As he lay down on the rim of a low ridge, from where he would be able to see the gold merchant in the distance, a flock of bustards rose into the air, like a fragment of the pampa that had peeled off and taken to the sky, and passed over his head in a triangular formation. He watched them in surprise, as if he were seeing something of himself leaving that land—the flock was migrating to the north of Patagonia. Every year, midway through the fall, these birds abandoned Tierra del Fuego, and only he and the beasts of the field remained. But now he, too, would fly away, like the bustards, in search of other skies, other lands, perhaps another life . . .
He had never before seen the grass as clearly as he did that afternoon! The pampa looked like a sea of yellow and gold, rippled by the west wind. He had never been so aware of the presence of nature! And now, for the first time, in the middle of this vastness, he became aware of his own presence, as if he had suddenly discovered another person inside himself. This time, the chill, welling up again from inside, struck him more intensely and made him shiver. He was on the point of standing up, getting on his horse and riding away, but instead he reached out his hand behind him, took out a wooden canteen, unscrewed the aluminum top and took a swig of the cane liquor he usually drank to shake off the cold. On this occasion, it also shook off the other cold, the one that came from inside.
Halfway through the afternoon, a black dot appeared distinctly in the distance. Immediately, he ran down the slope, untied the horses’ hobbles, mounted, and set off at a trot, as if he were just an ordinary traveler. Hidden behind the ridge, he spurred the horse onto the trail along which the rider would come, although that would not be for some time yet.
He rode on along the trail at that weary trot that travelers adopt when they are in no hurry to arrive. He turned once to look behind him, and, from the way in which the rider had narrowed the distance between them, realized that he was riding a fast trotter, and that he also had a packhorse with him, and was taking turns riding on the two horses.
He took out the canteen again, knocked back another swig of cane liquor, and steadied himself in the stirrups.
“If he carries on at this speed, he’ll pass me,” he thought. “Then it’ll be easier to kill him from behind. But if he stops and rides along with me, it’s going to be more difficult.”
The horse was the first to be aware of something approaching. It pricked up its ears and moved them like two startled birds. Then he, too, heard the muffled clatter of the horses’ hooves on the pampa, a dull thudding that reverberated strangely in his heart. The chill came again and made him shiver. It suddenly occurred to him that he might be the one who was attacked, and he could not help turning his head to look. A tall, elderly man was advancing at a rhythmic English trot on a black horse covered in sweat and foam, and beside him trotted a second horse, a dark brown sorrel. He noted that the man was as solidly built as his horses, and for a moment he felt intimated by this vigorous presence.
Coming close now, the horses were brought up short with a sudden jerk on the reins. He had hoped the man would come up on his right, and had left room for him there, but the gold merchant had cautiously moved over to his left.
He looked more like a hobo than a man who dealt in gold. A Basque beret, a black neckerchief, a loose-fitting leather jacket, baggy pants and short boots with coarse white woolen socks sticking out over the tops. These clothes—old, shabby and creased—matched his long, weary, unshaven face, and yet a cursory glance revealed a sharp gleam in his eyes and a sidelong way of looking that suggested that, hidden beneath his bulk, there was a controlled energy ready to burst out at any moment, like a spring.
“Good afternoon!” he said, falling into step with the other rider.
“Afternoon!” he replied.
“Going to San Sebastián?”
“No, China Creek!”
He would never forget the tone of this dialogue. Even the sound of his own voice sounded strange to him. He sensed the other man looking him up and down, trying to see his eyes. But he refused to show them, and so they went on, in silence, side by side, to the rhythm of their horses’ hooves, the sound of which was muffled by the tussock grass.
At a certain point, he slid his hands slowly and carefully toward his back pocket. The gold merchant, he realized, had seen the movement out of the corner of his eye, and now, with astonishing speed and naturalness, moved his left hand inside his leather jacket. Both movements were almost simultaneous. But what he took from his back pocket was the canteen of cane liquor, which he opened and offered.
“No, thanks, I don’t drink!” the other man answered, and his hand emerged slowly from his jacket, holding a large red handkerchief. He blew his nose loudly.
For a moment, nothing happened. The swig of cane liquor restored the composure he had lost in that split second of emotion. But no sooner had he steadied his nerves than the gold merchant, without taking his eyes off him for a moment, spurred his horse and, swerving quickly to the left, cried, “Bye for now!”
“Bye!” he replied, but at the same time, a kind of intense anguish seized his whole being and he saw his victim’s body, his clothes, his face, even his horses, enveloped in darkness, like a dizzying abyss toward which he was being inexorably drawn, and without being able to stop himself, almost without moving his hand, which he had been holding on his belt, he took out the revolver he carried between his belt and his stomach and shot the other man at almost point blank range, just as he was swerving.
The impact of the bullet caused the gold merchant’s body to tilt to the left, and he fell heavily to the ground. His terrified horses sped away across the pampa.
He reined in his horse. He closed his eyes in order not to see his victim on the ground, and sank into a kind of torpor, emerging from it with a deep sigh of relief, as if he had just jumped across an abyss, or as if he had gotten through the most exhausting day of his life.
He opened his eyes when his horse made a move to rear up at the sight of the corpse. Feeling calmer now, he dismounted.
The gold merchant’s eyes had half rolled up in their sockets, as if stopped mid-flight.
The emotion had tired him, and, after that intense dizziness, he now fell into a kind of lassitude, in the midst of which, more susceptible than ever, he slowly became aware of that same chill coming up from inside him. He shivered and looked up at the sky, and it seemed to him that there was a huge blue and white crack in it, like the void in Bevan’s dead eyes.
From the sky, he turned back to look at the rigid corpse. Without realizing what he was doing, he went to it, lifted it on his shoulder and carried it to his horse. As he was about to place it on the saddle, his horse jumped and sped off, leaving him with the corpse in his arms.
He stood there, motionless, still carrying the body, but it was so heavy that he had to close his eyes with the effort, and the effort turned to pain, and the pain dissolved into a kind of childish distress, a feeling that he was totally alone in the middle of a dispiriting and hostile world. When he opened his eyes again, the grass of the pampa was glowing red, like a sheet of fire, blinding him. In desperation, he looked around him, and about a hundred yards away he saw a clump of black scrub. He thought to run to it and hide the body. He also thought to run away in the same direction in which the horse had fled. But he couldn’t move, he took just a few unsteady steps, and then, to stop himself falling, sat down on the grass. With trembling hands, he opened the canteen and drank the rest of the cane liquor. Feeling better, he stood up, still obsessed with the idea of hiding the corpse, but not finding anywhere suitable, he was seized with a new frenzy, another abyss, more dizziness, and he took his flaying knife from his boot and set about chopping his victim to pieces as if he were an ox.
In the peat bog behind the black scrub, he lifted off sections of the surface and hid the pieces of the corpse under them, wrapped in the man’s clothes. It was when the only part still to be buried was the head that a thought suddenly struck him, a thought that drove him crazy. Th
e gold! He’d forgotten all about it!
He looked around. Bevan’s head lay on the gray-brown peat, staring at him with his dead eyes. There was no going back now. He had done all he could. The whole peat bog started to shake beneath his feet. The black scrub, stirred by the wind, seemed to be fleeing from him in terror, as if it were alive. The pampa blazed with fire, and the blue and white crack in the sky grew wider. He picked up the head to bury it, but could not find a place for it. Everything was fleeing from him, everything was shaking. The void in the eyes of the corpse and the crack in the vault of the sky were creating a void in his own eyes. He blinked, and the cracks grew bigger, and a thousand little needles of light pierced his vision, closing off the horizon, and he ran like a blinded animal after the black scrub as it fled from him and managed to throw the head into the middle of it and then ran on and on until he fell flat on his face on the pampa, torn apart with terror.
“What’s the matter?” the young fox trapper asks, seeing his traveling companion shivering, with big beads of sweat on his forehead. “You’re shaking all over!”
“Oh!” he cries, startled, and, as if he is recovering from a shock, for the first time a smile appears on his face, a frozen smile, like the smile of someone who has died by impalement, and he says in the same choked voice, “The cane liquor . . . I drank it to warm me, and it’s made me feel colder!”
“There’s some left, if you want it,” the trapper says, taking out the bottle and handing it to him.
He uncorks it, drinks, and hands it back.
“I can kill this one like a baby guanaco, with my whip!” he thinks, shaking in the saddle as the liquor runs through his body with the same old evil sensation.
“Feeling warmer?” the young man asks, trying to engage him in conversation.
“Yes, now I do.”
“This is my last trapping expedition. After this, I’m going north to get married.”
“Made much money?”
“Can’t complain.”
“Like a lamb to the slaughter,” he thinks, already warmed to the bone by the swig of cane liquor. Aloud, he says, “I came this way five years ago on my way north and lost all my money!”
“How did that happen?”
“I don’t know. It was all in gold.”
“And you never found it?”
“I didn’t look for it! I’d have had to turn back and I couldn’t!”
The trapper looks at him, uncomprehending. “That doesn’t surprise me. They say Tierra del Fuego has a curse on it! Something always happens to people who try to leave!”
“I don’t think anyone ever gets out of here!” he says, looking out of the corner of his eye at his victim’s neck, right there within reach of his hand, just like the neck of a baby guanaco.
“This time,” he thinks, “I can’t fail! One of us is going to get out of here, and it won’t be him! The first time it’s hard, afterwards it gets easier. I won’t get gooseflesh this time!”
Silence falls between the two men again, and there is no sound except for the monotonous rustle of the horses’ hooves in the snow.
“Now,” he thinks, “now’s the time to dispatch this poor devil with a blow of my whip on the back of his neck!” The effect of the cane liquor has worn off, and that forgotten chill again wells up inside him—but this time it isn’t as strong, just as the sense of dizziness that seizes him is less overwhelming and the abyss he has to jump across is not as wide.
With a sideways glance, he estimates the distance. He furtively turns the whip around so that he is holding it by the leather part, and steadies the handle on the saddle. The young trapper seems to be unaware of anything except the monotonous crunching of the hooves in the snow.
“No need to do anything with this one, the snow will cover him!” he thinks, ready to strike the blow.
He pulls lightly on the reins to slow down his horse and . . .
As he’s about to strike, the trapper turns, smiles and blinks, and in that blinking he sees Bevan’s eyes, the same pathetic expression in them, the deep crack in the sky, the empty eyes of the severed head lying on the peat, the thousand cracks like little needles blurring his vision, and, in his blindness, instead of striking the back of his victim’s neck, he hits his horse’s rump and digs his spur into one of its flanks, and the horse jumps to the side and slips on the snow. He spurs it again, and the animal manages to get up and steady itself on its hind legs.
“He’s going crazy!” the young trapper cries in surprise. “What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s not a good horse, and he’s too easily scared!” he replies, moving back onto the trail.
The silence falls again, heavy and alive, alone except for the crunch of the hooves in the snow. But, gradually, another noise makes itself heard over the sound of hooves. It is the west wind, which is starting to blow across the Fuegian steppe.
The trapper wraps himself in his white canvas poncho. The other man lifts the collar of his leather coat. In the distance, like a blade that has fallen across the middle of that vastness, they make out a fence. The light is starting to fade. The whistling of the wind grows louder. The trapper shrinks into himself, and Elvira’s white apron vanishes from his mind, like the foam of a wave or a seagull’s wing blown away by the wind. The other man raises his mast-like face, like an ox from which a yoke has been removed, and sets it against the gusts. And that strong west wind, which rises every evening to clean the face of Tierra del Fuego, this time also cleans that hard face, and wipes from that mind the last traces of alcohol and murder.
They have passed the fence. The paths fork again. The two men look at each other for the last time.
“Goodbye!”
“Goodbye!”
The two riders separate, two black dots again puncturing the solitude and whiteness of the snowy plain.
Beside the fence lies an empty liquor bottle. It is the kind of trace sometimes left behind by men who have passed through that remote region.
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDER
A boat sounded its siren, and Vladimir and his wife both turned their heads toward the desolate promontory on the edge of the stormy Gulf of Penas where the lighthouse of Puerto Refugio was under construction.
“That’ll be the cutter with the provisions, thank God!” Ana cried. She left off washing the dishes in the makeshift house that served as accommodation for the lighthouse builder and his men, and went outside, saying in a low voice, “Now maybe the gossip will stop!”
She was referring to the rumor some of the men had been spreading—that she and her husband were hiding stocks of canned food, which would have been better than the beans with seaweed they had been served for nearly a month. That was about the time the cutter should have put in at Puerto Refugio with material and provisions, but for some reason it had not arrived. Ana had had to make do with half a sack of beans, and, in order to avoid monotony, added edible seaweed from time to time. The workers had been pleased at first, but were soon as bored with the seaweed as they were with the beans.
“Why don’t you tell them to search the house?” Ana had asked her husband. “Then they’ll see we’re not hiding anything.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Vladimir had replied, his voice booming like thunder out of his six-foot-three frame. “There’s no need for you to get involved . . .”
“One of these days they’ll rebel . . .”
“Anyone tries it, I’ll tie them to the rock opposite the landing stage and leave them there until they beg to eat what they’re given.”
Ana had looked at him nervously—she had already seen him do something like that once. Vladimir was a Yugoslav, a mountain of a man, uncultivated and rather uncouth, but with a core of goodness, and it was in that goodness that Ana had taken refuge like a turtledove that finds a safe nest. In his youth he had been a fisherman on Bracˇ, his native island in the Adriatic. Keeping his connection with the sea when he emigrated to Magallanes he had managed to acquire the expertise the Chile
an Navy needed to build the first network of lighthouses in the maze of channels and gulfs that go from the Guaitecas Archipelago to the Straits of Magellan. Ana was also of Yugoslav descent, though born in Punta Arenas.
After a while, they heard the anchor chains falling, like a cataract of muffled bells, and although the noise was unpleasant and metallic it brought a touch of humanity to that cold, solitary place.
Vladimir went down to the landing stage to greet the commanding officer, who was coming ashore to see how work was progressing on the lighthouse.
“Any news?” the young lieutenant asked, as they climbed the slope to the house.
“No, apart from the lack of provisions.”
“We had to go to the aid of a ship that had run aground, and then tug it all the way north. And how has your wife been?”
“Working hard . . . worrying about the provisions. People have started gossiping, saying we were hiding cans of food . . . all because one day they found an empty sardine can that had been thrown away . . . The truth is, it was the last one left.”
“The empty can might only have been a pretext. There could be something else that’s upsetting them.”
“Something else?”
“Your wife . . . I warned you it would be a risk, bringing her here, woman among six or seven men. Abstinence makes men aggressive . . . I often see it on board . . . They explode for the slightest reason . . .”
Vladimir roared with laughter, and the sound echoed through the air almost as loudly as the noise of the anchor chain.
“I settle that kind of thing with my fists, lieutenant!” he said, stretching his arm out as if to take in the whole horizon.
The young officer looked him up and down, and smiled at this massive man with his powerful physique, who, like a child, was unaware how boastful he sounded.
“I’m younger than you are,” he said, “but when you’re at sea you see all kinds of things . . . There was the time I had to go to the aid of a cook and his wife, who were with a gold prospecting expedition on Lennox Island . . . The leaders of the expedition had had to give them revolvers to defend themselves, and keep them isolated in a tent a long way from the other men, about fifty of them in all . . . And the woman was an elderly lady without teeth . . .”
Tierra del Fuego Page 14
