Land of Smoke

by Sara Gallardo

  But nothing happened; there was nothing nearby. Only whiteness spread over the world.

  That’s how terror works: it’s born somewhere, courses like a thunderbolt, touches someone, is lost.

  Daytime was different. Blessed with its birds, no matter what one might say about the strength of the sun around noon.

  At the siesta hour, covered in his own sweat and the horses’, the priest learned an inn was near. If no obstacles appeared, by early afternoon they could reach it.

  Early afternoon, when the colours in the sky deepen. They would get there, leave their horses, sit in a place with walls, see faces, hear words.

  The Sapling Inn. A few ranchos, a flagstaff in the shape of a sabre whispering in the wind.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ said the guide.

  Too many men, too serious, stood outside the doors.

  To the well-honed ear, ‘something’ and ‘crime’ are synonyms.

  The bald innkeeper appeared. He crossed the ditch wringing his hands, came up to the priest’s stirrup. He spoke in Galician, continued in Spanish. There had been a crime.

  In the meantime the guide realised from the row of horses that the meeting had been recent. And something in the men looking at him arrive, their beards and hair moved by the twilight breeze, words left unsaid, brought that midnight terror to mind.

  The priest went in. His greeting was answered as if those there – watchful as ferrets – didn’t see him.

  Instead of worrying over whether he was thirsty or hungry, which was his duty and profession, the innkeeper tried to take him somewhere else. And even the priest understood that this death hadn’t been a classic one.

  Resigned to be faithful to his profession, he looked for a stole and followed the innkeeper. The guide and a few boys followed.

  In the ranchos, colts’ hides hung like doors allowed glimpses of women’s faces: white, Indian and a black one. The innkeeper walked on under a pink-streaked sky crossed by flocks of birds as high up as fleets of angels on their way to paradise.

  In the half-light, which reeked of hides, the stock of rhea feathers waved. The dead body lay on the ground covered with a white poncho. White socks and white espadrilles peered out from one end of the poncho; from the other, a beret and a white forehead. It was a Basque, a shepherd, a loner.

  The priest put on his stole, then leaned down to uncover him. The priest’s memory held dead by the score. In this one, the bad thing was the expression on his face: terror. The worst, the shape of the wound on his throat.

  Without knowing what he was doing, he said the prayers of the dead.

  They went out. The innkeeper expected a question. He didn’t ask. Huge and red-faced, he did not seem needy. But he was. Thirst, sleep, hunger.

  Waiting for the meal, he leaned on the counter. An old man was starting on a glass of Hollands. He offered it to him. Not knowing the local customs, he decided to wet his lips with it and give thanks. He got it right.

  The old man was dressed in a garment that reminded the priest of a certain violin he had come across in the jungle: something out of place. It was a frock coat. Threadbare and greenish, with buttons from all over, yet still a frock coat. Above it, from behind a beard, the following phrase came out: ‘The things you have seen, Father, surely you never believed in them.’

  The priest understood that he had seen nothing. And in a loud voice he asked the innkeeper how that poor man had died. The innkeeper went out to look for food.

  Father Matías ate, drank, asked to be called before midnight, and fell asleep in the warehouse, between two boxes of soap.

  When he was shaken he woke up smiling. He met again with the stink, an oil lamp smoked near the innkeeper’s elbow, bunches of candles hung by the wicks, like cut off heads. A man of faith, he became a priest again.

  But this pampa is not like Paraguay. No man seemed interested in the sacrament of confession. They looked somewhere else, they sneaked in through the door. He spoke, he joked, he threatened. He dragged a boy by the arm and forced him to kneel. He confronted the old man in the frock coat, who stuttered drunkenly. He had to be content with the innkeeper and the women, who made him hear things he didn’t expect. He distributed among them his supply of medallions of the Virgin.

  A nearly perfect moon was emerging. Each one remembered the one waiting under the white poncho, which at midnight would end his first day as a dead man.

  In the light of the moon, the flagstaff in the shape of a sabre surprised the priest in an unpleasant way. In the warehouse the Basque was still covered, the women prayed, the men looked on. The black woman took a step forward, flabby and fat, trembling.

  ‘He was good,’ she said. ‘A good man.’

  She pulled the kerchief off her head. Bald and wrinkled surfaces were revealed to the priest.

  ‘Embers,’ she shrieked. She pointed to her skull. ‘The Indian women. I was a prisoner, I was young, I was beautiful. You can believe it. I served in the house of a president of the Republic; I was born there. You can believe it. Someone has to avenge this man.’

  Hammer blows had been sounding for an hour. The door opened. The ostrich feathers swayed. They brought in a coffin made with beverage cases.

  Without uncovering him, they lifted the corpse off the ground and put it in the coffin. They nailed the lid over the white poncho. Just like that, with the grimace of terror on his face and covered by drink brands, a man whom everyone said in life had never known fear and was a teetotaller was left for the other world.

  The sun appeared over the edge of the sea of grass as the priest said mass on a door set at the foot of the flagstaff.

  Seen under the sun, the flagstaff revealed itself to be a bone planted in the middle of the ranchos. A rib, from what monster?

  The Sapling. A fitting sapling from a landscape without trees, thought the priest; the meeting of paths that converged from everywhere like the trembling legs of a spider.

  When a man of faith determines on a course it’s no easy thing to intimidate him. A cart went tumbling away with the coffin on top and the priest, considering what he had heard during the confessions, let the guide know there would be a change in his programme. A new path. ‘Where there is evil I must bring Good,’ he said.

  But the guide also had his own faith, and determined his own course.

  So when the priest got his head out from under the poncho that had sheltered him during the night, he found himself alone near his horse. Embers, a bundle with the roasted meat, a water bottle, spoke of a last good wish.

  As far as the rest went, only grass and rising sun.

  He answered with an act of faith: he opened the breviary. Once he’d finished the prayer, he rode in the direction opposite the sun, a new itinerary that went towards the east.

  For an entire day he travelled. At sunset he dismounted, tied his horse to his wrist, ate a little, prayed a lot, tried to sleep beneath his poncho. The voices of vermin sounded in the night. When he woke up he found himself without a horse. The halter, wet with dew, was a stump.

  He opened his breviary. Then he tied the food to his back, abandoned his riding gear and began walking.

  Near sunset he sank his foot in a hole, sprained his ankle, fell on the ground.

  He cried. Tears no one dried as he lay lost in the grasses under masses of stars. He bandaged his ankle with a strip of his cassock.

  At dawn he heard galloping. He stood up, faint with dizziness. Three riders stopped right before him. The haunches of their horses were covered in jaguar hides, which dripped blood. The men seemed happy despite the fright his appearance gave the mounts.

  The way they carried him is no small thing to tell, his foot all purple and swollen. The men were brothers and jaguar hunters. Like a mirage, three more riders joined them. Brothers too, looking the same, just the same. The only difference was that they had the priest’s horse and harness with them.

  When the fox is hungry, Father, he eats hide. Even more so if the hide is wet with dew.


  The priest remembered the dew, the voices of vermin, the cut-off halter.

  Then he seemed to see the plain turn into water, and some grazing cows suspended above the water.

  It was an optical illusion, but cows and water existed.

  Being a missionary can mean finding yourself with a bandaged foot for weeks, sitting on a cow’s skull in front of a rancho. It can mean watching six young men and six girls laugh and come and go, sturdy, short and dark, and a gaggle of kids who don’t call anyone Father or Mother run about amidst the hens and lambs raised at home, and dogs; and parrots that climb down clumsily from a hoop to fix a watchful eye. The owner of the house almost always accompanied them, sitting on top of another cow skull, drinking maté. Sometimes in the river a boat crossed the horizon and covered up the cows, small as they were.

  The missionary wanted to know about those thirteen sons and daughters, the origin of those children sprung from the earth. The girls decorated themselves with bows, and waited for their brothers alongside the cattle gates. He never got any answers.

  ‘This is the one who matters to me,’ the mother said.

  She caressed the hair of the youngest one, lying down by her side, his body huge and fuzz over his lip, his cheeks bloodless and hands hanging. Standing up, he was as tall as the door where the foal hide waved on windy days.

  ‘He’s sick. Cure him for me, Father, if God brought you.’

  One of the elders of the family used to slowly drive the milk cows, before dragging his feet to another skull, pulled up against the wall, where he then sat. Toothless, he told stories of battles, pointing to a blunderbuss hanging from a horn. Father Matías didn’t understand a word.

  ‘What’s going on with you, son?’ he asked the younger.

  The younger passed a hand over his eyes and smiled like an idiot. A tear fell.

  And the brothers arrived with the jaguar hides, laughing, the ponchos wrapped around their arms for the fight now turned to rags. The younger suffered fainting spells when he saw the blood, but none of the others even seemed to see him, ever.

  Father Matías, while waiting for his foot to get better, brought together the kids and taught them the catechism. One morning he baptised them all, and they celebrated with a roast. Eating it, he realised that baptism should extend to the youths. They seemed to agree, but the catechism didn’t continue. With a joke, or some mumbled reference to a job to complete, they scattered like the wind.

  Being a missionary implies not complaining, and complain he did to the lady of the house. He talked about everything happening to him. How could he possibly preach charity to an innkeeper desiccated with greed, chastity to women who survived from the lack of it, pity to men armed with daggers like swords? How could he ask for peace for that death, that Basque crazy with terror? And in that house…

  ‘You are from another land. Everything is different in this land. Who is the Basque that died?’

  ‘Don Juan Echepareborda,’ said the youngest. ‘Don Juan Echepareborda, amidst the sheep.’

  He laughed wildly. His mother took hold of his head and hid it under her apron.

  ‘Cure him for me. None of the rest matters.’

  Every morning and every afternoon, the young man massaged the foot of the missionary with stinking fat. The swelling shrank. The missionary looked at the cheeks, the fuzz over the small red lip. He explained the doctrine, but didn’t know if the young man was listening. He asked him a question: didn’t he want to talk to him about something?

  The eyelids of the young man trembled.

  Those were dark nights. The moon at the start of the journey had waned and could be seen above the pale blue, far away, absent and distracted amidst the clouds.

  The priest slept with the young man, dogs, lambs and parrots. Stretched out on the foal’s hide he heard laughter, a boy who cried in his dreams, a bark. He heard the wind. He heard the boy whimper in his sleep. They woke at dawn. He saw the shadow of bags under shifty eyes. He prayed for him, and told himself he had to make him smile.

  Dragging his foot, he went to the field behind the rancho where bocha was being played. The others made him join in. The mother appeared suddenly, watched a while, vanished.

  He was a man of the faith. He spoke to the boy of the other world, where peace awaited him. He looped the last medallion in his pocket, which hung from a red thread, over the boy’s neck.

  One day he saw the hint of a smile, like a bubble that makes its way with great difficulty through the swamp and finds itself in the open air. He understood it as the message of a submerged soul, and had to hide his emotion.

  Sitting on the cow skull, he told the mother that the boy was no longer sad. The father of the family, who had trimmed the horses’ manes while the moon waned, now busied himself with other things as it waxed. The growing of the moon made the mother nervous.

  ‘Cure him for me,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you seen him sleep?’

  It was true his nights were worsening. When he got up and walked through the shadows, the animals would nestle up against the priest, trembling.

  The moon’s rays fell like faint rain through the poorly thatched roof.

  The priest was tired of inaction and wanted a good gallop. He thought the exercise would be good for the young man.

  ‘Let’s go to the Salado,’ he said one afternoon. ‘I want to see it flow.’

  The mother brought them the horses. She seemed tormented, and clung to the stirrup.

  ‘You know what he does. You know what he does. Isn’t it true? You know what he does.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the priest.

  As with the case of the inn he understood he didn’t know anything. But he dug his heels into his horse and the young man dug his heels into the other, and they galloped. At the rancho the twelve brothers came out to see them leave, as well as the father of the family and the mother.

  The only ones who kept moving were the animals and kids playing.

  At sunset they arrived at a stream of yellow water that flowed into the brown river.

  They prepared to light a fire and make a few matés. A barge arrived, carrying something like a curved pole.

  In it the priest saw a man like himself, bald, red-faced, bespectacled. He ran to the shore, and shouted to him in his native tongue.

  Yes, he responded in German. He was a naturalist, and was carrying this bone to a museum.

  ‘Wait for me!’ the priest yelled. ‘Tomorrow I finish a mission.’ He thought of the young men he wanted to baptise. ‘Wait for me until tomorrow.’

  Joy and relief swept through his soul.

  ‘See you tomorrow!’ the other yelled. He gave the name of a place on the coast.

  ‘See you tomorrow!’ He repeated the name of the place. ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Until tomorrow.’

  But another, very hoarse voice called the priest from the rowboat.

  Grabbing the bone and waving his shirt tail, the old man in the frock coat stood up.

  He pointed to the young man and then at him, Father Matías.

  ‘Beware,’ he yelled. ‘Didn’t I tell you, Father?’

  He stretched out an arm with shaking finger. At the edge of water an enormous moon was coming out, red as the sun coming to rest before them on the sea of grass.

  The priest also lifted his arm and waved. He said goodbye in his native language, which sounded over the water like a kind of home, much sweeter than Latin from a breviary. He looked at the bone and at the old man in the frock coat moving away. He dried his tears.

  He went back to the young man to share his happiness with him. He saw him crouched beside the embers with hands clenched, his teeth chattering. He lowered his eyes, ringed by new shadows, and decided to return.

  They returned. As they travelled through the country, whiteness took shape like a thickening liquid. The horses whickered and moved their ears.

  The priest grew restive with their unease. He remembered the whiteness of the previous month. He remembered the guide who had aba
ndoned him, and prayed for him. He remembered the dead man. Exactly one month before. He prayed once again for him.

  It was almost midnight. The horses trembled and blew out air like the horses of the six brothers when they had carried fresh jaguar skins.

  ‘I can see the light at your house,’ he was about to say to the young man.

  The terror of that time arrived suddenly. It made the horses rear. The one he was riding flung him down and galloped away.

  Fallen, he saw the young man hurtling himself at him, tall as the bears in Germany, foam streaming from his mouth. He heard the howl. As he fought, he knew what the Basque had seen during the previous moon, amidst the sheep. He understood what the necklace of tooth marks was, and the expression of the face under the white poncho.

  The fall and his twisted foot stripped him of energy. He pleaded as he struggled, but hands of invincible force ripped out the collar of his cassock, sent buttons flying.

  There was a bang. A spurt flowed over the priest from the young man’s chest.

  He saw the eyes grow opaque, then sweet.

  ‘Baptise me, quick.’

  He did, with the blood he collected in his hand. He saw the smile that had been waiting so long. He saw the expression of bliss. He saw the family elder holding the smoking blunderbuss.

  He saw, then didn’t see. He felt pain and compassion.

  He died of them, right there.

  A CAMALOTE

  READING WALTER SCOTT it occurred to me to build a castle facing the Paraná. It made me happy with its battlements, towers, drawbridge. A camalote brought a tiger along the river from the northern region.*

  It killed my wife and three children.

  Reading Walter Scott I forgot where I was.

  I will not forget it any longer.

  * camalote: a cluster of aquatic plants carried by rivers.

  DOMINGO ANTÚNEZ

  I PREFER TO SLIT THROATS, though my marksmanship isn’t bad. Almost all of us prefer it, but it isn’t always a matter of choice. If I’ve been chosen by fate, at some point I will have to pay for it. Almost no one can match me at following a trail.