She thinks of God, but she doesn’t want to make a commitment. She asks him, that’s all, she asks him. She begs and prays.
That night, with the second diagnosis, she yields. She falls on her knees and promises.
Cataldo said he would hurry, and he’s wasted two afternoons.
He gives excuses:
“He isn’t bringing the pigs.”
He looks for the right moment:
“Now, now that the worker’s gone. But not yet: when it gets dark.”
Something thunders in the air. Cataldo looks up and there are no clouds. A plane with three motors cuts through the twilight. It roars over the willows and leaves Cataldo perplexed:
“They’re already here…That’s Mussolini, for sure. So I…”
Then his courage stirs him. He climbs over the fence and enters the henhouse.
From his shack, the veterinarian observes the invasion. He readies the shotgun, but he doesn’t bring it. He goes outside and hurriedly gathers stones.
Cataldo is meditating on his demands, and looking for phrases, he forgets about the danger.
The first stone strikes him in the groin. Right here, he thinks, because he wants to run away, but all at once, his leg gives out. But he doesn’t hesitate, he turns. A second one hits him in the back, it feels like someone’s shoved him. With effort, he tries to make off among the whirl of hens.
Romano follows him at leisure. He has him trapped, and he’s waiting to pin him against the fence, because with his leg impaired, he won’t be able to climb it.
And when Cataldo gets there and can’t, he falls to the ground and curls into a ball to better bear the blows.
Romano stops twenty yards away. He wants to make him suffer more, from fear, before he finishes pelting him. He aims, slowly, over and again, leaving him wounded and bruised.
Every stone that strikes shakes the dimwit’s huddled body. Every time, he crumples further, and now his face is turned to the ground. When he rubs against the dry grass, Cataldo remembers the matches. Hiding his hands even more, he takes out the box of Victorias, strikes one, it flares up, and he sets the scrub alight.
He crouches and crawls, and under the rain of stones, ignites the edges of the chicken coops.
Romano pounds him more and harder, but with his excitable disposition, he gets distracted, turns to the flames, starts stomping them and fanning them out with his hands. He digs into the earth with his fingernails, pulls out clumps, and throws them on the fire, but the soil takes the grass with it, giving the blaze more fuel.
The dimwit, wits dulled further by the flames, stops lighting matches and starts gathering stones. He puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles shrilly. Romano turns around, surprised, and just then, something strikes his ear, which starts burning as though it were singed. Another whistle. He understands: the dimwit is calling him so he can hit him in the face. He puts up an arm to protect himself, and runs off, tripping, because he can’t see well, there is smoke and there are shadows and the dimwit is striking him implacably from behind.
Cataldo knows fire. Over here, it will swallow me. Over there it’s going slower. At the same time, he thinks: He lets the pigs out somewhere around here, and he finds the way out.
Romano goes into the shack and picks up his loaded weapon. He steps out pointing it wildly, trembling. Then he sees that the fire, hissing like a cauldron, is devouring everything, and fear fills him, and he drops the gun.
A moment’s reaction, just a moment’s, is enough for him to try and save something: he frees the pigs, and opens the coop that houses the white hens.
The hens overrun him, and in a whirl of feathers, he grows confused among the pigs roaming confusedly through the ashes.
He heads to the road. Beside him runs a pig, and a chicken flies past his head.
The fire burns out in the fallow fields. But the smoke has risen into the night and it, more than the fire, alerts those nearby.
The scent of charred birds, of feathers and flesh blended together, begins to spread, and the hungry people from the farmhouses emerge into the darkness and sit down, silently savoring the scent of six hundred chickens roasted all at once.
The dogs catch a whiff, and it raises their spirits; but later, without hope, they will lie down with the men, their stunted maws between their outstretched legs.
“I want to go,” Amaya says, and rests her fingertips over the small coffin, at the height where her daughter’s lips may lie.
The carriage is white, and at each of the four corners is a chubby angel with golden hair.
Next to the open hole in the earth – so big, Amaya thinks, with such smooth sides – a priest is waiting.
Later she sees that the priest is speaking and making familiar gestures beside the casket.
From among those gathered, only one howl can be heard, a howl from a dimwit, punctuated by hiccups.
Amaya takes all the roads that are not lined with houses, for hours and hours, one day and the next. She returns when the cold lashes her, or sometimes even later.
She ruminates.
She says to herself: I have lived. Now I will think.
She imagines she is lucid, but she contradicts herself.
I have thought a lot about what I was doing. Now I should live.
She goes over her memories of the girl.
Now I won’t hurt her. Even if I went with every man I came across, nothing will happen to her again.
I’m free.
She feels she’s been released from her pledge: she offered Gaspar in Suspiros’s place, but it was Suspiros that she lost.
And she runs into Gaspar.
He looks at her, and he wants to hold her with his gaze. She stops. She observes him, she looks up at the eucalyptus. Again, she contemplates that gentle man, with sorrow, but empty of desire. She says no, shaking her head. And she goes on her way.
Later, on another afternoon, she says over and over: “My affection, José Luis, is like the affection of dimwits: my affection endures.”
And even: “You have to forgive me, José Luis. You have to forgive me for Romano and Gaspar. You are the one I was looking for.”
from The Absurd Ones (1978)
Aballay
In the evening sermon, the friar said a rather difficult word that Aballay didn’t manage to catch, about the saints who climbed up on pillars. Questions are plaguing him, but he saves them for when he has the chance to ask, at one of the bonfires, maybe.
They are visitors here, both of them, the priest and him, with the difference that, when the novena is over, the other man has somewhere to go back to.
The chapel, which rises above the scrubland in the middle of the low hill, with no dwellings or any other permanent structure adjacent, opens for the Marian feast days; that’s the only time the priest, who comes from a faraway but equally devout parish in the city, comes around to lead the services.
The pilgrims set up camp, and the merchants, too. The nine days pass with prayers and processions; the nights are filled with golden racks of ribs, guitars, yerba mate, and vino carlón.
Aballay has seen a shotgun wedding between two Laguneros – descendants of the Huarpe Indians – as well as various newcomers’ baptisms. He wandered in mainly from curiosity and the need to see how he got along with people, but he kept his head up and didn’t meddle with anyone. He counted four soldiers.
Meantime, the candlewicks burn down on the altars, and outside people feed the fires, which blaze in the temporary brush shelters, built for those dates alone.
The priest walks along the path running through the bivouacs, passing out his blessings and good nights. Each group clamors for him as he passes, and he pays honor to a family shown up from Jachal. They grill baby goat, the grandmother fries pastries, a man pours wine, everyone is peaceful and subdued. Songs are sung early in the neighboring shacks.
Facundo’s name comes up, because of a recent action.
Didn’t they kill him years back…?
Aballay was a shadow in the footsteps of the soutane, and now he is an inert mass out in the open. He waits.
One of the men from Jachal invites him over. He waves him off. His hunger is for something else.
But the priest intervenes, and Aballay obeys him. He doesn’t add to the conversation, nor does the priest urge him to speak up, maybe he’s used to the silence of the humble and dour.
But at a certain point, when the stars have climbed over the horizon, Aballay surprises him, touching his sleeve, and letting a query slip out in a soft voice:
“Father, could you hear me out…?”
“In confession?”
Aballay thinks it over, and says after a pause:
“Not yet, Father. But let’s talk now, I’m asking you, just you and me.”
With time, they pull away from the tumult around the bonfires, elude the revelers from the canteen, and vanish among the resting carriages where the children have lain down to sleep.
Then they talk, and when the matter that has troubled the unknown man comes to light, the father is pleased with his skill as a holy intercessor. This is the sign that his words sink in and are capable of sowing doubt. He tries to temper his speech with a simplicity of language, of expression, insofar as possible.
“No, son: I didn’t say they were saints, but that their lives were saintly. That custom was known among anchorites or hermits.”
“With due respect, those weren’t your words.”
“No…?”
“No, Father. You called them something else.”
“Well…Stylites. Could that be it?”
“Could be.”
“All right, then. It means more or less the same thing. Except that the stylites were a special class of anchorites…You know what that word means?”
“Yes and no.”
“Let’s just say no, and I’ll explain it to you. The anchorites were recluses, they withdrew voluntarily from other human beings. At most, they kept a faithful animal as a companion. They traveled through the deserts or lived in caves on the tops of mountains.”
“Why?”
“To serve God, after their fashion.”
“I don’t understand. In the sermon, you said they were on top of a pillar.”
“Yes…a pillar, or a column. That’s what the Stylites did. This strange custom of theirs was only possible in the ancient countries of the world where there were monumental temples, with pillars holding up their roofs, built before the coming of Christ. When the old religions disappeared and men abandoned the houses of worship, over the course of centuries, they were destroyed. In some cases, the pillars were all that was left standing. The Stylites would climb them to expose themselves to the elements and be free of temptation. They would stay there through wind and rain, through illness and through hunger.”
“How many days?”
“Days…? Eternities! It’s said that Simon the Elder lived thirty-seven years that way and Simon the Younger sixty-nine.”
Aballay enters into a dense silence.
The priest nudges him:
“So…? What do you think, now that you know the scale of their sacrifice? Could you imagine?”
These questions leave Aballay unaffected. He has many other pressing ones: could they sit down in such a narrow space, or did they have to stand, crouch, or kneel; why didn’t they die of thirst; did they never come down again, for any reason, not even to answer the call of nature; was it really believable that they didn’t fall to the ground when they slept…
The priest answers, knowing these questions may be the goading of an unbelieving hick bent on stripping him of faith in what he’s preached from the pulpit. No matter, he tells himself, there’s an answer for everything.
“How did they eat? They did so moderately, though some, depending on where they’d settled, enjoyed the blessings of nature. They might have had wild honey or fruit from the trees. Others, especially those who walked in the desert, are said to have eaten spiders, insects, even snakes.”
The repulsive creatures he’s just evoked deepen the priest’s growing worry. Worried for his safety, he tries to get a sense of his location. It’s the depths of night, he thinks, observing the thickness of the surrounding brush. They have gone far from the encampment, the mass of carriages and draft animals. He considers himself and this seedy man he’s never seen before, who looks anxious and unruly, who might or might not bring danger. He recovers his nerve, tries to calm himself down, and tells himself he should enjoy this possibly naive provocation, which has brought the memory of his readings back to him, if for no other reason than to communicate them to a lone parishioner in such extraordinary circumstances.
The priest explains that they may well have been able to sustain themselves through the charity of others, but Aballay says: “I thought they were alone and that they escaped from the rest of the people?”
“The desolate and faithful made pilgrimages to ask for their help before God, and from those pious persons, they would accept certain very pure foodstuffs.”
“Were they saints, then? Could they consult with God?”
“We all can.”
Aballay takes another turn in the narrow alleyways of his soul, and his attention strays from the priest. The priest lets him go, supposing he will react on his own.
Then:
“You said in the sermon that they withdrew to do penance.”
“I said more than that: penance and contemplation.”
“Contemplation…maybe they did see God, then?”
“Who knows. But contemplation isn’t just a matter of trying to know Jesus’s face or his divine splendor, it’s also about giving your soul and your thoughts over to Christ and the mysteries of religion.”
Aballay has grasped this, but he’s keen to clear up the first point, specifically:
“You said: penance. Why do they do penance?”
“For their faults, or because they take on themselves the failings of others. Concretely, in the case of the anchorites: they climbed up a column to be closer to Heaven and to take leave of the earth, because that was where they had sinned.”
Aballay knows what a great sin it is to kill. Aballay has killed.
Tonight, Aballay has decided to take leave of earth.
It’s true that the plain, which is the only place he knows, has no columns; he has never seen any apart from those of the portico of the church of San Luis de los Venados.
He remembers that to escape his mother’s discipline, he used to climb a tree. He admits that he’s trying to do the same now: flee from his guilt, and find a place to climb to.
It wouldn’t work anymore. Not even if he hid out in the leafy heights of an ombú. They’d find him out, they’d stone him, even if they didn’t know exactly why, just because he was acting strange. Nor would anybody offer him a crust of bread.
He’s resolved, conscientious, he’s made a deal with himself to abandon the earth and live a life of penitence. He killed, and savagely. He’ll never forget the gaze of the mestizo boy who saw him kill his father, one of the scant memories left to him from that alcohol-soaked night.
But his remorse won’t let him be still. He has to walk. To go (from one place to the next).
The friar said they climbed the column. Aballay is a horseman. Very early, at the first light of day, Aballay climbs onto his sorrel horse.
He pats him gently on the neck and asks: “Will you hold me?” He supposes his companion has agreed, and as they go off at a soft trot, he readies him: “Keep in mind it’s not for a day…it’s forever.”
The first day, the fast was voluntary; the second, it was a torment, obsessed with eating without finding a way to do so.
He enjoyed it at first. A day’s deprivation purifies the blood, he told himself, by way of consolation.
Then the hunger came on hard and heavy and he started losing hope of getting help and being able to carry out his resolution.
A cloud of smoke oriented him. He made it to the ranch. T
hey had slaughtered an animal and were roasting the offal right there in the yard. There was no need to ask. But he drew their attention with his refusal to settle in among the overseer and his kin. Still, they passed him a generous serving skewered on his own knife.
He knew that time was different from the others. He had received that hospitality that is offered without question to wayfarers. He’d gotten it before, too, in different places. But from now on, he would have need of it every day, and his changed condition wounded his pride.
He felt hemmed in by the straits he foresaw and those that penury had begun to reveal to him.
From now on, he’d have to use imagination to sustain himself, and wherever his wits failed him, or he glimpsed some risk of breaking with his plan, he would rely on the teachings in the priest’s tale.
Farms weren’t common in that lonesome country, and he didn’t see himself as a hanger-on. He would get hold of tools and provisions; he had a little cash left to pay for them. Would he hunt? Sure, but how would he cook the meat? Eat fruit? Nature didn’t abound in them in those parts.
He’d always been nimble in the stirrups or hanging off the cinches, so it was easy for him to fill his cup with water or even, when he felt like trying his luck, to drink it with his lips skirting the surface of the arroyos.
He had experience sleeping on the horse, and the horse had experience of him doing it. But if he didn’t unburden the animal, he wouldn’t get any rest, and soon enough, he would die. So he lassoed a bronco, made it his second mount, and passed from one to the other, to let them catch their breath. The second didn’t put up resistance to the rider or the routine; he must have had an owner before.
If he’d adopted the law of life on horseback with absolute rigor, he might have been reduced to the most ignoble practices in regards to the call of nature. He’d had the good sense the night they were together to ask the priest, who never found out the motive for that lengthy inquest on the customs and constraints of those who live atop columns. The friar said he couldn’t imagine a penitent so severe that he would forbid himself to climb down to earth for a purpose so plainly justified, though no doubt there were some whose mortification led them to excesses.
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