Cristóbal’s neck swelled with courage.
‘Now you’ll see, General,’ he said, and the sorrel shook its ears.
‘I will see,’ said Quiroga. His hair all in curls was the colour of pitch, and his eyes were full of the blood he shed constantly. He wore a poncho with a coloured border; on its edge there was a hidden patch no eye could spot. With a silver needle and a gold thimble, Quiroga’s wife had mended it in broad daylight at his house in La Rioja, so it looked just like new. He also wore a leather hat, much scraped.
They went to battle the next day, Cristóbal along with them. He did not have a rifle, but he did have a dagger as long as a man’s leg. He did not have a spear, but he had hands. And he did not have bullets, but he did have a chest like an ox’s. He grabbed an enemy and flipped him over, bringing down another twenty men. He took hold of Captain Bermejo and pushed him backwards, so he went flying over a cliff with his legs in the air. The flag bearer fell along with the captain and his saddle. In the depths of the river at the foot of the crags, the wet flag seemed to cry.
Cristóbal watched General Quiroga, who is afraid of nothing. He saw him laugh in battle and bite his lips with teeth red with blood. He saw him yell, jump and kill many, and this filled his soul with happiness. ‘There is no chief better than this one, not here, not in Magdalena, not anywhere. It was for his service that I, Cristóbal, was born, and I am content.’
On a stormy night, they galloped through shadow. General Quiroga led in his embroidered poncho. Nothing could be seen, not the flag, not even Cristóbal, big as the crags. They travelled through a river so as not to leave marks.
‘Here,’ says Quiroga, ‘you may dismount and rest.’
A man came up in a hurry, on horseback.
‘What is it?’ General Quiroga had dismounted.
‘My General, with your leave, this is the cave they call the Devil’s.’
Quiroga mounted again, reins in hand. With a loud voice: ‘Let’s continue.’
Although tired, they mounted. Nobody said anything. They only murmured, and the thunder went on thundering.
‘Who is the Devil?’ asked Cristóbal.
The rain fell and ran over the field. It ran over the ponchos, over the men, over the crags and cliffs. It ran over the stones and over the tails of the horses. It fell, sounding in the river.
‘Be quiet,’ said the men and the flashes of lightning.
‘I have seen General Quiroga go pale. That means there is someone greater than him. Someone tell me where the Devil is.’
‘Be quiet,’ said the thunder. They all marched in silence.
In the cool morning the birds sang. A drop hung from every branch. Quiroga was thinking.
‘My General,’ said Cristóbal, ‘I must leave you.’
‘Go,’ said Quiroga. ‘I have no need of borrowed men. It is only thanks to that stone wall you made that you haven’t had your throat slit. Don’t ever cross my path again, not you and not your horse.’
A huge tear rolled down Cristóbal’s face, two down his horse’s.
Back in Magdalena he saw a horde, and dust that reached up to the sky. Shrieking people drove a sorry-looking herd.
Cristóbal opened a cattle gate, galloped sideways. The sorrel, excited by the stench and steam, reared up. The chief of the troop, a man with only one eye, stopped then and there.
‘Who are you? Where are you going? What are you looking for?’
‘I am Cristóbal, from the Magdalena. I am looking for the Devil.’
‘Come with us. And don’t ask questions.’
It was dusk in a field larger than any other field, either actually seen or even dreamed of. Those sad-looking herds arrived from all directions. The horizon moved as they stumbled along, bleating. Not the ground, not the land, not even a blade of grass could be seen. Only cattle and the sound of hooves.
The riders punished their charges with relish, and hooted mockery with a sound like that of a coypu in the wetlands.
‘The boss is over there. You can go and talk to him.’
Pampa stirrups, serious face. In each boot was a foot, in each foot was a claw. Wherever that claw touches, two blazes flare. Wherever that eye looks, the heart stops.
‘I am the Devil. Who are you and what do you want?’
‘Cristóbal, from the Magdalena. I have come to do your bidding.’
‘I need a man like you, a giant. I am the owner of the world, and often need orders carried out.’
‘An honour for me.’
Cristóbal took off the hat he wore, flat as a table and wide as is the style in Magdalena. His sweeping greeting fanned the fields and made a cloud of dust fly into the sea. This became an island: Martín García.
‘If you serve me as you must, you’ll have a prize that never ends, in my palace where torches burn.’
Here the Devil laughed, showing the black canines he uses to bite what is most secret in the heart of man.
‘I do not want prizes, my lord. It is enough to serve you. There are two of us at your orders, counting my horse. This sorrel has a good trot and good character.’
Cristóbal grasped his lasso with his left hand, rolling it into four loose turns with the right, to let it fly when necessary. Thus he began his work for the Devil.
He worked no less than five years, lassoing hindquarters and forelegs, moving about, galloping and whirling his poncho round to hold the most stubborn at bay. Some he bumped down with his sorrel; they fell with a crunching of bones. He branded them with the Devil’s sign. He drove them through a door by the strength of his riding crop alone.
No need to say more about that door. Inside there was very little light. Yelling and wailing came from there, and the laughter of the farmhands. Also, another louder laugh.
When the five years were over, Cristóbal presented himself to the Devil.
‘Boss, if the way I serve pleases you, give me more work. My horse and I are capable of greater undertakings.’
‘Make me some corrals. Five of them.’
Cristóbal unsaddled his mount. Then he began to dig, pushing, forcing open, pulling with his lasso. He spat and kneaded the mud at each edge, making corrals without walls, sunk in the earth, as there is no stone in Magdalena, and almost no trees.
The Devil went and looked. The tassel of his beret danced; he seemed well pleased.
‘Not one will escape from here.’
He took out a horn whistle and blew it. The herdsmen and the one-eyed man arrived.
‘The corrals are done. Let’s celebrate with a roast.’
Off they went, and there was a smell of charred hide, so black the day turns into night. Amongst them, Cristóbal and his horse.
On the road that goes from Pila to Ranchos there lived a widow, the mother of ten children. A single tree gave shade to her rancho. She had hens, but they’d left to lay their hatch by a wire fence. The youngest of her daughters didn’t reach higher than a horse’s leg, but she knew how to mount with knees and hands. Each morning she’d ride saddleless. She dismounted at each nest and put the eggs in her plaid handkerchief. Then, she mounted again. Not a single egg was ever broken inside that plaid handkerchief.
From Pila to Ranchos went galloping the Devil with his people. They were thinking of the roast.
Nearby, a hen got upset with the widow’s daughter and pecked her finger, making her jump. The tin cross she wore revealed itself in a silvery flash.
The Devil halted, with a sharp yank on the reins. Foam spurted from his lips.
‘I can’t go through!’
He kicked against the horse, and the horse kicked against the ground.
‘We can’t go through!’
The demons, drooling, formed a swamp. They boiled, bubbling, like a cooking pot of pitch at its most fervent point.
‘What is it?’ asked Cristóbal.
‘Something that is something,’ said the one-eyed man, his tongue lolling out.
‘Something that is what?’
‘It cann
ot be named.’
The girl’s cross flashed again. With an awful cry the Devil went racing away, and behind him the the rest of the screaming lot.
Only Cristóbal and his sorrel remained.
Slowly, so as not to scare her, he approached the girl wrapping eggs in the plaid handkerchief.
‘Who is that lord you carry on your neck?’ he asked, removing his hat.
‘Ask Father Pedro, at the ruins.’
She pointed with her finger. Nothing but a long horizon could be seen.
There Cristóbal made his way on his horse, after both took a drink from the watering hole.
Father Pedro sat alone at that ruin the Indians had destroyed twice. So many dead friars! Crying out to God, their souls and their rosaries had been wrested from them.
Cristóbal dismounted, and made his greeting, tipping his hat low. The friar was very small and very pale.
‘What brings you here?’ came his question.
Cristóbal told him, because he was always well disposed. He told him how he had gone looking for a chief, how he had served Quiroga, how after that he had served the Devil. And what had happened when the girl leaped and the tin cross shone.
The friar smiled and invited him to share a maté. They talked of worldly things, and of what is sacred.
‘How may I serve that Lord then?’ asked Cristóbal, holding out his two hands.
Father Pedro said to him, ‘Fill the corrals you made for the Devil with water. Where there is water, there is no thirst. There is joy. Birds come, and people and cattle can rest.’
Cristóbal galloped away. He filled the hat with water from the Salado River. He poured it into a corral until it spilled over.
‘How foolish you are!’ cried a lapwing. ‘Good water is fresh! Who is going to drink that salty stuff?’
That lagoon remained salty, but Cristóbal filled the other four with fresh water. Now they have names.
After his work was done Cristóbal reached the sky with one gallop. The Lord thought him very generous, and his sorrel very handsome. They can be seen drawn in the stars, looking content. Friends of men, of beasts, of good water and of willingness.
TASKS
CANGALLO STREET
OF MY CHILDREN I prefer the middle ones. They were born while I was in Ushuaia. A cold place without news, because I don’t know how to write and neither does my wife. She is a laundress.
When I served my time, I came back. She got up as if to quarrel. My two first children were there. There were also two more playing on the floor.
I sat down, and she served me a meal. Afterwards, we looked at each other. Then I looked at the children, one by one, the first two, and those two others. I liked them.
I cried, she cried too. A few years had passed, and it showed. In time, we had others. Now there are six of them. That is something, six. Six children.
Inclined as I am to get angry, to drink, I refrained from another crime. Not because of the thought of Ushuaia, but because of those middle ones. Not because they were good-looking, unlike poor me, an ugly mulatto. Not because they were a blond boy and girl, and happy, not, like me, sad. Not because of anything. I just prefer them, and they love me.
I sell newspapers for the six of them, coughing in this street I hate, every night until dawn. But if anyone passing sees me smile, it’s because I’m thinking of the middle ones.
AN EMBROIDERER
DIEGO PÉREZ, an embroiderer by trade, died burned by the Inquisition in Lima. Fleeing from it, he left Madrid. In the street of the embroiderers, only one noticed his departure and went to see him off, crying.
The way he embroidered can be imagined from the silks of the games room at the royal pavilion in Aranjuez. A pale testimony, for throughout all the centuries nothing from that prodigious street can be compared to the embroideries he made.
He only found peace while embroidering. When he arrived in Buenos Aires, he did not dare offer his services to the viceroy or bishop, and instead worked for a harness maker. But his hands were not made for that. They flew over silk or velvet. He dedicated his free hours to embroidering a mantle of the Virgin of Carmen the English took away in 1806.
Did he have bad luck?
He was naive. It’s difficult to picture him as a heretic. His agony began with a confidence. He told a colleague that as a young man, he had embroidered cloth. But that now there was no difference between the embroiderer and the embroidered, that when embroidering he was embroidered, that the embroidery embroidered him and he the embroidery. The colleague – the one who had cried when seeing him off – thought about that. At last he denounced him for witchcraft. It weighed heavy on him, as he admired him.
In Lima he met with the accusation once again. He shouted, ‘I’m innocent!’ over and over again. They burned him.
As they swept away his ashes, he appeared before the Inquisitor, and before his colleague in the street of embroiderers. They saw him, luminous, waving like a banner, hands deformed by the needle, black from the fire, throwing out rays of light through the spikes of Christ. The game hunts and meadows he had embroidered ran through him.
He vanished, with a smile.
CHACARITA
I TALKED WITH BUONARROTI from the first moment. With these eyes that marble dust makes red, I touched his works one by one, in the places his hands had touched.
To emigrate does not mean to forget. On 13th November 1901 I arrived in Buenos Aires.
While I work, I ask him, ‘Is this how you think? Well, I think this way.’
I am an artist and creeds don’t concern me. I made grieving figures on truncated columns, the sepulchres of freemasons. Angels and Ladies of Sorrow with a cross alongside. The wreaths I brought forth from the stone seemed to breathe. A whole village sprang from my two hands.
Every breath I take is for art. It’s the substance on which I nourish myself. I know the acidity of jasper and how to awaken alabaster.
Yesterday two young people, art students by the looks of it, nudged each other in the ribs while passing my door.
‘From this place,’ said one, ‘issues part of what makes this cemetery so comic.’
The other laughed, an extraordinary laugh.
I won’t talk with Buonarroti any more. Now I will work in silence.
LADY MUSIC
THERE’S NO REASON to think the cap and whistle had always been everything in Enrique Bomon’s life. He was stationmaster, calm, with pale eyes. He never attended union meetings. The union proposed him as a delegate. He did not accept.
His life was a poor one. He was saving, some said. I don’t believe it.
He sat on the ground without smoking and made a little sound, the representation of a music that for him was complete.
Now you’ll see why. The world is full of twists and turns.
A couple of foreigners approached him on the platform. His beard was grey, but his posture was good and he looked serene. Leaning forward, he listened, neither confirming nor denying. He smiled.
The woman, above all, was agitated. She’d blushed when she got off the train, her husband behind her. Enrique Bomon showed no sign that he had either recognised or forgotten her.
Some women are like that. She had herself taken to the editorial department of a newspaper. She unleashed the reporters.
Around that time he changed his job, and began to work as a gatekeeper. Perhaps it was to avoid them.
If we begin to look closely, his chronology in reverse is as follows. All this is true: he played bass drum in the city band of Junín in ’98. Before that he was seen as a farmer in Zárate and wall painter in Pergamino. He’d opened a music shop when he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1874. Where had he come from? Australia and South Africa, where he was a miner, a seeker of diamonds.
Why a music shop? There’s the key. Let’s look at his chronology the other way around.
Birth: Brussels, 1849. At eight years old, the Royal Conservatory awarded him a position as soloist. He was called a prodigy. In what? Th
e cello. Servais, his teacher, cried when listening to him later, when Paris, Berlin and London gave him their blessings. One night, in Rio de Janeiro, Emperor Pedro II summoned him to his box seat. Without speaking he held his gold watch towards him.
Another night approached. He’d just emerged from a concert, and was looking at the stars above the palaces. The music in him had condensed into full expression. There would be no more instruments. No more public. No more expressing, seeking or serving her. She was within him.
Lady Music.
Another life went on.
All that remains is to explain the nomadism, the adventures. Who knows? Perhaps he felt a thirst for other identities, once his steely apprenticeship had ended. Perhaps he hoped to dissolve in non-identity.
The fact is: these chronologies are real.
Something else remains: his name. Enrique Bomon. Henri Beaumont, de Beaumont? The transcription of a customs employee erased his origin. And this delighted him.
J.M. KABIYÚ FECIT IN YTAPUÁ, 1618
INDIAN BRUTE, I heard myself called for this. It’s true I am one, but not for this.
I painted him on his knees. The drops on my forehead pricked like the thorns I painted on His.
I painted someone else, kneeling as well. Tears ran down my face thinking of him.
Indian brute, I heard myself called for this. It’s true I am one, but not for this.
Not for painting Judas, crying, on his knees.
WHITE FLOWERS
WHITE FLOWERS RAINED on Buenos Aires the night Juan Arias was born. Few saw them, even fewer caught their scent. Who knew if they were there because he was being born? Not even his mother, who didn’t even see them. Besides, she died right after he came into the world.
Someone in a lonely apartment saw them descending through the night and asked, ‘Who’s being born?’ or ‘Who’s dying?’ That was it.
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