Land of Smoke

by Sara Gallardo

  Afterwards there followed days of sun, burning dreams. And blue nights walking down the path to drink from the river.

  ‘Don’t let them steal away your brains,’ said the she-cat. ‘Those are things that lead to death.’

  The cat was young. He said, ‘I wouldn’t mind dying for them.’

  One afternoon, he arrived at the zoo at feeding time. He felt the same shame as when dealing with the old lady’s paper-wrapped meat, but much more of it.

  His constant watching made him notice a young lion, so young there were still vestiges of spots on his fur. In a certain way, he behaved like the cat: he did not live for himself.

  He lived for the patriarch.

  He stood at his request, even when slumbering, even answering to the lift of an eyelid. He carried the best morsels to the tree, leaving them at a respectful, but not uncomfortable, distance. He arrived at the meetings beforehand. So, while the youth hung on to the old, the cat hung on to the youth.

  And he got to know his thoughts better than anybody else but the youth’s mother, who watched her son while feeding a new suckling pup.

  He also got to know the youth’s real name. A keeper called him Juan, and he answered when he was called, and allowed his back and nape to be caressed. But his name was another. He heard it in that language he had just understood.

  The cat had got in the habit of spending hours on the tree with a lacerated trunk which threw a fragile shadow on the patriarch. The stench of the gathered beasts intoxicated him. The stench of the souls drove him crazy.

  One night he saw the young lion climb the hill. It was early. He heard it stutter. He told his ancestor that he had understood his lessons; this was no life for a lion. He asked his permission, and at the same time announced that at the first chance he’d look for a way to know that thing without which there is no lion. Freedom.

  The elder’s pain rose like a vapour, and made the cat reel on his branch. He closed his eyes, as if boredom or light disturbed him. Those among us who wish to know such things pay with the end of everything. With death.

  The young lion said the same thing the cat had a month before: ‘I wouldn’t mind dying for such a thing.’

  The elder lowered his head. He licked his paws a long time. He said: ‘I understand.’

  When the young lion came back down the hill, his mother shook the pups from her flank. She rose. ‘What are you up to, son?’

  ‘Nothing, Mother, nothing.’

  The cat! He gave himself up to the young lion’s cause. It was hard for him to sleep. He studied the gates, the schedule, the method of food distribution.

  One Saturday he said to the female cat, ‘Monday. Early on Monday morning.’ He’d chosen well, since on Sundays, by nightfall, animals and guardians were fed up and tired. All of them awaited Monday, zoo closing, rest.

  The female listened to him, crouched. Her eyes turned green like two lamps. She would help him. Anyway, she had already lived too much. (She wasn’t going to tell him life without him didn’t interest her.)

  That night the old lion sang. He sang showing his fangs broken in battles, darkened with time. He sang and the other lions, who had never sung, also sang. They sang and the two cats above them, transfixed by the song, caterwauled until fainting.

  The same way a ship emerges over the horizon on a windy day, wrecked but still afloat, and the fluttering of its sails gives the impression of life, the life of the lions in the desert rippled through them.

  The old lion sang. It was a goodbye to his grandson.

  His grandson understood.

  So did his mother. And the she-cat. No one else.

  Early Monday morning, in the drizzle, three men in a car swore they saw a puma and two cats drinking from the monument fountain. Early Monday morning, in the drizzle, a drunk actress said a lioness with her young crossed the avenue before her eyes. (It was a young lion and two cats.)

  Drizzle erases footsteps. Drizzle chases away lovers. Drizzle makes scents rise from the earth.

  To roll around over the earth, autumn leaves flying between one’s claws, sticking wet to the body the colour of autumn leaves. A male and female cat protect themselves, trembling, from humidity. A fire of embers gives off sparks in the drizzle, a female pauper drinks soup under the ombú.

  Monday at dawn, in the drizzle, a new sailor heads to his barracks. The wind snatches away his cap. He jumps down from the bus to stop it from doing turns in the mud in the park. Hadn’t he promised not to do anything worth arrest, to escape notice and get married when he got back? A weight fell on his back, the smell of wild animal, a jet wets his uniform, steams. He is carried away, open-legged; he is broken, savoured, eaten, hot life passing to hot life.

  Friends, I don’t believe you know a lair comparable to that of the palm trees on the lawn, curved spurts emerging above a tangle of their own species.

  A brief sleep for nervous recovery, for digestion. Inside the shelter, the water did not reach them. The cats mumbled.

  It was a dream. Adventure called. The young lion left the bushes, lifted his chest. Roared.

  He prowled through trees. Strutted. Sniffed. He came to the shores of a lake, and drank. The cats followed, sheltering from the rain as much as possible.

  The lion was mad with happiness. He dug into the earth, tossing it up, poking his nose in it, scratching a trunk that gave off bark in strips that were honoured to stop a while in his claws. In the rain, the voices of the night fall silent. They were even stiller that night. But he thought this was normal.

  The female cat begged the male to try to make himself understood. But it is one thing to understand a language, another to make oneself understood in it.

  The cats believed that day should be spent on an island in the centre of the lake. The bushes touched the water on the shores. There used to be a bridge with lights, which is no longer there. (Friends of the she-cat had been electrocuted there.)

  The lion looked at the island. He liked it.

  He had to make an effort not to finish off the cats with a swipe of his claw when they returned to speak with him. Growling, he listened.

  Cats do not enter lakes, so the lion helped them cross. It would have been easy for them to stay. But they went. They wanted to.

  The sun came out and the bamboo shook in the breeze at dawn. The geese on the other island with the stone lighthouse yelled excessively, running to and fro; they had noted the passage of an unknown beast through the water.

  But on the island! The sun rose and warmed the earth, bamboo and trees. The heat began to turn the world sultry. There was a magnolia tree in the middle of the island, and, in the magnolia, an incomparable sound. A pod encrusted with red seeds thwacked against the lion’s nose. He looked at it, asked the cat if it had made that sound. (The sound had ceased.) No, it had not. It was a thrush, a bird, a morsel who liked those red seeds in the autumn.

  On the island! Crawling along paths that led down to the lake. Jumping and playing in the shadows of the leaves. Scratching a tree once again, belly and mouth on the mossy bark. Chasing one’s tail in circles until going crazy and tumbling about in happiness, paws in the air. Oh, reaching, stretching, yawning in the breezeless atmosphere.

  The female cat said to the male, ‘We should have brought his food.’

  And to herself: ‘The end has begun.’

  Climbing to the top of the magnolia, the cats could cast a glance around them.

  They saw the avenue with its ever-moving automobiles and buses. The lakes, their rows of boats in the waters. The summit of the monument where they’d drunk water with such euphoria early that morning. The fronds, the trees, known one by one, some hospitable, some not, some fragrant, some not, some secret, some not. The people with dogs and the people with bicycles.

  But it was Monday. Few people out. Little noise. The geese themselves were so full from previous days that they rejected the bread someone offered them.

  The male cat judged it fit to recommend to the lion he hunt geese tha
t night. The female cat didn’t tell him that there would not be a tonight.

  Lying on a magnolia branch, one paw hanging down, the lion dreamed. New dreams from new fragrances, of the old lion, of his mother, of his father whose black and enormous mane ran from his chest to his belly. He woke up hungry.

  He set off to look for his meal of the previous day.

  When he got to the shore he stopped. He peered between the leaves. He noticed something.

  All was silent. Not a human being, boat, car or bus. From the summit of the magnolia tree, the female cat murmured something. Twice she had named the male cat with the wrong name, one from the time of her youth. On her palate and tongue she had a feeling, a taste, like the one she’d had that vertiginous night in the trees, when the tabby had died in that manner, when in love with the white one, and she had fled crazed from fear. She didn’t care about fleeing now.

  A sound broke the silence. The fur of all three stood on end. Something could be heard far off, all worked up. A barking.

  The island was circled by white helmets, hands holding elongated objects, dogs tied to leashes choking in the eagerness to hunt, a fleet of boats. Also, certain trucks with lights and cables.

  ‘Juan!’ a known voice shouted.

  The lion backed away, a gleam in his eyes. Memories of his kin came to him, of food and caresses. And the feeling of cold bars against his nose.

  ‘Juan!’

  Night fell.

  All the lions surrounded the patriarch. There was no speech that day. By his side were the enormous one with the black mane, and the lioness with her recent young, her milk dry since morning. They breathed against the scarce grass on the hill. They cocked their ears.

  A crackling could be heard from afar.

  The patriarch flattened his ears and closed his eyes. He was the only one who recognised that sound.

  With eyes closed, he saw the young lion fall from a branch, a soft, heavy fall. He saw two small animals riddled with bullets drop onto his back.

  The patriarch died just then as well.

  A LAWN

  AMONG THE GARDENS that run from Palermo to Recoleta there’s a square of lawn. One year the gardeners forgot to cut it. The grass grew at its leisure.

  Every half-hour a train ran by with rusty breath. The roots felt it pass, the earthworms interrupted their journeys.

  The grass kept growing as it pleased.

  In autumn, juices went through the earth, just as the needle of a mattress repairman goes through thick wool. The grasses and earthworms were surprised by the novelty.

  When the sun set, the doormen of the apartments burned the garbage. Whirlwinds appeared over the buildings. Black papers fluttered around the metal screening of chimney-tops, crumbling in their eagerness to escape. Sparks gave themselves to the air and disappeared; soot rose. The soot from other houses met it. Together, they formed clouds. Broken up by a flight of birds, the passing of a train or a gust of wind, they came to land on the lawn.

  The lawn. Near the traffic lights of the avenues, yellow, red or green colours tinted it according to the order of crossing, and over it the cars belched a trail of smoke.

  It wasn’t really a lawn. It was more of a pasture.

  With its soft surface it attracted those in love. Kids too, playing football or toddling about, their parents behind them. Ice cream sellers who when the heat won out came to sit down. And coffee vendors laden with Thermoses, who tried to make themselves heard above the sound of the trains. It attracted the birds, who found good food. And the insects, because it was a forest full of places to shelter.

  It attracted the owners of dogs.

  The dogs were keen to run, to smell, to do their business.

  They had owners of all kinds. The confident ones let go of the leashes. The frightened ones ran behind, tied to them. If women, they twisted the heels of their shoes. Loose and leashed dogs met one another, whimpering; free ones bounded off, chasing each other and returning when they heard their names shouted.

  There’s an hour of night when those in love have gone home and the trains have stopped, when dew falls on the lawn. The soot trickles down. Each blade of grass retains a dewdrop.

  Days of rain come too. Just water, washing, whispering, filling the earth with damp. Not a person, not a dog. Silent, the grass opens its mouth.

  One day the city mayor travelled through all the gardens between Palermo to Recoleta. A king had announced his visit.

  The gardeners arrived to cut all the grass, north to south, east to west.

  And the grass that died sang.

  It sang of the breath and rattle of the train, the descending soot, the juices of autumn. The earthworms. The lovers. The traffic lights. The ice cream sellers. The insects. The dogs with and without leashes. The owners of the dogs. The birds. The coffee vendors. The big children and the ones just learning to walk. The dew, the smoke from the cars, the rain.

  It sang, that voice of the grass, that smell of freshly mown lawn.

  WHITE GLORY

  DAPPLE-WHITE HORSES can be bland or they can be the glory of the world. White Glory was the glory of the world.

  No glory felt less glorious than he did while climbing aboard the southbound train in the city of Buenos Aires. He came from a confinement almost impossible to suffer. Not so much because of the walls, which he was used to, as because of the floor that constantly slipped beneath him, to say nothing of the lack of exercise. If it hadn’t been for Dick taking him out into the fresh air he would have sickened forever. Despite that he kicked down several dividing walls. As soon as he’d left that place he’d had to board a train. His shoulders trembled.

  A blanket of dark red with blue trim and four shields covered him. When he reared up, the squares could be seen, blue and green in reverse, along with his straps with gold buckles.

  Dick was worse off. He’d suffered in the ship but now suffered more. He didn’t want a seat in the train, preferring to sit on a bale of straw with White Glory. The hour came to say goodbye. He had to return to his land. He hadn’t prayed since childhood, but now he did, asking to be spared that pain.

  If you’d seen White Glory as I saw him that morning in the previous century, with eyes like black diamonds and the head of an archangel, you’d understand Dick. You’d have left your love, family and friends for him, as Dick did. When you saw him, you lost yourself.

  Dick carried an envelope in which there was a book of red leather with a blue fillet and gold shields, the blazing list of White Glory’s pedigree. Dick didn’t understand why the owner had left out the names of those ancestors that trod the clouds and will do so once more at the end of time. They were the most prominent ones, from the Arab side.

  The truth is that he’d respected the owner until a certain day, when he learned that he’d traded White Glory for money.

  Not only that. He’d sold him to people inhabiting the southern part of the globe. That’s where they were now.

  That night the train crashed. Dick, who had fallen asleep on the bale of hay, rolled under the legs of the dapple-white horse. His terror was what finally made White Glory lose his head. He cut his halter, kicked down the panels and shot off into the night with Dick’s brains stuck to his hooves. He didn’t know about the fire that had destroyed the train and turned the book of red leather to ash.

  Filled with terror, he galloped into the night. There were burrows in the ground, and he jumped over them without knowing. The night had the strangest smells.

  He galloped through grasslands reaching up to his chest. Uneasiness made him turn away from a thicket where an eye gleamed. He galloped without stopping.

  Once he was about to rest. But then something whipped him. He’d known the most magnificent riding crops, gold and tortoiseshell, rhinoceros leather. But no one would have dared lift one against him. A nudge of the heel was enough for him to win a race. Now he was being whipped in the dark. He bucked and bellowed, shooting off into the noisy water until it reached his belly. There at last
he halted, trembling, his mane dark with sweat. When he stopped, so did the whipping. He saw he was in the middle of a fog as fluffy as Dick’s winter scarf. He could smell only wetness.

  He drowsed, and lowered his head, but the cold of water against his muzzle made him rear up. Once again he felt whips, and shot off.

  If Dick had seen him like that… He was better off where he was, not knowing.

  A shadow rose up before White Glory. His mane waved vertically like a very slow bonfire. His back had no end. White Glory’s heart beat loudly.

  ‘What is your name?’ he heard. Pale edges glowed on the suspended hooves, a cloud wrapped itself around its endless flanks. White Glory folded his ears flat.

  ‘My name is mine.’

  ‘Is it easy? You think it’s easy. It is not easy. It is easy. It seems easy.’ He spoke with thunder, and the night seemed to accompany him. White Glory rose up on two legs, clutching at the air, his mane tossing around him like a torrent.

  ‘My name is mine!’

  The shadow galloped upward and he lifted his head to watch it. He saw the air rent in tatters as it passed through it. This sky was different from the sky in England, and there were stars.

  Dawn arrived. He found himself surrounded by what had seemed feathered riding crops, but was revealed as a forest of sparsely leaved, slender stalks which grew in the water. A mirror-like watery path traced his journey of the previous night. He drank. A couple of little birds fluttered before him, sometimes stopping to land on a stalk.

  ‘Sir, terror, farewell, goodbye, please. Goodbye, please. They are our first ones, we are frightened, we cannot feed them. Sir, please, goodbye, goodbye.’

  ‘Food, food, food, food!’ screamed the chicks.

  ‘Goodbye,’ nickered White Glory, advancing cautiously through the marshland, hooves smashing snails. There were many nests hanging amidst the stalks. When he emerged from the water a flock of birds that looked like tiny men received him with a racket.