Fate decided for him.
Lorenza had left two days before his return, taking with her his dream and his son, since it was a son—she had given birth one month earlier. She had gone off with a peddler, he learned; he didn’t even ask what he sold. The man could sell chickens or dishrags for all he cared. Lorenza hadn’t left word for him. No message with anyone. The little room where she had lived while waiting for him—waiting for him!—was perfectly tidy, no dust, nothing left behind. He had closed the door on leaving and the words spun round his brain. Well then, it’s over, they warned you, didn’t they, that it wouldn’t work out.
That must have been thirty years ago and nothing had ever hurt him that much again, and yet he had gone looking for it, fate, playing hide-and-seek with it, taunting it from high up on the plateaus, on crazed horses, within reach of a bull’s horns. Every time he got a jab in the hand or leg he hoped the pain would distract him from that other pain moored in his chest. As the years went by, the anguish abated, of course. But in all his living memory, not once did he ever feel such a fire consuming his heart and his guts again, not until these days lying in the cave, with his belly and his life consumed from within, and at first it made him laugh, almost joyfully, to see there was such a thing as a greater suffering. But now . . .
Now he doesn’t know how to get rid of it anymore, and surely the pain of Lorenza seems like nothing, and the sorrow he felt back then. Today there is no more room for sadness, no strength, and the wound uses everything up, his thoughts and his energy, even the urge to throw up. When the kid showed up, he could still tell himself that he didn’t have much to regret in life, that clearly the cattle had been his best company. But now he can’t even tell himself that much. Images scroll past his inner eye and he wishes he could stop them, they’re like a bad omen, these forgotten memories reappearing when he didn’t even ask them to, these muddled, overlapping thoughts, and even when he closes his eyes they’re still there inside and nothing will make them leave, but really they’d better stop, he can’t stand them anymore.
The terrible visions of the saladeros fill his mind, places he’d worked when he was young, that was before Lorenza, the animals bellowing as they approached the abattoir, entire rooms full of meat plunged in brine then packed in barrels of salt to preserve it. His father had told him how the meat used to spoil, in the old days, the steers were killed only for their leather and fat; and of course they cut off the best pieces, but almost nothing, sometimes just the tongue, to grill it—but the old man, remembering this, does not even feel his mouth water, and yet how he used to love it, grilled tongue.
The rest of the animal was just thrown out, left, abandoned, covering the floor with carcasses still three quarters full, such a waste. Salting the meat was the prime way of preserving it, and he remembers the desolladores at the slaughterhouse who separated the hide from the flesh, up to their elbows in death all day long, then in the evening they still stank of it and people would move away from them at the bar. At first they sent the cured meat to Brazil, it was good enough for the slaves, not much else, it made them laugh, the people here, they felt like they were playing a trick on them. But then before long the population took to it. And even later—but this was not something the old man’s father had witnessed, because he was dead by then—they invented the means of keeping the victuals cold, and the saladeros closed down, one after the other. The old man had witnessed those years that changed the world, and he was stunned to see the bovines come back to replace the sheep, after they too had once been banished from the pampas by the craze for merinos, just whichever would earn the most, the gold of meat or the gold of wool, when it wasn’t both at the same time; and you didn’t know which way to turn.
Nowadays the cattle farmers exported most of their meat by refrigerated transport. A few small firms still salted, but only for themselves and the locals, cured, aromatic hams that the old man knew by heart for having taken them along for years on end during the migration season. Sometimes he regrets his youth, when the gauchos on the steppe killed a cow or a sheep whenever they needed to, that’s the way things were, you got hungry all of a sudden, you slaughtered an animal. And it was true that they left half of it behind when they’d finished their feast, they too were unapologetically wasteful, they weren’t even aware of it, everyone was the same, that’s the way you did things back then. They ate the matambre, the meat between the hide and the ribs, thick and tender. Nobody wanted the rest: all you had to do was kill another animal. Wild dogs and all sorts of predators had a feast once they were gone, there was a sort of tacit agreement, they’d sit there waiting a hundred yards off or so, drawn by the smell, they’d start to howl if the men’s feast was taking too long. But the meat had to cook, had to be well grilled on the outside and red inside, and the fire had to have good glowing embers. That all took time.
The old man curls a little closer on himself. The memory of the smell of meat causes his stomach to contract and the pain shoots right through him. He calls out to the kid; no answer. When he manages to lift his head, the cave is empty and he feels terribly alone. It’s stupid, this impression he has, that if he’s all alone he’ll succumb, won’t have the strength, and he doesn’t dare tell himself why, because it’s drifting through his brain, resist, don’t let it come for you. He wants to tell the kid to find some way to drag him to his house, never mind if it hurts, the stage where he’s at . . . Some makeshift stretcher, a saddle with branches roped around him to keep him in it, anything would do, provided he can get out of this place, he can suddenly sense how evil it is, and the wind is making its way in, has come to chill his hands. He calls out again:
“Niño . . . ”
Silence. What if the boy has left. Maybe he’s fed up with caring for him and listening to him yell, because he, the old man, hasn’t made much of an effort, except to whine and complain when it hurts; if he were the boy he’d have skedaddled ages ago.
Slowly he stretches his legs, pulling at his guts, but his tetanized muscles can’t take any more. An immense fatigue comes over him, and for a moment he recalls the stag he hunted ten years or so ago, a clever old stag that made him travel for miles, going round in circles by the swamps, backtracking to make him lose the scent, it had taken him three days to find it again. And when he came onto a plateau and saw it, he got the feeling it was not by chance, and the animal was neither surprised nor frightened. It didn’t move, as if it were invisible, protected by its absolute immobility, not even an eyelash or a tremor. The old man had observed it, the immense antlers, horns lowered; it must have been fourteen, sixteen years old. Not many made it to that age, given the hunters, and injury, and predators; not many grew that big, five feet at a rough guess, one of the finest specimens he’d ever seen.
He fired. In the same instant he told himself he shouldn’t have: the sport on the previous days had been enough of a feast, the hunting, tracking, the way he’d been taken for a ride, his determination to catch up with the animal. How many wrong tracks had he followed? How many hours spent dreaming of capture, sniffing the air, rubbing the ground with his fingertips to figure out which way the stag had gone?
But the thought came too late, the shot had already been fired. Maybe he’d altered the trajectory with his moment of hesitation, because when he went closer the animal was still breathing, shot in the belly. Lying there outstretched, it watched the old man come nearer, and what he saw in the animal’s eye was immense fatigue, nothing left for anything else, neither fear nor malice, just that exhaustion that turned his eyes gray and made them shine, and the choppy breathing. He’d finished him off with a bullet to the head. He didn’t feel up to cutting its arteries with a knife, not that he was afraid of a bad kick, because he would have held on behind the animal’s neck, no, but because his heart just wasn’t in it. All the way home he felt sad, saw again the way the creature was startled when he shot it between the eyes, and the gaping wound in its belly, and for the first time he t
hought that death was not a pretty sight.
Same for him, then, ten years later, and the old man is well aware of the irony of fate, lying there disemboweled in his cave, and this fatigue all the way to his fingertips, to his eyelids which won’t open anymore, and his mouth that can’t call out, his stiff legs. Between his fingers the dressing leaks a green and yellow liquid, he doesn’t know if it’s from the plants or if it’s all that’s left inside him, emptied of blood and flesh, just this discharge he doesn’t recognize, he looks at it and doesn’t understand. He shifts his rigid palm and is surprised, because suddenly the pain has left him, and he moves again, nothing. Surprised, he begins to laugh; even his shaking does not feel like shards of glass under his skin and he makes a prodigious effort to open his eyes, feels a brutal happiness, as if he were anesthetized. So maybe the kid’s simples are working at last. All at once it pours inside him, like a draft of air, a luminous fluidity, and he feels light, almost airborne, whereas his body was dragging him gradually toward the earth, embedding him in every crack in the rock, sucking him in from underneath. Now he is floating, free, his innards are open and calm. He would like to sleep, he is sure he will wake again, cured, to sleep the way you do when you are resting, getting better, when you have nothing to eat and you have to pass the time, when you’re injured and your flesh is praying for mercy. So he wraps himself in his blanket like a little animal in its burrow, trying to find the most comfortable position, wedging the bag under his head. He turns his back on everything so the daylight won’t disturb him. He would have liked a nibble of the dried meat but the kid isn’t there to cut it for him, and he can’t shake off this torpor, he doesn’t want to lose it, doesn’t want to run the risk it might elude him. He can hear the melody in the background. He hasn’t felt this good for weeks, and he lets himself go, opens his hands, sighs. He can sense the light footsteps entering the cave, the sound of the fire crackling with dried branches, or maybe it’s something else, too late, he drifts off, he still has time to think that everything is coming to an end, and then, nothing more, all is well.
RAFAEL
Rafael heads off home without looking back, taking the horses with him, and before long all he has left in his wake is a long cloud of dust. He can feel the space between himself and the cave expanding, getting wider, and at last it begins to let go of him—the tightness in his belly, in his back, yielding with every step the criollos take. An almost joyful lightness courses through his body, tingling his arms and legs. He is tempted to spur Halley on, to break into a mad gallop as they head down the mountain—but he remembers in time that he won’t be able to hold the other three horses, so he keeps himself in check, looks up to determine his route from the position of the sun. His excitement abates, makes him wise. Truth is, he’s in no hurry to get back to the estancia; a strange malaise grips his throat as the hours pass. Whether on purpose or not, he keeps Halley on a short rein, at a walk, for hours. The criollos stamp their feet, they are used to galloping, even the old man’s horse, which must be a hybrid, so tall with such skinny legs, yes, even that one stumbles and snorts, all three pull on their ropes, and Halley strains against the bit, the boy is getting annoyed.
The first day, he checked every hour to make sure the bag was still securely fastened behind him, and looked around at it constantly to keep an eye on it, running one hand over the buckles, making sure it’s closed, tightly lashed. He has no choice but to take it home, the mother will have to believe his story, and for sure she will start arguing before he’s even opened his mouth, but when he shows her the bag, she’ll shut up there and then, of that he can be sure. And Mauro and Steban will look at him differently, because of the bag, for a start, and also because the little brother has changed over the course of these weeks, he’s grown up in spite of himself, living like that in the effluvia of blood and the death of a man, not an animal, a man. Confronted with that evil that devours flesh and clings to the walls of the cave, that oozes and seeks to worm its way into every living thing: how many times did Rafael awake with a start, with the terrifying feeling that a blast of air was peeling his skin to get inside? Thinking about these things consoles him for the fact that he’s on the way home, he was bound to have lowered his guard at some point, and one day the worms would have gotten into the folds of his stomach to start eating away at him, too. So he leaves it all behind, the wound, the maggots, and death, and the old man beneath the stones, refusing to wake up. He forgets about the cave. At last he can breathe again—he’d been virtually holding his nose not to throw up from the smell of putrefied flesh, back there; now suddenly his sinuses are open, flooding his body with pure air, he fills his lungs with sky, mouth open, he coughs, sneezes. The tears in his eyes make him laugh. Leaning down onto Halley’s neck he lets himself be lulled, he thrusts his hands into the horse’s mane to rub off the parasites, if there are any left, it won’t matter to the horse, and he rids himself of everything, bad memories too, and they walk on.
He even left the meat behind, for fear of bringing the infection and the fetid stench with him. So he hunts again, fresh meat, he kills a hare and roasts it on the spit at night above the fire, he rediscovers the magic of a time he thought was long gone, before he found the horses, before he tried to heal the granddad. At night the flames rise toward the sky, play with the shrubs in the shadow, revealing the green branches, the silvery thickets; behind him, the river murmurs and he struggles not to fall asleep. The aroma of grilled meat tingles his gums, and he swallows air, wait, it’ll be all the better for waiting. Since leaving the cave he does like the old man: he sleeps on the leather bag. Scattering the stones to make a soft patch of ground he sets down the bag and his blanket and goes to sit closer to the fire, his face lit by the embers. With the tip of his knife he cuts a piece from the hare, it’s still pink, never mind, the temptation is too strong, his mouth is watering, he feels his teeth ready to tear and grind, he laughs at the prospect. And the meat tastes of carrion.
He spits it out, swearing. Tries another piece and spits that out too, runs his fingers around his mouth to remove the filaments caught in his teeth, suddenly he’s nauseous, he drinks for a long time, eats a berry. Puzzled, humiliated, he watches as the meat slowly turns black on the fire, he lies on the bag and shivers under the blanket. From where he is lying, gazing at it from underneath, the hare’s carcass seems huge; it blocks the sky like a giant incongruous statue, a mass of hanging flesh without a back, the moon darts in and out through the holes left by the eyes, and the prey becomes a monster, an incoherent shape, a black, ragged dragon. Rafael sits halfway up. He kicks over the spit. The flames leap, throw up a shower of sparks, lick at the meat. A few moments later the fire is crackling around the remnants of something you would never know had been a hare.
When they reach the steppe, Rafael stops to study the landscape. He is much further south than he thought, he’ll have to follow the rivers for another day or two. The density of the forest led him astray, as if constantly trying to bring him back, to lose him among its conifers, its arrayáns, or the giant araucarias, from summit to hill, valley to plateau. Now the plain reclaims him, with its rocky ground half covered by the jarilla shrubs, the devil’s plant, the mother sometimes says, it’ll tear your mouth out or make it indestructible. Now and again the rock yields to a little lagoon, a watering hole for the animals—the horses stop to drink there. But it’s the wind which the little brother had almost forgotten, the wind hurtling down the ancient glacial valleys, veering up the jagged mountainsides, whipping faces and manes. He puts his hand on his hat to keep it from blowing away, he looks at the clouds, it’s as if the summer had gone by while he was looking after the old man in the cave, he’s missed it, and yet he didn’t stay there that long. In a few weeks the leaves on the bushes will turn brown and shrivel up, will blow all along the pastureland, and he won’t be able to do a thing about it, neither catch the leaves nor bring back time, and the mother will shout at him that he is behind with his work, of course
he is, almost three weeks behind, what does she expect. The first thing he’ll do when he gets back is lay in the wood for next season, every year that’s his job, and if this year Mauro and Steban have already done it, thinking he wouldn’t be coming back, he’ll sort the late calves and lambs, clean the stables, or repair some tools, why not, there’s never a lack of work. And then he’ll be there for the autumn shearing, he’ll pick up the wool, fill the sacks. This time, with Joaquin gone, maybe he’ll have new responsibilities, if Mauro is willing, but maybe Mauro will choose Steban and there’ll be nothing he can say to that, he’s been gone so long, after all, they’ll have made their plans without him. But he’s sure they’ll give him back his place, because of the work, the labor that wears you down before your time because no matter how boldly you go at it, there’s always more than you’d counted on, and your hands are callused from the crowbar and the barbed wire, they’re a wreck. In the winter they get so chapped they won’t heal, no matter how much tallow you put on them; it feels like a knife blade every time you grip a shovel or a rope. At night the sons sleep with greasy rags wrapped around their hands, to try and heal them—in vain, because the next morning it starts all over again.
So, yes, the mother and the brothers will give him back his place, they’ll be glad to, and more than enough work to go with it. But he doesn’t care: he’s bringing strength back with him. His hands will betray him if the others look, because the chapping has disappeared, and the open cracks across his palms have closed. All he did all this time was look after the old man, while the brothers were breaking their backs, he doesn’t feel guilty, they don’t have the smell of death clinging to their skin, or up their nostrils; it feels as if it will never go away.
Nothing But Dust Page 17