The Killer's Tears

by Anne-Laure Bondoux

  “It's difficult,” he said.

  “True,” Luis muttered. “It requires a lot of effort at the beginning.”

  He was thinking that he would not send any letters as long as Paolo was unable to write, and so his friends would not know of his cowardice. The ignorance of the child would protect him a while longer; but a time would come when it would not be possible to escape. He put the pens away.

  “Don't you want to teach me anymore?” Paolo asked.

  “Of course I do, but you have to go slowly.”

  Paolo was hesitant in his desire. He guessed that his power would be great once he mastered the snake-words. At the same time, he knew he would lose something precious. It would be the same as when he had gained Angel's friend ship and protection: in exchange he had lost his parents. Nothing, he understood, came free.

  Luis put the sheets of paper back in his bag. Just then, Angel opened the door. He walked in, his poncho dripping, and soon steam rose up around him as it did from the tops of the volcanoes that one could see far in the west. From the folds of the poncho, he took out a ball of wet fur, which he displayed in the dying light of the fire. He had just found a lost fox cub. The animal had a head wound and some dam-age on one of its legs, but it was alive. Angel had walked far from the house, toward the trees of the forest, where he had heard plaintive cries through the whistling of the winds and the drumming of the rain on his cap.

  He came near Paolo, whose eyes were wide open with wonder.

  “It's for you,” said Angel. “Do whatever you want with it.”

  Paolo took the cub in his arms. A delicate fur covered the animal's head. The fox was so light that Paolo suddenly felt as strong as a giant. As he carried the wounded fox against his chest, he felt a much greater strength than if he had been able to write all the words in the world. He looked at Angel grate-fully and crouched in front of the hearth to warm the cub.

  Angel got rid of his poncho. He hung it on a hook, and soon the dripping rain formed a puddle on the floor.

  “Is it really safe to keep this animal?” Luis inquired.

  Angel glanced at him with a challenging look. The city dweller might be good at showing off with his books and his pens, but he would never be able to rival nature's vitality, beauty, and wildness.

  “It could bite,” Luis objected.

  “No, no, I will tame him,” Paolo said.

  Angel smiled and sat on the bench, the silver-clasped box on his knees. Enough tobacco remained for two ciga-rettes. He rolled them slowly, then offered one to Luis.

  In front of the fire, Paolo had curled up with the cub in the fold of his belly. Before falling asleep, he muttered: “It will need milk since it's a baby, won't it, Angel?”

  That night, Luis did not read. That night, Angel had won.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE FALL WENT by, then the winter. The task of daily chores—cooking, keeping the fire going, repairing the dam age caused by the harshness of the seasons, caring for the goats, collecting the eggs of the chickens… even sleeping while listening to the roar of the storms—kept everyone busy. Luis was torn between his desire to help Paolo grow up and the cowardice that constantly pushed him to delay. So the book of poems gathered a fine coat of dust during the harsh winter months. Besides, it was so cold on some evenings that Luis's numbed fingers would have been unable to turn the pages.

  Thanks to Paolo's tender care and to the goat's milk, the fox cub healed and reached its adult size long before Paolo could even draw the letters of his name with a steady hand. When the first sunny days of spring arrived, and the temperature began to jump above the freezing point, the cub's appetite increased. It needed meat.

  Paolo started hunting, determined to be the only provider for his pet. He armed himself with an ice pick from the shed and went out every morning to look for moles or voles; anything as long as it could please his fox.

  Only snakes were to be found on the desolate land. Therefore Paolo had to venture far from the house, in the direction of the trees. He never entered the forest. This dark and vertical universe frightened him. His search stopped on the outskirts of the forest, and when a small appetizing animal appeared, he would hurry to corner it before the creature had the idea of fleeing into the woods. This fear of the dense vegetation hampered Paolo, and he often came back with an empty bag.

  In the house, the fox began to yelp and growl. Paolo had to attach it to a stake, but the animal would twist its leash until it almost strangled itself. Luis avoided passing within its reach. As for Angel, he observed the fox, fascinated by its pointed teeth, and eagerly waited for the day when the animal would no longer contain its violent tendencies. He was certain that since he was tall and strong, the animal would attack Luis rather than him or Paolo, who was his master and friend. Angel no longer wished to get rid of Luis,but he had a constant need to belittle him, to show him who had the upper hand.

  “You're afraid of the fox, aren't you?” he asked mockingly.

  “Yes,” Luis confessed.

  “It's your fear that makes it nervous.”

  “No, it's hunger. What about giving it one of our chickens?”

  “Our chickens?”

  “All right… one of your chickens.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  When the weather improved, Luis went for long walks, far from the fox and far from Angel, whom he considered mad and not much better than an animal. He would walk for hours until his feet were worn out.

  One day he reached the sea inlet very, very far to the west. Surprised by this discovery, Luis contemplated the icy waters and the pieces of iceberg that drifted along. The weather was so clear that he could make out the snow-covered tops of the volcanoes in the distance. Confronted as he was by so much beauty, his loneliness and confusion gave rise to bits of phrases and words that exploded in his mind like fireworks. He felt sorry he had not taken his bag along.

  Later on, he walked back to the house and found an even more surprising sight: the table was overturned and so was the bench, the ashes of the fireplace were spread all over the room, and, in an awful silence, Angel and Paolo stood facing the fox. The animal was crouched in the recess leading to the nook, and it was growling and showing its fangs. It had broken from its leash. Its ears down, eyes shining, it seemed about to leap.

  “Don't move!” Angel ordered.

  Luis remained frozen in the open doorway.

  Next to Angel, Paolo was crying silently, his body shaking. He was holding the ice pick, pointing it timidly at the fox.

  Angel took a step toward the table. The fox went back on its haunches a little more. Angel took another step. The fox growled ferociously.

  “Come closer to me,” Angel told Paolo softly. “Slowly, like that…”

  Paolo was sniffling, and his mouth was distorted by fear and pain. When he came elbow to elbow with Angel, he tried talking to the animal.

  “Relax, nobody wants to hurt you. I am your friend. You and me, you know that. I promise that tomorrow you'll have enough to eat. I'll bring you a whole doe and—”

  The fox growled louder, curling its chops.

  “And what if this beast has rabies?” Luis whispered.

  Gusts of wind were rushing into the house, blowing the ashes around, while the ceiling lamp swung on the hook. Angel took another step forward. He was only a few inches from the overturned table. He moved his arm very slowly toward the drawer. The knife was there, within his reach. He opened the drawer very gently, his eyes never leaving the beast. Suddenly, the fox sprang. One would have thought that it had been catapulted by an invisible and powerful machine. Its leap was so precise, so swift, that Angel hardly had time to cover his face with his arms. The fox swooped down on him, its muzzle wide open. Angel screamed.

  “No-oo!” shouted Paolo.

  Luis stood still. The cold was biting his back. He had the feeling he had become an iceberg, one of the inert blocks of ice he had seen earlier, armless, legless, unable to help the man who was crying out
in pain.

  “Paolo!” Angel shouted. “Kill it! Kill it!”

  Luis turned to the child. Paolo was looking at the tip of the ice pick in his hands, then at the fox, then at Angel, then again at the ice pick. In spite of his size and strength, Angel was unable to shake off the fox. They were both rolling on the ash-covered ground as though pushed around by the wind. The jaw of the fox was clenched on Angel's shoulder.

  “Kill it! Kill it!”

  Paolo gave a start. One last time, he looked at the tip of the ice pick. At the fox. Then he threw himself forward. Luis closed his eyes. All he heard were screams, yelps, cries,and panting. When he finally dared to look, he saw a shape-less heap: the man, the child, the fox—all three were entangled together, stained with blood, sweat, and tears.

  Angel was the first to emerge from the pack, his shoulder, his cheek, his left ear bleeding. He knelt down in front of the child and pulled him away. Paolo's face was filled with distress and he was still holding the ice pick with both hands. The tip had broken off, half of it embedded in the flesh and fur of the fox.

  “Paolo,” Angel said softly.

  “I killed it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what you wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  The child let go of the ice pick. His body went limp.

  Luis saw Paolo's torn heart reflected on the child's face and realized that with this incident Paolo had left his childhood behind. He also realized that this was going to affect his own life and that of Angel's just as brutally.

  At the end of the rocky path, in this house battered by the southern winds, there were now three lonely men, and a fox to bury.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JANUARY WAS HERE again. Luis's tobacco plants were blooming, the dirt of the vegetable garden was cracking like old varnish, the potatoes were easily confused for stones, two more goats were showing signs of old age, and Paolo's eyes were no longer shining like fresh chestnuts. Angel's shoulder was healing. There was a small bulge next to the mound of dirt.

  Angel and Luis spent many early evenings on the doorstep, smoking in the sunset. The air was heavy. To distract Paolo from his sadness, Luis pushed him to resume his lessons. He already could write several words: Paolo— Angel—Luis—Chile—fox—knife.

  “Do you want to learn a new word?” Luis asked one night while opening his bag.

  “I don't know.”

  “There are a lot of words, but only a few letters to spell them. It won't be difficult to learn them all.”

  Angel slid along the bench to come closer to them. He had let his guard down. He no longer feared the sheets of paper and the pens. All he wanted was to see a smile on Paolo's face, whatever the price to pay.

  “Come on, Paolo, show me how you do it,” he said encouragingly.

  “Are you really interested?”

  “Of course I am.”

  Suspicious, Paolo took a black pen. Angel—Chile— fox—knife, he wrote. Strands of his long straight hair fell on the paper and made a grating noise under the pen. He jerked his head to push them back. Angel observed his face. The child's features had hardened but were not yet showing any signs of puberty. How old could this boy be? Angel regretted having killed the Poloverdo woman without asking her first.

  “In your opinion, Luis, how old is Paolo?”

  The writing lesson finished, Paolo had gone off, leaving the two men alone.

  “I would say ten or eleven years old,” Luis said. “Is that right?”

  “I don't know.”

  “You're his father and you don't know? How can that be?”

  Angel remembered that he had kept the lie alive from the first day, when Paolo had prevented him from commit ting another crime by calling him Papa.

  “Fathers are not like mothers,” he said simply.

  Luis pulled a chair outside and sat facing the sky. He remembered his own father, who knew precisely what were the good years for wines, but always forgot the birth dates of his children. He understood what Angel meant.

  “And his mother, where is she?”

  “Dead.”

  Luis watched Paolo, who was weeding the garden far-ther down. His eyes went to the mound of dirt.

  “That's sad,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Surprisingly, Angel really was feeling sad. As he sat sur-rounded by the melancholic and sweeping light, in this empty and disconsolate place, time was passing by, sense-less, endless, and he could see the day coming when he would lose Paolo's affection. Without the child's love, he would again become what he actually was, a murderer, a thief, a crook, a parasite whose life was of no importance to anyone.

  He threw his cigarette on the ground and crushed it with his foot. His mouth was on fire; he was thirsty. He went back inside the house and reached for the pitcher. It slipped from his hands. He saw it fall at his feet and break into a thousand pieces.

  Luis put his head inside the door. “What happened?” he asked.

  Angel remained stunned. The chunks of clay, the shards at his feet, they were the broken pieces of his heart. His throat tightened. He fell on his knees and yet did not have the strength to gather the mess. Sobs were shaking his whole body.

  Luis came and crouched by his side. Without under-standing the reason for Angel's tears, he felt a great compassion. This brute, this uneducated, dour man was crying! He put his hand on Angel's arm. There were so many reasons to cry, after all! The broken pitcher, the cold, the hunger, the solitude, the banishment, the shipwrecks, the mothers who left one day to follow their lovers, the fathers who thought that giving gold coins was a way to please, the nights spent contemplating the sea in Valparaiso, the absence of women, the unattainable dreams, the marvelous poems one has forgotten, the betrayed children, the dead foxes, the fear of living, all these reasons and many more were enough to make anyone sad.

  The two men were kneeling on the floor when Paolo found them. He had come back from the garden, his fore-head shining with sweat. He wanted to drink some water from the pitcher. He squinted, uncertain of what he was seeing. When Luis and Angel turned toward him with red eyes and wet cheeks, Paolo knew he was not dreaming.

  That very night, he added a new word to the list of those he already could write: pitcher.

  A few days later, two of the old goats died. Only two remained in the enclosure.

  “Two goats, six chickens, a few potatoes, and a lot of tobacco leaves,” Luis counted.

  “We won't last the summer,” said Angel.

  Paolo turned to Luis. “You have some money, don't you?” he asked.

  “I told you: I have a lot. It's in a bank account in Valparaiso. But what good is it? There is nothing to buy here.”

  “Here, no …,” Paolo admitted.

  Angel and Luis sighed in unison. Of course, they were not going to let themselves starve in this forlorn house. Of course, a solution had to be found. But all the same …

  “I've never been to a fair,” Paolo said.

  “Neither have I,” Luis answered.

  He knew only the wealthy areas of Valparaiso, the restaurants, the theaters, the bookstores. Not the fairs.

  “Is that really what you want?” Angel asked. His heart pounded in his chest. Lately, it had been giving him trouble. It would swell inordinately or rattle like a monkey wanting to escape its cage. All this activity in his chest upset and baffled him. “Is it really what you want?” he insisted.

  “It is,” said Paolo.

  “Yes,” added Luis.

  Angel shivered. Paolo's words sounded like a knell on an autumn Sunday. Everything he feared was happening, and he did not see how he could prevent it. If he had had the courage, he would have killed everyone, himself in-cluded, to stop time and avoid the suffering he saw coming. But he turned pale at the very idea of taking out his knife. This tool was now good only to peel potatoes.

  The next day, they gathered their sparse clothes, and Paolo hooked the shutter of the window. Then he closed the door.

>   It was a windless, rainless, and sunless morning. The clouds formed a thick, still mass that seemed to crush the earth. Paolo took a last tour of the garden, walked down the path, stroked the mound of dirt with his hand, mur-mured something, then turned south. Of common accord, Luis and Angel had decided to take that direction. North was not to their liking. North meant Valparaiso and the friends waiting for unlikely letters; north meant Temuco, the police, an unpleasant past from which it was better to keep a distance. For Paolo, any direction was fine. He was leaving his past here, in the center of everything on this desolate land.

  “Let's go,” he said.

  Luis took his bag, just in case. Angel took his knife, just in case. And Paolo took a handful of dirt, which he put in his pocket.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE FIRST PERSON they met was an alpinist. A Belgian alpinist in search of mountains.

  “You're in the right place,” Luis told him.

  “I prepared my trip carefully,” the Belgian explained.

  He had rented a donkey in Puerto Natales, and had loaded its back with bags containing enough provisions and gear to face the toughness of the mountain for at least fif teen days.

  “Want to see?”

  He proudly exhibited his survival kit, his dehydrated soups, his thermal containers; then he started to unpack his brand-new climbing equipment, which consisted of cross belts, ropes, pegs, shoes, thermal blankets, and more.

  “I've been dreaming about this for ten years.” He laughed, his face gleaming. “So, you can imagine, I had plenty of time to do my shopping.”

  He stopped laughing when he realized that his listeners did not seem in the mood to chat. The stouter man, in particular, made him uncomfortable. But the man was Chilean! And everyone had praised the hospitality, the easygoing way and generosity of Chileans.

  “I have to continue on the road,” he said as he started to pack his belongings in a hurry.

  In doing so, he turned his back on Angel.

  The second person they met was a horseman, a farmer of the Pampas, proud and haughty, who had a dozen fat lambs in his herd.