She sees her sons looking down to avoid the sight of her mouth twisted with anger, her eyes darting flames. And the gazes of passersby, staring at the mother as if she were some old lunatic, with her trembling cheeks and her hands in the air and the words that spill out higgledy-piggledy, and there are days when she feels that searing shiver down her back and the bad smell in her armpits, and the hatred inside her, and Mauro and Joaquin stubbornly contemplate the ground, rejecting her in silence. But this is life, you refuse to let others stomp on your feet, the boys have to learn this if they don’t want the estancia to end up in the hands of those bastards in the neat and tidy clothes. I’m going to check my accounts, chimes the mother every time, as she pushes the door and goes in. Sometimes she stays for a long time, and outside they must be thinking they’ve had her for dinner in there and she’ll never come out; to hope that maybe this time things have worked out and they’re keeping her in there for a drink or to celebrate the sale of the herd, now that would make her laugh, and on this particular day she’s taking so long she can imagine Mauro getting impatient and saying, “Did she come out and we missed her?”
But how could she go past them, with her sons outside the bank like two guard dogs that don’t miss a thing, their senses on the alert, their gazes riveted on the door until everything blurs, their eyes sting, and Joaquin shakes his head.
“She’s still in there.”
“What’s she doing?”
The mother, in fact, doesn’t have the leisure to waste time imagining her boys, sitting there with that crafty swine and his bad news, telling her what she doesn’t want to hear, and she springs to her feet with a shout, what right do they have to take—and that bastard answering: The right that gives them the right, and what else while we’re at it, pretty soon they’ll be stealing what she doesn’t even have, she’d do better to keep her money at home, at least it wouldn’t disappear. No one will give her any credit now? Tell me another! It’s up to her? Yes, just you wait and see.
Out she comes, practically tearing the door from its hinges, appearing in a halo of rage—although nothing is really apparent, the twins can sense her fury all the way from where they are sitting, it’s like a draft, a hot wind the mother contains inside her and which boils in her bloodshot eyes, in her cavernous voice when she is next to them and says, with a ferocious look:
“Nothin’ left.”
They hesitate for a moment before they dare speak.
“Nothing?”
“They’ve taken everything.”
Mauro stamps his foot on the ground.
“But how could they? With the herd we just sold.”
“There were debts. They helped themselves. They all did.”
The mother gives a scornful sniff, turns to look toward the town. A mean smile on her lips. Like a kettle about to explode, and she murmurs, so that it doesn’t burst as it passes her lips, so that the words will calm down, otherwise she’d go back into the bank and slit Gomez’s throat right there where he’s sitting in his armchair:
“The father was right to leave. There’s no hope in this damn place, they take everything you’ve got, down to your last peso. We should have left, too.”
She lets out a stifled cry, the anger overflowing, even more than resignation. To the twins she has suddenly become incandescent, a live torch. It wouldn’t take much for her to split in two, taking the town, its inhabitants, and its banker with her, a burning tidal wave, a flow of lava. They don’t even dare to touch her. She tosses her satchel down next to her. Rubs her face, hard. Her cheeks are red.
Joaquin whispers, “What are we gonna do?”
“What?”
He repeats his words in the same tone. The mother gets annoyed, Talk louder.
“So tell me, there’s no shame! What are we gonna do. What are we gonna do.”
“Yeah,” he mutters.
“Yeah, what?”
“This.”
“I can’t hear you. Are you afraid these people”—she turns, waves her arm to include the street, the passersby—“will make fun of us?”
And Joaquin looks imploringly at the bystanders who are beginning to stop and listen.
“No, no.”
“So?”
“So.”
“What have you got to tell me, loud and clear?”
Looking lost, he observes the mother.
“I dunno, I dunno!”
“Well, I know. We’re going to start over. Come on.”
She had untied Rufian, then thinks better of it. Hitches him back to the post and heads toward the bar in a few determined strides. Inside her the rage has formed a ball of fire that only gambling and alcohol will quell. In the meantime, it is devouring her. At the end of the street there are children squabbling, and she gazes at them for a few moments and thinks about other things: the exhausting work, the days making her old before her time. Her wretched life. But never mind, tonight she’ll give fate a kick in the ass, she can tell. Behind her, Mauro is calling out.
“Ma . . . ”
She hesitates. He calls again, he’s the only one she might listen to, she’s drifting, one leg poised in midair. Ma, please . . . So she stops and looks at them, Joaquin and him, clinging to the cart as if someone were about to steal it. In the end they’re still just kids. For a split second she almost goes back to them, to ruffle their hair and sit next to them, to urge the horse homeward. But there is her anger. She forgets everything and shouts, “Come on.”
She doesn’t wait for them. She knows they’ll obey her. At the bar, she’s invited to sit down to a game, far away from the window. She joins in, picks up her cards, trembling.
“Watch me now,” she says.
Across from her, old Emiliano smiles and stretches. And says, Some movement at last. I’m in. The others nod and murmur. She hands the cards to Leo.
“Go on, shuffle.”
Her surly expression has not left her. The mother is on the warpath. To take on the banks, injustice. To take on the world. And with a beer in her hand. With her untidy hair and her face still red with fury, she looks like a gorgon straight out of hell. And indeed no one really dares look at her or ask her what’s wrong. They’re not interested; and her answer would be stinging, because everyone ought to sweep their own doorstep before they come ferreting around hers. The only thing that everyone can see is that she is in a very foul temper. She is the first to know that at times like this you ought to withdraw, because you play badly. But there’s honor. And rage. She is above it all. She picks up her cards.
She loses.
Shuffles, deals, loses again. And again. In the beginning the guys laugh at her, tease her. The stakes aren’t high. Then they go higher with each new game. The mother persists. In the room there’s heavy drinking and smoking. A white cloud floats above the gamblers, there’s a mingled smell of sweat. As time passes the table is littered with chips and cards, gazes grow either keener or unfocused by alcohol. There’s less talk. The men follow the game, lay down their cards, pick them up. Make a joke before the next round. The mother’s pile of chips is dwindling relentlessly; sometimes she can add to it, but not much. The next round and she loses everything. Sitting across from her they feel awkward, as if, all things considered, she was trying her best to lose. Determined to play the worst hand possible. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s drunk eight or ten beers.
“Playin’ real well now, aren’t you,” grunts Emiliano.
The mother pounds her fist on the table. How dare you talk to me like that!
“What you up to, trying to go bust tonight?”
“Play. Play!”
They continue, with a sigh. The excitement is gone: even the old rascals who usually fleece the mother, with moderation, don’t like this predictable succession of games, and their victories are bitter. They protest, exhaling noisily. The mother couldn’t care less, leaning
low on her elbows, her gaze unfocused. She hovers over her cards without seeing them, talks to herself in a mumbled voice. The twins sense her morbid jubilation as she throws her chips in with a flourish of outrage, demands a new game, slaps down her cards. The smoke from the cigarillos makes her cough.
“Open the window,” orders Alejo.
The lukewarm draft of air gives them a shiver of pleasure. Mauro and Joaquin get to their feet and go and sit at a table at the far end of the bar. They had taken the mother by the arm and told her to stop, to no avail. What the hell do those two know? She shoved them away, calling them idiots.
“Never. I got too much money at stake. I have to get it back.”
“Ma, and what if you lose everything?”
“Luck can turn. It’s my turn soon. Leave me alone.”
She shouts at Alejo to give them some empanadas, to keep them busy. The aroma of grilled beef and baked pastry fills the air, makes their mouths water. They sit down, and the mother can return to her cards, forget those sons of hers who bother her with their worried looks, who have finally left her alone, muttering that they have nothing to lose, so they think, and she’s not about to prove them wrong when all she wants is some peace and quiet so she can get on with the cards. From one distracted ear, confused by the beer and the late hour, she hears customers commenting on the game, doesn’t understand that they are shaking with laughter; doubt makes her hesitate. She plays a straight, six-seven-eight-six, confusing the last card, upside down, with a nine, her eyes blurred with alcohol. Night fell hours ago. From where she sits she can make out figures hurrying along the street, opening the door to the bar to come in or go out, and it all evens out, those who arrive and those who leave, like births and deaths, and there are still just as many people inside, just as many people watching her, shaking their heads and making remarks, she’d rather not hear, she studies her hand.
There are entire spells when she is unaware of her surroundings. Her chest is tight as if her heart were struggling, and it keeps her from concentrating, as surely as if Mauro and Joaquin were there, and not across the room, and yet she can sense their watchfulness, why the hell don’t they stop spying on her and judging her like that—she spills her beer, wipes it up with the back of her sleeve. She turns around all of a sudden, furious, sees them three tables further along. She shouts at them because it’s clearly their fault if she’s losing so much tonight.
“Are you gonna stop or what?”
They give a start. Because they didn’t think she could see them. She has eyes in the back of her head. For the poker game it’s the same, and with her gaze still riveted on her sons, she hears the bid and says, as usual, I’m in.
But this time Emiliano taps on the table next to her, gives her a nudge in the shoulder.
“You got nothing left,” he says.
The mother turns around and no matter where she looks, however much she searches, her side of the table is empty, all her chips have vanished. She begins to sob.
“It can’t be, I was going to make up my losses.”
Emiliano shakes his head and says again, You’re all out.
And that is when the mother falls.
MAURO
In the sweltering heat of the bar at night he waits, watching the mother out of the corner of his eye, sharing cigarettes with Joaquin, sucking at the last drops of the beer he finished hours ago. The tall twin has been used to this, ever since the father’s departure thirteen years ago. The brothers, the mother, the animals, the family, so to speak: he’s the one who watches over them all. It’s not that it’s exactly pleasant every day, but in a way it’s part of his work. And while the mother gives the orders, the brothers turn to him when it comes to learning how to reach inside a cow’s womb to bring out a calf, or how to manage with a ram that doesn’t want to go from one herd to another. Even Joaquin lets him take over, he knows what’s what: there are evenings when he is tormented by the decisions he has to make, particularly during the birthing season, a season he hates, for it forces him to hand down verdicts written in blood, do we save the ewe or the lamb, slaughter the bull whose castration went wrong or let him live on, maybe we can sell him before he dies. He never lets emotion get the better of him: but the question constantly hounds him, maybe he could have done better. Sometimes he tries. Often he ends up with his arms and hands dripping in blood, and the animal dying at his feet; sometimes, against all expectation, it gets back on its feet, a miraculous, tremulous survivor, and something powerful vibrates in his own belly, he looks at the brothers there next to him and says, simply, “There you go.”
And they nod. He towers over them—not just his size, his faith, too. He is the estancia. Together with Joaquin. It’s not that he really needs his twin for the work, but it’s something you can’t control, maybe it’s from being together in the mother’s entrails before they even came into the world, so they can’t ever be separated, anyway that’s the way it is, Mauro and Joaquin always two by two, it’s not right otherwise. Joaquin is there to look at his brother with pride, to assume some part of his strength, his labor, but above all to walk by his side, whatever happens, even when the older brother is wrong and Joaquin says nothing.
“Well?”
Mauro blinks, returns to the night in the smoky bar, to Joaquin sitting next to him, the empty plates from which they’ve scraped the tiniest crumbs.
“What?”
“I said, we have to shoe Salvaje. He’s thrown his right front shoe, did you see?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Remember the first time we shod him? We had to get him to lie down to do it.”
“He’s a good horse.”
“I know, he’s mine, I know him. But he’s stubborn as a mule, too.”
“Always takes a bit of mule to make a good horse.”
“Like the mother.”
Mauro laughs joylessly. Just what I was gonna say. He pushes back his plate, looking in vain for another crumb, a tiny morsel of forgotten meat.
“Lambing season soon,” continues Joaquin, twiddling his fingertips on the table—and Mauro realizes how much their thoughts wander into the same spaces, the same subjects.
“Yeah, I saw.”
The ewes’ swollen udders, their bellies expanding with the lambs’ kicks. In one week, two at the most, the brothers will ride across their land from dawn to sunset, counting the newborns, checking to make sure the sheep are healthy. It will take three months or so until the births are over, because after the sheep the cows will start; three months endlessly riding, caring, slaughtering if necessary, if they’re unlucky. When that’s done they’ll round up the herds to brand the lambs and the calves; but first of all there’s this period of delivery, with the smell of mucus and blood. Sometimes they don’t make it home for two or three days, and their hands are stained with sickly sweet effluvia and black clots which they try to clean by rubbing them in the dust on the trail. When they heat up their mess tins at night, their fingers stink and every spoonful they swallow reminds them of the awkward creatures they pulled from their mothers’ entrails, and they end up leaving half the meal, vaguely nauseated, inhaling the animal smell on their trousers and shirts. And yet they are proud of having, in their way, given birth, all through those scorching days. Joaquin puts his head down on his forearm and looks at his brother.
“How many, you reckon?”
“I don’t know. Maybe two thousand, if we’re lucky.”
Tired, they doze in spurts. They would like to keep their eyes open but their eyelids close despite them, and the room begins to spin as if they’d had too much to drink, or were whirling in place, round and round, the way they used to when they were kids to make themselves dizzy, arms spread, laughing out loud, Joaquin keeling over first. Mauro went on, staggering, clinging to the passing air. Afterward, lying side by
side, they would gaze at the sky and wait for the nausea to pass. The clouds retreated, returned, tilted; Joaquin would often sit up with a shout, because suddenly it felt as if he were falling into the void, but it was only the rolling inside him, and Mauro would grab him by the sleeve to calm him down. Then they would tell each other stories about the horses and the steppe. Until they eventually drifted into a hesitant half-sleep, and then the mother would be shouting for them at the top of her lungs, to make sure they could hear her wherever they were.
Mauro gives a start.
The mother.
He shakes Joaquin and turns toward her at the same time. He’s never heard her scream like this, he’s never seen her in such a state. Her howls pierce the noise, shocking the men, who pull away from her as if to avoid something dangerous. She is on her feet, roaring, tearing out her long straight hair, waving her arms, her eyes red with fatigue and anger. Emiliano tries in vain to calm her down. Alejo puts a glass of alcohol in front of her; she swallows it down in one. And then she collapses on her chair. The bar goes dead silent.
Mauro shoves a few men aside without apology.
“What’s going on?”
She doesn’t reply. Her gaze has drifted into the distance, foggy, despondent. The twins kneel down next to her.
“Ma?”
Slowly she turns her head, looks at them. She says, Joaquin. But it’s Mauro who replies.
“I’m here, Ma.”
“Joaquin?”
“He’s here.”
Tears stream down her face, old too soon. It’s the first time he’s ever seen her cry. Something snaps inside him, and he stands up straight, immense, and turns to face the gathering.
“What happened, for Chrissake?”
Emiliano gathers up his cards and hands them to Alejo to put away.
“Well, she lost.”
The boy frowns, fumbles for words.
“Everything?”
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