The horse gallops, pebbles and earth scatter beneath his hooves. How often has the little brother covered this path on foot? Just about every evening, for years, mud and twigs clinging to his trousers, his head ringing from being thrown to the ground by his brothers. He knows the path’s every bend, every hole, every flying chip of gravel, from having walked back along it, over and over, after every time Mauro and Joaquin’s joyful fury took him there. And even the day his mother gave him the horse, although back then he believed it would stop at last.
His horse. An endless wait, seven years, and during that time he would gaze at the mother’s little herd of half-wild horses, which more often than not kept their distance from the farm. Seven years he spent observing the shapes and coats of horses so far away they were the size of ants, seven years being sure of nothing, counting how many were missing in the spring, counting the foals still awkward on the steppe with its host of dangers. How could he determine which one the mother would choose for him? When, with the twins’ reluctant assistance, she brought the dark chestnut back to the estancia, not long before he turned seven, the little brother stood there for a few seconds with his mouth open. From a distance he had not seen how beautiful the criollo was. A magnificent animal, with a slightly curving white nose, and four white stockings that made him look as if he were dancing when he moved. Rafael knew immediately from the way the mother was looking at the horse and at him, the little brother, that the animal would be his; and he’d never seen a prouder, livelier one. He’d never seen a mane on a horse’s neck ripple with such insolent grace. The brothers were sick with rage. They said that with such long legs the horse would stumble on the first stone, and that the plain would get the better of his proud elegance. His back would sag, his hindquarters would succumb to work. Worst of all, he had a white hoof. He won’t last, said Mauro scornfully. I’ll give him one month before he’s walking on three legs—and he pointed his index and middle finger at the criollo as if holding a rifle, pretending to shoot. Bang. Rafael shuddered. He looked at the horse and thought he was admirable; he was already getting attached. When he’d finished his chores in the evening he sat at the edge of the paddock sighing with impatience, calling softly to his horse. He stole crusts of bread to give to him. Henceforth this near-black creature was his responsibility, and he would always come first. When it came to eating and drinking. And care. Even when the little brother came home exhausted from the pastures, before he went to collapse on his bed he would make sure his horse had everything he needed. And sometimes he would sleep next to him in the stable, to breathe in his smell, and feel that soft nose against his neck when he came begging for a caress.
On the calendar—which he could not yet read—time passed infinitely slowly. The mother had marked his birthday with a cross, not realizing he was incapable of figuring out when it was, and every morning he asked her to show him what day it was. Fed up, she stopped telling him, but he eventually grasped that you had to move one square at a time. And the cross started getting closer, magically, both near and far away, and he could feel the excitement, his stomach in knots.
Of course all through the spring Mauro, Joaquin, and even Steban went on catching him, lifting him up and passing him from hand to hand to the pounding of their horses’ hooves. They threw him in among the thorny bushes with a shrill cry, bent double with laughter in their saddles. The little brother said nothing. He was waiting for his revenge, and not just a little one, the day he would fly away on his incredible criollo.
But things didn’t go the way he’d planned. What he had imagined as a morning to celebrate came to a sudden end, an ordinary day like any other, an illusion, a slap in the face. The mother had given him the horse and he’d taken him out, feverish, happy, intimidated; and as he walked and trotted, he looked at the opalescent muzzle against the dark coat, his mouth opening on a deep impulse held in check. He was fascinated by how different this horse was from Jericho and Tierra, the two peaceable, rotund drudges he’d ridden up to now. Perched on the summit of the world, Rafael was jubilant, coming and going, turning round. He didn’t go home. He was waiting for the moment when the chestnut would show he’d had enough and rear up; he waited patiently, in vain. He turned his back on the farm, yearning for the horizon as if it were a new departure, casting a gaze full of wonder at the sky reddening with the setting sun, the same sky as every day and at the same time so special. He let out a cry, not too loud to begin with, to be sure he wouldn’t be heard, and when he’d ridden further away and was hidden behind a dried thicket, he yelled like a madman, fist raised. Then both hands reaching out to the clouds, taking in the universe all at once, drunk with the sensation of having become untouchable.
As he headed home, the brothers were waiting. On their horses, planted in a row, a good ways up from the farm, blocking the road. The little brother rode up to them, ready to join them and ride back to the house together, the four of them abreast on their spirited criollos, a fine family photograph where the only thing missing was the older boys’ smiles.
“So you think this is it?” asked Joaquin.
Rafael raised his eyebrows. The time it took for Mauro’s horse to bump into Halley and cause him to swerve to the side.
“We don’t want you with us,” said the tall twin. “We don’t want some brat in the way. Got it?”
Behind him, Joaquin had drawn closer, to knock the little brother’s hat from his head, then spit on the ground.
“You didn’t even see me coming. You’re a real shit.”
He had tossed the Stetson far off, into a mud puddle, and Rafael stood in his stirrups hoping in vain that the hat would fall to one side, thinking as fast as he could what his options might be: insult them, or run away. But he didn’t have time to do either, because Mauro had reached down to grab Halley’s reins, shoving the chestnut and obliging him to step backwards, while Joaquin seized Rafael around the waist and hurled him to the ground. The three brothers let out a whoop of victory, circling around the little brother, almost trampling him, until finally one of the horses bumped into him and made him stumble. Then the older boys galloped off in peals of laughter, Mauro leading Halley behind him. Joaquin hollered something that Rafael didn’t hear. A few seconds later there was nothing but dust, and the sound of galloping hooves, hell-bent for leather, fading into the distance.
The dust, settling.
And then silence.
In the end, nothing changed that day.
So Rafael will be like those solitary eagles who never get attached, indifferent to their isolation, hiding in their inaccessible nests. One of those wild beasts that crawl through the swamps avoiding their fellow creatures, reaching their burrow with the prey they’ve torn from sky or earth for sole companion. Neither the fact of turning seven nor the horse had mended the rift separating him from the other sons. He is not the fourth son of a family: from that day on he knew that nothing could change the fact. He threw in the towel.
So Rafael grows up with that wound inside him, and with every insult he forms his scar tissue, and he licks his wounds for hours on end. Gradually he learns to curb the urge to beg the others to let him be a part of the family. He cuts himself off from his brothers. He keeps them from his territory, however wretched it might be: he works alone. Out of the way, all the time. Even when they are together with the mother for dinner, he moves his chair to one side, leaves a void. Steban is always next to him, impassive and taciturn, a sort of screen, or relay, between him and the twins’ violence.
In the morning he whistles to the dogs before going to check the cattle, to look for sickly calves, or ewes about to give birth. Along with the horse, they are his only close companions. From the kitchen the mother hears him calling.
“One! Three!”
Yapping in response, the clatter of claws across the stone in the courtyard. The mastiffs come running, leaping. The little brother grabs them by the scruffs of their necks, almost lifts them off
the ground, kisses them. Ends up cuffing them if they try to bite, out of jealousy or excitement. He mounts Halley and calls again, “One, Three! Vamos!”
Fastened to a chain, Two whimpers. One of the dogs is always left behind on the farm, just in case. And anyway, right now he’s too young to keep up with the others. He has replaced the old Two, the one they had before, who died gored by a cow. A few days after the accident the mother went to get the puppy from a neighbor whose bitch had had a litter. She named him after his predecessor, the way she’d always done.
Since childhood the mother has always had three dogs, and they’ve always been called One, Two, and Three. She gets new dogs as old age and death require. She says that this way she doesn’t mix up their names. But sometimes she is referring to a dog from the past, and mixes it up with the living. She forgets. She waves her hand. It doesn’t matter.
The little brother takes the dogs along.
Three nips at Halley’s tail. Cautiously. One day when he wasn’t fast enough the horse broke one of his fangs with a kick of his hoof, and the dog now has a lopsided grin as he waits, tongue lolling, for Rafael’s orders regarding the ewes.
All day long they inspect the plains, sheltering themselves from the sun or the westerly winds. The animals no longer even look up when they arrive. The horse, the dogs, the little brother: they form a part of their landscape, their smells, the voices they recognize.
When they ride off for two days, they go as far as the first plateaus. From up there, on land so arid that even the stony ground cracks open, Rafael observes worlds overlapping. Dry steppe scattered with twisted thickets, alongside winding streams kept from watering the earth by the rocky terrain. There are few trees. And most of them are stunted, ornery shrubs, even if here and there a caldén or sycamore stands out. Virgin land untouched by the hand of man—if you forget the thousands of miles of barbed wire fencing in the estancias. With his hand pointing toward those infinite enclosures, the little brother counts and murmurs, organizes, plans how plots will be changed, herds divided depending on whether they are to be shorn or sold. He dreams of riding further.
The mother won’t let him. Only Mauro and Joaquin can go far away. The year Rafael turns eleven, the twins leave for eight whole weeks on a puesto to the far reaches of the domain, to inspect and treat a herd of sheep. The little brother is sick with envy. He pictures them living like kings in the wooden shack, laughing their heads off as they drink their maté together, free, finally free. Every day when he jumps down from his horse for lunch, opening his satchel as Three looks at him imploringly, he invents new spaces, transforms the plain into forests and valleys. He sets off down unfamiliar trails and peoples them with lakes, pumas, and immense plants, he is lulled by a delicate music, humming sounds that cause the disconcerted dogs to tilt their heads to the side. He is restless, crushed by the length of time that keeps him at home, disgusted by the smell of the ewes, the wool he has to bag every evening after the older boys have finished shearing. He comes home late, his mother shakes him.
“What’s wrong with you, dawdling like this, don’t you know we’ve been waiting for you?”
She shoves him toward the barn.
When he heads back to the farm at nightfall, the effluvia of wool seeping into his sinuses, he doesn’t even stop in the kitchen to eat.
Suddenly Halley pulls away with a bound, cutting short the last bend before they reach the house. The little brother is one with him, lying close against his long neck, parting the mane from before his eyes as if it were his own hair. Of the four sons, he is the best horseman. That is why the mother entrusts him more and more frequently with watching the animals, for this, and because she can send him on his own, since he never asks for his brothers to go with him. The other three stay behind and work at the farm. In the beginning Mauro followed him on horseback, stirrup against stirrup as far as the big gate. A terrifying silence, of the kind that comes before a storm. His brutal gaze upon Rafael, on the rifle strapped to the saddle—as if he were about to grab it and take aim. Shoot. Bang. The little brother remembers the flights of sparrows, thousands of birds in the sky, thousands of voices chirruping and whistling as if the angels had begun to sing. And suddenly, a first one falling. And a second. Then three, then ten. The cloud of cheeping veers off, abruptly, changing direction to escape the lead shots, fleeing southward.
Bang.
Mauro hates birds.
He also hates the little brother, who showed up when he wasn’t wanted, his very presence annoys him.
But he never reached for his rifle. After a few weeks had gone by, he stopped going along with him.
“Giddyup!” shouts Rafael.
In only a few strides Halley is on his own, in the lead. He pulls away, to the cries of his rider, lengthens his stride, curves his back. The little brother closes his eyes. He won’t open them again until he feels the horse’s slight hesitation when he crosses the channel, the nuance in his gallop.
He stops by the water trough. Has time to turn around and face Joaquin, who is crimson with rage, then he tosses his hat into the water.
“Again!” he cries, a broad smile spreading across his face. “You’re really nothing but a shit.”
STEBAN
What you gonna d-do, later?”
Sitting tall in his saddle, singling out the grass-fed calves he’ll have to separate from their mothers, out of the corner of his eye Steban can see that Rafael has blinked in response to his question and is frowning. The little brother turns to look at him. It’s amazing how whenever the half-wit says something, which is rare, the others give him a sidelong glance. You’d think that he’s not the one talking, that he has something written on his face, which is why they’re all surprised if he opens his mouth, if he gets half a sentence out without breaking it off. And yet he says plenty of things, however stingily, if they only knew—but he blurts them out in silence, articulates them without making a sound, and the twins burst out laughing when they see his lips fluttering in vain while deep inside he’s murmuring, so that no one can hear: Stupid bastards. It’s because he never says anything that the older boys have gotten into the habit of calling him the mute or, more frequently, the half-wit; and he can sense it in Rafael’s gaze, too, the condescension, the pity and disgust. And yet they’re going to have to support each other, the two of them, the half-wit and the little brother, and they both know why, although they don’t speak about it, they erase the images from inside their eyes by rubbing their eyelids.
Probably, when he was little, before Rafael was born, Steban had hoped deep down that the twins would accept him, but back then they already rode ahead of him as if they were a single being, forgetting him along the way, shaking him off in the steppe. Until that memorable night when everything inside him turned upside down. The next day he had almost stopped talking, and the divide between himself and Mauro and Joaquin had widened, and with it came their mockery, their scorn. Then very soon afterward Rafael arrived. In the beginning Steban had sealed a sort of tacit agreement with his older brothers, all three of them against that little thing that had made their workload heavier, because the mother spent much of her time with it, not that it needed that much attention, but it was always too much, and they wished it’d never been born. But things had changed, and alliances with them; Steban didn’t grow closer to the little brother because he liked him, but out of pragmatism. Because everything else had failed. The twins rejected him, insulted him, and in the end they used him. As for the mother, there was no counting on her. He couldn’t even talk to her. Because who knew what might happen then.
Rafael has the same suffering deep inside him, and that is why Steban is forcing his way in, obliging him to look at him, answer him. In his question, in the way he has of not taking his eyes off him, he is trying to convince Rafael that if they join forces they’ll be stronger. But despite the need, he can understand his reluctance to have to count on someone like him,
Steban, with his look of stupor and his mouth always open onto silence, honestly, if he was in Rafael’s shoes, he’d be disappointed too, he’d curse the heavens for being so unlucky. To team up with Mauro or Joaquin, yes, that would make sense; they were brutes, but they were solid. But when it came to Steban . . . There are days he can’t stand his own presence, he’d like to scream to be left alone, he hunches up his shoulders and lets his arms hang by his side, he is mute, overwhelmed by the fears rising inside him.
Next to him, the little brother is still thinking about his question, and eventually he shrugs.
“Dunno. What about you?”
“I’ll l-leave.”
“And go where?”
“Dunno. Somewhere . . . they’re not.”
He juts his chin out, indicating Mauro and Joaquin as they gallop over to the cattle, shouting loudly to annoy the young bulls. And then he turns to look in the direction of the house, no longer visible. And adds: “Somewhere . . . she’s not.”
He knows that the little brother won’t understand his last words, just his inquisitive look, the time it takes to show he’s listening, and already his attention has turned to the animals, which have begun mooing, or the dust from the twins’ horses, and he’s dying to follow them. And at that moment Steban realizes, too, that he is on his own, now and always, because he alone witnessed the mother walking away that night, with the father lying across the saddle, and he alone saw her come back hours later, without him. No one noticed the dark red stain on Rufian’s flank, a stain Steban stared at for days, until the dust and the rain got the better of it and every last trace of the father had disappeared. The father ran away. Maybe it seemed like that to others! But Steban never spoke about it, not even to his brothers. He’s convinced that if he said anything the mother would take him off in the middle of the night too. He doesn’t know where. Doesn’t know what would happen. Just that you don’t come back. To make sure he won’t give himself away, that the words won’t escape his lips, he has stopped talking. Nights on end he’s been banging his head against the wall of his room, telling himself to keep quiet, not say a thing, never answer. Just to look and to clench his teeth, because he cannot forget the sound of the horse’s hooves, like a dark presage in the gloom, that slow plodding of hooves that even now, twelve years later, turns his blood to ice whenever he hears it, what if it were to happen again. Maybe when Rufian dies he will take the fear with him.
Nothing But Dust Page 3