In his mute lucidity Steban observes the tired, happy kid, the position he is gradually assuming, not the mother’s, obviously, because Mauro wouldn’t allow that, but a sort of cheerful omnipresence, he’s there ready to give opinions or advice on everything, ignoring the older brother’s interruptions, and gradually he wears him down, by keeping up his incessant prattling, exhausting the others with constant chatter. Where did this come from, Steban wonders, shuddering—the mother’s death, perhaps, because this mood came over him the day after the funeral, such as it was, there in the orchard, and he feels an icy chill in his veins thinking of the mother’s weight upon them, and Mauro who has that same hardness about him, that same coldness, they mustn’t let it poison them all over again, the little brother must not stop talking: silently, he encourages him.
May he go on hugging his horse and his dogs. Spreading this strange cheer over the steppe, when, to be honest, there is nothing to be cheerful about, it doesn’t matter, it’s all to the good, he too would so love to have that happy glow in his eyes when he looks out over the estancia and the plains, and the evening sun. Without the mother there to complain and yell the next day’s instructions, these late afternoons when they sit on the stoop outside the house with mugs of maté in their hands could seem infinitely sad, and Steban has to admit that this is the very situation he feared, because he saw it coming; but now there is the little brother’s prattling, this vast thing inside him that is surfacing, bursting forth, inexhaustible, it wouldn’t take much for Steban himself to be infected with laughter and ready to seize his portion of joyfulness, were it not for Mauro’s black eyes reminding him that happiness goes against nature, that it is too ephemeral, and they have no right to it.
He is stark raving mad now, is Mauro, probing the hollows in the roof beams and the abandoned birds’ nests stuck in the rafters. Earlier that afternoon he broke the tiles to climb up on the roof, and the little brother protested from below.
“So I can have a better look,” the twin shouted back.
“Well, for sure if there’s no more roof, we’ll all be having a better look.”
“So what? What do we care about this house, nothing good ever happened here.”
“I care about it.”
“Well then. You can fix it.”
And he ferrets and roots around, and Steban observes him too; he stayed down in the attic because he felt dizzy, and he shudders at the blaspheming, every time a splinter wedges under the brother’s nails and he has to remove it with his teeth. What unbelievable illusion has led him to think the money could be there, rolled up in wads between the slats or wedged in against the shingles, what sort of image of the mother does he have, to think she could climb up and hide the money in such a vulnerable place, just under the roof tiles, all it would take would be a puff of wind or a leak in the old roof. And now he’s groping everywhere with his hands, unflinching, careless, like a dormouse scampering along the roof. There’s something pathetic, almost moving, about his determination, it’s completely futile and he knows it, when fate has decided to turn its back on you, and Steban wonders why the older brother hasn’t realized this himself.
From down below it all seems so laughable; the light around Mauro is so dark.
“H-how many more?”
The little brother counts in his head, looking at Steban who is pointing at the ewes, and after a few seconds he says, “Twenty-three.”
“Oh. That’s . . . that’s good.”
“Yes. And by the time I finish you two will have torn the house down.”
“Now what do we do?”
Rafael spreads his arms in front of the barren, gutted house. A ruin, a real reason for tears, but in the little brother’s voice there is none of that, no sorrow, no pity: anger. He turns to the older brother.
“I said, now what?”
Initially Mauro doesn’t react, he is dazed, undone by the mother’s craftiness, how after all these frenzied days she has bent him to her will, she is a shadow above him, suddenly annihilating him. He doesn’t even hear. Steban can sense the bottomless void in his gaze, the absence of any solution, the raving thoughts that surface when there is nothing left, and which the older brother expressed just before: what if the mother got back up on the night of her death, and took the money with her in her coffin to die with it? He was on the verge of going and digging her up again, if he hadn’t been so exhausted just then no doubt he would have, his eyes bloodshot, the muscles in his arms throbbing from so much digging and shoveling. There is a sizzling in his brain. Everything is saturated.
And then come the words.
“Pathetic bastard.”
And the moment the little brother says it, Mauro’s lips curl back over his teeth in a furious grimace, at that very moment Steban knows he was right, seven days, they have lasted seven days, and now the moment has arrived, there’s no more postponing it, it’s there and it’s Rafael who has just announced the end.
RAFAEL
Rafael confronts the tall twin and thinks of these last few days—the shorn sheep, the dismantled house, how the order of things has vanished. He was sure Mauro would not find the money. Of course he had moments of doubt, seeing how the older brother was prepared to dig up the thousands of hectares of the estancia by hand if he had to; but all of a sudden he could sense it was going wrong, and that in the brother’s mind everything was getting completely muddled, fatigue and rage combined to bring him to a halt at last, yes, let it be over with, this frenetic quest for money, and then there is Rafael himself with his sheep, too, his one hundred and two ewes that now number only ninety-nine because they took three of them for food, and the third one was well-fattened, to last several days, he chopped it up and put half of it in salt, otherwise what would be the point, to let the meat go off.
And the money they haven’t found: so much the better, basically. Because who knows what they would have done if they’d come upon it in the middle of the farmyard, not even well hidden, if they’d come home drunk with exhaustion and anger and just stumbled on the bag, to the point of no longer believing, no longer knowing what to do with it. There has already been so much misfortune since the money first appeared on the estancia. Really, Mauro mustn’t find it, he would want to keep the lion’s share, because when it comes to sharing . . . don’t even think of it. He would steal this treasure with its legacy of blood, and with no remorse, convinced as he is that he deserves it more than the others, that he ought to be the sole heir, and who gives a damn if the mother never earned it in the first place. If it had to cost them their lives, Steban and the little brother, Mauro would not hesitate for one moment. What better opportunity to get rid of the half-wit and the leech, as he sometimes calls him. And maybe Steban would have been in luck, if he’d sworn allegiance forever, becoming a sort of doormat for the old brother to wipe his feet on in the evening, a stooge, less than nothing. But Rafael had been damned from the outset, with the old hatred lingering since his birth, the place he occupied as if he had taken the others’ shares, imposing his guilty presence on the mother, who by then was on her own; so the money he brought back was a way of repairing the wrong he had done, however involuntarily, not that he ever could altogether, because nothing could erase those fourteen years of wretchedness, but it might have been a start—yet in the end he’s the one who has destroyed everything. As he stands there across from Mauro he can see the vengeance in his eyes, in his silence, his need to find a culprit, and Rafael is the perfect one. Who knows how far the older brother would take him today if he could drag him from his horse at a gallop? Who knows if he wouldn’t go and bury him alive next to the mother.
And yet it was happiness Rafael dreamt of when he brought them that leather satchel, a strange happiness for sure, which killed the old man and then the mother, that didn’t manage to bring Joaquin back, and now it is dragging the three of them down in its destructive momentum, and there’s no telling where it will
stop—knock down the house, and then what? Set it on fire? Kill all the animals, one after the other, for no reason, just to destroy this life of poverty? All across the steppe, two thousand sheep with their throats cut. And the cows. And the horses. It seems so long ago, the time when his only thought on getting up in the morning was to saddle Halley and go and count the steers. Years ago, it must be.
Or only a few weeks.
Such a monumental waste, a monumental sacrifice, starting with the mother, the way she rushed to hide the money, even if it meant having to deal with the three of them, all of it for nothing—unless want and deprivation had become a source of tiny pleasure to her, but he finds that hard to believe, like a rodent stashing nuts away all season while slowly starving, has anyone ever seen the likes of it? So the mother went crazy, that’s all. And as for her sons, look at how she destroyed them, with their gazes as empty as on the last hour of the last day, when it is all over.
So Rafael says, as if reading Steban’s thoughts:
“That’s it, huh.”
But he’s not thinking about the end of the world, because that strange lucidity is the half-wit’s alone: he’s referring to the shearing, and the race to find the money. That’s why he doesn’t ask the question. He already knows the answer. And he says it to say something, because Mauro is still digesting the two words he just said: Pathetic bastard. And inside he’s boiling, digging a deep fire, you can almost see the red in the older brother’s eyes, his jaws clenched so tight they could break. All three of them know that the line has been crossed, the line that was drawn in the future seven days ago.
Steban is the first to move. A movement so slight that the little brother is not sure Mauro saw it, Mauro with that crazed expression that hasn’t left him and his mouth open in silence, as if he were rehearsing some improbable tirade, as if he had to go deep in his throat for the flames that could burn him alive, or the noose to hang him. And what Steban is commanding in his almost imperceptible blink of the eyes is flight. The herd. Rafael has his back to the pen but he knows that the ninety-nine ewes are there behind him, and he doesn’t understand, the sign is too faint, he wants to shout at Steban: “What did you say?”
But there is no time. All of a sudden Mauro turns around and rushes back to the house, slamming the freak surviving door in the midst of the wooden frame, of no use now with the walls destroyed, to go into a room you can step over the wall, and Steban and Rafael see him run behind the beams, stop for only a second, turn around again. Stamping his feet, the half-wit points again to the sheep and screams.
“G-go!”
When he reaches the fence the little brother shouts at the top of his lungs.
“Go do what?”
And suddenly his heart seems to fail him, because he sees Mauro standing framed by the blasted house and there is something on his body like a protuberance, a malformation, a long bone growing, of course he went to get his rifle—and in that very moment Rafael knows that Mauro is going to use it, that this is no longer a time for threats or intimidation, that Steban is shouting in vain to stop him, then falls silent when the weapon slams into his ribs with the twin’s roar billowing out onto the plain, and Steban makes himself as small as he can, on his knees, weeping, his hands on his head, as if that could protect him if Mauro fires.
But Mauro couldn’t care less about the half-wit. It’s Rafael he’s after, and he strides toward him bellowing his name, to give him an idea of what is to come:
“Rafael!!”
Even the dogs have come running. In a flash the little brother understands what Steban was trying to say. He jumps over the fence, into the middle of the herd, and crouches down among them, almost invisible. He runs his hands along their spines, hoping to reassure them, the sheep are startled, go back to grazing the short grass, and Rafael encourages them in a hushed voice: Good girl, fine girl, lovely girl. He weaves his way through the rough fleece, moving away from the edge, where Mauro has come, almost running, the hunter thrilling to the prospect of blood, his rifle on his shoulder, his laugh terrifying.
“You think your critters are gonna save you, little shit?”
A second later he fires. A few yards from Rafael a ewe collapses. All around him is panic. The sheep start running, fleeing, they knock him over, bleating as if they were being flayed alive, a terrifying chorus in the dust, and he follows them, bent double, seeking the shelter of a body, a belly, legs, for a few moments, the time it takes Mauro to reload and fire again.
When the second ewe falls the herd has already clustered in a corner of the pen, and for an instant they freeze in fright. They climb on each other in a desperate attempt to get away from the danger, they have formed a huge mass, stumbling together, rolling on the ground, trampling each other, crying pitifully. Rafael, on his knees, looks at the dead ewes, the color on their wool, a brilliant, festive red, spreading, staining. His eyes are wide open, and in spite of his stupor he can feel the stinging tears, the infinite distress of having kept them behind to shear them, taking them unknowingly to the slaughterhouse; if only he had let them go with the others.
But there is no time for his bitter thoughts: Mauro has again taken aim. With the next shot the little brother feels shards of rock pebbling his legs: he clings instinctively to a creature’s back and it drags him screaming with the herd to the other side of the pen. He sees Mauro leap over the fence, still laughing, take aim, fell a fourth ewe, then another one is lying on the ground, shaking violently, so Rafael shouts: “You bastard, you could at least hit them good!”
And he cannot tear his gaze from the sheep’s convulsions, his ears are ringing with the dying creature’s screams, and the screams of ninety-four other sheep clambering on the fence in hopes of an escape, he cannot tell them apart and he puts his hands over his ears not to hear the sound that penetrates and wounds him inside; then he dries his tears and makes another dash.
Mauro is getting closer. Squinting, Rafael gauges he must be twenty yards away, twenty-five at best. The sheep are scattering as if they have understood that the boy is the target, and he scatters with them, trying to stay with those that are still clustering together, this shield of panicked creatures, the clicking of the rifle, yet another one down, two, maybe ten, and the red stains growing on their flanks, their breath stopped, their eyes staring at nothing, straight ahead.
The next shot hits a ewe that is right next to Rafael and throws her against him, he loses his balance and they fall together, he is crushed by her weight, pinned, and he struggles to get out from under, grabbing her with both hands, blood on his arms and seeping through his shirt, for a moment he thinks it’s his own blood, and then the ewe tips toward him and he sees her wounds and the life gone, he sits up with a cry, and Mauro is there, a few yards away.
It’s crazy how in this moment when he is paralyzed by fear he has time to think of so many things, the mother, the brothers, the horses, the time to tell himself that life is unfair, the older brother with his rifle and he, Rafael, with only a dead sheep to defend himself, he doesn’t let go, and when Mauro fires again, he can feel the bullet penetrate the animal’s body as he squeezes it against his stomach, right in the front, his shield, his armor. He stumbles again with the shock. He is holding the heavy body with one hand, catches himself with the other, recoils, crawling. Mauro bursts out laughing, walks over to him.
“I’m gonna fill that sheep with loads of little holes! And when there’s nothing left but space, the bullet will be for you. Sound good?”
Point-blank. Rafael sees the barrel pointed at him, perhaps six feet away, a barrel that seems to yawn like the gaping mouth of a monster, and for a fraction of a second he thinks Mauro won’t do it, not this close, not an execution. In the instant that follows he knows for sure that the older brother will not stop.
This time, the sheep’s body thuds against him when the bullet enters, and he wonders if it hasn’t gone through, the shock wave shakes hi
m right to his heart, he instinctively gasps for air. Suddenly he can’t hear anymore, just a strange buzzing, and the panicked bleating behind him has vanished; he turns his head slightly and it hurts, but the sheep are still there, he can see their mouths open in mute complaint, why don’t they cry out, and then he looks again at the ewe he is holding, the blood flowing on his hands and the torn flesh, and still his tears and terror.
And even if it does no good, he lifts the inert body up over his chest, burying his face in the creature’s still-warm fleece, like a last caress, they could have been one, and been saved, if life had turned out different, and he will never let go of his sheep, above him Mauro is taking aim, he doesn’t want to look, his arms tighten around the animal, he hears only the clicking of the rifle, and the falling of bodies.
It’s the dog he sees first when he opens his eyes. How much time has gone by, he couldn’t say. It’s hard to come back to the world, because his face is swollen; don’t move, and his head pounding, it takes him a while, to get used to the light, regain consciousness, somewhat—and that is when the dog appears in his left eye, since the other eye won’t open.
Rafael holds out his arm, not far, too painful. Three comes closer.
“No,” says Steban’s voice, somewhere.
The dog stops, uncertain. Then the little brother moves a finger, just one finger in a sign of prayer, and the dog springs forward, comes to sniff his hand and lick it, and still right up against him, the blood on the dead ewe.
Nothing But Dust Page 26