“Then,” continued Raúl, “he crawled to the house. They’d taken everything, of course. The radio, the TV, the refrigerator, the stove. They’d cut the telephone line too, the bastards. He went out, hauled himself as best he could onto a chair, and lost consciousness. During that time, at Araucania Madera, they were waiting for the wood. They waited until the end of the afternoon, and then they phoned me. I found that suspicious, and with two of my men, I went to see what was going on. And I found him there, seated, his arms hanging down, his head thrown back. And when I saw him, I swear,” Raúl said, “I thought he was dead. And it’s crazy, because I thought immediately of those bloody Indians. Right away. I don’t know how many times I’d told him not to trust them. I said: be careful, they’re going to have your skin just when you least expect it, that’s the way they are. And him: You should get rid of your prejudices …”
At the hospital, the doctor confirmed what they’d feared, they’d taken a kidney. While they were alone in his room, Roberto, lying on the bed, told Raúl that now the chief’s words took on their full meaning: What I really need is inside you.
“So can you begin see what they’re really like?” said Raúl. “These people are so obliging that they tell you in advance that they’re going to do you in. Isn’t that marvellous?”
Over the next few days, a representative of the insurance company came and went on Roberto’s and Raúl’s land, to finally, after long discussions that progressively went downhill, refuse them any compensation. When he left, he even went so far as to say, menacingly, that he suspected them of plundering the farm themselves.
“It’s then,” interrupted Raúl’s wife, “that I told my husband: it’s time to put our differences aside. Yes, there were some low blows. Yes, Roberto had played his cards badly, trusting the Mapu so much. But that’s enough, otherwise he’s going to kill himself. Because yes, your father had got to that point. I went to see him and what I found was a ruined man. Completely finished. He couldn’t accept that they’d done that to him.”
Alberto, whose hair was standing on end, was nevertheless lost in thought, to the point where for several minutes he could no longer follow what was being said. Bit by bit, an idea, vague at first, became clear and tenacious, and made him uneasy: he could not imagine his father contemplating suicide; that was simply not consistent with the person he was.
“What she says is true,” Raúl went on. “I think that if she had not lifted his spirits, he would have hanged himself. Yes sir!”
“One day,” Raúl’s wife added, “when I was helping him put some order into his house, I said to him: You understand now why Raúl and I have no contact with these people. They’re too different. And even there, even after everything they had done to him, he looked at me as if I had just said something incredibly stupid.”
“If you ask me, they brainwashed him,” said Raúl. “Because they did that to me too. But I wasn’t afraid to tell him what I thought: okay, fine, but where is Amalia, can you explain that? Where are your men? Where is your equipment hiding? And above all, where is your kidney, my friend? But him, it’s as if he’d given up. He didn’t care about anything I said.”
Raúl swallowed another glass of cider, and watched Alberto, as if to confirm that he agreed with his version of the facts. And he remembered the equipment he thought he’d seen in the shed adjoining Raúl’s house.
“After that, he spent all his time sitting on his porch, watching the sun set. The doctor warned him, the kidney left to him would allow him to live, at the most, four months. I told him: Do what he says, go to the capital for a transplant. But he barely listened. I had the feeling that he didn’t want to live any longer, that he was already dead.”
“It’s true,” Raúl’s wife broke in. “There was a treatment, but your father didn’t want to have anything to do with it. It’s sad to say, but it’s the truth: he let himself die.”
“And you can probably guess the rest,” Raúl said. “One afternoon, when I went over there to have him sign some papers, I found him on the ground, at the foot of the chair where he was always sitting. I’d arrived too late. Who knows how many days he’d been there, like that, in that position? Who knows?”
Then, as if there were nothing more to add on the subject, with a casualness that left Alberto breathless, Raúl and his wife began to describe other retornados who had fled the coup d’état and had come back to the country after the dictatorship was over. Scenarios featuring vaguely idealistic characters, clearly naïve, utterly ignorant of Chilean customs. But of all the stories told to him that night, none could approach the degree of desperation implicit in the last days of his father’s life. The retornados, thought Alberto, who were so much talked about, so much envied, because, everyone thought, they had come back to the fold with money in their pockets after their little vacation in the lands of the North.
9
That night, he didn’t sleep. He wandered from room to room, turned on the radio, went out onto the porch. The enervating chorus of crickets was going full blast. He kept seeing his father crawling like a paraplegic in the middle of the night through a clear-cut forest, he kept hearing the spiteful words of Raúl and his wife.
In the course of the morning, after he’d had something to eat, he saw that Llaima was spewing, like a factory chimney, a thick and constant stream of smoke that darkened the sky, and whose ashen odour was reaching him already. Far off, the volcano growled like thunder. What to do? Estimating the distance between the volcano and the farm, he decided that an eruption of lava would never reach his father’s land.
In the afternoon, after having found the property rights to the farm in a shoebox, he got into his pickup and headed towards Cunco. As he approached the small town, grey particles, drifting like snowflakes, covered the windshield. At Cunco, despite the saturated air, life went on as if nothing were happening: itinerant sellers filled the streets, students strolled on the square, and the Mapuches were gathered, as usual, in the doorway of the grocery store at an intersection facing the square. At a stand under a willow tree, Alberto bought an arrolado sandwich, and a soft drink. He sat on the back of a bench, his feet on the seat, to bite into the sandwich and watch the people come and go. A dwarf with a pugnacious face and a flattened nose, wearing a jockey cap, brandished a newspaper: Austral, Austral, todo sobre la elección del Nuevo alcalde … Austral, Austral, el Llaima a punto de … Alberto hailed him. When the newsboy stopped in front of him, Alberto dropped some coins into his sausage-fingered hand. On the front page, Alberto found the smiling and gratified face of Huenchumilla, his tiny eyes behind thick glasses, bright and fatigued. It was the smile of a man who could hardly believe that he had won. However, if he could go by the results, the victory was decisive, a cakewalk even. He scanned the articles on the municipal elections, taking in the new mayor’s promise to put an end to four hundred years of apartheid and his vow to attack racism, described as a shameful phenomenon in a country like ours!
He left the paper on the bench, went up to a garbage container to throw away the empty can, and stepped onto the sidewalk. When he turned around, he saw an urchin six or seven years old, on the tips of his toes, reaching his arm into the garbage to pull out the can. Behind the tangle of pine branches he located the bank with its imposing oak door, and he entered the establishment.
After a long wait, a man in a striped three-piece suit came to a halt in front of him, a grimace engraved on the lower part of his face. He followed a maze of beige corridors, adorned with paintings of idyllic southern landscapes. A mahogany desk loomed at the end of a vast office. A window gave onto a garden with a fountain, where a few sparrows splashed about. Seated, Alberto became aware of the soft strains of baroque music. The banker, impeccably dressed, with delicate features and fine manners, rested his elbows on the desk, and embarked on a tribute to his father. He was, the man assured him, a hard-working, honest, dedicated man, full of compassion. A kind of old-fa
shioned idealist, was he not? He didn’t wait for a reply, but added, his eyes half closed, “All my sympathies.”
Alberto informed him of his intention to sell the farm before returning to Canada, given that he was, along with his brother (who, settled in São Paulo, would be sending him a proxy), the legal heir.
The banker blinked, the corners of his mouth quivering, as though he expected this to be some sort of joke. Seeing that Alberto made no move, he cleared his throat, his fist in front of his mouth, more to hide his amusement than as a mark of politeness.
“But Mr. Ventura,” he ventured in a suave voice, “where have you been for the last twenty-four hours? Have you not seen what’s going on out there? Are you not aware that Llaima is threatening to swallow everything up?”
At first Alberto didn’t know how to respond. After a long pause he came to his own defence, saying that yes, of course, he had seen that the volcano was about to erupt. But the banker cut him off: he would be making a serious strategic error if he were to divest himself of the farm at this time. And he launched into a detailed description of the disastrous consequences for real estate in the region of Puerto Montt after the eruption of the Chaitén volcano about a year earlier.
“The sector where your father’s farm is located was highly prized five or six years ago,” he said. “People fought then to acquire fertile land near the Huichahue River, with its deep bed and pure water. Some profited by it, and made fortunes with oats. But your father and some others gambled everything on their relationship with the forestry companies, and that did not give the results they hoped for.”
Wrinkles appeared on his forehead.
“We here at the Bank of the South were the first financial institution, through the division we set up to offer aid to our agricultural partners, to warn against an irresponsible cultivation of eucalyptus. This tree, with its phenomenal growth and undeniable qualities, has in recent years, as you have no doubt seen with your own eyes, done irreparable damage in some parts of the region. You have to understand that once it has been planted, it takes ten to fifteen years for the ground to recover. It’s a serious problem, and some did not take the problem seriously.”
Alberto could not believe his ears. At the beginning of the 1990s, when his father took over the farm, this same bank had lent him money at preferential rates because he was going to plant eucalyptus.
“Why do you think empires like Araucania Madera pay others to supply them with wood?”
The banker stretched his arms as if to draw down his sleeves.
“Take my word for it, they’re not worth very much,” he stated, in a voice that broached no appeal.
And he raised his arched eyebrows as far as they would go. Alberto remained speechless.
“And what do you advise me to do?”
As if the banker were happy to see Alberto listening to reason, he bestowed upon him a smile of apparent concern.
“First, cross your fingers that Llaima doesn’t spill its lava onto your land. And second, keep your rights to the property and come back for a tour of the region … in ten years. If I’m still here, it would give me great pleasure to discuss matters with you at that time. Believe me, that’s the best thing to do. It will enable you to save time, energy, and money.
Back at the farm, even though he was exhausted, he spent most of the afternoon monitoring Llaima, whose crater was still belching out just as much smoke, but no lava as yet. In his head he tried again to measure the distance between the volcano and the farm, alarmed by a speleologist he’d heard earlier on the radio, who stated that lava from an eruption could spread over a radius of more than thirty kilometres.
THAT NIGHT, WITH THE SHOTGUN on the rear seat of the pickup, he drove slowly. The engine made the dashboard shudder, and the heater slowly dissipated the condensation that had formed a mock continent on the windshield. In the middle of an endless night, he crossed some railway tracks, then he drove for a long time in a straight line without meeting a single vehicle. He saw in the distance the confusing jumble of small houses, and the shaggy tops of the rucas. He took a nameless road that kept altering course, and seemed to be the village’s main street. Behind the lit window of a house, silhouettes moved back and forth in the intermittent bluish light from a television set. A woman in a long dress was walking falteringly, like a sleepwalker, on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. In front of a building where a naked light bulb was hanging from a cord, men in undershirts were talking, and softly laughing.
HE PARKED THE TRUCK in front of a small empty park, where in the darkness he thought he could make out some swings. On foot, he passed some modest bungalows in front of which toys, or sometimes piles of metal, lay scattered. He came to a square dimly lit by two streetlights. A few steps away from an impressive rewe representing Mapuche gods, an old man was lost in thought, sitting alone on a stone bench.
Alberto watched him. He went up to the man, who did not bother to look at him, and sat down on the same bench. Yes, his stature, diminutive as that of a child, matched the portraits sketched out by Noemi and Raúl. His hair was smooth and silvered, his eyes fixed and shining like that of a blind man, while his mouth with its delicate lips exhaled a light mist when he breathed. But of course, he thought all at once, it’s the man he saw at his father’s funeral!
He then realized that he’d forgotten the shotgun in the pickup.
“I knew you’d come sooner or later,” said the chief, still without turning towards him.
At their feet, miniature cyclones of dust swirled feebly.
“It’s a good thing, this little wind,” he went on. “It’s pushing the smoke towards the mountains. So you’ve moved into your father’s house?”
Alberto cleared his throat. He had come to shed light on his death.
“You know, I had great esteem for you father. That is why my daughter and I came to pay our respects and express our gratitude the other day. My deepest sympathies, my boy.”
Alberto looked at him, incredulous.
“Of course, people must have said all sorts of things about us. It doesn’t surprise me, and it’s of no importance, because you are here now.”
He smiled kindly, and held out his hand while slightly bowing his head. His name was Don Francisco. As he spoke to him in a voice astonishingly like that of a child, Alberto observed his bright eyes, his delicate features, his tanned complexion, the colour of earth, attesting to whole days exposed to the sun, and he told himself that there was no mistaking that face. He had something of the Mapuches’ shyness, their uneasiness and wariness in the company of a huinca. Still, he tried talking to him naturally, without looking at him, but with that dose of familiarity typical of people in the South. He spoke to him about daily life, about the unpredictable weather, a constant enemy, about women who complained too much (at that point a smile appeared, darting to the left side of his face), about corn harvests, as disappointing as those of the previous year …
After a time, Alberto was only half listening. When the chief paused at last, as if to catch his breath, Alberto cut him off:
“Excuse me, I need to know … How did my father die? Can you tell me?”
Alberto was there, listening, hoping that this was the right time and place, hoping that this man would throw open the door to the truth, and that he’d be able, once and for all, to rid himself of the anguish he’d been carrying around with him for days, like an angry monkey perched on his shoulder. He was so engrossed that he was unaware of the pleading in his voice, to which Don Francisco also seemed impervious, since, without being asked, in a pleasing, almost amicable tone, he journeyed back in time, paused at a day of dreary rain, stammered, shut his eyes for a moment, and then continued on further back to a fiesta at his house, the one spoken of by Noemi, when Roberto met Amalia.
And then, Alberto noticed, the chief began to gesture with his hands in an attempt to find the right word, an
d sometimes, surprisingly, he faltered … Was he lying? After a while Alberto became convinced that he was omitting entire scenes, but he was also certain that it was not intentional. And so, trying to read between the lines, he saw in his mind’s eye a Don Francisco who, astonished, watched a smiling and affable Roberto enter his yard for the first time. He saw the chief, who studied him without moving, the expression on his face shifting from disbelief to amazement, from incredulity to a nascent anger, while about him people came and went holding plastic glasses, and children dodged around the adults, running after a scruffy soccer ball. He saw Roberto asking who was the chief. A neighbour at the other end of the yard, in the middle of the celebrants, pointed at Don Francisco, in the half-light that was closing in like a curtain. He saw Roberto looking at the chief, hesitating, then approaching with a brimming glass of cider in his hand. Roberto held out his hand, and for a few moments Don Francisco let it hang there to no avail, taking pleasure, it seemed, in his rudeness, staring Roberto down. When the chief finally grasped his hand, he drew him gently in, and murmured:
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