Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  “It is a special night, Alejandro, when all the earth speaks.”

  Certainly it seemed talkative. A warm wind boxed his ears as it surged everywhere in kinetic waves. Grasses hissed in return, cutting snaking eddies around them. A massive ombu tree rose and creaked as deep within its rustling canopy a Chaco owl hooted, and the feeling was electrical dread in the boy’s soul.

  “Look to the grass, Alejandro. In its patterns you will find your future.”

  He tried as she said but it was so much, a thousand shimmering ropes roiling in fat, powerful curls to the horizon. At first they seemed as frightening tigers, nipping his ankles; then huge, snoozy beasts chasing one another’s tails; finally messengers, conjurings of this woman, speaking in low, urgent tones. The boy could almost feel their fortunes reverberating up his legs—almost—and then they were just indifferent beasts once again, chasing their tails. The woman smiled.

  “It takes time, my son. There are words to help.” She whispered three of them—strange, alien ones.

  The owl hooted again, and Alejandro caught just the strobe of a burning eye as his mother whispered into his ear, “Some day, Alejandro, I will tell you of the owl.”

  Come dawn it was his father above his cot, and there was nothing ghostlike about him as he slammed logs onto the stove and drew water thudding into a kettle.

  “Joining us today?” With a smile. The boy snuggled deeper into his blanket, exhausted.

  “Come, Alejandro.” Sterner now. The boy raised himself up, eyes leaden, as his father poked him playfully in the ribs. “Mandinga dance on your eyes?” Mandinga was the pampa devil: part Christian, all gaucho, a nighttime seducer whose favorite targets were lonely cross-country travelers and the dreams of children.

  The boy smiled, and this pleased his father, who valued the boy’s smiles highly. He dressed beside the stove, felt his skin prickle in the heat as he pulled off his bedclothes. The air filled with coffee and chorizo slobbering in a skillet. When his father turned his back, the boy spit on the hot surface of the stove. As he watched the globule hiss to and fro over heated pig iron, Alejandro foggily considered the previous night, thought of telling his father what he had seen, and decided finally with the razor shots of morning that it must have been just a dream, like the spit, noisy but evaporating quickly to nothing.

  The day hit its stride as most—the boy’s breath puffy white, the horse dung matted with straw, some with its own steamy breath. The workhorses knew him and tolerated the scrape of his shovel as he swept their stalls and picked out their hooves. The boy always brought a handful of spiced, rolled balls of lard. The horses disdained these but for two—his favorites—who lapped them up greedily and nuzzled for more. The boy patted their flanks, blew softly up their noses because they liked it, told them to be fair but firm with the cows and obey their masters.

  His father was at the corral. This morning would be spent finishing the breaking in of a new horse for the estancia. His father dressed well for this work: loose bombacha trousers with a clean waist sash, pressed cotton shirt, red neckerchief tied at the throat, and rakish gray beret—a touch of the paisano blood that flowed through so many gauchos and gaucho tradition. His father was the unchallenged best at this work on the estancia and arguably the whole province, yet the boy could not help smiling at what an awkward, stumpy gait he cut, like a seal on shore, when away from his natural environment, which for his father was always atop a horse.

  This one was a male, separated from the others for its spirit. His father had begun the process two weeks earlier, accustoming the prideful male first to a rubber bit and simple halter. While these represented assaults on the horse’s freedom, they were largely symbolic. The true challenge to a horse’s self-identity, the moment it would or would not accept the dominance of its master, came when a man climbed for the first time upon its back and whispered “Go.” Today was that moment.

  His father motioned to the boy, and he scampered to the tack room, returning, puffing, with his father’s leather saddle. Originally his grandfather’s, it was hand sewn by a master in Mendoza and covered with fine, pinpoint stitching and decorative tassels. His grandfather had ordered that he be buried with it, but his grandfather was a son of a bitch and the boy’s father—partly for its beauty, partly out of sheer defiance—had kept the saddle for himself.

  The horse shifted, agitated by the sight of it.

  His father stood beside its head now, soothed it with strokes and murmured patter. As another gaucho laid the saddle onto the horse’s back, his father sunk his teeth into the yearling’s ear.

  Any man can, with enough snaps of a whip, force a horse’s submission. And to do so is to be left with a creature compliant but dulled. And in perhaps many places, even most, that is fine.

  But not the pampas. Here, on these edgeless tracts of land, where a gaucho can be days from humanity—where the land conspires to confuse, humiliate, and finally consume him—a horse is not a servant but a partner, its intelligence, its spirit, its will vital components in keeping rider and mount alive. A true gaucho’s steed was ridden because it chose to be. Led because it trusted—even loved—its master.

  The boy’s father held the horse’s ear in his teeth as the second gaucho cinched down the saddle, then released it as the boy tugged tight on the leads, and for just a beat the horse’s eyes found his, losing fast their dreamy surprise. Becoming wary.

  And his father was on its back.

  The boy threw him the reins, and they all gave man and horse distance.

  The male was winding up now, trying to make its decision. The boy climbed onto the corral’s railing, watched as his father sat rigid and straight. Uncompromising.

  The horse lowered its head to the ground, testing if man and leather would slide off. They didn’t.

  So the horse bucked.

  His father carried neither whip nor spurs. There would be no punishment. He would confront this horse with only stamina and certainty.

  The horse decided to test his father on both accounts.

  It jerked wildly now, staccato blasts of rippling muscle. His father held firm, a force of nature the yearling shook furiously at.

  The boy felt pride surge in his gut, then fear for his father as the horse swung to crush him against the corral gate, and the man never flinched, only tugged slowly on the reins till the horse backed away from the fence.

  The defiance continued across the corral, but soon the horse tired, the shakes and hops became for show only; then it stopped, panted, and accepted.

  His father waited, let the horse feel, in its calm, the power of the man’s simple determination. He climbed down and fed it an apple from his pocket, whispered that they were partners now, patted the horse’s sweaty flanks once, and walked over to the boy, basking in the heat of his son’s affection.

  “A fine horse,” he nodded, lighting a rolled cigarette. He said that about every horse he tamed. “To break a horse, Alejandro, to shape its spirit, you must tame not with blood but respect. You will find that true, my son, with most things in life.”

  The next morning was always the boy’s favorite: a short overnight trip into the estancia’s vast interior to track a cut of the herd and accustom the new horse to its responsibilities. Just his father and he, the boy riding a small criollo he shared with another youth.

  After a morning’s journeying, they stopped under a solitary ombu for the noon meal: bread, cheese, a thick steak—carried between saddle and horse, where the animal’s sweat kept it supple—that his father lovingly grilled over a coal fire. They hadn’t spotted the herd yet, but the horse had done well, and his father favored it with extra oats.

  “Which direction is the ranch house, son?”

  The boy grinned at the challenge and shot a glance at the sun, traced its arc back to the morning horizon, oriented himself two paces west, and pointed. “There.”

  “And the direction of the cattle?”

  The boy studied the trammeled grass and the hoofprints embe
dded through it. The herd had lingered about the ombu, much like his father and he, then clearly moved south, southwest. The boy pointed.

  “A very good guess. But you must remember to be sure of a track’s age. Here, feel the edges of each hoofprint. Hard. Baked by the sun for at least four days. And look for the dung heaps. There are none. The birds and beetles have already torn them apart. You are right that the herd was here, and they left in that direction. But they left a week or more ago, and so may not even be the herd we’re tracking.

  “Time is measured differently out here, Alejandro. Tracks, animals, people. They all fade slower in this place, and so you must be wary of being led astray by ghosts. For nothing disappears here, my son. It dries and bakes and remains. Forever. These tracks are ghosts.”

  The boy nodded seriously, and his father squeezed his shoulder. “You’ll be a rastreador yet. You have the look and you have the perception. I think you perceive many things, Alejandro.”

  Such was his father’s world: a practical place full of practical rules and practical heroes. A true rastreador, or pampa tracker, was highly prized by his fellow gauchos: a man, in a place devoid of landmarks, who could read the subtleties of earth unchanging and orient himself unfailingly. He could track cattle across twenty thousand square leagues of pampa or find the nearest water by chewing blades of grass. If an estancia produced a single rastreador a generation, it was considered fortunate. They were mostly Indians when the gauchos first arrived in this place. But the Indian culture was gone now. Trammeled and dried like the hoofprints and dung heaps.

  When the meal was finished, his father brewed mate. They drank through perforated metal straws and settled on a blanket for a siesta.

  When the father woke, his son wasn’t beside him. He rose, walked stiff-legged toward where he saw the boy, nearly a mile off, crouched among blades of tawny grass heaving with breeze. The boy had his back to his father and didn’t seem to hear him approach. Clearly he was trying to read the land, and his father smiled proudly, for the boy had located the first stragglers of the herd, far on the horizon. So young, yet so clearly perceptive. A true rastreador. He was about to step forward, clasp his son’s shoulders, and congratulate him…

  When he heard the boy mumbling.

  The same three foreign words over and over. And his father recognized the words, saw that his son was not studying the cattle but the sea of grass itself, listening to it, and something caught in the man’s chest.

  “Alejandro!”

  The boy spun around as if caught.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I…I was looking for the cattle.”

  “Come here.”

  The boy rose to his feet, anxious without knowing why.

  “What do those words mean, Alejandro?”

  “It’s for reading”—he felt the withering stare of his father—“the future?”

  His father’s face erupted, and it frightened the boy. “Where did you learn this!” The boy shrunk back with a stammer, and his father felt instantly ashamed. He reached for him, stroked his reddish hair.

  “They may seem just words, my son, but they are pagan and not Christian. Do you understand?” The child nodded. “There’s a good boy.” His father produced a taffy the boy gleefully devoured. They returned to the horses. The boy’s tongue relaxed with the joy of the taffy and spoke before he had regained control of it.

  “Father, where’s my mother?”

  His father stiffened, and the boy saw a brief shadow cross his face.

  “You know your mother’s dead.”

  They caught up with the main herd that afternoon, flicking tails under a cloud of flies punch-drunk with the day’s heat. They drove the cattle a few miles east, his father feeling awkward and the boy guilty without understanding.

  At dusk they camped, dropping their gear haphazardly, for all the land was the same here, and ate puchero under powerful stars. His father anchored the horses with a cow bone, like ships on an unprotected sea, said a few empty words about constellations, and together they fell into troubled sleep.

  It was like the night itself stroking his brow, easing itself into his mind and waking him slowly. When his eyes finally opened and groped for purchase on the eternity all around him, they found not the night but his mother, stroking his brow.

  “Alejandro.”

  He stiffened in terror, his child mind gridlocking on the half-conscious impossibility of it. She reached for his hand, and his only protest was a small whine that must have touched some portion of his father’s nightmare, for he stirred and dug his teeth into his lip.

  Into the open she took him. Not far, for the open was everywhere here. The woman stopped and the boy waited, head down, fearful.

  “What is it, Alejandro?”

  “Are you really my mother?”

  “Yes, Alejandro. I am.”

  “Then are you dead?”

  The boy was prepared for anything but the shivering, miserable tears that coursed down her face. She sank to her knees, and the cry was hopeless and inhuman, and the boy, against all his expectations, took the woman into his small arms and held her, feeling a hole in him open and fill at the same moment.

  “Mommy…”

  And she jerked him away at the ends of her arms, so suddenly his head lolled. Her eyes were at once flat fierceness, and the boy crashed back to here, now, and he was scared.

  “A boy should not live without his mother,” she droned metallically. “A boy cannot live without his mother…”

  She released him and was already far away in a place deep inside herself.

  When an owl hooted it split the night hideously. The boy’s guts spun and he couldn’t stand.

  “Tell me…about the owl…”

  She turned quizzically at the boy, as if noticing him for the first time, and her voice was lifeless.

  “The call of the owl means death.”

  His father found him there before dawn, curled in the dirt, weeping. He gathered the boy up, carried him in his arms on horseback all the way to their shack, whispering over and over into his son’s feverish, pallid face, “It was just a dream, Alejandro. Just a dream…”

  He stayed in bed the next day, let his father fuss over him with a fearful caution that put wariness at the edges of the boy’s thoughts.

  By dusk he felt better, restless, and joined his father for a barbecue with the other families and a group of traveling gauchos from another estancia. The laughter, the sharp cackle of the bonfire, felt distant to him, as if experienced through cotton, and he sat apart as men roared with drink, children scrabbled a game of taba in clotted earth, and women fussed over a steer slaughtered freely from the estancia, an ancient privilege.

  When the iron plates had been cleared and laid in greasy stacks, the community settled themselves on cow skulls around the fire for the payada. As with the rastreador, each ranch produced a true payador, a minstrel, once a generation. That a distant estancia had also produced one, that both were here tonight, sent excitement through the small crowd, for of course there would be a contest.

  Each gaucho considered himself a poet, and such qualities were highly prized and severely judged in others, making such a contest a rough, dangerous event. Payadas always produced a winner, but if dragged out too long could just as easily end up being decided by knives as words.

  The local village champion was Agosto, ancient and red-faced, with a high-parted snow-white mane. He rose now, dressed extravagantly in maroon trousers and satin sash, and unslung his four-string viguela. Tradition demanded a gesture of hospitality, and Agosto called out to his opponent a greeting in verse, welcoming him to their fertile land. The visiting combatant, a hatchet-faced stranger, replied with exaggerated politeness, thanking his host.

  With the formalities dispensed with, the true contest began. The format was relaxed but generally involved one contestant calling out a question in verse to his opponent, the latter being judged on the speed and wit of his reply. The opening music
al query was Agosto’s:

  Someone who brags of his valor

  Yet in danger backs away

  Is like a paltry poncho

  Little wool and lots of fringe

  To which the stranger replied immediately:

  No one with the scabbard only

  Can back down a good gaucho

  A lasso with such conceit

  Will not bring down the cattle

  There were hoots of approval from the village. Though Agosto was the local boy, he carried no special favor in such a contest.

  The taunts between payadores escalated and followed the tradition of hurling sharpened maxims of The Life at one another:

  —One who ignores omens found in bleached bones shows fool’s courage.

  —The wider the wound, the prouder lies the dead man.

  —He who laughs last, lives.

  The contest continued over an hour with no clear advantage gained.

  When at last the crowd grew exhausted of the deadlock, the contest shifted to the next movement. More gnarled logs were laid on the fire, flames jumped and caught careless moths, and the two men each began their ballads. Sung in formal verse, like a Greek epic, they drew on themes close to their audience: the land, the people, their ways.

  Agosto followed classic lines and told the well-worn story of the Montoneros, gaucho guerrillas who fought the independence wars against Spain in the last century. It regaled the bravery of great-grandfathers, the character of the men themselves—melancholy, like the ballad itself.

  Nothing in life endures

  The good and the bad do die

  Only a sad and lonely grave

  Will cover us all impartially.

  That never failed to draw tears from his unabashedly sentimental audience, and Agosto hung on to it for all it was worth, stinging his chords, raising his voice from sadness to declaration, to howl of pride. The acclaim was unanimous when Agosto finished and bowed humbly. Even the earth roared approval, as a rolling gust caught the trees and hissed accordance.