invented the powder.
“So you see,” he finally concluded, getting up and mopping his brow, “it’s not just any old way that they’re going to finish off Van-Houten. But bah . . . !” (with a final shrug of his shoulders): “Anyhow, not much is lost if you go to the grave . . .”
And he spit.
II
One murky autumn night, in my canoe, I was going down a Paraná so depleted that even in the channel the limpid and forceless water seemed held back to be clarified still more. The banks spread into the watercourse as far as the river receded, and the shorelines, usually formed by woods cooling off in the waters, now consisted of two wide parallel beaches of dappled and muddy clay, where it was barely possible to walk. The shallows of the shoals, revealed by the darker color of the water there, mottled the Paraná with long cones of shadow, whose peaks thrust sharply into the channel. Sandbars and little black islands of basalt had emerged where a month earlier keels were cutting through the deep water with no risk. The scows and canoes that go up river faithfully clinging to the shore scraped their oars on the stony bottom of the shoals, a whole kilometer into the river.
For a canoe exposed reefs present no danger at all, even at night. On the other hand, shallows hidden in the channel itself can be dangerous, since they are usually peaks of steep hills, around which the deep chasm of water still goes down after seventy meters. If your canoe runs aground on one of those submerged summits, there’s no way of getting it loose; it’ll spin around for hours and hours on its bow or stern, or more commonly on its very center.
Due to the extreme lightness of my canoe, I was hardly exposed to such a mishap. So I was going calmly downstream over the black waters, when my attention was attracted by an unusual flickering of wind-lanterns, toward the beach of Itahú.
At such an hour on a murky night, the Upper Paraná, its woods and its waters, is a single blotch of ink where nothing can be seen. The rower gets his bearings from the pulse of the current on the oars; from the greater density of the darkness as one approaches the banks; from the changing temperature of the atmosphere; from the eddies and backwaters; in short, from a series of almost indefinable signs.
I accordingly put ashore at the beach of Itahú and, guided up to VanHouten’s but by the lanterns, which led that way, I saw the man himself, stretched out on his back on his cot, with his eye more open and glassy than to be expected.
He was dead. His still-dripping shirt and trousers, and his swollen paunch, revealed very plainly the cause of his death.
Paolo was giving the accident its due, telling all the neighbors about it as they kept coming in. He never varied the expressions or gestures of his account, and stood constantly facing the deceased, as though he were using him as a witness.
“Ah, you saw,” he addressed me as he saw me come in. “What had I always told him? That he was going to drown with his canoe. There you have him, stiff as he can be. He was stiff from this morning on, and he still wanted to take along a bottle of rum. I told him:
“‘What I think, Don Luis, is that if you take the rum you’re going to tip over and go down head first in the river.’
“He answered me:
“‘Tip over, that’s something nobody’s seen Van-Houten do . . . And if I do tip over, bah, what’s the difference?’
“And he spit—you know he always talked that way—and he left for the beach. But I had nothing to do with him, because I work by the job. So I told him:
“‘I’ll see you tomorrow then, and leave the rum here.’
“He replied:
“‘As for the rum, I’m not leaving it.’
“And, staggering, he got into his canoe.
“Now there he is, stiffer than this morning. Josesinho and Cross-eyed Romualdo brought him in a while ago and left him on the beach, more swollen than a barrel. They found him on the rocks across from Puerto Chuño. The canoe was lying up against the islet there, and Don Luis they fished out with their line in ten fathoms of water.”
“But the accident,” I interrupted him, “how did it happen?”
“I didn’t see it. Josesinho didn’t see it either, but he heard Don Luis, because he was going by with Romualdo to cast the line on the other side. Don Luis was yelling, singing and struggling at the same time, and Josesinho realized he’d run aground, and yelled at him not to row astern, because as soon as the canoe came clear he’d fall backward into the water. Later Josesinho and Romualdo heard the splash in the river, and the voice of Don Luis, who sounded like he was swallowing water.
“As for swallowing water . . . Look at him, he’s got his belt at his groin, and now he’s empty. But when we laid him out on the beach he was spouting water like an alligator. I was stepping on his belly, and with every push of my foot a tall stream came squirting out of his mouth.
“A bold man with stone, and too tough to die in the pits, he was. It’s true he drank too much; I can vouch for that. But I never said anything to him, because I worked with him by the job, you know.”
I continued my trip. For a long while, from the river shrouded in darkness, I could still see the lit-up window shining, so low it seemed to blink right on the water. Then the distance shut it off. But some time passed before I stopped seeing Van-Houten stretched out on the beach and turned into a water fountain, under the foot of his partner who was stomping on his paunch.
Note
1 On the way to Brussels with Rimbaud in 1872, Verlaine passed through Charleroi and wrote a poem about the town, later published in Romances sans paroles (1874). He also lectured there in 1893. Verlaine was born in Metz, less than 200 kilometers to the southeast.
Tacuara-Mansión
In front of the but of Don Juan Brown, in Misiones, rises a tree with a thick trunk and twisted branches, which shelters the house with its lush foliage. Under this tree, while he was waiting for daylight to go back home, died the chemist, Santiago Rivet, in circumstances strange enough to merit being told.
Misiones, located at t
he southern edge of a rain forest which begins there and ends in the Amazon basin, provides a haven for an array of human types whom one might reasonably accuse of anything whatsoever—except being boring. North of Posadas, the most uninteresting of lives includes two or three small epics of work or strong character, if not of blood. For it’s easy to understand that the types who have gone and got stranded up there—after their first soaking or in the final ebb tide of their lives—are far from timid pussycats of civilization.
Though he never attained the picturesque contours of a João Pedro, for times had changed and he was a man of different stuff, Don Juan Brown deserves special mention among the characters who belonged to that world.
Brown was an Argentine and a totally native one, despite his great British reserve. He’d spent two or three brilliant years studying engineering in La Plata. One day—none of us knows why—he cut short his studies and drifted up to Misiones. I think I heard him say he came to Iviraromí for a couple of hours, just to see the ruins. Later he ordered his bags sent up from Posadas, so as to stay two days more. I met him there fifteen years after that, and he hadn’t left the place, in all that time, for a single hour. He wasn’t that interested in the country; he just stayed there because it was clearly not worth his trouble to do anything else.
He was still a young man, heavy-set, and very tall as well, for he weighed 100 kilos—some 220 pounds. When he galloped his horse—a rare occurrence—it was notorious that you could see the horse dipping his spine, and Don Juan holding him up with his feet on the ground.
In keeping with the gravity of his bearing, Don Juan was a man of few words. His broad, clean-shaven face, under long and swept-back hair, was more than a little reminiscent of that of a revolutionary tribune of 1793. Due to his corpulence, he had some difficulty breathing. He always had dinner at four in the afternoon, and at nightfall unfailingly arrived at the bar—whatever the weather—at the pace of his heroic pony, being the last of all, again unfailingly, to leave. Just plain Don Juan we called him, and as much respect was inspired by his bulk as by his character. Here we have two illustrations of that peculiar character:
The Exiles and Other Stories Page 15