During that entire first journey I didn’t argue about anything: I was simply astonished by everything, or did my best to appear astonished, even on the few occasions when I wasn’t. It was the first journey; I knew full well that all journeys come to an end, and maybe this experience of time as finite is what lends light and texture to every living moment, knowing that you have to go back home, that you’re in a foreign land. I watched hungrily, I collected images, I tried to be alert to everything. I felt things acutely; my whole body, my whole skin was completely alive as if it was made of hunting animals, of felines, of the pumas that we were afraid to meet in the desert. I was awake and aware that life has a perimeter, almost as if I could see it. And in some ways I could: I didn’t think too much about death back then, even though we were furrowing a land that seemed to flower with bones every time it rained, but I still felt my body was dirty from my life before Estreya, Liz and the wagon. Just putting one of my feet down on the ground was enough for me to be overcome by the smell of wet earth, I was deafened by the scuffling of the cuys, every gust of wind made me shiver, I was caressed by the fragrance of the mint that grew among the weeds and of the small orange and purple flowers strung together in the mud, and I was stung by the prickly thistles. Liz’s cooking made my mouth water – she artfully managed to make hearty breakfasts in the ovens dug out of the earth: scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, orange juice till the oranges ran out, tea, fried tomatoes, beans. And Liz’s body held me like the sun does a sunflower, I would have found it hard to keep my head upright on my shoulders if she had stopped looking at me. I felt the force of this attraction like a gravitational pull, that force that allows us to stand. She was my North and I was the quivering needle on a compass: my whole body was pulled towards her, dwarfed by the strength of my desires. It was under the sway of that force that I began to feel, and now I think perhaps it’s always that way, that you feel the world through others, through your bonds with others. I felt alive, as fierce as a herd of predators, and as loving as Estreya, who celebrates every morning and every encounter as if taken by surprise, as if he knew it could have been otherwise. My little dog knows that chance and death are more dangerous than gunpowder; he knows they can strike with the force of a sudden storm.
British Science
Suddenly everything goes still, the wide pastures – that usually ripple and wave – stop their swaying, a heavy silence descends over everything, a black thunder cloud that had seemed far off is right overhead, imminent in an instant, billowing, swollen, whorls of mottled grey. Although its texture might appear soft to the eyes of those of us on the ground below, in the short time it would take us to get the jerky into the wagon, a torrent of rain would pour down on us, and violent lightning would flash, striking trees and sometimes animals. Liz kept a scientific object in the wagon called a Franklin rod. When a storm broke she would run and stick one end on the roof and poke the other into the mud. It worked. Lightning could strike like bombs all around us and we were safe like under an umbrella. I loved umbrellas: there were two in the wagon. One got lost during one of my experiments. I’d wanted to try and use it against the wind, and before that I’d used it as a bag to carry grass to my cow, the one I started milking when Rosario arrived. I’d also used it as a vessel: I’d tried to fill it with water to see if it would work as a container. Our gaucho had woven a little straw roof over the wagon seat and he sheltered there with Estreya whenever it rained, when the sky was a bulging mass of different greys, the thick light livid and sickly, and everything blue became almost black, like it was conspiring to flatten us. Liz and I would scramble inside, sodden, our clothes stuck to our bodies, hair dripping down our faces, feet swimming around in our shoes. We rarely had time to find the lamps. Before the storm, what hung in the air, and even the air itself, seemed to be the long inhalation of the bellows of a machine priming itself for an explosion, or the stampede of a herd of captive beasts. Invariably after the stillness a commotion would begin. Everything yielded to the violence of the wind that took advantage of the sudden darkness to lash the world, a world barely visible in the metallic flashes that struck everything that stood upright, drawing a new line from the lines in the sky down to the earth: a line making everything crack, split and fly off in fury, as if reluctantly snatched from stillness. Because stillness is the natural state of the pampa; activity takes place mainly below ground, in that humus that is both substance and a continent, that is more womb than anything else. Argentina is a land of botanical adventure; the most important thing that happens there happens to the seed, it happens unseen and unheard, it happens in that primordial mud from which we come and to which we surely go: the seed down in the darkness is swollen with moisture, dodging cuys and vizcachas it sprouts a stem, it grows a green leaf, it pushes its way through the bowels of the earth, it emerges under orders from its two seed-leaves until it manages to get enough energy from the sun and water so it doesn’t need those leaves any more, and right then and there a cow appears and gobbles up that little blade of grass that was born in the ground and the cow reproduces, and slowly and surely multiplies into generations of animals that will end up, almost all of them, being slaughtered. Their blood will fall to the earth where the seeds lie, and their bones will make a delicious skeleton for the caranchos and worms, and their flesh will be refrigerated and shipped to Great Britain, another vein, bloody and frozen, in this network of veins that runs from all over the world to the voracious heart of the Empire. Argentina plays the part of the womb in all this. Unseen and unheard processes, like I said, invisible, connected to the magma of all beginnings and all endings. Great Britain is a whole other story. It is the isle of iron and steam, of know-how, it is the island built on the work of men, not on the work of the soil and animal flesh.
Flesh, the flesh is so weak, so prone to violent twists of fate, like the storms that came upon us almost without warning in the desert. Both of us would get in the wagon and take off our clothes, dry ourselves with those towels from the mills of Lancashire, that before that had come from the Mississippi Delta and from the cracks of the whip on the backs of black people in the United States; almost everything that I touched knew more about the world than I did, and was new to me. The thick towels with their soft threads, that wrapped and enfolded us, and then a nightgown and woolly blankets and the cow hides, and the glow of a little tallow candle; the dim brownish yellow light streaked silver by flashes of lightning and the sound of the wind and rain. I would lean against Liz and she would read aloud. On one of those nights, the very first stormy night I think, though all my memories of that journey are tinged with the aura of newness and it can’t really have been a succession of first times; though perhaps it was, and I was reborn in the same pampa where I’d been born fourteen or fifteen years before, in any case, that night the wagon shook in the storm and Liz began to read Frankenstein, a story about a monster made of corpses and lightning. He was a poor monster with no father or mother, a poor forsaken monster made by British science with lightning, just like the lightning that was striking like bombs all around us right then, and which, steered by an apparatus like our Franklin rod, was called electricity. I felt a new kind of terror that night. Estreya smelt it, he jumped into the wagon and began licking my face. Rosario asked what was going on; being a tracker he too could smell the fear. I told him the story of the monster and he began shouting from outside the wagon that it couldn’t be true, that what Liz had read to me was pure lies, that only God could create life, not some gringo with a flash of lightning. But if it wasn’t a load of old cobblers, then you could probably make new animals too. Liz invited him in and poured three whiskies, then three more, and then three more again. Rosario, by then I was calling him Rosa and he was Rose to Liz, dreamt up a cow with the legs of a ñandú and the head of a puma, so that it could defend itself or at least run away. Sheep with duck feet so that they could cross rivers without too much trouble. Horses that grew wool for the winter. Cow trees. Like sheep trees, said Liz: when cotton –
the same as in the towels – was first brought to Europe, people thought that sheep sprouted in gigantic trees on branches so strong and flexible that the hanging fruit could merrily nibble the grass. ‘More cobblers, like that gaucho made of dead men and lightning,’ concluded Rosario in delight just before he nodded off. Liz let him sleep inside, as well as Estreya, who had got into bed with us. She gave me a kiss on the forehead. I hugged her and fell asleep wondering if dragons weren’t also animals made by British scientific experiments with electricity and promising myself that I would do everything I could to find out. I fell asleep rather proud of my scientific curiosity, me, who until then couldn’t tell Sunday from Wednesday or January from July. I’d rarely been so happy in my life.
Suspended in the Air
When I woke up late, startled by so much light – I was usually up and about before dawn – the wagon was humid, hot as an oven, and, unusually, three or four flies were buzzing around and landing on my face. I shooed them away. The electric monsters had given me nightmares: sheep with red eyes shooting lightning bolts at me and baring their hyena-teeth. The leader of the flock, a black sheep with blue horns and countless teeth, its mouth like a forest of white knives, came towards me and just as it opened up its jaws to swallow me I woke up. I was terrified, my heart was beating so loud I thought everyone would hear it. But no. Rosa was snoring loudly, Liz more softly. Only Estreya noticed, he rolled onto me and went back to sleep. His gentle breathing and the rhythm of his little heart on top of mine gradually spread to me, and I calmed down. I lay there a while listening to the drops of rain on the cover of the wagon. The sheep had reminded me how terrified I was of having to return to my old life and it made me think about La Negra. The woman who raised me was every bit as vicious, despite having no horns and practically no teeth. She was born furious. She used to whip me or beat me with a stick on a daily basis, whether or not I’d been disobedient. My back still bears the scars. How did I end up in her hands? I asked myself all over again. What had happened to my mother and father? There’s always a mother and a father, except in Frankenstein’s case. And I just lay there completely amazed at myself: why had it never occurred to me to look for them? When I was really little La Negra told me that she’d found me in a trunk by her door. She had a shiny wooden trunk in the house that was much nicer than anything else in the entire settlement. I would climb into it along with some beef jerky and water, close the lid, and stay in there nice and still, until even my breath slowed. And there I would wait. I did the closest thing I knew to praying: I talked to that God I’d heard a bit about and I would ask him to get me out of there. I repeated this prayer: ‘Get me out of here, please, Mister God; get me out of here Mister God, please; please Mister God, Mister God our Father, get me out of here.’ Or I’d convince myself that the trunk was my house and that my parents would come back to find me and they’d look for me inside it, and if I wasn’t there they might go away again. So I got inside it whenever I got the chance, every time El Negro and La Negra weren’t paying attention, every time they got to drinking caña at the general store and collapsed in a drunken heap. Whenever she found me there, La Negra would pull me out by my hair and tan my hide for being lazy, as she saw it. When I got a bit bigger I held on to my fantasy: La Negra would laugh at me saying that my mother must be one of those foreign women who ended up working as whores for the estancia bosses. That night, with Estreya on top of me, Liz next to me, and Rosa a few yards away, so far away from there, I asked myself if God had heard my crying, the way I used to cry in the days when I still cried: crying my eyes out completely silently. My tears were like the swollen rivers back there: pure silent water. I thought about the whole boss’s whore thing. It had never occurred to me: I might be a boss’s daughter. I decided I’d look into that first, and then into the dragon question. I was learning: Liz had told me that order is essential and you should take things one at a time. I fell peacefully asleep.
There was still a bit of hot tea left when I climbed out of the wagon. Rosa was good with fires: there wasn’t a dry branch, or dry anything, for miles around. And one of the wagon wheels was stuck two or three feet down in the mud: it had come off the terra firma of the Indian trail. There was boundless life in the desert; a world of burrows lay under the ground, a labyrinth of deep and shallow tunnels, sometimes parallel, sometimes crossing. Up until more or less the time of the journey that I’m telling you about, that vast territory was uncultivated, but maybe because of how well these underground tunnels ventilated the roots of everything planted there, it later produced fabulous harvests.
Vizcachas are hardworking animals that use their little paws like human hands and dig deep store cupboards for their provisions: tender shoots, grass, roots, seeds, any fruit they happen to find. When one of these stores is underneath a cuy burrow an enormous cross shape forms that, in the unlikely event of a wagon going over it, ends up collapsing and the wagon falls into a muddy pit of squashed baby cuy guts. That noon you could see the poor creatures swimming in their flooded burrows, carrying in their teeth the young who had survived. Back and forth they went, trying to save them. The muddy landscape stretched out showing its innards, its network of tunnels and caves, some deep, some not so deep, some straight, some crooked, all criss-crossing one another. Every step was a struggle, you had to haul your feet out of the mud.
Liz and Rosa were exhausted: we wouldn’t be able to get going again until the road dried up a bit, the cattle were bellowing as they sank into the mud, even the horses, usually so bold, hung back, finding their footing. And we were all getting bitten by horse flies. But birds had appeared: filling the sky with sound, bathing noisily in the pools of water, as if they were born from water, as if their life was in waiting until they got wet, as if somehow their lives were part of the cycle of seeds. And the cicadas, the frogs and the toads chirruped and croaked in chorus, thanking the sky for their rainbath. Bees hung in the steam rising from the sun-warmed mud. They didn’t go anywhere, just stayed buzzing, suspended in the air. Summer was bursting forth.
We could see an ombú in the distance and something that looked like a stream a bit further on. Having an order of priority, father-dragons, made me clear-headed: I suggested we wash, eat, have a siesta under the ombú and then set off at dusk. It was quite feasible: the Indian trail seemed solid enough, we just had to be on the look-out. First we gathered grass. Lots, all soggy, then we chopped it up with the machete and fed it to the cows who were going crazy in the mud; they’d need energy to set off in a few hours’ time. Afterwards we set up under the tree, brewed more tea, and Liz produced a honey cake; there was a whole world inside that wagon, it seemed limitless, and we had the longest breakfast I’d ever had. I told them my plans. The one about the dragon made Liz laugh, but tracking down my father who might be a landowner seemed sensible to her: that kind of thing goes on all the time, she told me. She reeled off lots of examples, and ended up going back to the wagon to look for a book. She brought out Oliver Twist and began reading it out: he was an English orphan whose luck changed when he found his family. You could tell he was of high birth from his impeccable morals, she said. I would find my family. Or maybe I’d already found it. That’s right, Liz said to me, stroking my hair, but there is another one: your birth family. I still haven’t found that one.
The Adventures of China Iron Page 4
