But the contest wasn’t finished and now the stranger, dressed in layers of black that accented the spectral narrowness of his frame, rose. From the first distant notes, his audience recognized his subject as the dark side of The Life—his invocation of the night, of mandinga—and his true subject, the amborgana, Indian witch.
With you, your dog, and my horse
We will ride the pampa
There to brew bitter mate
And wait for amborgana
The amborgana was evil, a caster of curses, and came in many seductive forms. As the ballad described the Indian witch’s feral beauty and dark sexual power, the stranger’s voice warbled and spellbound the crowd. Even the wind seemed to pause and settle among them, rapt, as the ballad told of how this witch, a shadow off the pampas, came to the village and there seduced a local gaucho.
The boy looked at his father, suddenly tense. The audience had become stock still.
She bore only a son
But was no mother
Not even human
An enchantress.
The story burbled luridly in recounting her power over the simple gaucho, her liaisons, spells, and all manner of composting evil. When the good villagers in the poem finally turned against her, as they must, the stranger’s voice took on urgency.
And the village rose and lay naked the witch
And drove her into the wine dark night
Beyond the edge of the world
Forever banished
But still, when the southern winds blow
Her name carries in the dreams
Of gauchos tortured by mandinga
Isiola.
The witch.
So fast—a blur—the boy’s father shot forward and tackled the payador to the ground. A haunting moan escaped the payador’s lungs as Alejandro’s father pummeled the stranger with fists, and at once the boy understood it all and fled, terrorized, into darkness, crashing into gates, crawling now, feverish, finding only by accident the door of their shack.
There, the boy sank into his cot, let the claw of delirium reach darkly for him…
And felt the breath of his mother.
“Alejandro,” she wept.
He didn’t move. Couldn’t.
“Your name is Isiola…your name is Isiola…”
“Yes, my son.”
“You’re a witch.”
“I am a mother. And I am a ghost.” Her face, wet and hot with tears, stung close. “A boy should not live without his mother. And he cannot live with a ghost. Do you understand?”
Her breath was so steady.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he choked.
His mother then lifted his chin gently, kissed him once on the lips…
And cut the boy’s throat ear to ear.
They caught her a mile from town, stoned her as she uttered a curse of destruction on them all, and buried her where she fell. According to amborgana custom, her head was cut off, laid on a termite hill, and she was never spoken of again.
He’d lain there two days, wandered the fence between this world and not.
There was no doctor in the village, only an old woman with cotton yarn who stitched his cut throat together with darning needles. Fever descended immediately. The wound swelled, broke a stitch, and oozed muddy pus onto his chest.
He would either die or he would not. But he lived. Lay another fifteen days and rose scarred and unsure if he was nearly dead or the dead nearly living. His limbs had gone cold, and that never changed.
The boy tried to speak, and the sound was tomb gravel. So he spoke little. He didn’t ask about his mother, but his father felt the need to say something. The words were vague, self-hating, and the boy absorbed none of it. He had, in his own mind, come to an understanding. His mother had been a ghost, brought the owl as a messenger of his own death and, on leaving, had left him a ghost as well. From the children who had come to gape at the damage, he learned of his mother’s final curse laid on the village as revenge.
It was short in realization.
Before the change of seasons, as his mother’s head dried and blew away, the cattle began to weaken. Struck as if by plague, they slobbered, bled from ears and anuses, and died in fantastic numbers. Whole herds bloated and putrefied in the sun, legs sticking out cartoonishly. The gauchos tried to keep the cattle moving, as if the curse was something that could be outrun. They tried herbs, faith healers, even priests, and still the cattle stumbled, bled, and died.
When the state biologists finally roared through, exhausted by the enormity of what was sweeping the land, they mumbled only one suggestion, before skidding off to the next devastated estancia: burn them.
And so the cattle were heaped into great medieval bonfires, lighting the edgeless land with a thousand burning hillocks. And the gauchos stood by holding their torches, scarves over their mouths against searing flesh, and as one their eyes fell on the boy and his father. For while the desperate biologists had a word for this, encephalomyelitis, the village knew it was the witch’s curse. And it was the boy and his father that had brought the witch among them.
On those nights, with an entire nation’s identity vaporizing in a million funeral pyres, Alejandro would walk away from the hellish islands of flame into dark grass and there, alone with the wind, would seek his future. The grass spoke to him those horrible nights, but the language was not yet clear. And Alejandro vowed, even as his universe was soaked with gasoline and set alight, that he would listen until the grass revealed itself to him in cadences he could understand.
By month’s end, a third of Argentina’s cattle had been heaped and burned. By midsummer the estancia was ruined, the village abandoned, the boy and father riding slowly down the path through faces hot with damnation, out of the village, forever. They settled in Córdoba, now just two more of the scores of suddenly rootless, confused gauchos, limping in pitifully on proud horses, begging for work in mills and assembly lines.
His father found a job in the canning factory; the boy scrounged aluminum scraps. They slept outside the town, on a dirty strip that ran south of the river. There were stars here, but his father spoke little of them. The boy, whose voice still carried the rattle of the grave, spoke less and less, till he rarely spoke at all.
Come morning they would stake the horses along the riverbank and cross the bridge to the city. The boy would hunt for his scraps along the slag heaps of the factories, dragging them in burlap sacks to the one-eyed tallyman, who’d exchange them for a small lump of copper coins.
Come lunch he’d be with his father, watching the leathery hands tear themselves on aluminum rims, watching the proud gaucho stance that on the assembly line looked only stumpy and foolish. Come lunch the boy watched his father die a little.
There were rumors of gaucho jobs on far-flung estancias, and the rumors were always false. What few herds escaped the catastrophe were herded jealously in pens to protect them from the rampaging microbe. The cattle no longer roamed free and, as simple as that, the gaucho’s life ended.
It had been the hope of returning to the pampa that held his father together, and when that hope crumbled, so did the man.
Gin, then cards, then a cheap particleboard casket after a dispute over gin and cards. They didn’t cut his throat, like on the pampas, just shot him twice in the chest, like in the city. The thin casket, still bearing a sawmill’s pencil markings, was lowered into a pauper’s pit among the slag heaps where Alejandro hunted for scraps. The local priest said some things but never got the name right. Before his service even ended, the small wooden cross tumbled in the wind. The boy righted it, stood there silent, and thought, Now I am an orphaned ghost.
The next day they took him to the orphanage.
Listen:
The tiny slap of kerosene on parquet floors. Alejandro’s head pounds with the reek of it but he continues pouring through the house, a large house, and the wafts are overpowering.
The mansion belongs to the chairwoman of th
e Sociedad de Beneficencia, an ancient creature whose precious metal clanks like a Persian queen. The Sociedad benefits orphanages, and this orphan has been sent to the chairwoman’s mansion because he refuses to speak.
For a month now he has scrubbed her floors, washed her dishes, all tasks not unusual for the Sociedad’s charges, but Alejandro has also stood each night on her carpet and been slapped when he won’t speak, and Alejandro never speaks.
Tonight, after her ritual slapping of the boy, the chairwoman leaned down to Alejandro’s ear and hissed two words: Witch child…And the boy understood that one of them would have to die.
Stirrings above. Alejandro runs for the front door. He can hear the shuffle of slippers on the steps as the great oaken door swings open on fearsome hinges.
“Who is it?” The voice gripped with sleep. “What is this smell?”
The boy draws the match from his coat, strikes, but too hard, and the head snaps off. He fishes for another, drops it, and his reservoir of courage vanishes as the old woman in a dressing gown comes to him in the dark, carrying an unlit candle.
“You there. Who are you?”
And the boy is going to answer when the chairwoman says softly, “Alejandro?”—and strikes her own match to the candle.
The boy remembers the woman’s face going bright, then warm nothing as he was blown across the street.
He woke in miniature and thought himself dead. The bed conformed to his nine-year-old body. Through his blurry, damaged vision the walls seemed heaven blue with a short doorway through which tall, indistinct figures in white stooped to enter. He thought they must be angels.
The angels spoke in soft whispers, and there seemed something hidden and bright at their center they were both protective of and deferential to. When they leaned over him, their faces disappeared in streaking ceiling lights and he thought, I am being judged for what I have done. With a voice that had but a single burst left, he spoke: “Please don’t send me to hell.”
The faceless heads in white parted and revealed at their center the tall, slender source of their heat and light. It was wondrous and beautiful and Alejandro thought, God is a woman with blonde hair.
God leaned close to his bandaged face and whispered, “You are safe with me, my son, and I will never let you go to hell.”
Shh.
I’m scared.
Don’t be.
I can’t see.
You were hurt in a fire, my child. It is temporary and it will pass.
Can you please hold my hand?
It is my honor, Alejandro.
I saw you in heaven.
You were tired and there were many drugs for your recovery.
I love you.
I love you too, my child.
I looked in the grass for my future, but all I saw was fire.
Fire is what purifies us.
Don’t ever leave me.
I am here for all the sons and daughters of my nation, Alejandro, and I will never leave any of you.
The pain subsided, the blindness lifted, but the memory of Her stood fixed absolute in the boy. An angel’s touch, a mother’s voice. There were gifts and flowers left for him, for all the children in the ward, each inscribed, With all my love, Evita.
Her portrait hung on the walls with a prominence and regularity usually reserved for the Virgin. Each child woke to it, went to bed with it, and like Alejandro, prayed to it. For this was Her hospital, built from CGT funds, constructed, as was Her whim, on a child’s scale. There were doctors and nurses, all in the uniform of the Eva Perón Foundation.
The staff spoke daily to the boy, tried to coax friendly words from him, but he needed only the portrait on the wall and nothing else existed for him.
While he waited.
A week turned into two. They asked who he was, how he had come to them. They told him it would be time to leave soon. He didn’t acknowledge their words.
Then one day he felt the light without seeing it.
From the door. At the very center of their pointless gaggle, shielded by it.
It was Her.
He hardly reacted, so certain was he Evita would come, morning light kindling blonde hair alive and more than woman.
She gazed down at the scars of old darning stitches on his neck.
“My doctors tell me you do not speak, that you will not leave the hospital.”
“I love you.”
“And I you, my son. But you are well and should be with other children, where you can play and learn.”
“I waited for you.”
She touched his forehead. “I am here, Alejandro.”
“I don’t ever want to leave you again.”
She stroked his brow and said quietly, “You have suffered much my child, haven’t you?”
He wouldn’t cry, and She loved him for that.
“Clerk.” Her voice flat and aimed at a colorless suit.
“Yes, Mrs. Perón.”
“Where is this boy scheduled to be sent?”
Flipping pages. “Accordia Orphanage, Senora.”
“I want him given a family instead. A real mother and father in a real town far from the corruption of this city.”
“It is done, Senora.”
She crouched down to the boy, took his hand. “You and I are joined in our hearts, my son. Though we will be apart, always will our thoughts be together. Do you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“My little soldado. When you are older, you will come back and be part of my foundation. You and all the children of our nation will work together to change the world. Can you hold this faith over the coming years?”
“Yes.”
“And so it is done.”
She released his hand, nodded to the clerk, and was gone.
On the fourth day after Evita died, his stepparents dragged the young Alejandro back into the house. He fought but he was weak and half frozen and his knees bled from nights spent kneeling in the howling open. His stepparents considered destroying the shrine—it unnerved them—but they hesitated, frightened by the boy’s devotion, frightened in some measure by the shadow of Her.
That shadow was long and heavy the week after Her death. This had been one of Her towns, the kind of humiliated, wind-blown place that fueled Her climb to greatness. There had been passionate speeches by the mayor, collections taken from people who had nothing to send flowers to a woman dead, all the while the gnawing, numbing feeling filling them that their time, the time of places like this, had suddenly passed. The gait of the town stuttered, conversations failed midsentence, and a ten-year-old boy built a small shrine he prayed to day and night, without food, without care for himself, until his stepparents dragged him, near-dead, into warmth.
He was forbidden to pray to it, but the shrine never came down and with time became a kind of town relic. This tiny pile of stones, a blonde-haired doll, the runny heaps of altar candles. Watched, tended, prayed to secretly at night on bare knees, all by the boy.
The stepparents Evita’s foundation had sent him to ran the only gas pump in the village, servicing the infrequent traffic of cargo trucks and slick urbanites weekending at the nearby estancia. The boy did his work, rarely spoke, spent entire days sitting on a stool staring into space, thinking…
Of Her.
And the faraway pressure of something building inside.
Though he lived once again on the pampas, he rode no horse, listened to no payador under bright moon. That life, the life of a rastreador, was gone. He lived a life away now, an orphan pumping gas and wandering the open tracts outside town in undeveloped thought.
She was slow and didn’t go to the parish school. She was young, a child still, liked his reddish hair, and didn’t mind the puffy scar that ran ear to ear on his neck. For a month they’d find a clear piece of ground near the river, just sit, say little or nothing. Sometimes he’d try to express a fragment of his relationship to Evita; she’d never understand, would push his shoulder in tease, laugh a dull, retarde
d honk. He’d stop, sulk, draw stickmen in the dust, put the sudden blossom of emotion into kissing her or touching her flat, pubescent chest.
After Her death he followed closely the march of the Senora’s ideas through her husband, Juan Perón. Alejandro’s focus now rested on this man, once so unimportant to him, now the nation’s vessel of Her word. He read of the rising protests against their political vision, felt dead fury when the oligarchy called Her, in braver and braver tones, just another whore.
“Nobody likes you.”
“I know.”
“They think you’re scary.”
“I think they’re nothing.”
“I don’t mind your neck, y’know. I don’t mind it…”
A year after Evita’s last ride to the CGT, the oligarchy rose and banished Her husband. Her word, Her philosophy, Alejandro’s future were in a moment declared nothing, null, finished.
And the throbbing began behind his eye.
The slow girl’s father was a brutish drunk, and Alejandro gave him a wide berth, sitting with his daughter at the river, listening to her hum, feeling the throb in his head grow. He turned thirteen, worked in the store, pumped gas for the passing oligarchy and Yankee lackeys. Each night he read again Her autobiography; each day he spent his meager coins on more candles for Her shrine. A boy called Her a name one day and Alejandro broke both his arms. They expelled him from the parish school. His stepfather tried only once to demand an answer to his stepson’s behavior but backed down, terrified of the silent eyes. Without school Alejandro spent more hours wandering alone the pampa grass and its snaking eddies, listening for his future.
And one day the future spoke to him.
In words he could at last understand. So he crouched, listened, even as a grass fire on the horizon came closer and closer, even as the smoke and ash stung his face; listened even as the flames rolled over him, and when they had passed he was unburned, and the words of the grass were clear: “You are the immortal protector of Her word, Alejandro. And your meter is fire.”
Afterward he brought the slow girl to the shrine and told her he felt his old life dissolving, felt himself blossoming into something beautiful.
Blood Makes Noise Page 14