“Hello,” he said in a surly tone, and in a way that made it sound as if we had always known each other.
He led me to a house built out of thick logs, with a zinc roof, standing beside an oak wood. Inside, I met a young Indian woman and four children.
My work consisted of helping to watch over two thousand sheep, putting the few cows in their pens, yoking a team of oxen from time to time, setting the trammel net whenever it was necessary to supply the kitchen with fish, and a few other tasks.
The work was very easy, and I realized that my presence there was more or less superfluous, because Harberton did almost everything himself, and took his time about it, too.
On the other hand, I soon changed my opinion about the place. There was plenty of time to spare, and the work was almost a game. I milked the cows, collected firewood in the forest, tramped the paths in search of lost livestock, and in the mornings, when I pulled in the net, it was a delight to watch the glistening sea bass leaping in the bottom of the boat, like dozens of severed arms.
At first, everything went very well in that idyllic spot . . .
I say “at first” because it was only after two or three weeks that I really became aware of something strange, something that was gradually to drive me to despair.
Harberton never spoke. After giving me my instructions, showing me the way around, and dividing up the work, he had lapsed into total silence.
His wife and children were used to it, but being in the presence of a man who never spoke was starting to affect me.
He would rise at dawn, put some meat or smoked fish, along with bread and onion, in his canvas knapsack, and set off for the mountains, returning only as night fell.
Once, when there was a snowstorm and he did not come back all night, I went out the following morning to look for him, thinking he might have met with an accident. I found him on one of the highest peaks, having taken shelter in a natural cave in the rocks, smoking his octoroon pipe and staring out at the surrounding landscape. The Beagle Channel was below us, like a green path blooming with foam—the only touch of color, as everything else was completely white. The last foothills of the Andes, which come to an end in Tierra del Fuego, lay there like broken moons, and the island of Navarino itself seemed like the beginning of another strange white world.
The Indian woman didn’t speak, either. After she had finished her household chores, she would squat in a corner, with a child in her lap. The eldest of the children was about eleven and was the son of Harberton’s first wife, the next two were the children of his second wife and the fourth the child of the third wife. The first two wives, also Yaghan, had died young—a fate that often befalls women of that race when they marry white men.
My refuge was the children. I made them a blackboard and, with a piece of stone that was similar to chalk, taught them to read and write. I would line them up in front of some weathervanes which I had made in the shape of planes, whose interlocked propellers made a noise like an engine, and get them to practice simple gymnastic exercises, run races and play games, until gradually the five of us formed a healthy and cheerful little group. It helped to soften the grim monotony of life there.
“Papa never speaks!” the oldest child said to me one day.
“Yes, he does,” I replied. “He speaks to the trees, the clouds and the stones!”
The child burst out laughing, and I couldn’t help doing the same, although I really didn’t feel much like laughing.
“Why is he like that?” I kept asking myself, more insistently each time. It wasn’t that I was especially curious to know what had made him so uncommunicative—it might only have been stupidity or an old man’s weariness—nor was it wounded pride on my part, but simply the desire to talk to an intelligent human being. The only one available was him, and he was refusing me that precious gift!
But one day I put an end to my obsession and made a decision. “The man isn’t in his right mind,” I told myself. “He’s gone crazy with the solitude, the silence, or God knows what, and if I stay here I’m going to go crazy, too. So I’m leaving on the first boat!”
But nothing ever put in at Puerto Robalo, not even an Indian canoe. A Chilean Army cutter was supposed to come every three or four months, but it was already five since the last one!
But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. One afternoon, a schooner damaged in a storm moored in the inlet of Puerto Robalo until the weather had improved. She was on her way to Ushuaia, and in the wireless station at Wulaia had heard that the cutter was due to come to the island the following Monday. It was already Friday now.
I told Harberton that I had decided to leave. On Sunday night, by the light of a paraffin lamp, he paid me what he owed me, no more, no less.
That night I said goodbye to everyone, and went to bed with the happy thought that the following day I’d be leaving that land of shattered mountains drowning in the sea, and above all that strange man submerged in his silence like an iceberg that only showed a seventh of its total mass, a man as rough and stony as the landscape around him.
The blue light of dawn was peeping through the cracks in the windows of my room when I tried to get up, but couldn’t—I was tied to the wooden bed. During the night, while I was fast asleep, someone had crept in and bound me with ropes that imprisoned me like an Indian child in its portable crib.
I struggled as best I could and called out, but to no avail. I lay there, alternating moments of great anger with others of calm resignation. But the worst moment was still to come, when, around mid-morning, I suddenly heard the shrill hooting of the cutter announcing that it had sighted land.
Only once before in my life had I felt so desperate. At the age of sixteen, thanks to the treachery of my older brother, I was locked in my room, and could hear the hooting of the boat I was supposed to be setting sail on. Since then, whenever I hear the three regulation hoots blown by a boat before departure, I always shudder a little!
After a while I heard voices in the next room, along with footsteps, the noise of what sounded like a quarrel, and weeping. Suddenly a child’s cry emerged from this mixture of noises, and the eldest boy, Dino, rushed into my room with a knife in his hand. He had discovered my situation and was coming to help me, although his mother had tried her best to hold him back.
“The hands first, Dino!” I cried when I realized that in his haste he was starting with my feet.
In no time, I was free. I gave my savior a hug, gathered up my few things and ran out. As I passed, I could see the startled face of the Yaghan woman out of the corner of my eye.
I ran like a madman down the slope to the shore, waving my arms to stop the cutter from leaving without me. Luckily, she was only just lowering the launch.
In my hurry, I had not noticed that Harberton was on the shore waiting for it.
When he saw me coming, he walked right up to me and said in a tone and with a look that I will never forget, “Don’t go, stay here! I’m going to die soon. The woman and children are like animals, they won’t know what to do! Bandits will come and grab all this and throw them out! Forgive me for what I’ve done, but I didn’t want you to go! All this can be yours, all you have to do is look after them the way I have until now! I didn’t want to tell you, because I was putting you to the test! I’ve been looking for a man like you for many years! Don’t go, all this can be yours! Find yourself one of my wife’s cousins and stay!”
His voice was harsh, and I had the impression I was hearing it for the first time. The words seemed to choke him, his lips were trembling as if in prayer, and the look in his eyes . . . ah, I shall never forget that look of supplication!
I started to waver, as I had so often in my life. I looked at his face, as rough as the bark of an oak, I remembered his grim silence, I looked at the rocks, to which a few trees clung like the hands of beggars, I looked at the cutter belching smoke, at the launch just reaching the shore, and as on every occasion when I couldn’t make up my mind, I followed where my hea
rt led me—and this time my heart led me to the waiting cutter . . .
When I got back to Punta Arenas and stepped onto the customs jetty, the little man in the gray dustcoat whose offer had started me on that strange journey emerged once more from the sentry box.
Seeing the determined way in which he was striding toward me, I thought he was about to ask me the same question: Would you like to go work on Navarino? But I was wrong. His rabbity face was wreathed in smiles as he said, “You couldn’t stand it anymore, eh?”
“No, I couldn’t stand it anymore!”
“Just like the others!” he said. “No one ever lets the cutter pass more than once!” And he walked away, laughing mindlessly.
“Yes!” I said to myself, watching him go, not sure if I was angry with him or despised him. “Just like the others. But I was the only one who saw the hidden part of the iceberg! I was the only one who glimpsed the tenderness of that submerged character! One day, I have to go back to Puerto Robalo! I’ll be rich, and I’ll transform the silence of the previous owner into noise and gaiety. I may even get to like the young widow. The children will be adolescents by then, and we’ll fit out a cutter as elegant as an albatross and go sailing through the islands harpooning seals like the Yaghan!”
But I still haven’t gone back.
THE EMPTY BOTTLE
Two riders appear in the distance, two black dots puncturing the solitude and whiteness of the snowy plain. Their paths converge, and, as they advance, their figures come into sharper focus, arousing that slight anxiety that is always felt when two travelers encounter one another on a solitary trail.
Gradually, their horses bring them closer together. One of them is a heavily built man in a black leather coat, riding a solid chestnut ideal for the harsh terrain of Tierra del Fuego. The other is slighter, and is wrapped in a white canvas poncho, with a neckerchief. He is riding a roan with a white streak on its face, and has another horse following behind, a small, shaggy chestnut laden with fox furs.
Their horses are together now.
“Hello!”
“Hello!”
The man in the leather coat has a white, pockmarked, unwashed face, like a mast that has been exposed to the elements. The man in the poncho is younger, with a fresh, pink face, and he is blinking, his little eyes red and moist, as if he has just been crying.
“Trap many foxes?” the man with a face like a mast asks, in a thin voice, casting a sideways glance at the furs on the packhorse.
“A few!” the young man replies, looking candidly at his companion, who returns his gaze for a moment, still out of the corner of his eye.
They continue riding in silence, side by side. The pampa is totally empty, as if the low gray sky has borne down so heavily on the land as to squeeze all traces of life out of it, and the only thing left alive is that deathly silence, punctured now by the crunching of the horses’ hooves in the snow.
After a while, the young man coughs nervously.
“Want a drink?” he says, taking a bottle from a knitted woolen saddle bag.
“Cane liquor?”
“The best!” the young man replies, handing him the bottle.
He uncorks it and drinks slowly, gargling. The young man also drinks, clearly relishing the liquor, and then they continue along the trail in silence.
“Not a bit of wind!” the young trapper says suddenly, after another nervous cough, in an attempt to strike up a conversation.
“Mmm . . . mmm . . .” the man in the leather coat says, as if the words have annoyed him.
The young man looks at him, more in sadness than in anger. Understanding that the man is lost in thought and has no wish to be interrupted, he does not insist and continues riding in silence by his side, searching for a thought of his own in which to lose himself.
They are riding together on the same trail, but their horses are more in tune than they are. They have fallen into the same rhythm, the chestnut looking every now and again at the roan and the roan returning the look, and even the packhorse trotting to catch up with its companions whenever it falls slightly behind.
It does not take the young man long to find something with which to occupy his mind—the same image, in fact, in which he has been finding solace for the past two years, though made more vivid this time by the cane liquor he has drunk. The image is of an island as green as an emerald deep in the Chiloé archipelago and, there in the middle of it, his fiancée, Elvira, in her white apron, moving back and forth between the sea and the woods, like a seagull’s wing or the foam of a wave. The times this dream has made him even forget about the foxes as he galloped across the country where he had laid his traps! The times when, gripped by a strange anxiety, he has ridden his horse to the tops of hills and mountains, because, the more he climbed, the closer he was to that beloved place!
The images the swig of cane liquor has aroused in the other man’s mind are very different. A memory is nagging at him, like a stubborn hornet you cannot swat away, and, together with the memory, there is an insistent thought, which is starting to make him feel dizzy as it pushes him toward the edge of an abyss. Because of that memory and that thought, he once vowed never to drink again, but it is so cold, and the offer took him so much by surprise, that he couldn’t resist.
The memory that torments him goes back more than five years. Exactly the time he would have spent in prison by now if the police had discovered who was responsible for the death of Bevan, the Austrian gold merchant murdered on this same trail, near the patch of black scrub they have just passed through, while on his way from the Páramo.
The strange thing is that, once past the first terrible onslaught of that memory, his mind is starting to enjoy thinking about these things, just as the young trapper is enjoying his images. You don’t need to be very clever—that’s what he’s thinking—to commit the perfect murder in a place as remote and solitary as this. For a time, because it’s procedure rather than because they really want to, the police mount a search, but they soon give up. A missing person? People go missing all the time! Some don’t even want to be found, don’t want anyone to know their whereabouts! And there are plenty whose whereabouts are only discovered when the spring thaw reveals their bodies under the ice!
Again, the silence is broken by the young trapper’s nervous cough.
“Another drink?” he says, taking out the bottle.
The man in the leather coat stirs, as if realizing for the first time that there is someone beside him. The trapper hands him the bottle, his eyes blinking in that characteristic way.
He uncorks the bottle, drinks, and this time gives it back without even saying thank you. A hint of unease, sadness or puzzlement again crosses the young man’s face. He also drinks now, leaving the bottle half empty.
They continue riding in silence, side by side, each man lost in his own thoughts, as the snow crunches monotonously beneath the horses’ hooves.
“This is the last time I go trapping foxes,” the young man is thinking. “By the end of the season, I’ll have enough money to leave Tierra del Fuego, go back to my island and marry Elvira.” Reaching that point in his usual dream, he half closes his eyes with a feeling of total bliss. It is as if there is a wall there, and he cannot see beyond it.
For the other man, there is no wall of bliss, only a twisted kind of pleasure, and, like someone settling in the saddle at the start of a long journey, he settles his mind on that moment, long ago now, when the whole thing started.
It was about here, more or less, that he met Bevan, but the circumstances were quite different.
It was on the ranch at Cerro Redondo that he had first heard about the gold merchant who was planning to cross Tierra del Fuego from the Páramo, on the Atlantic coast, to Río del Oro, on the Pacific, from where he would take a boat to Punta Arenas.
In San Sebastián, he found out the date the boat was leaving and, calculating the speed at which a good horse would travel, he went ahead to a spot where he knew the man had to pass.
True, a slightly uneasy feeling, a kind of chill, came over him for a few moments every now and again, but he attributed this to the fact that he had no idea who he was dealing with. This merchant couldn’t be your average scavenger, not if he was venturing alone across that bleak country. At the same time, something told him that this unease, this chill, came from deeper inside. Not that he was a coward, or slow on the draw. That was something he’d already proved in Policarpo, the time he’d had to draw his revolver when a few men complained about some marked cards and had killed one of them.
Of course, this time, it wasn’t a brawl. It was one thing to kill a man over a crooked card game, quite another to kill a man in cold blood and rob him!
But what else could he do? He’d had a bad season that year in Tierra del Fuego. It was virtually impossible to get contraband hooch onto any of the ranches where prohibition was in force. People no longer crowded around him when he showed his pack of cards and drummed up business with “How about a little game, boys, just for fun?” And there were too many people who’d lost one or two years’ savings in that little game, which made things more and more difficult each time he passed through a place where he’d already had to hold off an indignant victim with the barrel of his Colt.
There was nothing more to be had in Tierra del Fuego, and this Bevan business would be a good way of saying goodbye before he hotfooted it across the Straits to Patagonia.
“Bah!” he said to himself the morning he took up position to wait for the gold merchant, as if to lessen the chill that kept welling up from time to time from somewhere inside him. “If he’d bet me at monte, I’d have won every last ounce of the gold from him anyway, and things would have ended up the same way, with whichever of us was quicker on the draw being left standing.”
Tierra del Fuego Page 13
