The Adventures of China Iron

by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

  Everything Covered Me like a Second Skin

  Dear old Estreya, sparky and with a blue sheen to his black fur, was no longer new to the world and was learning nearly as much as me. We were growing up together: when we left, he only came up to my knee, and me, up to Liz’s shoulder. When we arrived, and we didn’t know we were arriving, he reached my waist and I was nearly as tall as Liz. I remember him as a puppy, sitting up straight like a gentleman with his ears down, eyes intent, and nose wet, even now he’s touchingly innocent when he trusts in the results of his good manners. I lived in a similar innocence, though I was beginning to feel a new fear. While I used to be afraid that there was nothing to life but La Negra, Fierro, and our ramshackle hut, now I feared the end of our journey, of the wagon, the smell of lavender, the shape of my first letters, the porcelain, the shoes with heels and laces, and all the words in two languages. I dreaded seeing anger on Liz’s face, or glimpsing something undefined and ghostly hiding behind a sand dune – sand dunes were starting to appear – or between the roots of an ombú tree, or out there in the dark amongst the creatures whose noises broke the silence. The creatures of the pampas are nocturnal, they come out of their tunnels and caves as darkness falls. I was afraid that something would send me back to my old hut and to my life as a china.

  I had gone from the raw to the cooked: the leather of my new boots was just as much leather as the leather on Fierro’s saddle, but it wasn’t the same kind of leather. The leather of the shoes Liz gave me was burgundy, glossy and supple, and it fitted my feet like a second skin. It wasn’t just the shoes and the leather: it was the cotton sheets, my silk petticoat from China – the real China where the girls really are chinas – the jerseys and the wool: everything covered me like a second skin. Everything was smooth and warm and caressed me and every step filled me with happiness, every morning when I put on my petticoat and the dress and jersey on top, I felt that at last I was complete in the world, as if up till then I’d been naked, flayed even. Only at that point did it hit me. The pain of being left to fend for myself at the mercy of the elements, before being dressed in these fabrics. I felt a violent passion for my clothes, my dog, my friend, a love which was as much fear as happiness, fear that they’d get broken, that I’d lose them, a love which swelled up and made me laugh till I could scarcely breathe, a heart-stopping love which came out in over-protectiveness towards the dog, the woman and my clothes, a love that watched over them with a shotgun. I was as happy as I was unhappy and that was more than I’d ever felt before.

  I wore wool a lot because we set off at the beginning of spring and it was still quite cold. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet but we were heading towards Indian Territory, to the desert.

  Under the British Empire

  One rainy dawn I put on my first ever raincoat. ‘The subjects of the British Empire have appropriate etiquette for all occasions’, Liz explained, outlining their manners and mountain ranges, their climates, deserts and forests. The details of all the clothing in the Empire built the world for me, a world that was round not flat. I’d never thought about it till then, my world map hardly stretched beyond the pampas and a few vague notions: Indian Territory, Buenos Aires, a watery abyss and then Europe, with Spain at the bottom and up there the British Isles, the cradle of men and weapons. This ball-shaped world came to life through Liz’s stories, half in Spanish, half in English. She started populating it with sacred cows, soft saris, hot Indian curry, African tribesmen with painted faces, elephants with tusks the length of a small tree, huge eggs laid by ostriches, the larger cousins of our ñandús, Chinese paddy fields, curly-roofed pagodas and coolie hats pointing up to the sky. As we travelled I began to understand some of these things, but the rest I understood much later, over the course of all the time we spent together. I found it hard to reconcile myself to the idea that we were on the bottom half of a globe when we seemed to be on the top, but no, Liz was sure that Great Britain was on top. How could that be? It was quite plain that your feet were on the ground wherever you were, even in the land of pygmies, gorillas and diamonds (hard transparent stones that are wrenched from deep inside rocks). She insisted that on top was Great Britain, the land where machines moved by themselves with burning wood as though movement was a huge bonfire, or as if the pieces of burning wood were horses. Or oxen, like ours, the four strong, docile oxen who pulled the wagon which enfolded me just like the silk petticoat and the awning proofed with wax that at the end of the day was just tallow from a cow, though it had previously been filtered many times through sandalwood and smelled like a heady flower, like a laudanum flower, I mean, like a drug, just like opium must smell. Opium was like caña but much stronger than our drink, she explained to me, and so many people succumbed to it in the North African heat, where men swathe their heads in a few metres of cloth for a hat, and women are covered from head to toe. The raincoat with its eastern smells covered me. The wagon, waxed like the raincoat and smelling the same, covered us. All three of us – not just me, but Estreya, who travelled on Liz’s lap to begin with, while I took the reins, and Liz herself. It was like we were secreting fine threads to make a shell or carapace, woven together like a kind of house made not from spider’s silk, straw, mud or the leathery shell of a crab, but gradually formed from the loops of words and gestures. From Liz’s story and my care for each of our possessions, a space was emerging. One that was ours, with the wagon which went steadily forward, with that empty land which was becoming as flat as it seems to those who have known hills and mountains. The vastness of the pampas was becoming flatter to me with every new tale of bustling London’s smoky sprawl; the desert horizon widened against a backdrop of African jungles; the prickly grass, the waving grass and the scrubby bushes became squat in contrast to the forests of Europe; these rivers without banks paled against her English rivers flanked by red-brick houses, so very different to our rivers bordered by mud and with nothing around but reeds, rushes, herons and flamingos, Liz’s favourites – luckily she likes the strong colours of the pampas . She said that everything there was shades of brown against the endlessly pale and transparent blue of the sky, except when the dust rose, or when different hues of green appeared, the young wheat springing green and glorious after summer rain, only matched, we thought then, by the green and pleasant fields of England.

  You only get the other colours in the sky at dawn or dusk, or in the flamingos who are always colourful. It was raining again and light was reflected on all living things, and on the dead, just the odd cow bone at that stage. The earth was burnished copper and our protective shell was growing around us, keeping the three of us warm. We were sustained by Liz’s words, Estreya’s pink tongue, and my rapture at being there, calm as a well-fed animal in the sun.

  Calm, but slightly confused: according to Liz, the earth was a round ball, and we were at the bottom. Maybe there was something about a stone in the North that pulled everything towards it, above Great Britain, because there was something above England, above everything, Liz explained, where the planet’s hat would be if the planet was a head, a head without a neck. What, with its head chopped off? No, just a round head without a body. Just a head, did I understand? No I didn’t; I’d never seen a head without a body. No, of course not, it was just an example. An example, she explained to me, was something you said to make an idea clear. But you don’t get heads without bodies, I insisted, so what can it be an example of, if it doesn’t exist? An example of things that don’t exist, but you’re right, she said, and she went back to talking about the planet, and this time she used the example of a little orange, which made it much easier for me to imagine: it clearly has a top, where the stalk connects it to the tree, and a bottom. And which tree does the earth hang from? It doesn’t. So the orange didn’t help me much either. Anyhow, I began thinking that on the top half of the planet, not just in England, things grew upwards more easily. Apparently there were hills and mountains and it was full of tall trees as high as several men on top of each other. How many m
en? The highest trees would be ten or fifteen men high. Do they look like ombús? A bit, but the trees there are taller than they are wide, elongated; the ombú is squat, as if gravity was stronger in the bottom half of the planet and everything was flattened or forced underground. Gravity was what made things fall down. So how come it didn’t squash us all – me, Liz, Estreya, the wagon, the oxen, mules, cows and horses?

  That night, Liz made a stew out of an armadillo that I’d caught and butchered. She cooked the poor creature in its own shell. She added ingredients that I was beginning to recognise; a mixture of onion, garlic and ginger with cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, chilli pepper, peppercorns, cumin and mustard seeds. Everything bubbled away in the shell, and when it was done, Estreya and I had our first taste of spicy food. Everything we were experiencing was new to us; ideas, sensations and even our taste buds were expanding under the British Empire.

  Dragons and My Pampa All Mixed Up Together

  While the land grew into a whole globe in front of me, another world took shape on the wagon. Me, Liz and Estreya were a trinity, within a rectangle starting from the oxen, one line along the roof, another at the trunk to the rear of the wagon and one running along the ground.

  ‘Only here in the pampa could a wagon create a bird’s-eye view’, observed Liz and so I found out what perspective was and noted that indeed, the few animals that stand out on the plains – hares, cuys and armadillos, the flamingos in the lagoons, herons, the occasional puma if we managed to see one – are always alert and quick but they take fright at just about everything. Anyway, the fauna of the flat pampas seemed to be stuck to the ground. The animals didn’t stretch up like giraffes, those amiable-looking, long-necked animals that eat from the tops of trees; nor did they extend themselves like gigantic elephants, using their trunks like hands. From up high or from down low the world looked different; it also looked different from behind a turning wagon wheel or from the highest branches of an ombú. In those days of discovery I tried looking from lots of different angles: I walked on all fours seeing what Estreya saw, the pasture, the creepy crawlies that went about on the surface of the earth, cows’ udders, Liz’s hands, her face, food on plates, and everything that moved. I leant my head on the heads of the oxen and I put my hands next to my eyes and I saw what they saw, only what was right in front of them, the cattle track and the uncertain horizon they strove to reach. I also stood on my hands, seeing first feet and knees and wheels and hooves and then what was above them. And I began to see other perspectives: the Queen of England – a rich, powerful woman who owned millions of people’s lives, but who was sick and tired of jewels and of meals in palaces built where she was monarch of all she surveyed – didn’t see the world in the same way as, for example, a gaucho in his hovel with his leather hides who burns dung to keep warm. For the Queen, the world was a sphere filled with riches belonging to her, and that she could order to be extracted from anywhere; for the gaucho, the world was a flat surface where you galloped about rounding up cows, cutting the throats of your enemies before they cut your own throat, or fleeing conscription and battles. I took over the cooking some nights so that Liz could draw all the things I couldn’t quite imagine from her descriptions: I had my special loves. I loved the tiger, like a giant orange stripy puma, I loved the hippopotamus, an animal with an enormous mouth and the square teeth of a child, a kind of wagon with hard skin and four fat short legs, a creature that likes to live inside rivers, and I loved zebras, those African horses with stripes. But the dragon aroused such passion in me, that beautiful beast made from horrible beasts: the eyes of a locust, the horns of a zebu, the snout of an ox, the nose of a dog, the whiskers of a catfish, the shaggy mane of a ñandú, the tail of a viper, the scales of a fish, the claws of a gigantic chimango, and with potent phlegm made of fire. The dragon was an animal that I liked to imagine flying above our heads and over our roof like a guardian angel: why shouldn’t a wagon be a house protected by a dragon? Liz liked to captivate me, she needed my awe-struck gaze, my laughter, the joy that her tales and her exquisite drawings, so beautifully precise, gave me. This I understood when I saw myself drawn by her, looking just like what I saw every morning in the looking glass, but made of lines, without colour. She told me the story of the dragon one night, while I was grilling some tararira fish I had just caught. About how the first four dragons had been born in the China Sea, and how they played around flying and swimming and breathing fire all the time; about how one day they felt sorry that men were going hungry, and about how they flew to see the Emperor of the Sky who was listening to a fairy orchestra in his jade palace. About how he turned to them, furious at having been interrupted, and although he promised rain, the rain never came; about how the four dragons then decided to take water to spit on the earth, about how the emperor got angry, about how he buried them under rocks as enormous as everything we could see as far as the horizon; about how the dragons cried and cried until they turned to water and formed the four rivers of China that were called the Long River, the Yellow River, the Black River and the Pearl River, because those were the dragon’s names.

  I slept like a baby once Liz had explained to me what jade, fairies and an emperor were, and what the fire was that came out of the insides of those good animals who were turned to water. I put the shotgun away, dragons and my pampa all mixed up together, all the while asking myself if it was thanks to the dragons that the whole earth shone when the river burst its banks.

  At the Mercy of the Caranchos

  It only took a few days of wagon, dust and stories for us to become a family. Entwined in our burgeoning love we laughed at old fears of being abandoned, of being defeated, of falling to the ground without the strength to get up, stuck to the ground and left at the mercy of the caranchos, of being reduced to what we are: a structure of bones and minerals, like stones. Weaving ourselves as one, we were slow to notice that the near nothingness we were crossing was starting to look like an abandoned burial ground; we ploughed on blithely, as if we were travelling through paradise, though maybe I’m wrong, maybe paradise isn’t a place to travel through, it’s simply a place to be. Where would one want to go from here?

  Days of going more or less in a straight line had passed without us seeing a single cow, Indian, white man, or horse. Weeks of flat days as if there was nothing in the world but weeds, one or two little mules, and the caranchos. Occasionally at night a hare would be dazzled by the light from our campfire and Estreya would give chase and sometimes catch it. That and the earth pearled with bones when the wind or rain came. The dust was merciful, covering everything including the skeletons lying by the wayside; little by little it covered them leaving faint relief carvings, imperceptible burial mounds, little more than oversized ant hills, but also teeming with life, the life of worms born in dead flesh.

  Until the rain came again and once more we’d see a cemetery of Indian braves at our feet: we could make them out because they were one with their weapons and animals, as if the heroic skeletons of the pampas were centaur fossils, said Liz. I didn’t know what a centaur was and I definitely didn’t know that Indians could be brave. I think it was with that story and that discussion that we reached the third week of our journey. We rested, we washed again, this time in an almost crystalline river with just a pair of herons for company. Nor did I know what a desert was, even though I realised that so much emptiness couldn’t have been the natural state of this pampa. I didn’t know that a desert was exactly that, a territory with no population, no trees, no birds, without almost any sign of life in the day except for us. I thought desert was the name of the place where nobody lived but Indians. Either way, the desert was getting more and more frightening; we started having nightmares, sometimes even in the daytime. I began writing in order to fend off these nightmares. Liz would teach me my letters and tell me what prayer to say at bedtime. I still know some. ‘Dear Lord, please send us un amigo. And save us from the quagholes’.

  And if trust in our prayers wasn’t enough to send
us off to sleep, Liz and I would drink a whisky, that elixir of life in Britain, water from Scotland’s water and above all, she explained to me, earth from Scotland’s earth, which turned barley into this nectar. They soaked the grain in hot water and left it till it sprouted. Then they dried it using a smoke made with tree branches, with sticks and sometimes with peat, a kind of earth made of plants that haven’t become earth yet. We could make whisky. We really could: we just had to get some grain, some oak barrels and funnels, some stills with long iron tubes. The snag is how long you have to wait: it takes whisky twelve years in the barrels before it’s ready. I liked whisky and I also liked the fact that I liked it: I wanted to be British too.

  Lost in Thought, into the Muck I Sank

  I told Liz, redheaded Liz – my new friend, my first ever – about it all, about the second beginning of my life, the only beginning that matters to me. The other one I don’t remember, but if I do, I forget all about it again thanks to the whisky, my new languages, the river, the voices from my house, my dog, the rain and the bees. The river devoured that past but a quaghole could have swallowed it whole. I’d heard of wagons, armies, mules, cities made of stone, silver and gold, Spanish galleons full of men armed with arquebuses, I’d heard of so many things that the mud could swallow. That’s why the Indians walked so lightly and didn’t dare put anything other than tents on the ground and didn’t use furniture other than sheepskins and animal hides, or so I thought. Anyway, we had to follow the Indian trail, so sure was Liz that her estancia lay in the direction of the Indian hordes. Inside her wagon, already our wagon by then, she had a compass and a great big map all folded up on itself: it showed the continents, seas, rivers, the mountains in brown, and the plains like my pampa in green. Not a single route marked in the direction we were heading. That was what the compass was for, to know where the North is, that icy land, the hat on top of the planet, pulling like a magnet, which is a piece of metal that attracts other pieces so much that they stick together. Not long after that, during our long spell in the desert, I learned it was called a brújula in my language. We’re like the children of Israel, Liz would say, but instead of raining down manna on us, every so often God makes cuys and armadillos appear from under our feet. They did spring from the ground, she was right, not thanks to any miracle, but because I smoked them out of their burrows. After giving them a sharp whack with a stick, and without looking into their little eyes, so like ours, I dispatched the poor things straight onto the grill. Having just found out about the spherical nature of the world, I reckoned the animals must come out of the ground because in the South, Jehovah sends us food from below, rather than making it fall from the heavens via miracles and gravity. If you really think about it, it’s even more miraculous the way our food pops out of the earth and offers itself to us, defying gravity. Though, to be fair, it didn’t actually offer itself to us. They kicked, squealed, and bit us, the little varmints, never giving themselves up or giving in.