The Adventures of China Iron

by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

  Most Were Naked and Beautiful

  That’s how they first glimpsed us, a procession led by a wagon carrying three people – a woman, a man and a two-spirit – singing in a strange language, and accompanied by a little black dog with amber eyes who barked along to the song, almost always in the right key; then came hundreds of cows marching and dancing along in quite a disorganised fashion but always managing somehow to keep the wagon in the middle, the youngest cows trotting happily onwards, butting one another occasionally; five beautiful horses free to gallop every which way only to come straight back to the cows and then run off again; six gentle oxen and some hens clucking in a cage at the back of the wagon. Above the cage was a gadget our observers didn’t recognise and they feared was a weapon – though such a gay procession didn’t tally with their idea of the army; they were already familiar with the stern discipline of soldiers, their dry cruelty, the humiliation born of hierarchy.

  They followed us for a couple of days and we noticed straight away. Estreya barked at the trees, wagging his tail, incapable as my dog is of imagining humans offering anything other than shelter, food and play; Rosa noticed because he’s a tracker and he knows about these things; Liz and I picked up on the Indians from Estreya and Rosa’s behaviour but we didn’t allow ourselves to get spooked. We just kept on drinking the wine and singing, singing now to the eyes we thought we could make out in every tree; there were just three of us, we had to keep going, we could neither attack nor defend ourselves. We could only sing.

  The desert – I had always believed that it was the land of the Indians, of the unseen people who were now watching us – was like a paradise. Or what I would call a paradise: the lagoons down yonder and the lagoons up over there were, curiously, higher up than some dry areas, and there were so many trees, in some places there was nothing but trees. The birds all sang at full screech: I don’t know why birds screech nor am I sure that they really sing, the only animal I can safely say knows how to sing is my Estreya, but then what are the birds doing when they screech? They’re calling out to other birds, showing their charms so they can make more birds. Life has a complex mechanism of self-perpetuation, cruel life employs beauty as a way to make us and to kill us, that’s how it renews itself over and over again. The birds flew and it was a dance and it was also their way of finding food: thus the herons launched themselves into the water to swallow fish to keep themselves alive and to make more herons. Whether it was the wine, or the renewed freedom of having left the estancia, or both, I’d gone all contemplative. We hadn’t caught up with our gauchos but we weren’t alarmed because they were on horseback and had a huge advantage over us. They’d be leagues ahead until they stopped long enough for us to catch up. What we were nervous about was encountering the Indians.

  We heard them first and then we smelt them. They were singing too and they were eating asado: that aroma guided us towards a plain between two mountains, to the banks of a sky-blue lagoon, a flowery meadow, and there they were, some armed and in soldiers’ uniforms but ill-fitting ones, as if they had pulled their trousers over their heads and wore their hats over their private parts. Most were naked and beautiful: they were tall with broad shoulders and strong jaws, eyes shining as if continually lit by the power of the noonday sun, they had very dark shiny skin smeared with grease, and painted with white drawings like ghosts – they made the paint out of powdered bones – and wore headdresses made from flowers or feathers or a combination of the two, and seemed not to choose these adornments according to sex like we would do. They were gathered around fires in little groups, eating with knives and their fingers, when they smiled their teeth were as white as the paint that covered parts of their beautiful bodies, and there were so many of them; their tents were spread out all around, the tents also glistened from the same fat as they used on their skin and which was good for lots of things, like almost everything the Indians had. We had arrived on a sacred day when they were celebrating the bounties of summer, the summer that brought the beauty of flowers and animals and the generosity of the earth that gave forth its fruits, requiring no work beyond reaching a hand towards the trees, or snaring one of the many little creatures running around on the ground, or flashing a spear at the fish and the birds. That’s how we saw them as we got near without knowing where to stop, no tent looked any more important than the rest. Perhaps we would stop at the first line of tents and then keep walking; we were just deciding what to do when they began to look at us and a group came forward. It was some of the naked ones who took the lead, not their warriors.

  Time passed, probably just a twinkling, but it seemed longer due to a curious stillness, a stillness in which we all just looked; us at them and them at us, our cows at their cows, my dog at their dogs, the horses at everyone. Up until the naked people ahead of the other naked ones began to sing and walk forward: we did the same thing, singing as well, we walked with open arms, we did everything they did and we ended up merging with these Indians of pure splendour who smelled of fat and chañar trees in bloom and lavender, because that is what they put in the fat they used, so when I embraced Kaukalitrán I sank even deeper into the forest that is Indian Territory. Into the summertime I sank. Into the berries bursting red and replete from the bushes. Into the mushrooms growing in the shade of the trees. Into every single tree I sank. And I became aware of the whims of my heart, the different appetites my body could have: I wanted to be both the berry and the mouth biting into it.

  I didn’t have to wait long for my wish to be granted. The hug was followed by kisses, I felt Kaukalitrán pushing herself and her savage saliva into my mouth, she tasted of wild mint, ñandú leg, puma, ombú, the smoke of sweet daisies, caña and something bitter that I couldn’t quite identify. ‘Welcome to our celebration, my dear English girl-boy,’ she said when we paused for breath. They spoke to us in perfect Spanish, they talked like Hernández because they’d learnt the language from their grandparents who had learnt it on the estancia of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the Restorer of Laws who loved acting like royalty, and who had taken the eldest sons of the Indian chiefs hostage as a guarantee in a peace treaty. Or the ones he believed to be the chiefs, because the Selk’nam Nation changed chiefs continually and amicably, only occasionally causing squabbles that were resolved by the council of women elders or – if their advice was insufficient – by the clean strike of a spear. Rosas had carried off the first-born of the peacemakers. Our Indians weren’t Selk’nam any more, they had mixed with the Tehuelche and quite a few Winkas, as they called the white man, but they had chosen to remember their most southerly forefathers. They told us that they were the desert and that they welcomed us with open arms. That they had been watching us approach for three days and that we should drink and eat and dance in their celebration of summer. Kaukalitrán said that to me, Catriel said it to Liz, and Millaray to Rosa. They said that looking into our eyes, never letting go of our hands, and that’s how they led us to the lagoon they called Kutral-Có, the Water of Fire, and we would soon know why. The six of us sat on a tree trunk and they ate the golden cap of a thin-stemmed mushroom and offered some to us. We also ate bitter fruits. No one spoke for a while until Kaukalitrán made a gesture that seemed to take in the whole lagoon, the other two began laughing and the flamingos rose up into a single pink stain against the blue sky, revealing the water, which didn’t know what colour to be amid all the commotion. The indecision of the water made me giggle, shyly at first, and then helplessly till I was in stitches: Kutral-Có doesn’t know what colour to be, it’s alive, the lagoon is an animal, look Estreya, I called my dog over, our sister the lake can’t make her mind up! Look Kaukalitrán, look how my Estreya has the sun inside him! Look Liz, look what a beautiful puma Kaukalitrán is! Watch me run on my two ñandú feet, look how no one can catch me, Rosa, not even you with your lightning young horses. Look puma, see me outrun you! Come on Kauka, I want to swim. I took off my clothes and let myself be led by Kauka who knew the mud around her lagoon, Kutral-Có, where they celebra
ted summer every year, but I didn’t feel any mud; I knew that I was stepping on the tongue of the animal I hadn’t known was an animal, the bottom and the edges are the lagoon’s tongue, the water is its body, and its body is full of stones and plants and fish and bits of tree. When Kauka and I got into its body we became fish, I turned silvery and slender like a surubí fish and like a surubí I grew a little beard which I smoothed against Kauka’s body, which had become flat and wide and lead-grey like a pacú fish and I licked her golden pacú tummy while she floated in the water which had finally made its mind up; it was purple now with brownish scales around the brown of its tongue. I licked the golden tummy of my pacú fish that grew thinner and took on tiger stripes and, now a tararira fish, nibbled at me like I was a fish hook, she nibbled at me and just stayed there, hanging from me, my fish lady. I could see Liz on the tree trunk in the distance, her red hair aflame. She was naked too and they were painting her with brown paint; I saw her become a chestnut foal. Although I’d already seen her like that, I’d never seen her that way naked in the arms of another, nor had I seen myself naked in the middle of the body of a lagoon and in the arms of a tararira, and this new perspective made me laugh, Kauka laughed too, and we drifted apart as if our sexual embrace had dissolved in the water. We swam ashore. I wanted to be my real self too, I wanted my skin to be painted with the image that would lay me bare, I was a tigress tararira fish as well, or Kauka was. I decided I didn’t care which and I lay down on the grass and let my body be painted by one of the machi, who had seen my tararira soul, and I saw Liz as a foal again and I kissed her on the back and Liz spoke to me in English saying tigress, my tigress, my mermaid, my girl, my good boy, my white gaucho girl, and my tigress again and we just collapsed in the mud with Kauka alongside us and with her Catriel and then Rosa and Millaray and we wallowed around until we were as frog-like as the frogs that were jumping around us and we mated as frogs there in the mud that seemed like the beginning of the world and just as it was in the beginning we all loved each other without shame and we didn’t stop loving each other because the flamingos and that infinite pink returned, as though Wenumpau, the sky of the desert, took pleasure in showing us its luminous blood. That distracted us, it made us hungry and we ran back to the kutral, the fire, all of us brown and we had to hold back our ravenous hunger, we were only able to get our teeth into it after the ceremony, the cook divided up the ñandú on the fire into as many pieces as there were people. He didn’t keep anything for himself or his assistant and Liz and Rosa and I held back so we could see how the Indians ate and we saw that they didn’t rush, they told one another that there was roast meat and so the ones who had been given the biggest portions, the muscly breast of the ñandú, would grab a knife and cut off the best bit and give it back to the cook and his assistant, and only then did they let their crazed hunger take over and everyone gave in to gnawing like half-starved pumas. We lay down in the grass around the kutral, night was falling and with nightfall, of course, came the dew and we felt like rain-drenched earth and someone brought us some blankets made of feathers. Mine was pink and I fell asleep all flamingo, watching the sky bursting with stars and holding hands with Kauka and Liz, who was sucking all the milk from the Milky Way through the ring on her finger.

  I woke a couple of hours later, by myself, and I didn’t know what to wear: my gaucho clothes were ridiculous but they were the only ones I had so I went back to Kutral-Có and had a wash to get the mud off, as it was starting to itch, and I put them back on again and added my flamingo blanket as a poncho. By a kutral quite near to the big fire, the cooking fire – there were many fires, they made constellations on the ground with all those fires – were Liz and Rosa, dressed like the Indians, with white tunics made of heron feathers that had touches of gold and russet from the scales of pejerrey fish and capybara fur. They were all so beautiful, as exquisite as any animal, like all animals, like the animals from which the clothes had been made.

  There was no centre, as I’ve said, nor any ruka that was bigger than the others, but bit by bit and surely because of the novelty we presented, the night became organised around our kutral. Rosa went to the wagon for the gifts we had brought. The Indians liked the mirrors and what could have seemed like childishness on their part turned out to make perfect sense to me: they looked at the beauty of their reflections and they were gorgeous, as were the old men and women with their furrowed skin wrinkled by sun and snow and their white hair; as were the women who had just given birth with their swollen breasts; as were the men dressed like soldiers; as were the women warriors, because amongst these Indians – my people, my nation – the tasks are divided according to the simple criteria of ability, desire, and need.

  We also presented them with the barrel of caña and what was left of the wine and the black cockerels that had grown during the last storm. Kauka loved them and I imagined her feathered, dressed as a jet-black warrior. I’d seen her flex her bow next to a fire to warm the string, she was strong and black and flecked with light like the most luminous night. Once the kutral got going, the other foreigners also joined us. There were captive Englishwomen who walked around freely and came over to hear the news from Liz: the Queen’s state of health, God save Her, how the railways were coming along, the power of the new machines, the slavery in the coal mines, the joy of the jewel-green fields of England, the force of the sea that alternated between lapping and lashing dear old Blighty. And they talked about this new life, they told Liz about freedom; she already knew a bit about that but she would find out a whole lot more and never want to go back to stiff upper lips, crossed legs nor even to England’s green and pleasant land. There were also German scientists who went around collecting phosphorescent bones, as if trying to give substance to the devil’s lantern, and who found fame by putting their names to dinosaur remains, much to the amusement of the Indians who cried with laughter every time someone showed them a skeleton called Roth or a lichen specimen – its delicate little leaves encased in a stone as transparent as Liz’s ring – called Von Humboldt. There were exiles from the Republic of Argentina who were always too busy plotting to come over to us – the Indians put up with them but didn’t like them, we don’t like them because we knew that with them you never get more than brief alliances ripe with betrayal, different each time but nonetheless inevitable. And there were gauchos, hundreds of them, who were already dressed like the locals, including our gauchos, the ones we’d helped to escape from Hernández. And so many others. Among them there was a man who moved so delicately, his long braids swaying against his tunic of feathers as pink as mine and a sash around his waist. With the Indians, as I said, neither clothes nor way of living is determined by sex. He looked like a china disguised as a flamingo, you could just make out a touch of masculinity in his stubble, nothing else. He came over to me and suddenly I knew that what Hernández had said was true: it was Fierro, but now made more out of feathers than of Iron. I wanted to run away, but following behind him were my two little boys. Reader, I can’t describe it, I just can’t express the happiness that I felt in my body, the fullness in my soul, when I pressed my nose to their little heads and stayed there lost in the smell of my kids. They were beautiful and they hugged me so tight that I was forced to stay and listen to what Fierro had to say. Indians adore love stories and Fierro was in the habit of singing everything that had happened to him as well as plenty that hadn’t, it was his way of earning his keep. Indians appreciate art as much as Hernández does, but they don’t go around passing off gaucho verses as their own. Fierro would already have sung about us and Raúl to them, along with who knows what other verses. I let him come over and sit opposite me, guitar in hand, and we all listened to his verse.

  Oh China, Love, Forgive Me Now

  O h China, love, forgive me now!

  To God I’ve pleaded long

  That he should bring us here as friends

  So I to you could make amends

  And ask your pardon for what offends

  B
y singing you this song.

  Your head of plaits you’ve shaven clean

  On mine two plaits I braid;

  The wood once hidden by the trees

  Is now revealed, we see with ease

  That when our loves we’ve failed to please

  Our errors must be paid.

  Josephine is now your name

  A name that’s sweet to hear,

  I know that I have done you wrong

  But if you’ll listen to my song

  You’ll hear how I have suffered long

  And you’ll be kind, my dear.

  ‘Twas I who killed your love Raúl

  ‘Twas I who took his life,

  A strong man he, a fair one too,

  Whose face was honest, whose heart was true,

  But all his strength I did undo

  With the blade of my gaucho knife.

  Raúl abandoned me for you,

  Like a rancher’s bastard child,

  As cattle leave their dung behind

  And ñandús sprint off unconfined

  So he left me – t’wards you inclined

  And – jealous – I ran wild.

  You I won at cards one night

  By filling El Negro with drink.

  He lost the game, he lost his life

  That Negro runt was born for strife

  I can’t say I’ve never flashed a knife

  But I’ve since had time to think.

  As you stole my Raúl from me,

  I stole you from his side,

  You thought sore pride had caused my wrong

  But ‘twas fear of gossip that spurred me on

  Lest folk found out my heart he’d won

  And us they should deride.

  But after that my conscience pricked