Nest in the Bones

by Antonio Di Benedetto

  What did he mean? That the delay was the fault of the locust invasion. Thanks to the diligence of the telegraph services, the stationmaster knew this, but neither he nor the other enthusiasts there to receive him could have imagined the news would make such an enormous impression on the face and the eyes of the newly crowned Nobel Prize winner.

  For he was frightened, and his fright was tenacious, as if the creatures were still crawling over his face. They say he asked, as soon as possible, to be taken to the zoo, to confirm the existence of the animal kingdom, but in a place where he was certain to find it behind bars and inoffensive. He wouldn’t enjoy such vengeance this trip, because in 1922, the zoological park in Mendoza had yet to be founded.

  But that is not the main story, and the occasional interruption was foreseeable, for when it comes to confabulation, not even Borges can be expected to cleave to a strict chronological order. The other story, the one mentioned in the opening lines of this report, is of such uncertain origins that it may have come down to us from the earliest Indians. Such a hypothesis rings plausible so long as one keeps in mind that what it describes, or attempts to revive in the imagination, is the fantastical origin of the plagues, or at least of one of them, and related treacheries.

  The most recent chapter of these events, which defy common sense, takes us to the 1930s, a period marked by what occurred then to the person now writing. A young journalist, I was assigned, because of the economic harm this disorder had done to the rail services, to a kind of inquiry or journalistic documentation. I was to ascertain whether the official excuse was valid, that the trains could only arrive slowly because, with the enormous weight they were carrying, the steel wheels slipped and couldn’t cross the zone between the pampa of Buenos Aires and the pampa of San Luis, where limitless rows of famished, ravaging locusts were perched. When the vermin came to rest on the rails and a train passed, the first car would crush them, and as the body of the locust has an oily consistency, that car and those behind it, now skidding and unable to maintain their normal forward motion, would be turned to a giant iron caterpillar. A laggard one, moreover, hence the chaos on the B.A.P., the Buenos Aires-Pacific Line.

  The journalist’s entry into the infested region was not greeted by herds of insects, nor even a solitary specimen posed on the windowpane as a foretaste of what was to come. The only symptom was the convoy’s slowness, a precaution, as though it were yielding to placid lethargy. The journalist and the photographer yielded to that abandon without question until a locust appeared, swooping down from the air and trying to brace itself against the windowpane. In accordance with the proudest tradition of those lands, the creature began to buck and primp like a horseman on the glass, determined to send us a warning. Then it let go and departed, windborne.

  The train didn’t derail. The conductor had a knack for dealing with the plague. He maneuvered with consummate care, arriving at the station in a large village, the present one, where the plot unfolded.

  Climbing down onto the platform was like stepping into a crab marsh. The people who didn’t get off at the station watched the journalist and his photographer with commiseration, recognizing that, if they were going to be devoured, it was by their own choice, they had tamely turned themselves over to that holocaust.

  They managed to move forward, though doing so meant treading on cadavers that they themselves were the cause of. The journalist made a rapid conjecture: if those tiny beasts had a soul and their souls were inclined to vengeance, they will feed on me as soon as I fall still. Even more, it dismayed him to consider that subtle movements wouldn’t save him: the wheat ears, though shaken by the gales, still bore up the locusts which never ceased, even in these unstable conditions, to devastate their grains and stalks.

  He relaxed when the photographer led him to the steps of a corner bar in front of the station.

  They ordered a wine in the shade and protection of the roof and walls, where the multitude of insects that tormented human life found their only emissaries in the flies, which were intolerable as well, but more familiar, at least.

  The journalist’s glass of white wine, flung by the owner, whipped swiftly across the tin bar top and disrupted the journalist’s musing, though not so fast as to free it from the suicidal stratagems of a green gleam that plunged diagonally into the beverage. The green gleam was a locust, which lay across the glass like a mint sprig in a cocktail, with the same color and vegetal appearance. Insufferable, given the visitor’s growing irritation.

  He proposed to his fellow adventurer the calm of the small, tree-lined plaza next door, and wondered if the leaves had a repellent scent, since they’d remained immune to that devouring fury that had rained down from the heavens.

  Once in the shelter of those verdant shadows, so predictably close to vanishing from the urban landscape, the journalist’s myopia revealed to him a kind of surface or bark on the trees, less furrowed than mobile and mimetic, being green and seeming composed of the bodies of locusts. Not content to merely seem so, it was so. This provided the occasion for the man with the camera to exercise his profession; to act, but without fanfare, as the subject wasn’t still, it roiled, and begged for the aptitudes of an instant camera, an impossibility at the time.

  Nonetheless, inspired by the challenge, the photographer threw himself into the task, trying to shoot a masterpiece, moving from tree to tree in the little distance the plaza had to offer. Those shifts left the journalist alone at the behest of his absurd curiosity. He noted that the corner of the building belonged to an agricultural bank, that it was Saturday afternoon, or siesta, which is even drearier, and was surprised to find a business of this kind open.

  He stood up and went to look closer. The rolling blind on the window was lowered halfway, so the journalist had to find a better position to get a glimpse of the interior. He stood on a low barrier and, his objective achieved, came back down, after witnessing the vulgarity of that workplace.

  Whence he felt drawn to another gentle scene: a young woman, seated on a bench, caring for two children. She didn’t look old enough to be their mother. He approached her to ask her flat out. Just then, one of the children intruded, bursting into vigorous tears at the stranger’s appearance and causing the other child to burst into tears in turn. To round off the spectacle, the second child began throwing a tantrum that robbed the reporter of his good judgment, so that he stepped forward with a menacing mien, utterly out of sorts, with an amiable request on his lips, but his probable intention of (he later thought) seeking a sentimental alliance with the babysitter already frustrated. He stopped before the group and demanded that the children quit crying. The effect, as was foreseeable, was the opposite. The journalist, now intractable, tried to save the situation by censuring the young lady emphatically: “Make them quiet down! If they don’t, I’ll take one of them with me.”

  Which threat must have astonished him, when he recollected his words at the police station, where he was dragged by an officer moved by therapeutic instincts who, once called upon to proceed, found that the journalist’s outburst required jail time, not as a punishment, but rather as an indispensible reprieve.

  Which intuition he explained when explanation was demanded by the station chief.

  For, when the journalist told off the children and the babysitter, the photographer set aside his photographic undertaking to remedy the incident and witnessed the young woman, spilling buckets of tears, make her escape, soon returning with a uniformed policeman who didn’t mince words before charging the aggressor.

  The photographer, mortified at the sight of a colleague brought low, but lacking the will to intervene, thought it urgent that someone with some sort of authority intervene, and knowing no other person of comparable influence, called on the stationmaster where they’d disembarked an hour before. He showed his credentials, trotted out his photographic equipment, and brandished those verbal defenses he had swallowed only just before.

  The railway man, likewise a uniformed servant of the s
tate (with the word gefe or chief embroidered in hold thread on the breast pocket of his jacket, beginning a g rather than an j, in conformity with the peculiar orthography of the British rail lines in South America), was indignant and, though not so expeditious as to make his feelings evident by the expression on his face, he did not fail when it was time to act. At the station, he made much of the journalistic calling of the accused, which at that time and place had no significance whatsoever. The same cannot be said for the weighty assertion that this same party had been hired by the Buenos Aires-Pacific Line to document the scandal, in which the railway authorities were naturally blameless, of the train delays occurring precisely in those parts as a result of the swarms of locusts, the consequences of which were evident, not so much there as on the other end of the line.

  The spirit of law and order, as embodied in the officer in question, might have been compelled to let the matter drop, had he not found himself with a certain advantage over the ordinarily superior powers of the railway company: the stranger was already locked up in the clink.

  So that instead of fretting, as a preliminary step to the refusal of immediate release, the policeman, his bearing triumphal, let slip a suspicion. He asked the stationmaster if he really knew who the offender was:

  “Offender against what?”

  “The law.”

  “What law?”

  “What law, I can’t say. Later, when things have calmed down, I’ll find out. But there must be one that forbids kidnapping.”

  The stationmaster didn’t show his cards for all to see, but he did adduce a defense, affirming the impossibility of a visiting delegate perpetuating a crime of such magnitude:

  “Kidnapping? Who? The girl? He tried to run off with the girl to commit some dishonest act?”

  “No. I’m not saying that. But he did warn her he would steal the little boy.”

  “But he didn’t, did he? There was no kidnapping.”

  “Kidnapping, no, but threats…And you know how things are nowadays…”

  And thus, the defense was plunged once more into confusion, and barely managed to ask:

  “How are things? Did something happen?”

  With the authoritative bearing of one who knows better than his neighbor, the officer explained:

  “What, you don’t know?” (He addressed the stationmaster alone, preferring to ignore the photographer.) “You haven’t heard…?”

  “What?”

  “The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the aviator’s child.”

  All this, that is to say, the incarceration of the journalist investigating the delay of the trains that led to the sea, to the edge of the Pacific Ocean in other words, took place, as has already been made clear, in the decade of the 30s, at the same time as the famed kidnapping of the child of Charles Lindbergh, the “Lone Eagle,” who had, in 1927, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a single flight, from New York to Paris, and whose little boy was stolen and murdered years later.

  The stationmaster accepted the policeman’s excessive zeal when the latter advised him of the need to respect formalities, declaring that it was a mere matter of hours, and that the journalist would be in safe hands with him, drinking yerba mate. “Just in case the boy’s father, who’s a bank manager, comes around hooting and hollering: the police…don’t you do anything, with all the bandits showing up here from one day to the next?”

  In fact it was precisely two hours, though the detainee himself was unaware of the designated period until his traveling companion informed him of such.

  Two hours of chitchat and mate with the officer who, dispirited and cordial, illuminated the journalist with regard to his theories concerning the plague of locusts.

  He spoke to him amicably of a man and a suitcase, or maybe a trunk. The man was like him, like the journalist: a stranger who took up residence in the village, from love, it was said. But he was a loner, and he went by the name of Professor. A loner who, by all rights, was determined to deepen his solitude. At first he’d go to the post office to send off letters, and he received letters as well. Then people noticed he no longer took that road to the post office, not to send mail and not to receive it. From which the policeman concluded that he received no responses because he no longer wrote to anyone.

  In the meanwhile, the professor restricted his nourishment, he made do with a few packets of noodles from the store, a daily loaf of bread, some potatoes…and more rarely, a single hen’s egg.

  As his purchases dwindled, his flesh began to wither, and since he customarily dressed in black, and deep purple rings had formed beneath his eyes, he made a funereal impression when he showed up in the street.

  “You told me,” the journalist ventured to ask him, “that he arrived in the village for love. Love for what, the place or a person: was there a companion involved?”

  “It could be she existed. It could be she died before he came. Anyway, no one knows where she’s buried, if the professor’s lady friend ever did live here.”

  “Did he visit the cemetery? Did he take flowers to any grave in particular?” The journalist fears he’s overstepped and tries to emend his words with the following inanity:

  “I’m sorry, but do you all have a cemetery here?”

  With a tinge of pride, the officer informs him:

  “Of course we do, my friend! A big one, well tended, though it must be said, not all of the dead are from around here. The cemetery’s shared between two municipalities.”

  He picks up the thread:

  “Was he ever seen paying respects to anyone in particular? My feeling is no. Why deny it, I…given the nature of my profession, I distrusted him, even more when the thing happened, I mean when he got started with his plans. Because he did want to teach us things, I’ll admit that much, but they always came out twisted. He didn’t talk much, he wasn’t confident or the sort to give long speeches. But he made himself heard when he got started with his flower craze. He said lots of them reproduce thanks to pollen from elsewhere and that in order to be fertilized, the plant has to receive pollen. It’s the air that brings the pollen, he said, but it’s best if there are insects to help. And he had chosen a flower the bees like, and when the bees have fed on those flowers, they make honey. He saw beehives as the future of this village.

  “He offered to bring these pollinating insects, hopped on the train, and came back after a while with a suitcase or a trunk, I never saw it, I wasn’t yet assigned to this detachment. I heard about it, and that’s why I’m not certain.”

  “Well, suitcase or trunk, what did it have inside?”

  “Locusts. He opened the trunk and the pests started flying out. Whatever they landed on, they stripped it raw, whether it was grain, flowers, vegetation, or wild shrubs.”

  “That’s the origin of the plague you’re suffering?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, because the professor’s stunt was ages ago.”

  “How many years?”

  “I wouldn’t rightly know. Who can say? Could be what I’m telling you happened back when the Indians camped out in these parts, or even before…”

  “Why, then, did you say he was a professor who wrote letters and traveled by train?”

  “You don’t think it’s possible he was was the chief of a tribe or a witch doctor and maybe with the passage of time, as the story went from person to person, he turned into a man of knowledge, a professor?”

  “So what you’re telling me has come down from an age-old tradition, maybe from before the Spanish arrived?”

  That’s the only objection the journalist dares to proffer, taking care not to accuse the chief of pulling his leg, so as to avoid raising hackles at a moment so decisive for his upcoming release.

  But the officer seemed oblivious to his incredulity, and merely responded by musing, without a trace of bitterness or annoyance:

  “From before the Spanish…? Could be. There’s so many of these stories, but just a few have to do with the village, this village. I’ll go ahead and tell th
em to you.”

  The journalist, alarmed by this declaration, glanced uneasily at his wristwatch.

  The officer noticed and chided him courteously:

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be out soon enough. There’s time for everything. Death is the only impediment. And speaking of death…”

  The journalist didn’t meekly endure this intimation that the officer would now move on to another tale. Unwillingly, he made an impatient face, which the other registered before returning to his theme:

  “You were asking whether the professor visited any grave in particular, and we left aside the matter of the professor’s love. Love for whom? We found out later. There was a strange death. I worked the case. The schoolteacher disappeared. We tracked her until we found her sleeping in the countryside. What am I saying, sleeping? Dead. The clue was a column of locusts shaped like a whirlwind rising up over the sunflowers.”

  “What relationship did that death have with the professor?”

  “What relation? You tell me: 1. The whirlwind or spiral of locusts rose up from the teacher’s body. 2. The body was empty; inside there was nothing but locusts. 3. The professor brought the locusts to the village.”

  “Still, I don’t understand the relation between the professor and her death.”

  “Well, I did, and I wasn’t alone.”

  “You weren’t alone, you say? Who else thought so?”

  “The coroner.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Sometimes the coroners take over the functions of investigators or detectives. That was the case back then.”

  “And the judge, did he not pay attention to you or your suspicions?”

  “No.”

  “How did the professor take the death? What did he do that you could see?”

  “He made his desperation obvious, in a surprising way, too. He made a public confession, in the schoolroom where we held the viewing.”