Eucalyptus
Page 12
He slowed down. Surrounded by a thick spiralling cloud, he was barely able to see the poplars bordering the road. A bit farther on, despite the fact that the windows were closed, he heard branches cracking, and for the first time he thought about a forest fire. He climbed the valley leading to the farm, passed slowly in front of Raúl’s house, intact, and made out, scattered over the property, a dozen cranes and chainsaws. (“Yes, he took them all and blamed it on the Mapuches …”) He went down the little incline, and finally, now filled with panic, saw the tops of the flames which, like hungry fingers, were eating away at the eastern part of the farm. He drove alongside the fields to the north, heedless of whether the fire might reach him. When he stopped the vehicle at the farm’s entrance, in front of the hallucinatory and unreal spectacle of the land ablaze, he thought about Llaima. But the volcano was sleeping far off, stately and peaceful.
Alberto got out, and despite the fierce heat, barely endurable, despite the thick smoke that stung his eyes, he sat on the truck’s hood to climb onto the roof. He realized, stunned, that only his father’s land was on fire. An accident? A criminal act? Putamadre, who had done that? He thought of Raúl, Araya, Pedro, and also a young Mapuche crawling under barbed wire, nimble and imagined, sent by the chief while they were talking together. A Mapuche way of purifying land with fire? When the roof of the house caved in, and he saw in the distance what was left of it enveloped in flames, his eyes grew moist. But he stayed put until the wooden and barbed wire fence could no longer contain the fire’s assault. He stayed because he felt that he was witnessing the end of something, the death of part of himself. He remembered the story his grandfather liked to tell him when he was a child: the story of a family born in Andalusia more than seven hundred years earlier, and that had to flee one day to Macedonia, only to cross the Atlantic some centuries later because of wars and stupid persecutions, to settle, without really knowing where it had come to, in a pastoral land whose splendours held the promise of a radiant future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by MIZO
Born in Chile in 1969, Mauricio Segura grew up in Montreal and studied at Université de Montréal and McGill University. A well-known journalist and documentary filmmaker, he is the author of three novels and a study of French perceptions of Latin America. His novel Black Alley, published by Biblioasis in 2010, was widely praised as “a gritty look at multiculturalism in practice” (Noah Richler, CBC Radio) that exerts “an urgent complicity rarely seen in other works about racial tensions, multiculturalism and the immigrant experience” (Words Without Borders).
Mauricio Segura lives with his family in Montreal.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Donald Winkler is a Montreal-based literary translator and documentary filmmaker. He has translated books by the astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, the philosopher Georges Leroux and the novelists Daniel Poliquin and Nadine Bismuth. Winkler is a two-time winner of the Governor General of Canada’s Award for French-to-English translation.