Whatever the case, Aballay planned to stay clean. Wasn’t he repenting to clean his soul?
Aballay rummages in the branches of a bush, looking for something to eat. He surprises a woodpecker, which stalls before taking flight. He slaps it out of the air. He picks it up, careful not to hurt it. He sees its desperate agitation and looses it from its horror.
The bird shoots upward now, and the man is happy to see it free.
But a stubborn memory pierces him: the mestizo boy’s stare, when he killed his father.
Stubborn as well, determined to return, is his vision of the men on pillars. Generally, it is blended with his impressions from the day, and tonight is no different.
Aballay is a penitent and he sits on a pillar. Not a pillar like the one at the church, nor a pillar from a cemetery gate: the stone pillar of a bridge, thin and tall, with him on top.
He’s not alone. There are other pillars and others doing penance. They are ancients, saints, and for him, they are strangers. They don’t talk, because they are not allowed to, and if they did, he wouldn’t understand their language. They, like him, are draped in ponchos.
In one part of his dream, there is peace, then it turns to a nightmare: the birds arrive.
They walk on his head and shoulders. They peck at his ears, his eyes, and his nose, or they try to drop food into his mouth. They make nests, lay eggs…and the whole time, he is mortified from fear of the void, where he will fall if he moves a muscle.
Aballay wakes up groggy. He orders his horse: “Take it eeeasy…!”
He comes upon a shop. There’s no point in riding up to it: there’s no grate built into the wall for him to make his purchase from his horse.
With time, he finds another. Before passing him his jerky, the shopkeeper sets a condition: “Cash in hand.” Aballay pulls off some of the copper bits and coins of various denominations that give his belt its glimmer.
He comes upon the yard of a staging post. There’s gambling. Cards, knucklebones. In the ring, the cocks slay each other at first sight, or blindly, if they’ve clawed each other’s eyes out. People place bets.
There is drinking and eating.
Aballay has tied the bronco to the post, and he wanders through the different groups on his sorrel horse, to take a look. He takes a look as well when he passes by the grill. But someone accosts him: “You don’t play, you don’t eat.” Aballay understands. The man who accosted him is about to throw his bone. Aballay pulls another coin from his belt. The bone takes flight and lands on the ground on its edge, meaning Aballay has won. The loser pays up: contemptuously, he throws his coins on the ground, between the sorrel horse’s legs.
Aballay looks at the money that could be his, if he stooped to asking someone to pick the coins out of the dust and bring them nearer his reach. He could grab them himself, sliding down the animal’s belly, holding onto the cinches, but people would laugh, and he’d have to fight. With vague sorrow, he considers the two futilities before him, trots off to the post to untie the bronco, and goes.
Since then, on account of that gesture, which the witnesses had trouble puzzling out, but which had something to do with repudiation, Aballay’s fame begins to spread.
He is unaware of it. If he were more observant, he would have seen the sudden glow in the admiring eyes of the servant girl who brought him yerba mate with sugar one morning.
The ones he brews himself are bitter, and he drinks them in the morning, to still the insistent rumbling in his gut. He doesn’t abuse the exemption apparently granted him by the examples the priest had given, save for cases of extreme necessity or insurmountable demands – though for him, yerba mate is one of those. He doesn’t even set foot on the ground to light a fire.
He has the necessary tools. He chooses uneven terrain to serve as a table whenever he can tie up the horse in such a way that it more or less rests against the edge. Over a mound no higher than the saddle, he makes a little fire and boils the water. When the plains are too level, he descends into those wide, deep channels in the earth opened up by forgotten currents. Then, he finds his flat spot from below.
Drinking mate slowly at sundown, he admires the calm bronco’s submissiveness. Without troubling his master, he nibbles at whatever plants are within reach. In the meanwhile, his partner, free from his duties, wanders through the tender grass and sprouts at his leisure. Aballay has his legs crossed on the quadruped’s back, which serves as a chair. He laces his fingers to form a hollow the size of the delicate gourd. He sucks, with long pauses, at the handmade metal straw. He is absorbed, not in his thoughts perhaps, but in the mystical languor of the warm, green juice. And, though he is not in the habit of talking alone, he exclaims, one time, aloud: “God is my witness!”
Startled by the noise, which breaks the supple silence, the bronco reacts with a neigh and a shiver. Its trembling clears Aballay’s head.
On a trail, he comes upon four docile Indians. Generously, they offer him fish, which has started to stink. It’s raw, they carry it across the countryside in rush baskets open to the sun to sell in the market in the village. Aballay doesn’t accept it, but he returns the favor, giving them two fistfuls of salt from his saddlebags.
Right away, the Indians set up camp, start a fire, gut and grill the fish with the pearly scales.
Now it smells passable to Aballay’s incurable hunger. He waits, splay-legged, on his horse.
The four fishermen are jubilant and try to force him to come down and join them. He refuses, but accepts his portion.
The Indians crouch while they eat. One of them observes him from the corner of his eye. He realizes it’s not that the white man doesn’t want to, it’s that he can’t climb down from his animal’s haunches, and he transmits this disturbing conclusion to the rest of his clan: man-horse.
Bulges sleep in the night. Aballay and his horse are one; the gentle bronco is the other. They are nestled in a mass of weeds, it’s the best thing they’ve found as far as they can see. There’s no light from the moon, a blanket of clouds obscures it.
Aballay is perched on a pillar. The sun is burning his mouth with its aftertaste of spoiled fish.
There’s an old man. His column is more splendid, but their thirst makes them equal.
He’s old and looks like a saint, but he doesn’t have a saint’s composure. He lacks endurance. He opens his poncho at the neck to cool off. Everything occurs in silence, until the old saint shouts: Water! To Aballay, it didn’t sound like water, but that’s what he gathers from the man’s gesture; what he imagines is thunder, on the heels of a lightning bolt…
Aballay falls, he thinks the flash of the lightning bolt has knocked him over, and when he lands, he awakens, and the rain is soaking him. For an instant, he enjoys the water, which gives succor to his burning mouth. But then he finds his body has touched the ground.
Though the downpour pelts his eyes, he tries to look up, or at least lift his forehead, in a confused motion that not even he knows the meaning of: is he begging forgiveness, making clear his fall was unintended?
Muddy and unsettled, he leaps onto his horse and decides, according to his judgment and at his own risk, that this descent need not be counted, even if he worries otherwise. He recalls that he himself chose the yoke that now weighs on him. He will heed it with the most docile obedience.
The days of the dust cloud have proven demanding, and the distress has taught him to use his wit to secure his sustenance.
From the signs, he deduces the dust isn’t windborne, that it’s horses, not wild ones, but cavalry from the armed forces. That’s bad for Aballay; he might get recruited, or bayonetted for no reason; he could lose the horses, they could be requisitioned or simply stolen.
He takes cover in the distance and leaves behind the last traces of people, ending up in the brutal pampa.
He draws on the examples given by the priest, who told him of the penitents in times long past who didn’t have it easy when they took to the desert: he spoke to him of eating spi
ders and even snakes.
He feels for the jerky in the saddlebag and senses hunger not too far off. This gives him ideas: serpent-lizard-pichi. Probably there were no armadillos running around in the deserts where the saints of old dwelled.
It’s the way they shoot off in all directions, plunging into the caves, clinging desperately to the roots, that makes them so hard for Aballay to hunt them on horseback. But he ventures toward the ruts (those he makes, hanging from the animal when it rushes off; those the animal will make if its leg sinks into the holes the pichi digs for its dwelling).
He fails repeatedly. He perseveres and learns.
Later, when he has to cook them, it’s like boiling the water for his mate. Except that you have to kill the creatures. He lays them on their back, stabs them to death, and makes a cross-shaped cut to open them up. For his lunch, he cooks them in their shell, which serves as a pot, in their own abundant fat.
And so there’s food to spare. But he needs water, and that makes him turn back..
Utterly bedraggled, he’s returned. He hasn’t seen himself for some time. The eyes of the others are wary of his presence, not because it’s unusual for vagrants to come through, but because they don’t care for them, they might turn to crime if their misery gets extreme.
At a farm, they know who he is. They don’t recognize him, they’ve never seen him before; but they’ve heard his story, which has spread, unbeknownst to him, in diverse and contradictory forms that nevertheless exalt him according to a certain conception of the good.
“He bears his cross,” they whisper to each other, with a reverent demeanor.
Aballay, who has pricked up his ears to hear their murmurs, thinks the truth is strictly otherwise: he has no cross, no medal, not even a prayer card.
He accepts some tattered clothes, which are offered to him as alms.
It’s a warm day.
He looks for the arroyo and submerges himself, in abundant ablutions.
He doesn’t have a comb, and he plans, as soon as possible, to stop at a shop or a staging post to get one, and to replenish his salt, yerba mate, and jerky.
Riding one day at a slow trot, at prayer time one afternoon, he strips and files down a dry branch with his knife, and then another, shorter one. With a strip of leather from the bridle, he ties them into a cross. With another, he ties it around his neck and lets it hang outside the shirt he now wears, thanks to the charity of the farmhands.
Where five houses cluster together, he hears thundering sounds, but they are not aggressive, he soon learns, when the cries of enthusiasm and demonstrations of joy rise up. Passing alongside the store, he sees their origin: among the scattered planks, with a border of logs, the hard, compact balls, carved from quebracho, maybe, thrown by various men, look lithely now and freely for their path, now strike one another like bandits. Bocce: he’s tempted to join in. Probably they’d let him place a bet. A depressing memory pulls at him. Could he throw one? How nice it would be…! From the horse…?
The comb, the jerky, the salt, and the yerba mate use up all the money in his belt. All he has left is one coin, the most valuable, the silver patacón, which had been the centerpiece of the glimmering garment, when all the coins were still there. He keeps it in a slit, like a pocket, in the hardened leather that firmly and gracefully envelops his waist.
He doesn’t join in the game, only in the spectacle of the game, but without mingling with the men. Since he’s stuck around, they remember him when it’s time for the barbecue:
“Go on, go for it.”
He wavers, so they continue:
“What…? You want some, no?”
Aballay nods, but barely, without fully assenting, because he can guess what will happen next: they will try to get him to come down and gather around the grill, and once more, it will be a duel between himself and his resistance.
And so it is, until someone sees the crucifix and asks his neighbor: “Could he be the one…?” They agree that it could be him. Then they step forward to pay their tribute – bread and wine, to start with – to that strange pilgrim who, so they say, never gets down from his horse.
And so Aballay’s spring ended, and his summer passed.
The winter made him think summer had been a heaven for him and his life in the open.
Past the fields, the sun was rising, but Aballay couldn’t manage to wake up. It was freezing, and he was freezing. He was gripped by vague sensations of living in a state of wonder now grown brittle. He didn’t bother to move, and a benign drowsiness overtook him.
His lethargy lasted a long time, the proximity to a gentle death, but his blood responded to the first hints of clement air.
When he became aware of the risk he had waded through, he made the sign of the cross, kissed his wooden icon, and looked down at his bearers, wondering:
If I died on horseback…who would take me down? Could death accomplish it…?
From his wagon, the rag-and-bone man shouted at him: “Gaucho!” and Aballay didn’t realize the man meant him, or else didn’t care to be addressed in that manner, as more than once, it’d been done to disparage him. He was going to ignore him, but the other, shouting to make himself heard, was only trying to ask if he had feathers.
Aballay restrained himself.
“Feathers?”
“Ostrich feathers. I’ll buy them, or I’ll trade merchandise for them, quality stuff.”
This meeting, this proposal, convinced Aballay he’d found a calling that wouldn’t require breaking his vow.
He had to head off toward the central plain, less arid, more solitary, and go south, to places odious for the danger they posed: of treading the turf of tribes hostile to whites.
He stalked the rhea. Not to harvest its flesh (which would be impossible without stepping down). Aballay didn’t want to take its life, he wanted to take its feathers.
He learned to wait patiently, to employ a watchful eye, to yield to immobility (to avoid alerting the long-legged creature to his presence).
He tried to chase them down, to snatch at their wingtips or tail feathers when he came up beside them. But they didn’t give: if the sorrel horse caught up with them for a stretch and he got hold of the feathers, the strides of their long legs threatened to drag him off, or the ones he’d tear out were scant or tattered.
He rued his ineptness with a bolas, but then, he didn’t have one anyway.
He tried with the lasso. He learned that pulling an ostrich over wasn’t the same as capturing it. The big bird kicked with frightful energy and scared off the horse.
And finally, in front of the shopkeeper’s grate, he saw his dreams of barter had been a deception.
No one ever told him that was woman’s work; he’d taken it for granted he’d be dealing with a man. And yet there, in the front of the wagon, was a woman.
In considerable straits at that particular moment.
No one noticed Aballay, nor did he step forward, nor even utter a single word. He simply stood to one side to assess the situation, and noted that those inside the wagon were trapped: another woman, more delicate in appearance, a man, maybe her husband, and two or three girls.
He could see that for the driver, pulling that wheeled mass out of the muddy water was the job of the oxen, and she shouted at them imperiously and prodded them harshly with a skillfully wielded cattle prod.
Aballay waded into the mire, to see how deep it went. Then he unraveled his rope and tied it around the yoke. He came round to the front, and with his main horse and its companion, began to pull, with caution, but steadily. All this without dismounting from the sorrel, which roused the driver’s attention, then her admiration. She joined in to help him.
The first attempt did little, given the weight of the wagon and its load. They lessened it: one by one, Aballay helped the five passengers out, without letting his horses rest, and they set to pulling once more.
Around twilight, free from the prison of silt, though it had left its marks on their boots, clothes,
and faces, they relaxed in front of a vigorous fire on dry soil. The pot of corn porridge sat in the cradle of the flames.
Aballay could see his fate – which he hadn’t sought out – would be to provoke confusion tinged with admiration.
Given his attitude, the driver acceded without resistance or comment to his refusal to dismount to eat the warm food, and later, to rest in a natural position. She acted with inborn prudence and trusted she would find another occasion to pay him back for his help.
Aballay slept on the bronco.
When he awoke, knowing the affection his sorrel horse felt for him, he didn’t worry over its absence; it had been left to run loose as usual, and he supposed it was out grazing, to recover from its strain the day before.
Aballay, too, was savoring his own green aroma, in successive rounds served by the postboy along with some flatbread to eat. Then he went off to find the laggard.
When he found him, he was lying down, untroubled, unmenacing, unbreathing.
Aballay started thinking, and wondered whether he might merit dispensation to step down from his horse. After deliberating, he decided against it. Hanging down from the bronco, he removed the sorrel horse’s bridle and let his hand linger tenderly on the animal’s smooth, glowing coat.
A feeling of helplessness seeped into his will, a desolation that so dazed him that he couldn’t think of what to do to keep from killing the bronco with his weight. He was in the same place as at the beginning: to keep from setting his boots on the earth, he needed another horse to alternate with.
Undecided, he followed the wagon.
Further on, when they were stopped, he had his chance:
“Might you give me…”
Nest in the Bones Page 12
