Eucalyptus

by Mauricio Segura

  “I don’t like this kind of game, I don’t like it at all …”

  Roberto drew himself up.

  “But I don’t understand, it’s you who … At least, that’s what the boy said who came to see me at the farm,” he objected, pointing to a scrawny child with a round face behind the chief, whose silhouette came and went among the other youngsters.

  “I’m sorry? What are you saying?”

  And Don Francisco, Alberto said to himself, began thinking very fast, and looked around him, trying to understand what could have happened, and how at the same time he could bring an end to this annoying conversation. It was then that, purely by chance, his eyes lit on Amalia, standing in the kitchen doorway. She stood erect wearing a brown skirt that covered her knees, following her father with that look of apprehension and expectation that he knew so well, that look that she had first adopted in adolescence when she began to live a double life—a double life she never revealed to her mother when she was still of this world.

  “I thought perhaps we were going to talk business.”

  “Ah, yes? Excuse me,” said Don Francisco, raising a hand as if to stop the wind.

  And with long strides he walked straight to his daughter, discreetly motioning to her to join him in the kitchen. This scene, in the blue half-light smelling of fried food, amid a clutter of dirty glasses, silverware, and piles of chipped and dirty plates, the chief recalled, but with a smile, as if to excuse his fit of anger. Several times he repeated, in his defence:

  “She’d never said a thing to me. You understand? Not a word. She’d sent little Juanito to your father’s farm, without breathing a word to me.”

  So there was a confrontation between father and daughter. What did she want, for God’s sake? the chief insisted. Had she already forgotten what that man had done? The pain he’d caused to the family of Matias, the boy who worked for him and whom he’d killed? What had got into her? Alberto imagined him advancing on his daughter, beside himself: why had she done that, especially during the Nguillatún celebrations? Was she trying to provoke him, to hurt him, trewa kodo!

  When celebrants came in to the kitchen, Don Francisco ignored them, and continued to upbraid her and to demand explanations.

  At first her only response was to shrug her shoulders, and with this gesture, thought Alberto, she was telling the truth. She didn’t really know why she had invited that man. Then, clearly not knowing what she was going to say, she began to describe that humid day, with its blinding light, a light that, in summer, made the poplars’ branches shimmer in slow motion. She was walking, dazed by the heat, and fascinated, as usual, by the contrast between the cool grey of the slumping bushes’ shadows and the incandescence of the indigo sky. At first, when she saw the black vehicle that, like a hallucination, appeared down the road, aqueous and improbable, she didn’t think much of it. Even though she wasn’t really looking, absorbed as she was in her thoughts, going over in her head the assignments on which she had been working the day before. What caused problems with the mucous membrane? Was glycerol essential when inserting a sperm straw for insemination? She raised her eyes, and doubtless that’s when she saw, thought Alberto, the sun glinting off the chrome on the black American van. That furtive but ostentatious reflection that would remain fixed in her memory, much more than Roberto’s serene and quietly complacent manner, his elbow resting on the window frame as he took her in without any sense of embarrassment. Yes, without her being aware of it, it was the elusive, multi-hued mirage-like reflection that had captivated her. In fact, it was only days later, perhaps even a week, that this spellbinding reflection came back to her, accidentally, thanks to another reflection, at the university, when a door opened in front of her. Afterwards, Alberto told himself, when she thought about it as she was coming out of a class in bovine biology, she realized that she had no idea why she was so obsessed in this way. Running after a micro, she took her courage in both hands and faced her demons: how old was she, for God’s sake? Was she an imbecile, or what? To be so fascinated by a vulgar black car with a man at the wheel who devoured her with his eyes? Was he really devouring her with his eyes? She wasn’t even sure. She spent whole days talking to herself out loud, cursing herself under her breath.

  She invented a thousand excuses to go near Roberto’s farm. She had to visit a childhood friend who lived close by, to gather canelo twigs in the nearby forest, to buy ears of corn from one of Roberto’s neighbours. And always she kept an eye on the goings on at the farm, noting that they worked hard there, and that there was no woman in sight. One day, near the gate, she approached two young men who worked there, and inquired, without seeming to, about their working conditions and the boss’s behaviour. She learned that he was demanding but loyal, that he often needed a veterinarian but he didn’t often call for one, the visits being too costly. At the end of the conversation, the men asked her if she was looking for work. Smiling, she said no, that she still had two and a half years left at the university. Afterwards, she often, during the afternoons, imagined herself arriving at Roberto’s farm in a van to discuss with him the hypothetical respiratory problems of calves. And she saw herself explaining how to keep the stable air fresh: eliminating dust, water vapour, and harmful gases such as ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide.

  “But if you really want to know,” continued Don Francisco, “it seemed to me that what she wanted from your father was to get away. In fact, I always felt that she was ill at ease with us, that she had her eyes set too much on the huincas, if you know what I mean.”

  That night, in the chief’s backyard, cowed by his anger, Amalia swore up and down that she would keep her distance from Roberto.

  Every time Roberto tried to approach the chief, he turned his back on him, called one of his children, took a lively interest in what the women were saying. Then, at a certain point, curious to know who Roberto was talking to, the chief sought him out, but he had already disappeared. And so what Noemi had told him, that Don Francisco had introduced his daughter to Roberto, was that all nonsense?

  “You know,” said the chief, “we’re like that, the Mapuches. We forget nothing. Maybe that’s why our elders said that the past was a burden to them.”

  “You’re talking about what?” asked Alberto. “My father’s young worker?”

  “Young Matias’s death was terrible. It shook us. Me, in particular. His mother was my neighbour. But that’s not all, you know. A long time ago, you may never have heard about it, one of our people was trampled by your grandfather’s horse.”

  “I knew about it.”

  They looked at each other. A glimmer of defiance shone deep in the chief’s eyes.

  Against the wishes of her father, Amalia continued to hover around Roberto’s farm. One day the chief learned, through one of his neighbours, that his daughter was now working for that man. Weeks later, an acquaintance of his daughter told him that Amalia and the man were seeing each other, and that in the evenings they paraded through the streets of Temuco, hand in hand. He was filled with anger, but what could he do? Confront his daughter? He’d never known how to talk to her. So they came to a tacit agreement: when they passed each other at night within the house walls, rank and oozing humidity, they avoided mentioning that man. Only once she opened her heart (and it was then that he understood how deep were his daughter’s feelings for this White man) and begged him to forgive the man for what he had done. Had he not taught her to have the wisdom to forgive? He didn’t answer, and she took the message: never again would she try to rehabilitate him in his eyes.

  Over the following two years, Roberto did everything in his power to help the Mapuche village. He convinced the bureaucrats of the Cunco commune to repair the chronic water leaks in the crumbling aqueduct system. What is more, and this was his real triumph, he persuaded those same bureaucrats to free up funds for the construction of a small clinic.

  How had his father achieved all that, Albe
rto asked himself, with no connections in the region? He thought again of his Aunt Noemi. Why had she not said anything? To protect his reputation? Because she was appalled by the influence trafficking and the little ploys that undermined the system?

  One Saturday afternoon, as a blazing sun turned the inside of the chief’s living room into an oven, there was a knock at the door. Amalia went to open it, and sitting at the table, leafing through Austral, the chief looked up to find Roberto on the doorstep, standing in an inferno of dust and stagnant air. He watched him as, head lowered, hands in his pants pockets, he entered the house. Amalia and the man stood side by side, awkward and timid as adolescents.

  It was she who spoke, first reminding her father of all that Roberto had done for the community. She could no longer continue this way, without his consent, without being able to share with him what she was living with her lover. She had decided to go and live with Roberto, but she didn’t want to slam the door, she wanted him to support her, and once and for all to forgive her man his past errors.

  The light from the window blinded the chief, so much so that he had to turn his eyes away. In a muffled voice, he told his daughter that she could take her belongings, that he never wanted to see her again. Roberto then intervened, but seeing the expression on Don Francisco’s face, he cut himself short in the middle of a sentence. Large tears fell onto Amalia’s navy blue T-shirt, as she packed her suitcase and softly closed the door behind her.

  Don Francisco would never have believed that no longer seeing his daughter would cause him such suffering. He would never have believed that passing her without saying a word would be so painful. He admitted all this to Alberto.

  Exactly nine months later it was he who, on a Sunday afternoon in autumn under a cloudless sky, paid a visit to Roberto’s farm. He climbed the sinuous path leading to the house, and as he approached, the dogs roused themselves from their torpor and began barking sleepily. She came to the door. Suddenly she was beautiful to him, mature, full of confidence. For a long moment, standing next to the rubber doormat, none of the three said a word. Looking about him, Don Francisco told them that after a visit to the Pehuenches, a Mapuche community in the mountains, he contracted a serious infection and had to have a kidney removed. As a result, he had for months been suffering from kidney failure.

  “But you have to get treatment, Papa!” cried Amalia, dismayed, immediately forgetting their quarrel.

  “I’ve been promised a kidney, but I’ve been waiting for months. It seems there’s nothing to be done. Meanwhile, I can’t function with all my vomiting, I’m always dizzy, and my morale … To be honest, I don’t think I’ll see the summer …”

  Amalia’s eyes opened wide.

  Again, the three of them stood there, silent.

  “But I’ll give you one of my kidneys, and that will be it!”

  Casting his eyes around him again, the chief, in a weak voice, thanked his daughter politely, but as if to discourage her in her desire to help him, he reminded her that for a transplant to succeed, the blood types had to be compatible.

  And then he continued to stare at the stable, the corrals, the tractors parked every which way in front of the kitchen coop, the poplars lining the road, as if to imply that he had come only to deliver the news.

  After a few formalities, he turned around and left, his progress now unsteady.

  The next morning, Amalia made her way to the hospital in Cunco. When a nurse told her that she did not have the same blood type as her father, she was devastated, said Don Francisco. Everyone could see that she was performing her tasks on the farm like a sleepwalker, lost in thought, sometimes short-tempered. One night, as Roberto himself told the chief, while the couple was at the dinner table and the teapot was steaming on the wood stove, he asked Amalia what they might possibly do for her father. Her only response, without even looking at him, was to go and shut herself up in the bedroom.

  Two weeks went by, with Amalia consumed by an anxiety that was slowly poisoning her relationship with Roberto.

  One day, Don Francisco continued, while Roberto was in Cunco on business, he went to a private clinic behind the church on the square, in a low building, all steel and glass. When the doctor asked him for his blood type, he found it ironic that he, the former head of a hospital, did not have that information. A nurse took a blood sample, and he learned that he was O-, in other words a universal donor. Through the doctor, Roberto established contact with a kidney specialist in Temuco, who the same day reassured him: if he was in good health it was possible, yes, to live with one kidney.

  One Saturday morning he told this to Amalia, Don Francisco said. First she was surprised, and then, as if having second thoughts, she became glum again and asked him, curtly, why he had taken those steps.

  “Why do you think?”

  Slowly she rose, went around the small kitchen table, making the floor creak, stroked the back of his neck, and planted a long tender kiss on his lips.

  One cold night, the couple knocked at Don Francisco’s door. For almost two hours, sitting around the table in the main room, Roberto tried to persuade the chief to accept his offer, while Amalia gazed adoringly at her lover with bright eyes full of admiration, turning from time to time towards her father, as if to say: You see how you were mistaken. You understand now what he’s really like …

  Don Francisco protested several times that the day he’d gone to visit them, he’d had no intention of making such a request. But Roberto did not relent: he’d never been so sure of anything in his life.

  “I understood on that day that he was doing it out of love for my daughter,” said the chief. He wanted to tell her: See, you can never any more doubt my sincerity. But for me, it was clear, he was also doing it so as no longer to have young Matias’s death on his conscience. You know, the Mapuche labourer who worked for him.”

  Alberto half-opened his mouth: the chief was right, his father wanted to redeem himself. In God’s name, did you succeed, papa? Did the memory of that boy stop haunting you? As Alberto listened to Don Francisco’s story, in his mind, superimposed on the apocalyptic scene painted by Raúl of his father’s loss of a kidney, were the ambulance headlights that, in the dark of night, appeared like two eyes. The white van stopped in front of the village clinic his father had helped build. Two men got down from the vehicle. One wore a white smock, the other a short-sleeved shirt. They rolled their machines up to the clinic.

  “You understand,” said the chief, “I didn’t want to get the institutions involved in that. They always complicate everything, they understand nothing about our way of doing things. They’re so quick to accuse us of all sorts of wrongdoing. And then, your father knew a kidney specialist in Temuco who put him in contact with a surgeon who, for a price, agreed to come.”

  Seconded by the ambulance driver who assisted him as a nurse, the surgeon, a young man of few words, bent over Roberto, while behind, pacing up and down, a machi intoned a lament to the accompaniment of a kultrún.

  “What happened to the equipment? At the end of his life, Roberto saw the error he’d made in dealing with that company, you know, Araucania something-or-other. But to sever the connection had its consequences. He had to break with an old acquaintance, someone rather unsavoury, who didn’t want him to terminate his partnership with the company. There were attempts at intimidation, of sabotage, and of course we supported Alberto.”

  Suddenly Alberto saw, at the entry to the farm, Raúl spitting words in his father’s face. And he remembered Raúl’s shed, with its cranes and its chainsaws.

  “I said to your father: Let him have his machines, your friend. We’ll make out. Strange as it may seem, many people began to resent him just because he spent time with us. What do you want, that’s the way people are around here.”

  And a few minutes later, knowing that Alberto only wanted to know one thing, Don Francisco said:

  “What I want to
tell you is that your father was doing well, after having had the unbelievable generosity to make me the gift that he did. And then one day Amalia left for Cunco on a shopping trip and she came back to find him on the ground in front of the house, in very bad shape. We did everything to save him … What had happened? In any case, I know that your father’s stitches were reopened, to make it look like it was a medical complication that had caused his death.”

  During this long conversation, Alberto several times recognized his father in the various scenes described by Don Francisco (“Roberto was a fighter, a force of nature. But for me he was above all a man alone, who felt he had always been abandoned …”) There was no doubt: he had known him well and appreciated him. For her part, since Roberto’s death, Amalia had left for Temuco, where she was living with someone she knew, while looking for a room to rent. Apparently she was determined to continue her education. When Alberto expressed his wish to meet her, Don Francisco was quick to discourage him.

  “She’s not ready, you’ll have to give her time. Fortunately she’s young, and she’ll be able to rebuild her life, not so?”

  The chief went silent, and Alberto felt that he had nothing more to say. After a moment, they rose, and before separating, they shook hands without saying goodbye.

  ALBERTO DROVE BACK, his eyes on the road, but not really seeing it. He felt that he had at last come to know his father, through all the characters he had played in the course of his life. According to Don Francisco, his father had found some serenity in his last years, and was no longer a puppeteer manipulating those around him. Perhaps that was it, the logical outcome of his life: to rid himself of the Machiavellian view of the world that had poisoned his existence.

  But right away, he began to have his doubts: was he accepting the chief’s account of his father because it would rehabilitate him in his own eyes? And why ignore all the gaps, the approximations, all the implausibilities even, in the chief’s story? Putamadre, what was true in all that? Who found his father’s body? Amalia? Raúl? He began to smell smoke and thought at first that the engine was giving out. Seeing nothing unusual on the dashboard, he told himself that it was perhaps farmers nearby burning garbage or hay. When the headlights could no longer penetrate the clouds of smoke, he realized that it couldn’t only be dust. He lowered the driver’s window, and after inhaling a lungful of the smoke’s pungent odour, he rolled it up again.