by Pablo Tusset
‘A what?’
‘Siwash. An Indian from the North country. Anyway, the Indian could tell that the hardware-store boy was in desperate straits, and so he carried him off to his family. In the summertime, the Indian’s clan generally set up camp near a well just a little bit upriver, and that was where he brought our man. The Indian’s people gave him food to eat and before long our boy from Omaha fell into a deep sleep beneath the watchful gaze of the Indian’s entire family, none of whom were at all accustomed to having such blond, hairy men in their midst. The hardware scion slept the whole day through and when he awoke, he felt much better. It was nearing nightfall when he got up and walked over to the well, hoping just to clear his eyes in the cold water. That was when he saw it.’
‘Gold!’
‘Exactly. Gold. In the bottom of the well: a golden sheen that sparkled in the oblique, late-afternoon sun, like a bottle of Freixenet held against the light. He practically choked. At first the Siwash didn’t understand what the fuss was about, but the grandfather of the clan finally came up with a plausible explanation: that dust had to be some kind of cosmetic substance – the golden pigment that gave colour to the hair atop the Pale Face’s head and the brilliant locks that covered his chest and clustered about his mouth.’
‘You’re making this up …’
‘No, really. Those people were not used to seeing blond people. They had only seen white men from very far distances, looking for some invisible something in the bottom of the rivers. Think about it: next to a Siwash, a Dutch-descendant knickerbocker shines in the sun like a Marian apparition, just like the bottom of that well. What with all this fuss, our young friend realised why nobody had gone up this particular creek. Generally the gold nuggets travelled downriver, dragged by the current. The gold diggers normally tried their luck in areas shallow enough to sift in themselves; if they found something they would continue sifting further upriver, and if not they would abandon the creek entirely and try somewhere else. But as it turned out, in that tiny well, ten or twelve metres deep, the current was very slow – so slow that the gold would just settle there, like a fine shower of glitter, and the superficial water would continue to flow downriver, entirely clean of gold. In other words: the well was a kind of natural decanter that allowed gold to simply accumulate at its bottom. The only thing left to do was find out exactly how thick that golden layer actually was. More wine?’
I poured for both of us, did a quick recon of the ham plate and revisited the warm escalivada, which still didn’t win me over, though a healthy splash of thick, greenish olive oil and a dash of salt improved it somewhat. Fina took advantage of the moment to pick at the trout and sink a couple of bites into the ciabatta toast. I waited until she covered her mouth with a napkin and asked, ‘Well? What happened?’
‘Well, as it turned out, a perfectly Bugs Bunny idea suddenly occurred to our hero. Out of sheer curiosity he went into the well, about three metres down, and filled his hat with the dust at the bottom. Once he returned to the surface, he knew that there was tremendous wealth in that sand, almost equal parts quartz and gold, and as soon as he realised that he was now immensely rich, he suddenly became extremely disaffected by the prospect of having to dive down like a duck for days on end to extract his treasure. And so, the only thing he could think of to do was to take a crash course in hunting and fishing with the Siwash. After all, the gold would remain there, for however long he had to wait. On the other hand, the Indians never remained at the same campsite for more than a week and it was highly improbable that he would ever find them again. And so he stored his hat away in the mule’s saddlebags, and decided to forget about the whole thing until the moment arrived when it was time to really get to work, something that could easily wait for a few days.’
‘And he stayed with the Indians …’
‘He didn’t just stay. He went with them. And not only did he learn how to tell the difference between a salmon and a rabbit, he learned to tailor-make traps for each one, depending on the situation. And since he was a dreamer with a good head on his shoulders, he used all the skills he had honed in the back room of his father’s hardware store and invented an ingenious system for retrieving felled animals that left the Siwash utterly speechless. A week went by, then two, then three, and before long it dawned on him that he actually liked the nomadic life, and he followed the Indians from camp to camp for the rest of the summer, and for part of the autumn, too.’
I paused again, for another sip of wine and slice of ham.
‘And the well?’
‘With the first few frosts, the Indians began to descend the mountains toward the south, and our hardware-store heir decided that the moment had arrived to retrace his steps and get to work on extracting that gold. He knew that he must have travelled some two hundred kilometres with the Indians in the general direction of the Yukon, but he nevertheless employed his recently acquired skills as a predatory trap-setter on the long road to the North. The first snowfalls came and our friend was still only about halfway there, busy tanning rabbit hides to protect himself against the growing chill. He then tried to speed things up a bit, but the winds and snow began to make the road more and more difficult to travel on, and it took him an entire week to cover the last twenty kilometres before reaching the well.’
‘And when he arrived, it was full of people digging about.’
‘Not exactly. We can safely say that no man could have gotten into that hole even if he had tripped right over it. And there was no water there anymore, just a huge block of solid ice, covered by hard snow.’
‘Bummer.’
‘Very much so.’
‘So then …?’
‘Well, he had no other choice but to return to Dawson with the original bit of gold he had put in his hat which was now in his mule’s saddlebag. The gold would be completely inaccessible until springtime, and even then it would require several men and various days, or perhaps even weeks, of work. Why, they would have to put together a veritable mining camp. But it didn’t end there, either, because our friend was struck by another Bugs Bunny idea: what would a normal person do in this circumstance? A normal person would get busy hiring other normal people, a small group of experienced miners who had been successful in their own individual efforts, and who wanted to round out their fortunes by working for someone else for a week or two. But what did our blockhead of a hardware scion do? Well, he decided to play Mother Teresa of Calcutta and went around Dawson looking for poor souls.’
‘What for?’
‘Well, he was alive and rich thanks to the generosity of a few Indians whom the rest of the world shunned, and so he figured the moment had arrived when he should return the favour by sharing his secret with a score of needy souls. Working as a group, they could extract the treasure from under the ice and then they could all go home with their pockets bulging, to set up comfortable lives for themselves.’
‘That doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to me.’
‘Sometimes, Fina, I think you’re a bit of a dreamer as well: all that NGO nonsense has ruined your common sense. Can you imagine what happened when that man, dressed in rabbit skins, began to tell his story to the bunch of poor, ragged folks staggering about half-drunk through the town of Dawson? They laughed in his face. Who was about to believe a playboy who everyone remembered for throwing away his riches in the local saloons and who now bumbled down the local skid row telling drunkards stories of riches beyond their wildest dreams? And they were even less inclined to believe him when, in an effort to back up his story, he started talking details and began to tell about his days with the Siwash. You see, George Carmack, the local hero to whom the Bonanza discovery is attributed, was a white man who was such an Indian sympathiser that he actually married a Tagish woman, and in fact, he made his great discovery through one of his wife’s brothers, an Indian known as Skookum Jim. So when our Omaha dreamer began to get specific about his Indian adventure everyone pretty much agreed that not only was this poor man a li
ar but a dreadfully unimaginative one at that. He turned into a kind of local dunce who wandered in and out of the local saloons ranting on about golden wells of great wealth and riches. Everyone lost respect for him, and the more he insisted the more insane they took him to be.’
‘But he still had the gold that he put in his hat, didn’t he? That would prove that his story was true.’
‘Ah, yes. That also occurred to him, too. One day he took out a handful of gold dust, walked into a saloon with his palm open wide and shouted ‘Look! I have a whole pound of this stuffed in a hat, so whoever wants to come and see for themselves …’
I stopped for a moment and took a sip of wine, looking Fina straight in the eye all the while.
‘Well?’
‘Well, the people most interested in the gold dust were a couple of mounted policemen. If that bravado about the hat was true, it had to be because the guy had stolen it from some honourable citizen. They detained him. Interrogated him. After two hours he found himself obliged to make up an excuse and so he said that he had invented that pound of gold just to impress the people in the bar. Even so, he had a pretty tough time explaining away the handful of that superfine powder he’d shown the barfolk. Luckily, that evening a dancer from one of the saloons on the main street accidentally tossed a lamp out the window during her show and half the street caught on fire. At the time, the city did not have a fire house and the police had so much on their hands that everyone more or less forgot about our poor luckless friend.’
‘What a bad scene …’
‘Very bad. And that is where the story ends. It was already the beginning of December, and the idea of having to wait seven months to go back to the well, in that place where everyone took him to be a suspicious drunk, was more than the poor fellow could bear. And so he set out on the long trip back to Omaha, disillusioned and full of anger.’
‘And the gold in the well?’
‘A mystery. The hardware scion never went back. It might still be there, but I doubt it. Nowadays, that area is part of a tourist route for saloon aficionados. Someone must have found it at some point, maybe the Canadian government. Or maybe not. Gold fever didn’t last very long, only a couple more years. Go figure.’
We didn’t say anything for a few moments. Fina, very serious, seemed to be meditating on what she had just heard, as if trying to hit upon some kind of allegorical meaning that was presently escaping her. I took advantage of the moment to ask the waiter for a dry slice of manchego cheese. She didn’t want anything more to eat, not even dessert.
‘Hey. You’re not pulling my leg or anything, are you?’ she asked.
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because you like to do that sort of thing. It’s like you.’
‘You know who told me the story? Greg Farnsworth, Junior, the only son borne to our hardware store heir, many years later, of course. I spent a few weeks working at his petrol station outside of Aurora, about 150 kilometres from Omaha.’
‘Oh, really? I didn’t know that you’d worked at a petrol station.’
‘Just that once, in the summer of ’86. I needed a few bucks to get to Denver and he needed a pair of hands to organise his warehouse. I usually went over to see him and old Annie to drink iced lemonade on their porch as the sun went down. They didn’t have any children to tell war stories to, and so they told them all to me, a foreigner passing through town.’
‘But how do you know if the story is true? I wouldn’t be so sure … it still sounds a lot like a Jack London story to me.’
‘Fina, come on … do you think a couple of old farts with one foot in the grave would make up a story like that just to fool me? That man treasured the memory of his father, he told me about his adventures as a way of keeping him alive somehow, to keep him from getting lost in the dust. And apparently, he felt that I was worthy of hearing the story – I was worthy, in fact, precisely because I was a traveller passing through town. He gave me all sorts of details – names, dates, places … Maybe I reminded him of that dreamer who went up North in search of a privileged perspective on the world, I don’t know … Plus, he showed me the gold in the hat. He had it stored away, along with the rabbit skins and the mule’s saddlebags, like religious relics.’
‘Reaaally?’
‘A wide-brim hat, brown, completely deformed but hard as a rock, moulded by the gold dust to the inside of the saddlebag. And the dust was really gold, brilliant gold … If you touched it, it left a little sparkle on the inside of your hand, just like a fine shower of light. It’s one of my most treasured memories: that superfine gold dust.’
Silence. The fire crackled. Suddenly the mood had gotten intense; I felt the need to crack some kind of joke. As an emergency measure I made like some thick-lipped black guy and began to tap my feet to some Georgie Dan dance steps:
‘When people criticise me, saying that
I spend my life thinking about nothin’
It’s because they don’t know I’m the man
who’s got the greatest coffee plantation in the land.’
‘And now,’ I declared, ‘we are going to have a couple of glasses of champagne and a little spot of coffee, how about it?’
Fina finally broke into a smile again.
‘Oh, no … first you have to do the Bugs Bunny face again. You gave me your word.’
I did a brief Bugs Bunny impression to make her happy and then called the waiter over. The end of the dinner was inevitably slow and lazy; we drank the champagne and tried to talk, about anything, but it was clear that a change of scenery was in order. I asked for the check – ninety and change – and we got up and tried to get out of there. I say tried, because while we had been eating dinner another couple had entered the dining room and sat down at another table. I had seen them but Fina had been facing the other way and didn’t notice them until we got up to leave.
‘Oh my God! Toni and Gisela! Good God, I haven’t seen you since forever!’
Shit. When Fina bumps into someone in a restaurant, you know you’re fucked. It’s always been centuries since she last saw them and she always insists on getting the full update on their life and times right then and there. The couple – thirtysomethings that looked like the typical childless couple that can still indulge in the luxury of going out to dinner mid-week – duly recognised Fina and waited for her to approach them, displaying a full repertoire of enthusiastic gestures. I could see that this was going to set us back at least an hour if I was willing to enter the game, and so I improvised a distraction manoeuvre.
‘Oh, God, Fina, I’m going to piss my pants. I’m going to go to the toilet while you say hello to your friends and then I’ll just wait for you in the car. Don’t be too long, all right?’
She agreed without paying too much attention and went straight over to the table, full of glee.
I didn’t bother stopping at the toilet because I wasn’t, in fact, pissing my pants, and went outside instead. It was hot. Late spring evening. We were far enough away from Barcelona to be able to see the stars. That and the scent of the log fire have a way of making a person feel bucolic and pensive. I reached the Black Beast, did the ‘stuuk’ bit and got in, opened the window and let myself get lulled into the cric-cric of the crickets and that sleepy, post-dinnertime glow.
BROTHER BERMEJO
The interior craftsmanship of the Black Beast may very well have been perfectly calibrated for speeding down a motorway, but it is rather difficult to fall into a deep sleep in a seat that locks you into a position more suitable for a race-car driver. Even so, I managed to fall into a sweaty dream state, obsessed with the idea of setting a bunch of crickets’ chirps in four-four time, but I kept getting distracted; every time I heard a few steps upon the gravel road, or the sound of a car driving past me, I was brought back into surveillance mode. After a while, though, aided by large gulps of the evening breeze, I soon felt the indescribable pleasure that one feels when falling deep inside oneself. I began to dream that I was driving full sp
eed down a bunch of lonely mountain roads, amid clouds of buzzing insects reflected in the haze of the streetlights, always toward a remote valley awaiting me in the distance, with its tiny village, houses and soft single beds that would finally allow me to sleep with my legs fully stretched out.
An unbearably suffocating feeling jerked me out of my trance, however, and my arms flailed about in the air as I tried to escape something that felt as if it were sealing my nostrils shut with a pair of tweezers. Once I fully came to, I found Fina laughing at me from the other side of the window.
‘Where did you go? I thought you were going to the toilet.’
‘Fina. Shit, don’t do that again, all right?’
‘What?’
‘Hold my nose while I’m sleeping. I can’t stand it.’
‘All right, all right. You don’t have to go and get mad at me.’
‘Right. Just don’t do it again. I fell into a perfectly fine sleep and you had to go ahead and cut off my breathing. You know what that feels like?’
She walked around the car and got into the passenger seat, glowering. Now she was playing the I’m-offended routine in an effort to get out of the little joke she’d played on me.
‘So what now? We’re leaving?’
