Tierra del Fuego
Page 16
Two or three times, Esteban, feeling humiliated, had had to leave his food untouched and go out of the house to breathe. At other times, he would walk, dazed, along the cliff in the direction of the sea and would not return until after Vladimir and his men had left. Ana would leave his lunch on the stove to keep it warm, but after a while she stopped serving him. Only hunger, darkness or the hostile weather of the gulf could force him to accept the food, and he would slip into the house with a hangdog look on his face. The workers were also starting to feel worn down by those daily remarks. They would have preferred Vladimir to come to blows with Esteban, instead of having to listen every day to that humiliating interrogation and then that strange laugh. Ana moved about more nervously than ever, avoiding the eyes of the men, who seemed to be blaming her for something . . . Sometimes she regretted telling her husband, and would also have preferred to see the matter resolved with a good thrashing rather than hearing those insulting questions and that cruel and increasingly tedious laugh.
As time passed, everyone started to feel sorry for Esteban, and a suppressed hatred for Vladimir and his cruel jibes grew among them. But Vladimir kept going, obsessively, like a drop of water that falls and falls until it starts to erode a solid block of stone. The bleakness and isolation of the place made the fall of that laughter all the more maddening to their shattered nerves. If any of them had followed Esteban when he fled to the cliffs, they would sometimes have found him sitting there, crushed and weeping, and at other times standing with his hands tensed, ready to throw himself into the sea, or swaying in the wind like a rag doll.
“The man’s going to end up in the sea, Don Vladimir!” Ricardo said one day.
“You can fish him out!” Vladimir replied sarcastically. “Didn’t you use to go gathering sea urchins with him? You’re his friend!”
“I don’t have any friends . . .” Ricardo said grimly, under his breath.
“That’s obvious . . .”
At last, one day, a siren announced that the cutter was putting in again with material and provisions.
No sooner had the commanding officer stepped ashore than Esteban rushed forward and asked him to take him back up north.
“What’s been going on here?” the young officer asked Vladimir.
“Nothing, lieutenant . . .”
“Why’s the man in such a hurry to leave?”
“Ask him. He must be bored with the work . . .”
The cutter set sail that same afternoon, with Esteban on board. As she rounded the point where the lighthouse was going up, she hooted briefly, and the sound rolled across the solitude like the cry of a wounded animal. Vladimir and his men took off their caps and waved them in farewell. Like an echo, Vladimir’s laugh rang out for the last time.
Back at the house, Ana was sitting on a small, rough wooden bench by the door, covering her eyes with the corner of her apron, even though there was no one there to see her weeping all the tears she had in her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francisco Coloane was born on the southern Chilean island of Chiloé. His stories and novels, spanning almost sixty years, have been translated into over ten languages. He was awarded the National Prize for Literature in 1964 in Chile, and the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Republic. The movie Tierra del Fuego (2000, directed by Miguel Littin) is based on Coloane’s story of the same name.