Nest in the Bones

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  Now Pedro Pascual comes back to himself. Now he understands everything: the little engine was something like a bloodhound, or like a clown going ahead of the circus. The king’s train, the train that couldn’t but differ from all the other trains fleeing along the rails, is bringing up the rear, more serious, in the distance.

  It’s different, Pedro Pascual says to himself. He wonders why: because there are coats-of-arms on the cowcatcher, and two flags…And why else? Because it looks abandoned, with the windows down, with no one peeking out, no one getting off or getting on. The conductor, over there, and a guard, over here, and on the station’s cement tiles a soldier at attention, saluting, but to whom?

  The populace, uninterested, gathers on the platform, and nobody tries to rush forward. The children are sucked in by the non-occurrence. The men walk from one end to the other, stomping hard, and if they could, they’d raise a racket, but their espadrilles don’t make any noise. They talk loud, to show their bluster, but not a single one looks at the train. It’s as if it weren’t there.

  Only afterward, when it departs, do they watch it from the rear, and then the comments come: “It might well be…!”

  Before the train becomes a memory, the officious little airplane comes up from behind, not wanting to lose track of it.

  Pedro Pascual will end up regretting his curiosity and dawdling, though without much time for penitence.

  An hour’s walk from the station, past all the goat pens, it greets him, harangues him, blinds him: the water from the sky. It wears him down, bowls him over, as if trying to hurl him down a well. It cows him, puts the fear in him, woven with lightning bolts of a purity like a blade of deadliest steel.

  Pedro Pascual steps down from the carriage. He doesn’t want to leave his horse, but the tree cover is low, and even crouching, he can barely fit underneath. The meek animal, obeying an unspoken command, stops in its tracks, and the rain pounds its flanks.

  Then it happens. The lightning bolt erupts like a white flare and ignites the alpataco, the crooked-branched tree that was giving the man cover. Pedro Pascual manages a scream as he burns down to a cinder. He makes a sound, the sound of a man burning down to a cinder.

  A few feet away, the horse whinnies with terror, the light has blinded it, and he tears off into the night, and the weight of the cart and the fodder make the wheels sink in the sand and water, but still, he doesn’t stop.

  The legs of the animal glisten, but his eyes are dull.

  He has run all night. He slows his step, sleepy and defeated, and then stops. The shafts make him ache from the weight of the carriage, but he holds out. He falls asleep. A house wren picks at the surface of the fodder and hops boldly along the horse’s back till it reaches his head. The animal awakes and shudders and the bird flies around him and reveals the white breast feathers adorning its drab gray torso. Then it leaves him.

  The quadruped buckles, more from hunger than fatigue. The load of damp fodder enlivens his nostrils. He sinks in his hoof, straightens his leg, to get traction, then sets off on the hunt.

  He sniffs, he tries to get his bearings, though where he is, not the least trail will guide him, and the silence is so imperious that he refuses even to whinny, as if to participate in the all-embracing muteness and deafness.

  The sun pounds the sand, ricochets, and sticks in his throat.

  The scent of the caldén’s fruit beguiles his instincts, but the spines tear into his lips.

  The sundown calms the day and grants the animal a respite.

  The new light reveals three sets of tracks that lead to the carriage, get confused, and trail away. They came from the feet, nearly flush with the ground, of the pink fairy armadillo, Juan Calado, the beast with the skimpy fiberglass dress. For a night, the bundled fodder would have been a treat for him; parked there, an endless storehouse. But the cart was too high for his tiny legs.

  It is also a grisly emblem for the helpless passivity of the horse with the frustrated eyes. There he stands, faint, wasting away, powerless to answer his stomach’s urgings.

  A partridge breaks free from the mountain; its chirping provokes a fear that displaces hunger as the driving force for the animal yoked to the carriage. The jaguarundis are hurtling through. The partridge knows it; the horse doesn’t know, but he has a feeling inside.

  The two big cats, one black, the other cinnamon, are playing, tumbling, rolling in a tangle, feinting with their tufted paws, cuffing each other, but harmlessly, saving their claws for the incautious or dawdling prey that will soon come across their path.

  The horse risks his flanks and takes off running. The inordinate noise, a noise not of the desert, frightens off the jaguarundis as the horse couldn’t have on his own, and he takes off toward the hillocks.

  The sand is soft, and the beast’s curving flanks are soft as well. He is followed by straight, sharp lines, the geometry of the carriage straining to work its way upward.

  And in that war with the sand, the animal starts to pant. Bewildered and wheezing, his nostrils swollen, he has long since given up the search for food, but his foot, like a bolas, has hit on a coarse clump of grass, solupe, as it’s called. At last he can lower his head from something other than exhaustion. His lips probe greedily until they find the stiff stalks. It’s like swallowing sticks, but his stomach takes them in with welcoming murmurs.

  Beneath the profusion of solupe lie thin leaves of sweet fescue, and to prolong the tranquil hours of the stilling of his hunger, the edible parts of the fescue are woven below with tender stems of rose moss branching off in supine clusters.

  The aroma of the one plant has betrayed the other’s presence, but nothing portends water, and the animal returns, another day, to his wonted shelter, to the “islands” of the foothills.

  A turbid morass, where the light goes dull, a moribund morass that will be gone with three suns, holds him and holds him like a longed-for corral.

  The islands and islets are rife with thirsty animals in transit. Their numbers die down when one group charges another, but it never empties completely.

  Their roaring, quarrelsome presence disturbs the horse, but none of them, so far, have turned on him. One day he keeps his distance, suffering the sun on the sand flats, another day he risks chomping at the parched patches of broom.

  The hare breaks loose from the islands. The guinea pig digs deeper in its burrow. The fox renounces his hatred of sunlight, and his tail appears in the open field behind his wretched body. Only in the tree branches does life remain, the life of the birds, but they too fall silent: the puma is coming, the short-haired bandit, the rogue who looks small from the front and grows big behind, the better to pounce.

  He’s not seeking water, he won’t eat any rabbits. From afar, he has glimpsed the horse without a master. He proceeds, the wind in his face.

  Borne on the same wind, in the opposite direction, is the scent of a wild mare, free, who has never known saddle or harness of any kind. She goes to the islands for water.

  The unexpected presence of the male makes her neigh with pleasure, and the horse, still yoked to the carriage, turns his head to look toward her, raising a cloud of flies. Just a few yards away now, the mare trots boastfully, and finally gives in and shows herself to him, with her long mane and sturdy body.

  He jerks, jerks with his carriage. This monstrous maneuver startles her, she can’t understand how the cart moves when the horse does. She bucks, she slips off as he tries to bring his head close to hers, like a strange, atavistic prelude.

  She leaps, eager and apprehensive; the warm impulse coursing through her has shaken her. And shaken, enthused, unthinking, she drops her savage guard and tumbles with a whinny of panic at the first leap, the first swipe, of the panther.

  As though his own flesh were wounded, as though hunted by the beast now tearing at the mare, the horse goes mad, takes off in a rush, a mournful clatter, and heads for the sand.

  The sand ran out before his terror. Now his hoof steps in the salt bog. It’
s sticky, ponderous, and sucks him into the earth. He has to get out, but barely reaches the white, sand-flecked surface.

  He gathers strength for another push, chewing seepweed, the salt flat’s lone daughter, a paperlike leaf hugging a stalk two yards long, furled as if around a staff.

  Further on, he chases scents. He sniffs avidly, catches a whiff of something, and follows after it, with his ailing step, until he loses it and it is gone.

  Now he smells the scent of pasture, of the thick grass from the corral. He noses around it and gnaws on the bit as if he’s grazing. He chews, sniffs, and turns back to get at what he imagines he is chewing. What he smells is the fodder in his carriage, and he walks around and around, dragging it, fervidly chasing the burden behind him. He spins in a deadly circle. The carriage cuts a track and gets stuck, and the horse can no longer move forward. He pulls, his chest swells, he slips. The last bit of life slips out of him.

  He’s so parched, so thin and weightless, that later, one day or the next, the weight of the bundles will tip the carriage backward, the shafts will point to the firmament, and the vanquished body will hang there in the air.

  In the interim, the buzzard comes, in his dark attire, the one who never dines alone.

  One September

  The cart is cleansed, the bones are cleansed, less from the rain than from the hostile and purifying saline vapors.

  The bones are ruins, fallen and scattered, the prison of the skin is gone. But on the tip of one shaft, the flesh snagged in the bridle has withered into a sack, inside which the slender, half-flayed cranium stares up into the sky.

  Life skirts over the ruins, the search for the safety of sustenance: a flock of celestial parrots, the males among them almost blue, the females a white barely touched by the sky.

  Like them, a pair of ringdoves migrates from the droughted Pampas. In flight, they see the intoxicating brea flowers painting broad swaths of yellow along the mountains to the east.

  But the dove with her cool gray plumage knows she will not make it that far with her maternal burden. Below she sees, in the tense aridity of the salt flat, a carriage that might hold out support and refuge. She weaves two circles in the air to begin her descent. She coos, to tell the male she is no longer following. But he doesn’t stop, and the family is broken apart.

  It doesn’t matter, because the mother has found a ready-made nest where she can hatch her eggs. Like a hand cupped to receive water or seeds, the horse’s blind, upturned head houses the gentle bird in its depths. Later, when the eggs break open, it will be a box of birdsong.

  The Affection of Dimwits

  When the tremors start, Amaya thinks: The thing I’ve been waiting for so long. And then, with fervor, with passion: May it wound me. May it destroy everything, everything.

  She feels alone with the quaking earth. But then her husband starts shouting:

  “Go out to the yard! Suspiros! Amaya! Suspiros, go to the yard, now!”

  It doesn’t occur to her to obey. Suspiros, Suspiros, she repeats to herself. He likes her better, too.

  She waits. The birds chirp violently. A cow moos, anxious to escape. Everything else is silence, and the earth has ceased to shift.

  The clamor continues:

  “Suspiros! Amaya!”

  That’s all that’s left of the tremors: a man’s fearful voice. Nothing has fallen, nothing has been destroyed.

  Amaya slides out of bed. Her feet glide into a plain pair of house shoes and her slip falls over her pale knees.

  She goes to the girl’s room. Suspiros is awake, her head on her pillow, eyes wide open, unafraid, waiting.

  “Didn’t I tell you what an earthquake was? Remember how everything broke when you were younger?”

  Amaya resigns herself once more to her daughter’s ways. She kisses her lovingly, picks her up, and carries her to the yard. Why? She no longer has reason to. To heed her husband, who is waiting safe under the pergola. No, it’s just because, as she jokes, that’s the earthquake ritual, going out to the yard. But then she grows somber: she realizes she had also accepted the possibility of her daughter’s death.

  No one called Colorada. Where could she be? She is reborn with the sun. She comes back when she’s hungry. But at midday, the family performs its duty, with one or two voices calling out toward the fields, in case that’s where she’s gone:

  “Coloraaadaaa…!”

  She’s reclining in the shade against the trunk of the mulberry. “Dimwit, dimwit,” she says. “You’re a dimwit.” To whom? No one’s in front of her, or even nearby.

  She hears them calling: “Coloraaadaaa…!”

  She says: “Wait for me, I’m coming right now.” She raises herself up from the mulberry and steps out into the light.

  Under the oilcloth on the table, she touches one of Suspiros’s legs. Suspiros knows the routine: she puts out a ready hand, and Colorada fills it with white mulberries.

  Amaya comes into the kitchen and forestalls her sister:

  “Hands.”

  You have to wash your hands to sit at Amaya’s table.

  Colorada resents being bossed around and obliged to wash her hands. She argues, indirectly:

  “I’m not red,” she says, referring to her nickname, colorada.

  Amaya feels she’s overlooked something and can’t afford to be understanding. She grabs a shock of hair and waves it under the other woman’s nose, prodding her energetically:

  “What about this then?”

  Colorada, seeing her own color there before her eyes, smiles softly, points at a portrait on the wall, and replies:

  “I’m that one.”

  It’s a family memory: a dead little sister, fair-haired.

  Amaya lets the shock of hair go, and her forbearance returns. She remembers: when Colorada was a girl and asked who was in the picture, their father, that lonely soul, responded, to hide his sorrow: “You, it’s you. Can’t you see it’s you?”

  Then they grew up, their father died too, and two men came into their lives: for Colorada, one who left her dumber than before, fathering a daughter who would later be lost; for Amaya, the husband walking through the door that leads to the veranda, a little sullen – he has his reasons – and a little discomfited, as well, dropping his eyes for a moment, but only a moment, to be sure that Suspiros is there with them.

  At siesta, her husband goes back to bed. She likes the store at these times, because it’s empty, shaded, and cool, and the doors are closed to shoppers. Two hours of silence, of not being with anyone. She likes the new merchandise. Trying on all the shoes in her size, smelling the boxes of powder, loosening the glass cap on the perfumes, taking a deep whiff of the colognes the men use…

  She roots around in the corner reserved for the salesgirl. There’s a package of cookies for midafternoon, a rolled up gray apron, loose papers, crumbs…Amaya looks for the sports paper, with the muscular, young athletes. She doesn’t find it.

  She makes do with the newspaper. The newspaper’s all she reads these days. Her only books lie on the two shelves in the dining room: textbooks from the Teacher’s College. One time, her husband – she doesn’t know why – burned all her novels. She could have stopped him, maybe. She could buy and read others. But she doesn’t want to, it simply doesn’t appeal to her.

  “Lencinas will defend his degree…” “Crowds of the faithful file through the vestibule of the Jesuit church to see the heart of P. Roque González de Santa Cruz, first civilizer of the Paraná Basin and Uruguay…” A photograph: people around an engraved urn. She thinks she recognizes two old acquaintances, though the round hats pulled close to the eyes makes the women’s faces look the same.

  She likes the stories on the first few pages best, the ones with the letters U.P. in parentheses next to the dates. They come from other worlds.

  “This morning, the Graf Zeppelin was expected in Seville. The dirigible met with adverse weather between the Azores and the Portuguese coast. The Duchess of Victoria will disembark in the Andal
usian capital.”

  One bit of news wounds her: “Buenos Aires, 30 (U.P.). – By his own choice…”

  The last name is recorded, but Amaya only pays attention to the first, José Luis. And the age, 31 years old, and the fact that he was the poet from that book…which is still almost unread, and that Amaya knows nothing of.

  Then she feels a tremor, not from the earth, but inside, a tremor and an anguish that weaken her flesh and make her crumple over the glass of the display case.

  She catches the four o’clock bus and gives herself to the city’s streets, taking in the shower of compliments. Because she’s desperate, and desperation gives her, once the first lapse is over, a strength that makes her body vibrant, elastic, younger.

  She maunders amid gallant phrases, incites the men without looking at them. They don’t touch her, they graze her. No one gets his hooks in. But it stings like a failure when she walks a block and no brutish, sexual tributes come her way.

  All afternoon, she’s provoked unknown men, not wanting them, not paying much mind, never yielding, just trying to get them to look back at her. Now she provokes her husband: but in another way, from another angle:

  “Thirty-one years old and tired of everything!”

  “Is that what the paper says?”

  “No. It’s what I say. Why would he kill himself when he’s still just a boy? For a woman, I know, I don’t need you to tell me. Can you imagine? Just for that. A woman makes him disgusted with everything. Maybe even she disgusted him.”

  Now she thinks in silence and her husband listens in silence; but he looks at her, and she doesn’t look at him.

  The theme of age reemerges:

  “Thirty-one years old…He could have been here, some summer or other. We could have seen him, you and me, anybody could have seen him, and no one would have said he was going to kill himself.”

  Amaya turns back to silently imagining José Luis’s summer in Chacras de Coria. Her eyes are eloquent, but her refusal to speak gives her husband room to reproach her: