Land of Smoke

by Sara Gallardo

  She grew fat. That curl that always escaped from her coiffure stopped escaping. Sometimes, sitting before the piano, she let sound a note.

  She dedicated herself to order. A speck of dust was a drama.

  The cook stayed behind. So did Obarrio. Once a year he left. Where to? To drink blood in the land of Indians, according to the cook. What blood? Georgette enquired trembling. Fresh blood from mares, the kind that pulses to the mouth from the neck in a stream that grows and shrinks with the beat of the heart. A month later Obarrio would come back, greet everybody, let his horses free. He would go back to work.

  Georgette suffered from fainting spells. She would have the town doctor called. The farmhand would leave at a gallop. Fever overtook her. The boy from the pharmacy arrived on a chestnut horse, the cupping glasses clinking in the saddlebag. Both the doctor and the boy attended diligently, both left with their heads full of dreams.

  Seated on a bench in the garden, she started to speak in French. One day she raised her eyes and saw the cut-throat of Los Pasos before her. A black toe emerged from his raw horsehide boots. He asked for a cerisette. He carried a lamb in his arms, which he offered her to raise. She didn’t understand his gaucho lisp. He didn’t understand French.

  She died one afternoon in her imperial bed. The taffeta quilt was the same pink as the setting sun. Her ghost rose up. It saw her, hair dishevelled, asleep. It saw the house, the piano, the kitchen. It saw the horses on the hitching rail. It saw a diamond, a star, a lily – or thought it had seen them. It was Obarrio’s love. Love for her.

  Floating in the house she inspected the wardrobes, the remaining flowers. A longing to leave, an anxiety to stay, she hung about uneasily, her fate in limbo. She trembled like the cork on an invisible thread in an invisible water.

  The president of the Republic was playing croquet with his daughter. It was his month of vacation. Beneath the trees a girl smiled, dimples that shifted in the lights and shadows of the straw hat. She was blonde. A curl escaped from her coiffure; like a swarm of bees, a memory of kisses surrounded her. The general ran beneath the branches. The shout of one daughter stopped him. He turned back with an ecstatic smile. He was about to fall into a canal made deep by the rains.

  The general’s decadence began. From that moment he lost the steel quality of his mind. In conference with the governors he would interrupt to ask for a liquor bonbon. The country expected a government comparable to the first one. The vice president made an effort to please him. Nothing turned out as it should have. Anyway, the general had already entered history. And history didn’t blame him for that end.

  No one knew Georgette’s surname. Even the general had forgotten it. On the tomb only Georgette was written, and a date.

  She remained alone, floating through the house and the garden. Her passion for order persisted. The house took on an abnormal splendour. Not a feather was carried away by the wind, not a leaf entered through the window of the salon for years. Rumours spread, staff could not be found. The Eden lingered on.

  Half a century came to an end when one of the general’s daughters, the one who had run after him that day playing croquet, turned eighty. Because of that, she had a good thought. She ordered a mass for all living and dead members of the de Narváez family, as for all those related to it. The merits of a mass are infinite. The benefits met and exceeded the expectations. They reached further than the general’s daughter had imagined. They reached the farmhands who had dug the holes for the trees of his ranch, the Indians he had exterminated and the soldiers he had commanded. They reached allies and enemies. They reached Obarrio, the cook, the town doctor and the boy from the pharmacy. They reached me, the one telling you all this, and you, the ones reading it. They reached Georgette.

  That blessing fell on her soul. Her uneasiness shattered like a glass. A slit seemed to appear. Through which she slipped. And she entered peace.

  The house finally let go. The leaves could move again over the avenues, the gazebo rotted, wasps settled on the chandeliers. The balcony collapsed; it lost its doors. The Eden turned into desert.

  There it remains. It can be seen by anyone who sticks his head out the train window a few stations after Chajáes.

  THINGS HAPPEN

  ONCE UPON A TIME there was a pensioner with a garden in Lanús. He had been head of personnel at a state-owned company.

  His garden was the admiration and envy of all Lanús. That’s a zone that, as everyone knows, lacks water two days out of three. The neighbourhood writes notes of protest, and the first to sign them has always been the pensioner with the garden.

  The usual way was this: the neighbour who most liked complaining would arrive with his document in hand. He would find the pensioner kneeling under the rose bushes, or covering the paths with white pebbles, or passing a rake over a circle of lawn which looked like, let’s say, an emerald. Ant poisons, fertilisers and tools could be seen in the green shed through a sheet of fibreglass. And there, standing up, almost without taking off his straw hat or wiping the mud from his fingers, the pensioner would add his signature, a single flourish, just as he had signed so often in his days as a director.

  One morning he woke up. The smell of his garden was missing. Was it raining? The pleasant drip-drip of water wasn’t sounding against his window either. Uneasy, he went outside. He found himself in the middle of the sea.

  A green wave rocked the garden. A strong wind had knocked down the scarecrow.

  He fell to the ground. When he regained his strength, he lifted his face. Again, he saw himself navigating in the sea. Once again he fell prostrate to the ground.

  He noticed, one of the times he stood up, that foam was sprinkling the jasmines on his fence, neatly painted white. In desperation, he looked for a tarp he kept in case of hail and tried to cover them. It was difficult. He barged ahead, clinging to the small fence not meant to serve as a railing. He tied the tarp to the rail and to some wooden pickets stuck in the earth. He worked with dedication, with rage.

  Dizzy, soaked, he thought of taking a warm shower. But he realised the water in his tank was limited. He would need it for his plants, to drink.

  Nonsense. He was dreaming. He threw himself on the bed and closed his eyes.

  He dreamed he was in his office, a frequent dream of his. An employee was asking for leave: his wife was dying. Forty-eight hours, he would tell him. The employee left, tears of frustration splashing the lenses of his glasses. Those tears were falling on the face of the personnel director.

  No, they weren’t tears. The wind had changed, and there was condensation on the open glass of the window, falling on him in drops.

  He sat up. Was it true then? The scene before him seemed to be dancing. Clinging to the walls, he went out.

  It was true.

  The garden, veering slowly, was changing course. Its prow pointed towards a vast expanse identical to the one surrounding him on all sides.

  The rose bushes leaned their chubby cheeks towards him, as if asking for help. He rinsed them with fresh water, sobbing in their ears.

  But he was hungry. He went to the pantry. There was instant coffee and several cans of tongue, mackerel, milk powder. He hated all that. They were gifts from his sister, who was married to an employee of a meatpacking firm.

  Because, as he had clearly stated the morning she arrived – loaded, breathless, the marks of the bag handles on her hands – before making gifts one should enquire about the tastes of others. He followed the principles of veganism, with occasional exceptions for yogurt and cheese without salt. Yet his sister had left that packet.

  Cans. And how helpful they were now. With a groan, he opened one.

  How long would this last?

  Or maybe he was crazy. Maybe he only thought he was in the sea, while his neighbours were looking over the fence at him with pity. It was easy to imagine their conjectures: so many hours in the sun, dedicated to his plants… Or maybe he was in an insane asylum now, hallucinating? Maybe the drops he believed were fal
ling on him were injections?

  Whatever the case, there he was. He saw the sea through the windows, green and sparkling now that the sun was up.

  The sun! He got up to look at his grass. Bright emerald still, and fresh. But for how long?

  Desperation made him burst out in shrieks.

  At sunset he took up the newspaper he had been reading the day before. Football, movies, comic strips. How far away everything seemed now. He checked the date. He made an almanac on the last page of a seed catalogue.

  The only thing left now was to sleep. Night had fallen. Outside, that murmur. Inside, the rocking motion.

  Days, night, mornings followed.

  The first to die were the carnations. They trembled, dried up, brown. The roses saw their petals fly over the desert. Then their stalks twisted into spirals. The grass died in patches. All that was left was a bare circle of earth with bits of straw. They eventually flew away too.

  The fence, tarp and jasmines fell heavily in the sea with crash.

  The pensioner attempted to distract himself. He turned on the television. But it transmitted wavy lines that reminded him too much of the surrounding undulations. He went on noting down each day in his almanac. He examined the water tank. He cursed heaven that he lived in West Lanús. The usual lack of water was reflected in the tank three-quarters empty. The terror of thirst started to obsess him.

  Looking for some positive side to his situation, he told himself that the weather was steady, and that the waves would lead him somewhere.

  But then the calm came.

  The anxieties of the calm have already been written about too well. The loss of hope for a port, provisions and water running out, the glowing of strange presences, the agony.

  Sweat trickled down the pensioner’s bald head in his destroyed garden. He had gathered the white pebbles in two flowerpots, which he kept in the kitchen, but outside, the flowerbed’s design now appeared to him like a laugh without teeth.

  On the tenth day of the calm, a loud racket set the garden in motion. The sea rushed forward. There was a collapse. The end! he thought, clinging to the dry trunk of a shrub. As in a fit, he recalled a television programme. The winner, a prodigy of a boy, had said that the ancients believed in a flat world with a waterfall at the edge. The conductor handed him a prize, and everyone laughed at the ancients.

  ‘Here we are!’ he thought in despair, dragged with the house and garden into the depths. A circular current held them while the entire sea made the sound of regurgitation.

  A monster appeared. It had dripping scales and looked extremely content. Its head brushed the low storm clouds. Limp vegetation hung from its mouth.

  The fear was unimaginable. Of the fear he felt, I will only say: it was like being dead: no pulse, on the ground. An image crossed his mind. He had once seen a photo of two trains crashing on the Lanús line. One of them stood vertical.

  Tall as a hundred trains, the sea serpent lifted her body into the air, and enjoyed the view of infinite sea. That view made her feel like moving. She didn’t see the chalet, too close and slightly behind: she was sated, too.

  Parts of her body rose from the water as she moved away, while others sank into the waves, and the pensioner, his garden and his house spun in the whirlpools, until he felt the atoms of his self starting to split.

  This happened on the thirtieth day of navigation.

  *

  By that time he had decided to protect the glass of the windows. Any cracks would be serious. The house was his refuge. He closed the shutters and got used to walking around in the dark inside. It was a relief.

  Outside the sun bludgeoned the garden. Dressed from head to toe, in a hat and gardening gloves so as not to see his flesh reduced to shreds, he tried to fish. Without a fence, it was a dangerous task. He tied himself to the grass tap and used tinned food as bait. He spent days making hooks.

  He discovered that sometimes he did catch something. He promised himself he would eat that, no matter what it was. If a whole day passed without a catch he would open a can. It must be said that all sorts of beings crawled and throbbed in the garden, tossed into it by the waves or arriving by personal initiative. They spared him the effort of fishing. He flung them into a cooking pot. Some gave him terrible skin rashes. Others gave him dyspepsia. Still others had no effect. Fearing for his fuel supply, he cooked several dishes at a time in the oven. He got used to cold soup. But seafood makes you thirsty. What made him most anxious was the decreasing water supply.

  One day two seabirds landed on the television antenna. Out of habit he insulted them, waving his arms. Go away from my fields. In the middle of the gesture he stopped. A bird means land.

  ‘Land!’ he shouted, sinking to his knees, his voice cracking in a thousand tones.

  There was no land in sight. The birds were of an unknown dark-red colour. But he didn’t notice it. Seeing that his fuss had scared them off he begged, ‘Stay!’

  He had to watch them move slowly towards the east.

  He kept his eyes fixed in that direction. A waste of a morning. Better to lack hope than to gain and lose it. He made it into the house, threw himself into bed and cried.

  In the afternoon he looked again. He thought he was dying. He wetted his head. He saw something like a mountain.

  And what if he passed it, in this aimless navigation beyond his control? But it was coming nearer.

  At sundown the light grazed until it hit a blackish-red crag, like a blood clot. Foam tossed against the shoals.

  No gesture, no human sound came from it. If carefully observed, it seemed to move, like a dead rat covered in flies. Seabirds covered it. Their caws seemed like the voice of that stone.

  The pensioner fell on his knees, stretched his arms towards the crag, cried out. He looked for a bed sheet and waved it frantically, begging for help. Nothing.

  But, actually, yes. With the sinking of the sun, the crag seemed to be made of enormous faces, just like those he had seen in movies, some of America’s national heroes carved in a mountain. In the movie they had seemed magnificent. But not here. Maybe because of the birds’ droppings or because of the reef fog, those men’s and women’s faces looked as if they had a cold, with runny noses, teary, or dribbling. He screamed until he almost lost his voice, his strength, his life.

  When the sun set, he got terrified. Despite his fear of the reef, he shut himself in the house.

  What to do now? Not sleep. He looked for some magazines he kept under the bed.

  His neighbour on the left in Lanús, a poor thing contented with geraniums in flowerpots, belonged to a Protestant sect. He often chatted him up over the fence, praising his garden, though his real intention was to convert him. Once a month, he would produce a publication from under his arm as he took his leave and say, ‘Maybe this will keep you entertained.’

  That was enough to irritate him. But since those who work with fertilisers and phosphates need to have papers at hand, he kept the magazines. He would use them when he had to wrap up waste, satisfied that the neighbour could sometimes see his pages in the rubbish bin.

  What to do, tonight? He tried to focus on the humour section. A healthy humour. Nothing about alcoholism or adultery. Almost always something about dogs or cats. Impossible to understand, with that crag the colour of a blood clot, those reefs, birds, and faces so close in the night.

  He looked out. He tried to see something, to hear the noise from the cliffs. Nothing.

  The inconvenience of bad journalism is that while reading it, you think of something else. He had suffered when he retired. What a personnel director he had been! The employee called in sick. I hope you get better, he would say in an unforgettable way. He would send the company doctor. What a doctor he was. They had an agreement. Forty-eight hours. Get better. Or die.

  He always liked asking his employees their political affiliation. They swallowed bile. The official badge on the dissidents’ lapels provided him with great entertainment for a while.

  The eff
ect of bad journalism: he fell asleep in the armchair.

  A heavy wind began to blow at that hour. The house shook. The sea became a field of waves at play, tossing house, garden and pensioner about, tumbling them from bed to table, from armchair to door.

  He heard the antenna of the television as it tore away, bounced off the roof with a metallic goodbye, disappeared into the air.

  A shutter’s corroded hinges collapsed. The windowpane was uncovered. Light entered through it, and he saw the waves, transparent, covering the sky, licking the sides of the house, filtering through the joints of the windows.

  He crawled. He looked for a can of insect glue. He smeared it on the window joints, but water entered anyway, stretching the glue into icicles, dripping down their tips.

  Five days of wind. Five days without eating, without making notes in his calendar, clinging to a leg of the bed.

  He didn’t have the strength to open the door. Trembling, he unsealed a can of sardines. Somehow recovered, he started to make his way outside. He gave a shout.

  The garden was a palm underwater. The only part jutting out was on the other side, the part that used to border the Protestant neighbour, a slightly raised section made of brick, where he used to keep clay pots with flowers and flowerbeds. Between the house and that section, the garden looked like a pool crossed by silvery schools of fish.

  All around, bare sea stretching towards the horizon.

  He didn’t have a single tear left. Not a hair remained on his head to yank out. A beard he did have, long and tangled. His electric razor had broken during the first days of navigation.

  Does God exist? he wondered. It’s true he had prayed at moments of excessive horror, like the night of the crag. His mother had once taught him how. And in a pamphlet he had read the story of the lost man in the Himalayas who had survived thanks to meat extract and prayers. But what prayers were those? And what meat extract?

  Let’s see, what kind of a situation was this? How could a human being ever anticipate a risk like that? He could prove it: no insurance company would have this in its programme.