She is leaning against the guardrail of the house, her hands on her hips, and watching them, or the plain behind them. Or even the condors circling in the clouds, drawn to the odor of death they can smell from the sky, on currents of wind from the south and parched air. The sons have noticed them, and snarl that after the fight they’ll go and shoot them, those nasty, heavy birds with their feverish flight, for the boys they’re a feast. But first of all they have to finish the fight, the little brother hopes to take Mauro by surprise to make him pay for the blood he made him swallow, so he lines up behind Steban and behind Joaquin, following them like a gray shadow. Before long the older boys forget about him. A good blow to the side of the head, if he can. He circles round and round the twin, waits for his chance, hopping, talking to the severed leg to urge himself on. But deep down he knows he’ll fail.
The chopped-up body of the steer lies a few feet away. Sometimes they step over it to escape a blow, or roll over behind it for protection. The mother is still watching, sees their arms dripping with blood. She doesn’t shudder, doesn’t judge. This is the animals’ fate. She waits for the sons to start cutting up the meat again.
Everything is wild, brutal, even the gaze she casts upon them.
MAURO
To add to the harshness of life: does he even know why he tries so hard, the tall twin, always some chore to finish, one more than the other brothers, one even the mother would not dare ask him to do. To prove what, exactly: that he’s the strongest? They all say as much. That they need him? They would sooner die than tell him that, and yet they’re all convinced of it—he is, they are, without Mauro the estancia would not make it, the sheep would be unshorn, the calves would be branded too late. And who would repair the buildings, who would unwind miles of barbed wire without flinching, who would carry sacks of seed and grain, and roof-beams? At the age of eighteen, he’s deformed by labor, his arms taut with streaks of blue veins, and already he has to walk swaying from left to right to go easy on his back. His shoulders are so broad that they block the light when he stands in the door, coming in for dinner. Sometimes when he’s tired he bumps into the door frame, causing the entire room to shake, yet he doesn’t even notice. He instinctively places his hand on the wood as if to steady it; and the little brother could swear it wouldn’t take much for him to knock the house over. Every evening his short black hair is full of twigs, and he combs it with his hand, there in the room, and no one protests, because he’s done the work of three men. His brothers would never dare raise their voices in his presence, except perhaps Joaquin—but Joaquin couldn’t care less whether the floor was swept that morning. Mauro is a giant, a godsend to the mother, despite any careless behavior he might display; to Steban and Rafael he is a monster.
There are evenings when the three other sons, even Joaquin, even the mother, are covered with the gray dust of the steppe, to the point you’d think they’ll be buried there, unable to go forward or back, come to a complete halt. Exhaustion grips them like a vise, and getting up, serving the soup, eating it, everything is painful. They don’t talk, not that they’d have anything to say: their thoughts escape them. Deep inside them there is only a void, a total absence of thought process, in order to save their energy, rebuild it. And although Mauro always comes home from the plains or the stables with his head held high, eventually his eyes, too, begin to close, sometimes over his cup of maté, and his upper body slips to one side, and Joaquin reaches out to catch him. Then the mother says, “Get to bed now.”
And no one moves. The four sons bear the signs of an existence eroded by fatigue—their own, but also that of the animals and the earth. Often there is not enough rain, and the hard soil cracks open beneath their feet, the spindly trees are dry and will never grow into anything more than gray copses. Further north, further east, the pastures are rich: but they’ve never seen them. All they know is what the mother has told them. Their lands grabbed by the rich, bought for a song, and the herds with them. Mauro cannot understand why the grandfather sold them.
“He didn’t sell,” barks the mother. “They stole them from him. They made him. All so they could . . . could poison the world with their filthy business.”
Beasts in the tens of thousands, so numerous even the pampas was not enough, and they began to ration their grazing, to feed them corn and forage, to fatten them to make them heavy. In San León incredulous men read articles in the paper that heap praise upon the new intensive farming techniques, the future, they write, column after column. They may raise sheep in these parts, but no one’s forgotten that above all, the meat has to have room to run. To build up muscle, for the taste, the texture. Nothing to do with the meat that comes from those strange farms they talk about all the time, where the beasts never move and are force-fed, whose flesh stinks of death. The sons spit on the ground whenever the mother talks about those big farms: they’re out to get them, she’s sure of it now, and she can thank her lucky stars that she had the sixth sense to sell most of her cows in time. Mauro shouts, clenching his fists: “But their meat is worthless!”
And so what? They begin to suspect that meat eaters couldn’t give a damn about quality, provided they have enough to stuff their guts. It can be fatty and white, but provided they get it full to overflowing, they’ll say it melts in their mouth—that’s another thing the mother brings back to their incredulous ears, when she returns from the town. Soft meat. They joke about it among themselves, shocked, furious. They’d rather regurgitate this gelatinous flesh than swallow it; and the day the mother comes home and tells them she tasted it in San León they look at her as if she’d said something blasphemous. The meat was good, she says; they don’t believe her. Mauro bursts out laughing, she’s playing a trick on them. But deep down they know the mother isn’t the joking kind, and it worries them. Since the sale to the fattener she hasn’t bought any more cattle. The tall twin pounds on the table.
“So you’re going to make do with sheep, you too!”
“And why not?”
“You promised you’d hold out. You said it wouldn’t happen in your lifetime.”
“I’ve thought it over. I can’t go losing with steer what I gain with wool.”
“You gave your word.”
“And what does that change?”
Mauro made a face.
“It means we’ll be shepherds. Shit-faced shepherds. That’s not a life for us.”
“Your life is what I decide.”
“We could go on like before.”
“There’s no more before.”
The mother was born shortly before the great droughts of the second half of the nineteenth century. Oddly enough, she doesn’t remember them, even though her parents lost a third of their livestock. Forty years later everyone still talks about it. The old folks say the climate has changed since back then. The steppe has become too arid for life to take hold. Too much wind, too many animals, and the rain that never comes often enough. The land is dying from its pastures.
One day there’ll be nothing left, not even a spiny shrub to feed the sheep that scrape the ground by the millions. Not a drop of water for a whole year, or two. Everything will die, men dried up, animals devoured from within, trees scorched. Only rats and grasshoppers—like in Brazil, in 1877, they’ll end up like that, they’ll die from that rainless sun and wind; they dream of the flood. Tremble at the thought of losing everything.
The mother goes on with her story. A world is disintegrating. She raises one finger in the air.
“Maybe it’s time for me to take you to San León. You have to see. Before everything disappears.”
The town. Mauro won’t want to remember the first time the mother takes them there, Joaquin and him. They are afraid. Too many people, too much noise. Too many shouts, everywhere at once, greetings or insults, men and horses, and steers, and sheep. Donkeys too, and the cacophony of voices calling loudly to each other, each one alone in the world, drownin
g out the other voices that are raised in turn to make themselves heard. Hammers pounding on houses, rattling; the squealing of cartwheels passing by. The way people hail them, joke with them, not really them but the mother—she knows everyone, she doesn’t introduce her sons because she figures it’s obvious, and the men look at them, holding their hands above their eyes to shield them from the sunlight, and they talk about the boys as if they weren’t there.
“Is that little Mauro who’s grown so tall? Good lord, what a bruiser he’s turned into.”
The mother nods, gives a quick laugh, with that way she has of half-heartedly sketching a sentence.
“Wanted to see the town. So . . . ”
She drags them from shop to store, inflicts on them her interminable haggling, down to the last peso, obliges them to check the invoices, makes them carry her shopping and her bags. In the street they hear the gibes: So you found yourself some slaves to help ya? Joaquin murmurs:
“What are slaves?”
The mother ignores him and raises her head, with her proud look, and answers back, for all to hear: I’ll have you know these boys work hard, I’m the one who trained them. They feel awkward. When he gets home Joaquin will lie to Steban and Rafael about how huge the city is, how busy and full of light, how they caught a bull-calf that had gotten loose and was causing panic in the streets. He’ll roll his biceps and talk about San León as if they had conquered it; Mauro will nod in silent agreement. In fact, they are fascinated and impressed by the town, it is as tough as they themselves are, a famished, thirsty place.
Slowly, with subsequent visits, they become more accustomed; the mother has decided to take them along to help from now on, so every month they leave the two younger boys in charge of the estancia while the three of them set off for the day. Mauro reminds his twin to keep his mouth shut so he won’t look as idiotic as that numbskull Steban, and forbids him from looking around, and especially from pointing.
“It makes us look stupid, as if we didn’t know anything. So the people in town laugh at us when they see us. Shit, Joaquin, behave yourself.”
At the bar, they watch their mother gambling, the men slapping her on the shoulder when she makes a smart move. She raises her glass, drinks it down in one. She’s the only woman ever to set foot in the bar. Sometimes when she’s had a lot to drink she bursts out laughing and says she’s become a man like all the others.
With the same rigidity. And the same faults. She drinks as much as the men, we all get our turn, she thinks, her eyes raised to the sky, a mean smile on her face. She’s a vengeful poker player. It’s her reward when she’s finished her errands—questioning every invoice, filling the cart with stocks of food, grain, coal, horseshoes, and barbed wire: invariably, she ends up at the bar and rolls her cigarettes in her callous hands, orders a Fernet or a whisky, then another one, tosses down the cards, kills her demons, bets again—no one finds any cause for complaint, she has even acquired a certain local notoriety.
There are evenings when girls sing and dance on the stage at the back. In the beginning the twins don’t dare look at them.
Until now the only woman they’ve ever known is their mother, with her broad hips, patched skirts, and filthy apron. Her brown hair, long and flat, framing a face with perpetually drawn features. They recall seeing other women at Mass on Sundays, also dressed in dreary colors; some were prettier, and shapely, and wore a smile. But when they turned six they stopped going to church. Too much work on the estancia. The mother put a statuette of Santa Maria in the house, and they had to pretend to pray to her every evening. The mother, and the Virgin. Nothing else. They’ve never seen lipstick on a girl’s lips, or makeup around her eyes. Let alone blond curls, and of course they have no way of knowing they are fake. And that smile. It takes their breath away. They can’t even grasp whether this thing standing there singing in front of them really is a woman, or some species they know nothing about. They are so visibly shaken by what they see on stage that people make fun of them again. The mother calls them to order and they run back to her, yet they can’t help stealing glances at the girls. Mauro stutters with a nervous laugh:
“But . . . ”
She interrupts him with a swipe of her hand.
“Putas. Jodete!”
They huddle next to her. Just hearing those vibrant voices at the far end of the room causes something to stir inside them. The girls are amused, they wave to them as they sing. The boys blush. Sit closer together. An abyss opens inside them, a devastating temptation. Stupor, too: so, this exists. There they are by the mother, their mouths hanging open, their eyes almost popping out of their sockets from staring. Shivers all over. They squeeze their abdomens. When, at the end of the show, a tipsy customer goes to slip a bill into the bodice of one of the girls, grasping her breasts in each hand to kiss them, Mauro lets out a cry and takes hold of Joaquin’s arm. They are burning inside, they picture themselves on the crest separating paradise from hell. The heat is suffocating.
And they know that the mother will never let them kiss the girls’ breasts. She will never give them the money.
RAFAEL
So there are these dark moments on the estancia, the twins’ agitation floating in the air like a warm current, wafting by the two younger boys who stand back, hidden behind the barn, fascinated by the strange spectacle. They know instinctively what is happening, their elder brothers standing pressed against a ewe’s rear end, twitching furiously, it doesn’t last long, the animals don’t react once they’ve been caught.
Mauro pulls his trousers back up, head lowered, he never looks at Joaquin, who is slow to copy him. He closes the gate behind him, not saying a word.
It’s always in the evening. The mother is snoring in her armchair, stunned with fatigue and alcohol. They know she got up that morning before they did.
Since Rafael continues to shadow the twins, of course one day he gets caught—was it Steban’s loud giggle or the ewes turning their heads, the older boys give a start, grab hold of them. Filthy little spies, how long have you been watching us?
After they’re done what’s left are two battered bodies making their way back to their room, and the pain, and the stifled tears. Steban moans, holding his jaw. The little brother, in his corner, make his lips bleed, so hard has he bitten them to keep from crying. The twins hit hard. The humiliation and rage at having been caught in the act. With their kicks in the belly they buy silence.
Now the twins are more violent than ever before. For weeks Rafael and Steban have stopped watching them in the ewes’ paddock; in vain. The sting of shame doesn’t go away. It only feels better during the time it takes to fight, to tense one’s muscles and make others suffer.
The older boys hit them where it won’t show, sparing their faces. They don’t want the mother to find out, above all. She might notice how, some mornings, the younger boys walk bent over, how they avert their eyes when they walk past the twins. Not even. She gives her orders for the day without looking at them, she never interrupts a chore she’s in the middle of. Mauro and Joaquin snicker.
Rafael darts away, scurries, goes to his horse, the dogs. Curls up in one corner of the barn, with Three half lying on his legs, and he waits for the older boys to forget him. He buries his nose in the mastiff’s fur, and he wishes the caress would never end, that his arms never had to let go. No matter how much he ruminates, then murmurs his plans into the dog’s ear—plant the pickets, unroll the barbed wire, clean out the stable and the barn—nothing works. His body is becoming wiry, but refuses to fill out, and Rafael despairs of ever bursting with muscles with which to confront the twins. Next to him Mauro looks like an ogre on the prowl, terrifying with his instinct for knowing where the boy is working, where he is hiding while he’s cleaning the leather. Joaquin is never far behind, catching up the moment his twin gives a faint whistle. Here he is, I got him. Steban runs away and curls up—every time, the little brother finds him lyin
g under the bed as if he were dead. He doesn’t blame him. The half-wit, whimpering as he rolls in a ball on the ground, is of no interest to the twins. No fighting. It’s no fun. Whereas Rafael . . .
So he gets used to their blows, now and again he strikes back, and for a moment he forgets the pain. He always ends up on the ground, his back and belly stomped on by the older boys’ boots. He sobs while Mauro and Joaquin laugh as they give him his hiding, he waits for the pain to come, the real pain, when his horizon will be reduced to the rhythm of his heart trying to beat, and his paltry dreams of revenge.
What if he killed them. What if he kept his rifle with him all day, even for the most menial chores, with two cartridges, one each, he wouldn’t need more, he won’t miss. He can see himself with the rifle on his shoulder, carefully taking aim in the direction of their footsteps, their stifled chuckling. He can feel the trembling of his forefinger on the trigger, the clinging thoughts, the mother, the estancia, prison. Does he want to throw his life out the window for two bastards, he’s not sure, even if he is panicky with spite, or he has to do it better, then, somewhere else, far away, next to a ditch he’ll have been digging for days, lure them there, tip them in, one bullet each in the head. For months the idea obsesses him.
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