The Adventures of China Iron

by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

  Now the sound of the water, the undertow and the tides are our music, and they watch over us. Our rivers are alive and the streams are animals, they know that we live as one, that we only kill what we need to eat and that our fine native bulls and our healthy cows are our livelihood; all we ask of the beasts is that they wander freely on the islands and that they eat and shit, they are Iñchiñ too. What little work we have is done contentedly, though not without effort: we build wampos to put our cows on when the water starts to rise; when there are floods they float peacefully, tied to the branches of the yvyra. You should see the cows up there when the water subsides all of a sudden and some of them get trapped like brown fruit among the willow leaves, watching us a bit startled with their ever-gentle eyes. No doubt they’re amazed by that aerial view of the world, a perspective they never quite get used to and which has them protesting quietly, perhaps fearing that mooing too loudly might send them tumbling to the ground. Getting them down from the treetops without hurting them is a task we are now experts at, we do it so deftly and smoothly that the cattle look like flags being lowered; as they come down swaying gently, the air is filled with their perplexed lowing.

  We grow pumpkins and muskmelon, potatoes and watermelon. Other plants too, plants not for eating with our occasional plates of guasutí meat or beef or pira, but rather to help us to think. Or to be strong. Or to laugh. We grow them on wampos piled with earth and tied to the trees.

  Light is Doubled on the Islands

  The land gets muddier and muddier until it gives way to the croaks and cheeps of a reed bed, the air on the banks sings with the criss-crossing of guyrá in flight, riverbanks are a little luxury the pampa allows itself, the cows bathe with a little persuasion, slipping and slithering; the land then re-emerges from beneath the river, and although it must be the same land, it’s now full of trees, their naked roots at the water’s edge. We put our rukas up a little way back from the shore; rivers in the pampa can suddenly swell with silent but ferocious energy, and you wake up submerged if you don’t know the sounds and ways of the impulsively rising and falling ysyry.

  When we reached the far shore, there where the pampa drowns, some of us swam across the river, the ones who’d chosen the southernmost peoples as their ancestors, and who would quickly remember how to canoe. They swam across naked and those of us left on terra firma had a contest hurling axes at the trees which we then, in sorrow, had to pull down, giving thanks for their life which we’d taken in order to make rafts. In this way we gradually became people of water, and people of wood. Oscar was among those who swam across: his sort knew about canoes, but knew nothing about the rafts of the Selk’nam peoples. They soon got the idea, Oh, wampos, they said, and made rafts – so much better than ours, darling, Oscar enthused to Liz. Those were our first wampos, we used them to get the oxen across, just a few good strong ones that would then pull the next few wampos – you really have to pull hard when your hooves are sinking into the mud – beautiful oxen, our dear mansún, the ones that carried across everything we had. As they made the wampos, they became more skilled and started making wampo-rukas: we live in floating houses and moor them with strong leather ropes that can withstand any flood, so we go up whenever the river rises and as it subsides, we go down with it. Sometimes it sinks so low that we end up almost stuck in the mud, rich pickings for the mosquitoes, or rather we would be if Liz hadn’t gone to the village to buy nets. She went dressed in her English clothes, gave no explanation, and simply showed them a piece of mesh and asked to buy up all they had left. The Argentines must have wondered what on earth the gringa was up to; when they pressed her she said in the worst Spanish that she could muster, wedding dresses, bride, gown, and they seemed satisfied with that, imagining a throng of gringas disembarking to come and inter-marry and improve the stock. So some days we wake beached in mud and other days perched atop the yvyra, and where once there were islands there’s nothing but river everywhere. The Paraná is an animal that likes to live in segments, just as our bodies have limbs, but then feels the urge to reconnect and to overflow its banks as if there were something beyond itself, as if the islands weren’t part of its body, though they are. When the river remembers this we wake to find ourselves and our rukas up in the trees, with our canoes butting up against the rukas and treetrunks dragged along by the current banging against us or piling up in dykes on either side. Other times we wake to find the Paraná’s smooth back has become a garden, we fall asleep in the moon-thrummed dark and awake surrounded by aguapé looking like green cabbages with bright purple flowers which stand out against that green matched only by distant English wheat fields in spring, though richer yet: a beautiful, vivid green of a thousand hues, so many shades that a single word can’t contain them all and new words become necessary. We use Guaraní words: aky for the tender green of young shoots, hovy for the deep blue-green of all the leaves at dusk, hovyu for the intense shade everything takes on in summer, and we are still pondering what to call the dry colour of the reeds even though they are always damp, what to call the silvery underside of willow leaves, what to call the little islets and aguapé that are dotted all over the back of the Paraná and its ysyry, what to call the dark green grass that grows in the shade of the trees, what to call the ita poty which grows on damp stones, what to call the plants like green plates with tiny floats on their stems and roots, tough discs that can hide snakes and pumas. They too travel downstream whether they like it or not, the Paraná drags them along when it rushes down from the northern land, the Guaraní land, that belongs to us too a little ever since they began calling us Ñande as well as Iñchiñ. That north that we are soon going to explore once we have negotiated with the Guaraní, the negotiations are long discussions that end up in new relationships, in a larger sense of Us. We will do it on our wampos, just a few of us, and using the ysyry: you can’t go against the Paraná, it’s a great and powerful river, and no one travels on it against its wishes. You have to follow the current, go where it leads. So we will take a different path, head back up the channels we came down; the ysyry are less powerful and, as luck would have it, too narrow for the navy’s gunboats to navigate. We can’t declare ñorairo and fight until we’re ready. And we don’t have any weapons.

  Contemplating the Trees

  Nobody works every day on the Y pa’û islands: we take turns, working one month in three. When it’s our turn, we make sure our cows don’t sink into the tuju and if they do start to sink everyone helps out: we keep watch so the floods don’t take us by surprise. It all takes time, corralling the cows onto the wampos, putting out grass and water for them, calming them down so that they stand still enough to keep their balance, getting up there with them and patting them so that their breath is as slow and even as though they were in a meadow full of tender shoots of grass. Our plants are also up on wampos: these ones are enormous rafts with walls along the sides to keep everything in and they’re full of earth, not so much that they can’t float, but just enough for the roots of the plants to spread. For those of us not working the day goes by contemplating the trees, we never get tired of lying on the ground watching the play of light and shadow between the waving branches, their edges are bathed in a splendour which in Great Britain – Liz isn’t really British anymore but she can still remember – you only see in the haloes around saints’ heads in churches. Our leaves – those of our yvyra, our whole jungle – give off an aura of wondrous vegetable sanctity.

  If we wake up early we greet the dawn from inside a cloud, one that descends from the sky and rises from the rivers and streams in the early hours, the Paraná’s tatatina: a cloud that prevents us from seeing anything except its insides which are luminous and opaque at the same time. An impossible cloud; how can something luminous be opaque? London lives in a cloud like that for a good part of the year, but its cloud is pinkish from all the smoke from the engines of the machines and ours is white like a bone from Our Lord God. The tatatina imposes a kind of peace: we just boil water to make mate and te
a or grill some corn for the children, our mitã, they usually know who their parents are but they live with everyone, we all look after them and they come and go from ruka to ruka even though they keep their things in one hut in particular. We do the same. I share one with Kauka, but I can sleep and wake up in any other, wherever I am when I get drowsy and succumb to sleep; if not next to my warrior lady it might be beside Liz, who welcomes me of an evening for her curries and her stories, and some nights into her bed too. Sometimes I stay with Rosa who teaches the mitã the knack of breaking in horses, and sometimes I stay at Fierro’s with his children and mine, where both of us have taken to writing. I sleep with my loves, I leave with Estreya after listening to songs, after playing games, after smoking or drinking the herbs we grow, that’s a year-round undertaking, testing their flavour and their effects at the same time as mixing and grafting them together to create new plants.

  As a result, we have an angel’s trumpet that tastes of narã orange and berry, its fruit grow like weeds in Y pa’û; a tea that first blinds you, then takes you deep into your soul, a tea that transports you to the centre of the divine light and from there allows you to see that the whole world is a single animal, us and the ypyra leaves and the surubí catfish and the chajá screamer bird, and the giraffes and the praying mantis mamboretá and the passion flower mburucuyá, and the jaguar and the dragons and the micuré possum, and the camuatí bee, and the mountains and the elephants and the Paraná and even the British railways and the huge swathes of land cleared by the Argentines. We also have a herb that you smoke that tastes of itself, of its own sweet and rough flower, and also of warm bread and cheese rolls and marmalade made from lemon and narã, the bitter orange from the deltas, a happy herb called vy’aty that takes away pain and fills our eyes with warmth, that makes the world more friendly and other people companions we can laugh with. We have mushrooms that we’ve been enriching with flavours to make them less bitter: quince, tararira, different types of water hyacinth, fresh wild lettuce, pure Paraná river water, merõ melons and curry. Mushrooms are important to us, they’re for eating during ceremonies, never alone, because mushrooms are are gifts to us from the very belly of the earth, and life and death are in that tyeguy, all mixed up together, one producing the other. Mushrooms can make gods appear, it can happen that you stretch out your body and then find you can’t see your feet let alone touch them, it can happen that the thing that normally separates you from everyone else vanishes, it can happen that the devil sticks out his tail and you fall into hell. You emerge changed from mushrooms, the same but different, mushrooms give people divine perspectives and these perspectives from beyond life and death can be terrifying. Or liberating. You need to have a machi wise woman nearby when you take mushrooms. We have special rukas and wampos for eating them, we have machis ready to guide the journeys of visitors who are new to all this. We also have a plant that we don’t really like but that we cultivate because we need it: we chew its leaves during hard times, when floods or wars mean we have to work all day and all night. These are the times when we need women and men to lead us: we always have a few chiefs, they take it in turns and don’t usually have to do anything, but in times of crisis they’re in charge and you have to put up with that until it’s all over. Kauka’s one of them, she leads a group along with an Englishman called Air, who spends his time fishing without much success and reciting limericks. In my nation, women have the same power as men. We don’t care about the vote because we all vote and because we can have as many chieftesses as chieftains and we can also have two-spirits in charge. Even Fierro, who here on the islands has become a she and taken the name Kurusu – which is a woman’s or kuña’s name in Guaraní and a homage to the person who made her female, that’s right, Cruz – even Kurusu Fierro has been a chieftess in periods of war with the Guaranís. That was in the beginning when they didn’t want to accept us as neighbours, and when they hadn’t yet come to any of our vy’aty ceremonies or tried our mushrooms, which they call marangatú. Even I, who can be woman and man, have had to lead the charge during a terrible flood and a skirmish with the Argentines, who feared we wouldn’t let them transport their grain and hides down our Paraná. Kauka, who is one of our bravest and wisest warriors, has led terrible battles, the kind that fill the ysyry with bodies that the water then hurries to carry out to sea, wanting those to be pearls that were their eyes.

  Otherwise, our time is our own apart from that one month in each season when it’s our turn to work. During the other two we have fun competing at tree climbing, spearing leaping dorado fish, making dolls and gods with braided reeds, telling stories and singing songs about love and war, and rowing. Liz, Rosa and I are the fastest: travelling these waterways together is something we really love, the three of us, our canoes strapped together, rowing through its ysyry travelling as one, and we win all the weighted wampo races in Y pa’ û. We train nearly every morning when we don’t have to work, provided it’s not raining too much, but even sometimes in torrential rain, when we compete in wet laden wampos. We’re unbeaten and that’s why we’re the ones who carry the animals and plants when we migrate: the three of us bringing up the rear, each in our own kayak, the rukas on a small wampo at night, Rosa calming the cows and the dear oxen who no longer have to carry anything and can enjoy the same unencumbered life as the rest of us, they are Iñchiñ too. Oscar and Kauka lead the way, they command the flotilla of kayaks covered in branches that are at the vanguard of our migration, those that go ahead, making sure no nasty surprises lie in store. We make our way slowly, waiting for favourable currents, lingering on the islands where we find fruit trees, or where dorados and other pira jump enthusiastically in the rippling streams, or when we see bees hovering in the air. We meet up with our other loves, we sleep with them on those calm nights. During storms the three of us with Estreya tether ourselves to the strongest tree trunks, and caress the animals to reassure them as we steady ourselves against the currents.

  I Wish You Could See Us

  I wish you could see us, see our little steamboat, our wampos carrying cattle, rukas, horses, healing plants, our canoes and kayaks alongside, our nation slowly migrating along the channels of the Paraná: a whole people silently advancing along the limpid ysyry, which breathe the peace of flood and ebb, of whiskered fish and clinging tuju of the riverbed; our rivers that can hide and reveal the yvyra roots around their islands; our rivers full of flowers that float on the surface while catfish poke around in the murky silt beneath; our rivers of leaping pira, dorados thrusting their powerful bodies out of the water as if the river’s insides were bursting open with sunlight. I wish you could see us, we the Iñchiñ people, now Ñande, silently migrating, rowing with love because only with love can we dip and pull our oars through the body of the Paraná. I wish you could see us with our feathered rukas billowing in the wind, quietly and calmly we go, each person’s skin painted with their animal self, all heading north. I wish you could see us; but no one will. We migrate in autumn along rivers unnavigable by Argentine and Uruguayan boats. We migrate to escape the cold, we migrate so that we’re never where they expect us to be. We migrate when the tatatina, the Paraná’s voracious mist, swallows everything up, when dawn is white blindness and things can only be distinguished by their sound, if they make any sound: low tones of water lapping against the islands; the rhythmic sound of oars dipping in the river; high-pitched screeching and trilling of birdsong and the barking from near and far of all the dogs on our island and on the neighbouring or outlying islands. The tatatina signals the onset of autumn, time for us to make tracks, and we are ready in a matter of days; in less than a week we’re all on our wampos covered with branches and with clumps of reeds along the edges; we imitate part of the landscape, part of the Paraná riverbank and we are swallowed up into the cloud blanketing land and river. The canoes go first, and are lost at once in the mist, then the rukas with our people and children, behind them our plants and lastly the animals. I wish you could see us; but no one will. We
know how to leave as if vanishing into thin air: imagine a people that disappears, a people whose colours, houses, dogs, clothes, cows and horses all gradually dissolve like a spectre: their outline turns blurry and insubstantial, the colours fade, and everything melts into the white cloud. And so we go.

  TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

  T he Adventures of China Iron is a kaleidoscopic book. Twist the lens, let the pieces settle and each time you see a different perspective.

  We saw a novel that dialogues playfully with nineteenth-century Argentinian history, notionally set in 1872, the year that José Hernández’s epic poem Martín Fierro was published. As a highly provocative spin-off from this classic which narrates the trials and tribulations of an outlaw gaucho, the novel finds its feisty heroine in the shape of Fierro’s young wife, here named China Iron. Whereas in the original poem she is relegated to a few lines, in Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s novel she takes centre stage, along with her Scottish fellow-traveller Liz.

  Her travels through Argentina call to mind the many existing nineteenth-century travel narratives of British travellers in Argentina, with their eyes on imperial expansion (such as George Chaworth Musters’ At Home with the Patagonians or Florence Dixie’s Across Patagonia ). They also powerfully and unsentimentally evoke the vanishing life of the gauchos (encapsulated in Ricardo Güiraldes’ Shadows on the Pampas ), the estancias with their cattle lore, rural poverty and hardship, and the unpleasant realities of conscription.

  Turn the kaleidoscope, and the focus shifts to the world of nineteenth-century scientists and naturalists. We feel the presence of Alexander von Humboldt and his awe of the landscape, Charles Darwin’s marvelling at the variety of species (the ñandú known also as Darwin’s rhea streaks across the novel), and William Henry Hudson’s nostalgic narratives for rural Argentina such as Far Away and Long Ago or The Ombú . Turn it again and we have a send-up of all this – a playful pastiche, queering Argentina’s national myth of the noble virile gaucho.