Nothing But Dust

by Sandrine Collette

  Maybe the fear will vanish if he can leave the estancia.

  But who will want anything to do with a boy the others have always referred to as the half-wit?

  “Shall we go?”

  The little brother’s quivering voice makes him open his eyes. Sometimes he looks at them, the three brothers, and the mother, and the dogs and the cattle, and it’s enough to make him burst into tears, because something inside him murmurs that there’s nothing to be done, that he is shackled to this life. If he wants to leave he’ll have to be like one of those hares caught in a trap that gnaws at its own paw to get free, never knowing if it will stop bleeding, because in that moment it’s not a matter of life or death, but just of getting away. But that’s another thing Rafael won’t understand, and it’s useless to try and explain. So Steban falls silent again, pulls the suffering deep inside, and gives the nod of his head the little brother was waiting for; the horses set off, straight ahead.

  They ride down the slope to join the twins. Within a few yards the gallop of their horses and the wind rushing over them rouse them and make them laugh. Rafael lets out a joyful cry, he’s already forgotten Steban’s question, he’s breathing in the air as if he could sense the animals’ mood upon it. Steban outflanks him, annoys him, nudges his own mount’s shoulder against Halley’s, and the little brother shrieks and laughs, he’s never afraid when he’s up there in the saddle, and he pulls away, rides off, comes back, and even Steban can feel a faint twinge of envy seeing him whirl around the way he does on his criollo, as if they were one, and then he says, after checking in his mind that there’s not a single dangerous word, Let’s get, get to work now.

  Ahead of them is a plain, three hundred hectares, and at least a hundred steers they have to round up for a fattener. A godsend for the mother, who gave her orders to her sons this morning with a smile—something so rare that they all took notice. To be sure, the sale means the herd will be reduced by over half. But for all the mother fusses and carries on about not selling her cattle, she said yes right away, because she can tell she’s not going to be able to fatten them up. One day she too will have only sheep left, she knows it, even though it’s gut-wrenching, a loss of nobility. She’ll end up producing only wool. Like everyone else.

  Steban and Rafael catch up with the twins, ride close behind them when Mauro whistles and waves them on. They’ve all got their gazes riveted on the Angus, they ride side by side, exchanging a few words or a joke. A strange truce comes over them when it’s time to herd the cattle, their hatred and hidden pacts fade away, they all look intently in the same direction. Even the way they look at Steban seems to lose its arrogance, and Mauro yells orders without anger, without disdain, just get the work done, round them up, take them away, follow some sort of animal instinct. And the dogs circle around the sons, dash over to the herd, their eyes on the stragglers.

  “Call the dogs back,” Mauro tells the little brother. “It’s too soon. They’re going to piss them off.”

  Progressively they move apart, the twins restraining the bulk of the group in the middle of the pastures, keeping the playful animals from getting away. Steban and Rafael go after the loners. For two hours, crossing the immense plain, they approach the solitary steers, scold them, drive them toward the others. And set off again. Start all over. They bring them back in bunches, in small numbers; sometimes it takes the two of them to force a stubborn young bull, and the jumpy horses dodge the horns sweeping the air. Rafael says, “We’ll have to keep an eye on this one, he’s a nasty piece of work.”

  Then immediately laughs.

  “No we won’t, he’s going off to be fattened. That makes one less who’s got it in for us.”

  And Steban nods, mindful of the creature’s bobbing head, snaps his whip if the bull gets testy, holds out his arm to send the little brother around to the left side, or to the right, or behind. Last season his criollo was jabbed by a nervous male, and he can feel the horse’s reticence when the animal turns toward them, it’s almost nothing, a hesitancy he alone can feel, even Rafael next to him doesn’t realize. But he strokes the horse’s neck, furtively, encourages him in a hushed voice. With his fingertips he caresses the scar you can still see on the chestnut’s shoulder, and the horse shudders, loses his concentration, it doesn’t take much, an opening to one side and the bull rushes through it. The little brother cries, “What are you doing?”

  Steban doesn’t answer, he waves his hand to send Rafael after the young bull, and soon he has brought him back, with that crazy Halley of his who’s like the devil, all over the bull, this side and that, nudging him with his breast without ever coming within reach of a horn or a hoof, a horse that might have been born from the same womb as the cattle themselves, knowing their every reflex and flaw, and every danger. In the saddle the little brother is so proud of having caught the fugitive, he tries not to show it but his stifled grin distorts his mouth, and he doesn’t say anything, not even that it was Steban’s mistake, he doesn’t need to, Steban knows it only too well. Further along two cows are grazing and don’t look up. Steban follows Rafael’s gaze.

  “No, let’s t-take this one . . . first.”

  They drive the bull ahead of them, it trots reluctantly. Steban places one hand on his criollo’s mane. In that voice only he and his horse can hear he murmurs, “Don’t worry.”

  RAFAEL

  Gradually, more and more animals join the herd, as the brothers drive them into an ocean of mooing, and the dogs nip at the beasts’ hocks to prevent the most stubborn ones from bolting. The animals don’t run much, they save their strength. Most of them are young but they already know, thanks to some improbable hereditary awareness, that the day ahead will be a long one. Sometimes they go dozens of miles or more before they reach the corral the mother will close behind them; by then the dogs’ tongues are hanging out, the horses are rearing. The little brother enjoys this routine, it has always filled him with a kind of exaltation, to be wedged there in his saddle, merging with Halley’s sudden pirouetting stops and half-turns in order to tear after a fleeing heifer or bull-calf. The horse is covered in foam but doesn’t tire. He’s focused. It’s a game for him, too, and the little brother laughs. Out of the corner of his eye he makes sure the dogs aren’t getting trampled by the steers, he calls Three when he gets too close, the way he tends to do. The mastiff turns his head the other way. Rafael points his hand toward the ground and shouts, “Three! Come!”

  The air is heavy with an animal scent. When they get home their clothes will be full of it, right through to their skin, tonight and every day hereafter, because they won’t wash. Once a week the mother heats water for the tubs and they soak, reluctantly. The smell of their own bodies is as much a part of their life as the animals’ is, they can’t even tell them apart, smells drowned by the smoke of burned horn when they’ve been shoeing the horses, or the pungency of earth if they’ve been rolling on the ground to wrestle a calf away from its mother for branding. Between their sweat and that of ewes and steers there’s so little difference; only a sour whiff betrays the boys’ smell, whereas the animals’ is powerful, peaty. After work, the little brother often inhales the odor of wet fur and leather, his hands against the horse’s damp flank, he raises them to his nose the better to take it in, to melt into the animal’s bulk. Halley turns his head to Rafael and the boy holds out his sticky palms for the horse to sniff. He listens to the horse’s snuffling as he breathes in the strong perfume, then looks at him questioningly and licks the familiar effluvia, tickling the boy’s skin—in the end, the horse calls quietly in a quivering of nostrils, and Rafael places his cheek against him wordlessly.

  Steban suddenly gives a long shrill whistle. The entire herd is there. The four brothers split up again, two behind, two on either side. The dogs bound from one to the other. The only horizon left to the animals is straight ahead. And the little brother shouts to give the signal: Move on! It’s as if an enormous mass, both unique an
d ungainly, begins to move there beside him, causing the earth it is crushing and the sky above to tremble, and the cows low, the air quivers all at once. Four hundred hooves, like war drums hammering the ground as they advance heavily, and the vibrations rise into the horses’ pasterns, and swarm around the brothers’ legs and heels like an immense hive. Rafael places one hand on his belly and twists his shirt. Every time, the sound resonates so loudly that it makes him shudder, his guts are in such turmoil he’s afraid they’ll spill out, so he presses, hard, the time it takes to get used to it again, his body shaking from the long stampede, a strange fever running up his back. All he’d have to do to forget the herd is close his eyes, keeping only the cadence, this odd piece of music, monotonous and unending. An impossible rhythm, and he’s there, ecstatic and terrified, one hand on his horse’s neck to remain here in the world.

  When the trembling calms down, he swings his legs forward and Halley begins to trot. The brothers’ shouts resonate all at once, along with the cries of the running, worried cattle. The warm safe world into which he had retreated is shattered. He’d like to reach it again, but he knows it’s pointless, even if he could, the magic has vanished. He’ll have to wait for another time, a new cavalcade. The break is painful.

  Red-rimmed eyes.

  The cattle’s backs undulating like a brown sea.

  For four hours they drive the herd ahead of them, across prairies, fording streams. It could go on forever, and they have no more landmarks, they are lost in the plain with its unchanging landscape, they are dulled by the cattle’s lowing and the dogs’ barking. When the enclosures grow smaller they hardly notice. Mauro and Joaquin have been silent for a long time, they’ve stifled their shouts, their throats sting from the dust. The cold wind defeats them, dries the corners of their eyes.

  The little brother says nothing.

  He is thinking about Steban’s question, earlier, his voice hoarse from speaking so rarely. What you gonna do, later?

  He’s never thought about it.

  For the first time he understands that his life could be different, that he is holding it in his hands. A moment later he spits on the ground. What did he say—and go where?

  The mother is his future, the estancia his destiny and his tomb. He doesn’t want to think, or to answer. It would spoil too many things. Only the livestock matters, and the work of every moment, the unending repetition, wearying and reassuring, and even the galloping of the horses is the same day after day, and the cattle’s breathing, and the light of dawn over the plain. Seen like this, life has no reason to change. It can last the time of humankind, the time of the universe, of certainty. Above all he must not ask himself Steban’s question. There is poison behind it.

  “Left corridor, left!”

  Joaquin rides past him at a furious gallop, driving the cows while Steban prevents them from turning back. The little brother gives a start, urges Halley to follow and waves his whip to thrash the cattle’s flanks; he’s annoyed the others have gotten ahead. They steer the herd toward the big corral. Like every time, the animals in the lead slow down, hesitate. How much do they sense, the moment the enclosures rise higher around them, that old instinct urging them to turn away from the direction they’re headed, bringing that presentiment of capture or death—an instinct the brothers suppress by pushing them from behind, with the dogs gone mad, their fangs nipping at the animals’ hocks. The cattle press together, lowing, caught unawares in their forward rush by this sudden stop; they stamp their hooves, begin to turn in circles. They would be ready to go all that way again, back to where they started, if the horses were not forcing them to move ahead by tightening the circle around them and pushing them ever further. So the herd moves forward again, slowly at first and then loping quickly, trying to escape from something invisible, charging straight ahead, into the enclosure, if there were a precipice it would be no different. The earth shudders, seems to sink. The horses, nervous, try to pull away from the reins holding them back. An echo in the sky. The animals’ cries, the stamping like a coming storm, thundering, rumbling. The mother closes the gates. Rafael jumps off his horse and helps her to lock them.

  In the middle, the cattle are bellowing incessantly and the little brother blocks his ears. He never could stand these cries of distress that echo over the steppe as the animals discover their penned-in state, colliding with the barbed wire, recoiling as they bleed. Every lowing cry causes him to shudder, an ever-increasing clamor that gives him a sort of fever as he runs from one gate to the next, repulsing the most terrified steers, placing his hands back over his eardrums the moment he can. From a distance he hears Mauro insulting him.

  “Whip them, whip them, asshole! They’ll get through!”

  Last year, or maybe it was the year before, a bull managed to jump over the fence, taking with him the barbed wire and the entire herd they’d spent all afternoon rounding up. A whole day for nothing, twice as much work, and the bull had to be slaughtered because it had severed its tendons. So Rafael shakes himself, waves his arms frantically to make them back up, opens his ears to the animal lament, and screams louder so he won’t hear them anymore, louder than the steers and the cows combined, and his roar fills the air and his entire head, burning his throat, pounding in his temples. He knows that in the middle of the corral the cows and calves will already be calmer by now; around the edges there are only the rebellious ones, furious and afraid. And after an hour even they see they are the only ones still snorting and bellowing, and they lower their heads to sniff the dust, and seek out the buckets, or some grass or grain. Sometimes when the brothers think the beasts have finally settled they’ll raise their muzzles with an enraged thrust of their horns and let out a long moo, which sets a few of them off again.

  And then it fades, shrinks, closes over. The sounds vanish. There is less movement among the herd, and the animals are quiet.

  Everything returns to silence.

  Because at last it’s a good day, enhanced by the money the fattener has given the mother, the sons are allowed to kill a steer. The little brother has already seen how Mauro raises the sledgehammer above his head and brings it down with all his might onto the animal’s brow to knock him out, but as always the sound of cracking bone and the animal’s stifled cry make Rafael open his eyes wide, his mouth is open, too, on a stifled exclamation, as the animal collapses. And Mauro is already on top of the steer, severing its carotids, a blade so sharp that he showed the little brother how he could dissect a fly in full flight, and Rafael knelt on the ground to find the severed insect, and stared at the tall twin who was looking down at him. Mauro nodded.

  “You see, for the steer it’ll be the same thing.”

  All four observe the creature and the red puddle spreading underneath his neck, the convulsions shaking him, hardly a whisper. Not one of them says a thing. A moment of suspended time, something in-between where anything could happen and nothing happens, just the normal flow of things, the twittering of anxious birds, the startled breath of the steer, and his fall, in slow motion, as if a thread were still holding him on his feet. The blood oozing into his golden fur, thick and sticky, while his heart surrenders and stops. Whether you’re a man or a beast, that is where it all begins and it all ends; that plump, taut flesh pulsating, pumping, beating. All of a sudden, it stops beating. All it takes is for the movement to stop, a stomach and chest to freeze. One sigh, the last, and then nothing. A dead body.

  When at last the steer is motionless, its dying spasms have left it, Joaquin gives a final kick to its croup to make sure. He says simply, That’s it. At first the sight of the blood pouring onto the ground is somewhat daunting, until they get their hands into it and something brutal rises from their guts and makes them laugh, maybe a voracious, inextinguishable hunger, the joy of knowing they’ll soon be eating from this red flesh which even now seems to be quivering still, there beneath them, and the smell of grilling meat makes their mouths water even as t
hey are cutting open the skin to pull back the hide. Then they cut up the meat, collect the blood to make blood sausages. Their hands and arms are splattered with the still-warm crimson liquid; with his fingertips, Rafael has drawn lines on his face. War paint. He laughs. Mauro grabs him and smears him from chin to brow, making fun of him. He calls him the Indian. He forces his mouth open and makes him swallow some fresh blood.

  The little brother vomits onto the ground. A scarlet puddle on the brownish ochre earth.

  When he wipes his hand beneath his nose he can see the red streaks on his skin, he smells the dead animal, all the way down into his throat and up into his sinuses. He takes a sip of water, spits it out, then twice more, to rinse out the metallic taste that lingers. Lips pursed, he takes out his knife and begins to cut where Joaquin tells him to. The dogs eye the cheap cuts. Mauro slices the legs at the knees and hocks, tosses a foot to each brother and shouts, One for each of us! They fight, laughing, each boy brandishing his piece of leg like a sword, and the little brother finds it hard to lift his up, and yet it’s only the foreleg, if it had been a hind leg he’d have given up, forty pounds of carcass that Mauro and Joaquin are swinging around their heads with cries of excitement; Rafael hunches down beneath the blows, wipes his hands that slip on the blood. He swears at his older brothers to attract their attention and get back in the fight. Sometimes one of them gets clobbered on the jaw and has to step aside for a few seconds, the time to recover his wits—bone against bone, and the blows resound in their heads, their tears mix with blood. Their cries echo across the landscape, provocation and laughter. The mother lets them get on with it. Rafael spies on her out of the corner of his eye, sure she’ll come and stop them; but she doesn’t move.