I was thinking about these things when something astonishing happened. Mister Capadocia’s pink Bel Air Chevy convertible came to a stop, right beside me, on the street.
“Jedediah!” he shouted with his sandpapery voice. “Come on, look!”
My eyes leaped out of their sockets when I saw that incredible magenta heap, which was over three hundred years old, in working order. The stylized silver eagle shone impatiently on the car’s hood.
But something more caught my attention.
In the driver’s seat was a native.
I had never seen a native in my life. I had only read about them in my books or had seen them on holos.
Miss Lombroscia had also told us about them: the genetically altered men sent to terraform Mars hundreds of years ago.
The natives made up something like a special caste, a strange one. Officially hated and segregated from a world which no longer belonged to them and in which they were no longer needed, they were, deep down, secretly admired for their bravery and their freedom. And that made people even more jealous of them.
Some natives lived in the outskirts of Olympic, in the Peridier crater reserve. But the majority of them were mestizos as Marsified as myself or any other colonist, who made souvenirs and played the Indian for tourists.
But this man was something else.
He was maybe twenty-eight or thirty years old, and he wore his fine cranial tentacles pulled back in two ponytails on either side of his strong, olive-colored face. His silvered eyes looked straight ahead with assurance and without the impediment of any sort of nose, and the blue claws of his hands clung to the steering wheel delicately.
I imagined that the seat of the Chevy would be uncomfortable for his inverse articulations, but a quick look told me they were double jointed and he could sit on the seat as well as I or any other human.
Mister Capadocia gestured at me with one hand and I approached. Borzoi was loose in the back seat, a little nervous from all the jolting and the red dust raised in the car’s wake. As always, as a collar, he wore an old cord around his neck that had been cut and re-tied a hundred thousand times.
“Want to help me with the dog?” Mister Capadocia asked me, smiling, his dentures shining metallic in the light of the distant tiny sun.
I looked, instinctively, in the direction of our house. My father wouldn’t even notice that I wasn’t there. I responded with an enthusiastic nod, and my face was lit up with an enormous smile. I barely felt the hard vinyl of the seat under my rear.
I took Borzoi’s leash, as he licked my face effusively in welcome, and we took off.
The Chevy kicked up clouds of fine dust as we traveled, like a wake of spume on a red sea.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the native. Wow!
He was... I don’t know, he had an aura of dignity, of strength. He seemed like a prince in rags. After journeying for a few kilometers I admired him greatly. By the time we’d finished the trip, I had decided that, when I grew up, I wanted to be like him.
The truth is that everything was based on his image and on that sort-of-atmosphere that emanated from him, because in all the time the trip lasted, he didn’t open his mouth a single time.
On the other hand, Mister Capadocia hadn’t stopped talking, thereby reducing the silence of our chauffeur and my own, which was, by the way, already legendary in Olympic: “That quiet boy, Amos’ son? He’s simple, isn’t he?”
And no, no I wasn’t, not at all. But it was better this way. They left me alone. Enough for me to be able to devour my books, of adventures and science, of history and fantasy, my comics and my science fiction sagas.
We stopped at the reserve.
Mister Capadocia got out of the automobile with a bit of effort and headed to a clearing on a promontory. There, two boys of around eighteen, both of them mestizos, waited for us.
They wore their hair braided in an attempt to imitate the tentacles, and their tanned skin was marked with sinuous lines of bright colors.
They were mounted on two sleipnirs as nervous as they were.
Mister Capadocia introduced them to the native and they got down from their mounts and made a deep and respectful bow. Then, they all drew a little bit away from me, and talked about something which I could only catch the occasional phrase, like: “It must be done,” “It’s imperative,” “Now, or later it will be worse.” And things like that.
The native spoke a few times and I could feel a deep and low voice that seemed to shake my bones.
I felt a tickle within me when, for a moment, his silver eyes locked with my own from afar.
After a while, the two young men nodded in silence, nervously, and mounted their sleipnirs just like in the holos, with a leap, to then ride off at a gallop through the Martian sand in the direction of Utopia Planitia.
Mister Capadocia made a signal for me to remain where I was, and he went to the red adobe houses, where a group of people as old as he was bid him welcome.
The native remained outside, balanced on his leg-feet, resting.
I squatted down beside Borzoi and gave him a bit of water from my canteen.
I studied the native from the corner of my eye, afraid to offend him with a direct scrutiny.
His skin, the color of olives, was totally covered with tiny, tight silver spirals, whose very pale shine made his skin adopt different tonalities as the light fell upon it from different angles.
I knew that, at night, those spirals gave him an extraordinary mimetic ability, making him almost invisible.
When I lifted my gaze again, he was watching me fixedly.
I shuddered, but not from fear. It was something... strange.
His voice resounded smooth and velvety, but very deep: “You’re Jedediah, no?”
I was left speechless.
He smiled with tenderness and something of compassion for me. “My name is Ajax.”
I nodded, with my eyes half-hid by my hat.
He breathed deeply of the Martian air, closed his eyes satisfiedly and, then, with a smile as fierce as any I’d ever seen in my entire life, said, “The hunting has begun.”
Only many years later did I know that what the slits in his mouth had smelled at that moment was the blood of the massacre.
He sat on a rock, watching me. In silence.
My heart began to beat wildly, just as when you know that you’ve got something important to say, but your sense of shame is so huge that it stops you; and then an internal struggle begins that lasts long enough for the moment to pass and you remain silent, with something important to say forever blocked in your throat, and that sensation of being a useless coward who will never do anything meaningful.
My cheeks burned with suppressed courage.
Time passed and if I didn’t speak I would regret it, as I always did.
Without raising my eyes, I spat out as fast as I could, “When I’m older, I want to be like you.”
My cheeks burned even more.
A smooth laugh emerged, like a feline purr, from the native’s throat.
“Like me? But I don’t have even ten honors.”
Ten honors! Wow, I thought. Ten honors were a fortune. In my mind, the ten shining gold coins paraded before me.
I had barely four nickels, saved over the course of various years of fences painted, dogs walked, and errands of all sorts.
I knew that all my father’s treasure consisted of eight silver coins or, as they were called, eight “forgivenesses.”
Ten honors were, for me, a treasure, and it used to mean that in miner’s slang.
Then I did something that even today, after everything that happened, I remember with astonishment. Without knowing why nor where those words came from, I said: “I could be your ten honors.”
Where had that come from?
I blushed more than ever, I thought my freckles would fall off my face. I thought that even my sky blue eyes must have turned as red as my skin, like the sand of Mars.
I felt his hand on my
cheek, large and rough.
He had approached so silently that I hadn’t heard anything.
I trembled at the idea of his stealth.
“And you will be.”
I lifted my eyes, confused. What could that mean?
He made a grimace with his brown mouth and added with a sad and somewhat glassy look, “And that will bring you many problems.”
I felt as if he knew everything about my life, as if he’d known me for centuries.
That inner tickle returned, but it was pleasant.
He placed his hand on my head and patted it heavily, like someone who wants to be good with a kid but even so keep a distance.
His wolf-like legs took two steps back and he sat again, watching the valley spread some seventy meters below us and rising until it became a utopia.
Silence filled all those spaces between us and the wind wove its arabesques of sound upon that heavy blank canvas.
Every now and then, I felt Ajax’s gaze on me, like a mix of discomfort and joy. I’d almost say, of pride.
The native studied me in a way that made me think that, perhaps... maybe... almost a miracle... I could be important for someone.
Hours passed like this.
I burned with the desire to ask him so many things and he simply watched me, like someone beloved. Like someone with whom he shared a secret.
A secret that I, obviously, didn’t possess.
Not yet.
And why doesn’t my father talk to me?
Well, it’s simply because he doesn’t talk to anyone.
It wasn’t a personal question. It was simply... the dust. Yes, that’s my theory.
The dust is something omnipresent on Mars. It’s fine, it’s red, and it makes you cry.
It gets in your clothes, in your boots, in your hair. There is no safety seal in any home that keeps it out, not even in the Mayor’s Office, even less in the Church, and people only go in there once a week or when there’s a funeral.
But above all, it gets into your throat. It’s like a dry, asphyxiating hand.
And my father is dry, like Martian dust.
He smells of sweat and talc. He only drinks alcohol on weekends, a lot of it. He works from sun up to sun down, prays, and stays silent.
And I don’t seem to exist at his side. It’s as if I turned invisible the very moment I step onto the porch of our house.
A house that still has the same lavender-colored curtains it’s always had, because they’re the ones my mother had chosen (as my father recounted, one Christmas Eve, when he had especially indulged with the ouzo).
Sometimes I wish I were anywhere else.
That night, I returned with the feeling of having taken part in something grand.
When the Chevy parked in front of the door to the house, the four of us (if we include Borzoi) were a mass of reddish sand.
We shook ourselves off as best we could, in that strange tired way we Martians do, almost resigned to the uselessness of trying.
Mister Capadocia told me not to say anything to Amos, just to avoid explanations.
I nodded. In any event I didn’t plan to tell him anything about this marvelous day.
I untied Borzoi, who licked my face, leaving a tangerine mark on it, and I waited as the Bel Air moved once again to its spot in the yard, under the yellowish willow.
I remained at the fence, waiting, marking time by kicking little rocks.
An hour later, the native emerged.
He looked at me with an amused expression: “You’re still here?”
I shrugged my shoulders without moving my gaze from a little rock that was especially difficult to kick, feeling as if my face were boiling.
“Did you want to talk with me?”
His voice sounded gentler.
I raised me head and found myself staring into his silver pupils.
He was intimidating and, at the same time, he inspired a trust in me that I had never felt with anyone before.
He placed his hand on my head, ruffling my dirty hair, red on red.
“Don’t forget me, all right?”
“Never!” I said, more vehemently than I had wanted to be.
He smiled with a half-chuckle. “Good, good.”
He gave me a last look, tinged with nostalgia.
He began to draw away, walking slowly, in the center of the street. It was already dark.
Something within me burned.
I ran after him and crossed his path. What I said was more an entreaty than an enunciation: “I’d like to be your friend!”
He lowered his gaze to my face. I would’ve sworn that, in the darkness of the night, I saw a tear shine.
He took my face between his hands with a delicacy that seemed wrong for a colossus like he was.
He rested his forehead against my own and whispered some words that I didn’t understand until much later: “Of course you’ll always be, Jedediah. Never forget what I feel for you.”
Then, he took off a necklace he wore and put it over my head, in silence. I felt like I had a knot in my throat. He gave me a slap on the back and left, walking very slowly.
I stayed in the middle of the street until he disappeared from sight.
I spent all night looking at the oval of bone with its intricate designs, dreaming of the time when I was old enough to go in search of him and be like him.
I don’t feel notably different. I mean to say, I don’t think that I have anything particularly notable that distinguishes me from others.
But I know that I am not like others. Perhaps something in me is missing.
I don’t get along well with people my own age.
All of them want to be soldiers to fight in the Schismatic Revolts. But I am disgusted by war and all that. I don’t think it serves for anything.
What I do like a lot is to talk with Mister Capadocia. Or rather, to listen to him. To hear all his stories of when he was in the asteroid exploration squadrons.
Mister Capadocia has told me many times that, when I’m older, he’ll give me the Chevy... I don’t think this will be true, but meanwhile he lets me ride in it as often as I want, in his yard, under the willow.
I also like playing with Borzoi a lot, he’s good and affectionate. And he’s a very intelligent dog. Some nights I let him come in through the window of my bedroom and he sleeps with me for a while.
Lately, I think a lot about Mister Ajax. I’ve stopped dreaming of being an outer planet pilot and instead I think about being an archeologist or anthropologist or a geneticist, or anything that will let me work close to the natives.
It’s a strange feeling, which gives something almost like meaning to my boring life.
I think they call it hope.
Around when I turned sixteen, many strange things happened in Olympic.
First was the “long peregrination.” The natives of the Peridier Crater had chosen to emancipate themselves and headed for the autonomous territories on the other side of Planitia Utopia, a name that was never better chosen for a place of promises.
The ones who I had so admired went there.
Later, the mine closed because the supply route lay in the middle of the conflict zone. Thus I found myself unemployed: I had begun to work, to earn a few nickels to use to get out of there.
This was a tragedy for the town which went, in months, from a few thousand down to a few hundred inhabitants. Although Mister Capadocia said that the closing of the mine had been a blessing for me in particular, for I’d been spared having my spirit burn out in earning a regular salary that could barely fill my stomach and would cloud my thinking, as if to say, in the end, that there was no reason for me to leave there.
But the old man was wrong; I wanted to leave Olympic with all my strength and that was the sole motive of my existence.
Then, Mister Capadocia died and I inherited an old dog that didn’t last more than a week before, out of grief, finally rejoining his master. I cried like I’d never cried before, as much for one as f
or the other. My childhood had forever left me, and although I’d known that that had been inevitable for some time, for the first time it was palpable.
I inherited the Chevy and the house; the old man had left them in my name. I couldn’t believe it. On Mars, you’re an adult at sixteen, but without gold that doesn’t mean anything and he knew it. Now I could choose my tutorage, which was how the lack of universities in the mining zones was handled, or I could move to a large city and enroll at a major college. But I knew what I wanted. I’d known it for five years.
And then the most astonishing of all the events that happened that year in Olympic took place: my father spoke to me. Little and bitterly, of course. Drunk as he was (perhaps to work up the nerve) he stumbled over the words, unused to using them. But he told me something strange, something which perhaps would define my future from then on. He told me that he had always loved me and that he would be very happy if I left that run-down town.
That night I left home, crying and swearing that I would never let an entire lifetime pass in order to have a soul and show it. That I would never again remain silent.
I went straight toward the east, beyond the Phlegra Mountains, to the Schismatic Zone.
I was not a mercenary or a Blue Cross doctor. I had no idea what tasks I could do there.
In reality, I wasn’t much more than a guy who had quickly moved from being a short and skinny sprat into a tall young man, thin and ungainly; who had a pink Bel Air Chevy as his whole fortune and a necklace of bone to which he prayed every night. A simpleton who had learned what little he knew from books and the stories of an old man.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Magenta is a good color on Mars, almost a camouflage.
So no, I won’t change the color of the Bel Air.
And I don’t plan to, a bit for that reason, a bit out of an homage to Mister Capadocia and also because, well, I can’t afford the luxury of repainting the vehicle.
Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction Page 23
