The Exiles and Other Stories

by Horacio Quiroga

  It was at this precise moment when Dr. Else made his appearance in Iviraromí.

  II

  As in the case of Rivet, the manco had been the only person in the area to respect the newcomer. Despite the abyss into which both of them had tumbled, the votary of the great Encyclopédie could not forget what the two ex-men had been one day. The many jokes (and how rough they were among those predatory illiterates!) directed at the one-armed man about his two ex-men, found him always on his feet.

  “Rum was their undoing,” he would answer gravely, shaking his head. “But they know a lot . . .”

  Here we need to mention an incident that did not promote local respect for the famous physician.

  Shortly after he arrived in Iviraromí, an habitué had come up to the counter of the boliche to beg him for a remedy for his wife who was suffering from something or other. Else heard him out most attentively, and, turning to the little brown-paper notebook on the counter, began to write a prescription with a terribly heavy hand—till the pen was breaking. Still more heavily, Else burst out laughing and crumpled the sheet of paper, and there was no way to get another word from him. He just went on repeating:

  “I don’t know anything about this!”

  The manco was a little more fortunate that same day at siesta time, walking with the doctor toward the Horqueta under a white-hot sky, when he consulted him on the prospects for adapting rum yeast to the orange mash, how much time it might take to get acclimated, and at what minimum ratio.

  “Rivet is more familiar with that than I am,” muttered Else.

  “Still,” insisted the manco, “I well remember that the initial saccharomycetes . . .”

  And the good man spoke his mind to his heart’s content.

  Else, with his beret over his nose to block the glare of the sun, answered with brief comments, and as though unwillingly. The manco deduced from them that he ought not to waste time acclimating any rum yeast, because he’d get nothing but rum, even at one to a hundred thousand. That he ought to sterilize his mash, add plenty of phosphate, and start it working with Burgundy yeast, ordered from Buenos Aires. He could acclimate the yeast, if he wanted to take the time, but it wasn’t indispensable . . .

  The manco trotted along beside him, stretching out the neck of his undershirt from enthusiasm and the heat.

  “Ah, but I’m happy!” he kept saying. “Now I don’t lack anything!”

  Poor manco! He lacked precisely what was indispensable to ferment his oranges: eight or ten empty wine casks, which in those wartime days were worth more pesos than he could earn in six months of soldering day and night.

  He nevertheless started to spend whole rainy days in the warehouses of the yerba plantations, transforming empty gasoline cans into containers for rancid or burned-out fat to feed the laborers, and to run around all the boliches in search of the oldest casks, those of no use for anything anymore. Later Rivet and Else—since it was a question of 180-proof alcohol—would most certainly help him out.

  Rivet helped him, all right, to the extent of his ability—but the chemist had never been able to drive a nail. By himself the manco opened, took apart, scraped, and scorched, one after another, the old wine casks with half a finger’s breadth of violet lees on every stave—a trifling task, however, compared to that of putting the casks together again, which he managed to do with his arm and a quarter at the cost of endless hours of sweat.

  Else had already contributed to the project with all there is to know these days about fermenting agents; but when the manco asked him to direct the process of fermentation, the ex-scholar stood up and burst out laughing.

  “I don’t know a thing about that!” he said, tucking his cane under his arm. And he went off walking aimlessly, more blond, more self-satisfied, and dirtier than ever.

  Such walks made up the doctor’s life. He was found on all the trails, wearing his sandals with no socks and his mien of euphoria. Except for drinking in all the boliches every day, from eleven till four in the afternoon, he did nothing else. He didn’t even frequent the bar, differing in this respect from his colleague Rivet. But on the other hand he used to be seen on horseback late at night, clutching the animal’s ears and calling it his father and mother, with gross bursts of laughter. They went cantering along like that for hours on end, till the rider fell off finally, to laugh without remission.

  Despite this frivolous life, there was still one thing capable of extracting the ex-man from his alcoholic limbo; this we found out the day Else showed up in town walking briskly—to the great surprise of all—and without looking at anyone. That afternoon he expected his daughter, a schoolteacher in Santo Pipo, who visited her father two or three times a year.

  She was a slim little girl dressed in black, with a sickly appearance and a sullen look. This at least was our impression when she passed through town with her father on the way to the Horqueta. But in view of what we gathered from the reports of the one-armed man, that expression on the little teacher’s face was only for us, brought on by the degradation her father had fallen into, and which we witnessed day by day.

  What became known later confirms this hypothesis. The girl was very dark and didn’t look like the Scandinavian doctor at all. Maybe she wasn’t his daughter; he at least never believed it. His way of behaving toward the girl confirms that, and God only knows how the mistreated and neglected child could manage to get her teacher’s diploma, and to go on loving her father.

  Since she couldn’t keep him at her side, she traveled to see him, wherever he might be. And the money Dr. Else spent on drinking came from the little teacher’s wages.

  The ex-man nevertheless retained one last sense of decency: he didn’t drink in the presence of his daughter. And this sacrifice, on behalf of a little native girl he didn’t think was any daughter of his, betrays more hidden ferment than the ultrascientific reactions of the poor manco.

  For four days, on this occasion, the doctor was nowhere to be seen. But even though he was drunker than ever when he showed up again in the boliches, we could appreciate the work of his daughter in the repairs to all his clothes.

  From then on, every time we saw Else fresh and serious, going by quickly after fat and flour, we all would say:

  “His daughter must be coming pretty soon.”

  III

  Meanwhile the manco, astraddle, kept on soldering roofs for the well-to-do, and on his free days scraping and scorching barrel staves.

  And this wasn’t all: the oranges having ripened very early that year, on account of the unusually severe frosts, the manco also had to think about the temperature in his distillery, so that the nighttime cold, still sharp that October, wouldn’t disturb the fermentation. Thus he had to line his but inside with bundles of disheveled straw, in such a way that the result looked like a rough and hostile brush. He had to install a heater, which had a hearth consisting of an acaroid-resin drum, and bamboo pipes that wound like fat yellow snakes among the straw bundles along the walls. And he had to rent—porter and all, for a fee to be paid from the returns on the alcohol to come—the sturdy-wheeled cart of the black man Malaquias, who in this way again went to work for the manco, carting oranges from the woods with his usual taciturnity and the melancholy recollection of his two wives.

  An ordinary man would have given up halfway through the task. But the manco never lost for an instant his gay and sweaty faith.

  “We don’t lack anything anymore!” he repeated, making his whole arm dance, and in time with it his optimistic stump. “We’re going to make a fortune with this!”

  Once the Burgundy yeast was acclimated, the manco and Malaquías proceeded to fill the casks. The black man cut the oranges in two with a slash of his machete, and the manco squeezed them between his iron fingers, both moving at the same speed and in the same rhythm, as if hand and machete were attached to the same driving rod.

  Rivet helped them at times, though all he did was go feverishly back and forth from the seed-strainer to the casks, in the
guise of manager. As for the doctor, he’d observed these several operations very attentively, with his hands sunk in his pockets and his cane under his armpit. But faced with the invitation to lend a hand, he’d burst out laughing, repeating as always:

  “I don’t know a bit about these things!”

  And he went to stroll up and down by the roadside, pausing at each end of his route to see if any passerby was in view.

  In those hard days the distillers did nothing but cut and cut and squeeze and squeeze oranges, under a fiery sun and covered with syrupy juice from head to foot. But when the first casks began to turn alcoholic, in a fermentation so lively it cast a topaz-colored spray two finger-widths above the surface, Dr. Else maneuvered toward the fired-up distillery, where the manco was widening the neck of his shirt with enthusiasm.

  “Now it’s working!” he said. “What do we need now? A few more pesos, and we’ll get really rich!”

  One by one Else removed the cotton stoppers from the casks, and with his nose in each bunghole inhaled the delicious fragrance of the developing orange wine, a fragrance with a penetrating freshness not to be found in any other fruit-mash whatever. The doctor then lifted his eyes to the walls—to the yellow hedgehog insulation, to the piping that snaked its way amid the straw, shading into fumes of vibrating air—and drowsily smiled for a moment. But from then on he never left the vicinity of the distillery.

  What’s more, he stayed there to sleep. Else lived on a farm owned by the one-armed man, on the banks of the Horqueta. The national government designates as farms the twenty-five-hectare plots of virgin woods or scrubland it sells at the price of seventy-five pesos a plot, payable in six years—so till now we haven’t mentioned this opulence on the part of the manco.

  His farm consisted of a solitary swamp where there was nothing but a little shack set apart within a ring of ashes, and foxes in the scrub. Nothing else. Not even door-leaves at the entrance to the shack.

  As we said, the doctor moved into the distillery among the ruins, detained there by the nascent bouquet of the orange wine. And though his aid till then was what we know it was, in the course of the nights to come every time the manco woke up to check on the heating, he always found Else tending the fire. The doctor slept little and badly, and spent the night on his haunches in front of the acaroid-resin can, drinking mate and eating oranges heated on the embers of the hearth.

  The alcoholic conversion of the hundred thousand oranges finally came to an end, and the distillers found themselves with eight bordelaises1 of a wine that was no doubt very weak, but still strong enough to assure them a hundred liters of a 100-proof alcohol, the minimum strength acceptable to the local palate.

  The aspirations of the manco were local as well; but a speculative type like him, who was already worried about the location of the transformers on the future electric cable line from the Iguazú to Buenos Aires, could not forget the purely scientific aspect of his product. He consequently ran around for a few days acquiring some hundred-gram vials to send samples to Buenos Aires, then got a few samples ready and lined them up on his workbench to send them out that afternoon by mail. When he came back to get them he didn’t find them, but he did find Dr. Else, sitting on the scarp of the road with his cane between his hands, supremely satisfied with himself and incapable of a single motion.

  The adventure was repeated again and again, so often that the poor manco conclusively gave up analyzing his alcohol: the doctor, red-faced, teary-eyed, and radiant with euphoria, was the only thing he discovered.

  Yet not for this did the manco lose his admiration for the ex-scholar.

  “But he drinks it all up!” he’d tell us at night in the bar. “What a man! He doesn’t leave me a single sample!”

  The manco lacked the time to distill as slowly as required, and also to get rid of the sludge in his product. Thus his alcohol suffered from the same ailments as his essence oil, the same sickening odor, and a similar caustic aftertaste. On the advice of Rivet he transformed that impossible rum into bitters, resorting only to apepú—and licorice, as a foaming agent.

  In this final form the orange alcohol went on the market. As for the chemist and his colleague, they drank it unstintingly just as it dripped from the plates of the still, with all its brain poisons.

  IV

  One of those fiery afternoons, the doctor was found flat on his back across the deserted road to the old port, laughing, with the sun coming down straight on him.

  “If the little teacher doesn’t get here one of these days,” said we who knew him, “she’s going to have trouble finding the place where her father died.”

  Exactly a week later we found out from the manco that Else’s daughter was on the way, convalescing from the flu.

  “With the rains about to come,” we went on, “the girl isn’t going to get a lot better in the swamp of the Horqueta.”

  For the first time since he’d been among us, no one saw Dr. Else go by quickly and steadily before his daughter’s impending arrival. An hour before the launch put in he went to the port by way of the ruins, in the little cart of Malaquías the porter, whose mare, despite her slow pace, was panting from exhaustion, with her ears drenched in sweat.

  The dense and livid sky, as though stagnant with heaviness, could presage no good, after a month and a half of drought. As the launch arrived, in fact, it began to rain. The little teacher with the shivers stepped onto the dripping riverbank in a downpour; she got into the cart in a downpour, and in a downpour made the whole trip with her father—so that when they arrived at night at the Horqueta, unable to hear as much as a fox-howl in the desolate scrub, they could indeed hear the dull crepitation of the rain on the dirt patio of the shack.

  This time the little teacher had no need to go down to the swamp to wash her father’s clothes: It rained all night and all the following day, with no relief but the watery lull of twilight, which came at the hour when the doctor was starting to see strange vermin clinging to the backs of his hands.

  A man who has already had a dialogue with destiny, stretched out on his back in the sun, may see unexpected creatures when his life’s sustenance is suddenly removed. Rivet, before he died a year later from his liter of carburated lamp alcohol, certainly had horrors of that order fixed before his eyes. But Rivet had no children; and Else’s error consisted precisely of seeing, instead of his daughter, a monstrous rat.

  What he saw first was a large—an enormous—centipede crawling around the walls. Else remained seated staring at the scene, and the centipede vanished. But as the man lowered his glance he saw it rise between his knees, with its body arched, its belly and swarming legs turned toward him—moving up, and up, interminably. The doctor extended his hands in front of him, and his fingers gripped the void.

  He smiled heavily: illusion . . . nothing but illusion . . .

  But there’s more logic to the fauna of delirium tremens than in the smile of an ex-scholar, and they have a habit of creeping obstinately up one’s pants legs, or springing brusquely from the corners of the room.

  For many hours, in front of the fire with his mate gourd inert in his hands, the doctor was aware of his condition. Calmly, he viewed, tore away, and disentangled more snakes than one can tread on in dreams. And he managed to hear a sweet voice saying:

  “Papá, I’m feeling a little sick . . . I’m going outside for a minute.”

  Else still tried to smile—at a beast that had suddenly burst into the middle of the shack, uttering horrible shrieks—and then got up, at last terrified and panting: he was in the power of the fauna alcohólica.

  From out of the darkness innumerable monsters were now beginning to poke their snouts. From the roof as well things he had no want to see were falling down. All his sweaty terror now was concentrated on the door, on those pointed snouts that appeared and disappeared with dizzying rapidity.

  Something like the murderous eyes and teeth of an enormous rat lingered for an instant against the door frame, and the doctor, without look
ing away, took hold of a heavy stick of firewood; the beast, guessing the danger, had already taken cover.

  On the ex-scholar’s sides, and from behind, things that crept upward were digging into his trousers. But the man—with his eyes out of their orbits—could see nothing but the door and the deadly snouts.

  For a moment he thought he could detect, amid the splattering of the rain, a fainter but clearer noise. Then suddenly the monstrous rat emerged in the doorway, stopped a moment to look at him, and finally moved toward him. Else, crazed with terror, flung the stick of firewood at the creature with all his might.

  With the scream that followed the doctor came abruptly to his senses, as if the vertiginous tapestry of monsters had been destroyed by the blow and replaced by a most atrocious silence. But what was lying destroyed at his feet was not the murderous rat, but his daughter.

  A dousing in icy water, a chill to the core of his being—none of this is enough to convey the impression of such a spectacle. The father still had a scrap of strength left to pick up the child in his arms and lay her on the cot. And as he realized, from a single glance at her midsection, the irremissibly mortal effect of the blow she had taken, the wretched man sank to his knees before his daughter.

  His little daughter! Who’d been neglected, mistreated, repudiated by him! From out of the depths of twenty years, in a burst of shame, erupted the love and gratitude he had never expressed to her. Little native girl, little daughter of his!

  The doctor now had raised his face toward the wounded child: there was nothing, nothing at all to hope for in that stricken countenance.

  The girl, nevertheless, had just opened her eyes, and her gaze, vacant and already dizzy with death, finally distinguished her father. Then forcing a painful smile—bearing a reproach only that pitiful father could in those circumstances appreciate—she murmured softly: