“Do you remember him? Do you remember there were two of us, right from the start, and that you went and ruined it?”
But the mother doesn’t even answer, and Rafael can see in her gaze that she is waiting for Mauro to be quiet, his distress leaves her indifferent. Joaquin belongs to the past. The tall twin is not mistaken when he argues with her, when she refuses to say how much money she has put aside since she lost her son at poker, since she decided to keep the jar in her room, away from prying eyes. The little brother has been placing bets to himself. A few dozen pesos. Fifty. Nothing. How much is Joaquin worth? Rafael’s only benchmark is the price of a ewe or a cow. Somewhere in between? Does it go by weight? Fifteen pesos the pound. But with Joaquin’s know-how, surely a lot more. He decides on fifty thousand pesos, because he hopes the mother will never have that much. And yet he reckons all she’d have to do would be to sell five head of cattle. The thought of it, so easy, fills him with dread. Try not to think about it any more, so as not to let it drift through the air, within reach, but the mother is bound to know, and he tries to reassure himself, there has to be something else, some trouble, some lapse of time, an old resentment, so that in the end Joaquin won’t come back.
Gradually life goes back to the old routine, spread among them the work gets done. From the outside, nothing has changed on the mother’s estancia. And just as the surface of a pond becomes smooth again, and concentric circles vanish once the pebble has fallen to the bottom, the four of them who are left, mother and sons, breathe and grow calm at last. Little ripples. Fewer and fewer. And then nothing. Joaquin is gone for good.
JOAQUIN
No more smiles, ever. That will be his revenge, his way of being faithful, of showing Emiliano that you don’t gamble for a boy when there’s nothing else to take. He won’t be a source of shame to his mother: he knows how to work. He knows he’ll have to make do with sheep now and he already misses the smell of cows, but when it comes to herding, rounding up, shearing, and butchering, he already knows all that. He is afraid of no one. The only person who could humiliate him with his robust build and endurance has stayed behind at the estancia.
But smile, that he won’t. And when the old man leaves him at the end of the day to his three gauchos and there he is alone with them he makes no effort—he almost felt like clinging to Emiliano to get away from them, he doesn’t want to see the others or speak to them. And they don’t either, they just touched the brims of their hats in greeting when he arrived, and then they picked up their conversation where they’d left off, if he’d been a passing dog they’d have done no differently. So, seething with bitterness, Joaquin sits on his own on the steps to the house and looks at the sky, counting the hours until it’s time to go to bed, not even sure he’ll have any dinner. The mother did give him a hunk of dried meat but he doesn’t dare take it out. He doesn’t understand why the guys already stopped working when there are still two hours of daylight, and he has heard they’ll get up early the next morning—but anyway, the mother would say, is that any reason. After an hour has gone by, he’s as bored as a dead rat; if he weren’t so tense, for sure he would have fallen asleep, never mind his empty stomach. So when one of the gauchos calls out to him, he gives a start.
“So old Emiliano has brought us a baby.”
Joaquin makes a face and doesn’t reply. He stares at the young man who has stopped speaking, he’d be surprised if he’s even five years older than him, and a heavy silence falls over them all, the way it used to with Mauro sometimes, and his long face with its drawn features looks from one man to the next, with a blank expression.
“Heard tell he won you at poker.”
It was the oldest man who spoke, a dark, wrinkled little man whose eyes shine beneath eyelids grown heavy with work and sun, and the twin thinks that this is the first time he has heard that word, won, not lost, for the first time his ears can put up with it, so he nods and murmurs, “Yup.”
The old gaucho nods.
“That’s a blow. I suppose you’re not too happy about it.”
“It shows,” says the one who called him a baby.
“Let me ask him, Fabricio, you always go too fast, what does it cost just to ask him?”
“We don’t care, Eduardo, that’s all.”
“Don’t listen to him, baby.”
The old gaucho looks at Joaquin, laughing to himself at his joke and adds: “You don’t mind if I call you that? Fabricio’s right, you look like a kid.”
And Joaquin bites his lips not to call them assholes, claws at his knees with his hands not to get up and punch them, all of them, he’s sure he could beat all three of them, every last one, old or not old. He hunches over in silence. Keeps his teeth clenched, even when they go in to heat up a bowl of beans for dinner, he picks at his food. The others try to tease him once or twice, but soon give up—they have other fish to fry.
After the meal, they go out again to smoke. Unsure, Joaquin stays there in the corridor, his satchel at his feet with all his meager belongings. Eduardo sees him from outside and comes back into the house.
“I’ll show you where you sleep.”
He opens the door at the end of the corridor. Here you are, this is it. And we’re good guys here, you’ll see. Things will be better tomorrow.
“Who else sleeps in here?”
“Well, we each have our own room, what did you think. This room is your home. No one comes in here besides you.”
On his own, Joaquin sits on the bed. He misses Mauro, and the mother, and even the little brother and that half-wit Steban; he wishes he could cry to get rid of the stinging in his throat, so he could breathe better. But nothing comes, just a dryness that causes his heart to flutter, his cheeks to flush, something dead in his chest, because all of them back there at the estancia have closed the door on him. He was hoping, he really believed, if he’s honest, that if the mother herself didn’t, Mauro would do something when Emiliano came. But he had waited in vain. In a hushed voice he’d begged, but his tall twin didn’t budge, not even a sign of anxiety on his face, no regret. Just a few words: I’ll come back and get you. And he’d have to take his word for it.
He can sense that the guys outside in the darkness are sitting down now. One of them is playing a guitar. Soundlessly Joaquin opens the window and listens; at the estancia there was never any music. It’s nothing like the bawdy or raucous songs at the bar in San León; what he hears calms him, lulls him on the evening of this difficult day. With his elbows on the wooden sill he puts his cheek on his arms. He wishes he could fall asleep and that it would go on, the plucking of chords resonating deep inside him, the voice humming, almost murmuring. He feels as if he’s been listening for hours, he’s with them in the dark, whispering the refrains, trying to memorize bits of lyrics so he can say them again, too.
“Hey, kid.”
He opens his eyes without even raising his head. Eduardo is waving to him through the window.
“Come on out.”
Joaquin slowly shakes his head. He doesn’t feel like it. No strength. But the old man insists, eventually comes in the house and knocks on the door. Doesn’t open it; speaks through the wooden panel.
“Don’t stay there worrying about things, son. Come on out, why don’t you.”
Joaquin looks at the closed door, hears the voice coming through it. At the estancia no one ever knocks; doors are made to be opened as you burst in practically tearing them from their hinges. And shouts go with it. Never before could he sit in a room like this and hear someone asking from beyond a closed door:
“Can I come in?”
So for the first time in his life Joaquin says, Yes.
He wakes up outside in the middle of the night. For a fraction of a second he thinks he can still hear the music and the men laughing around him, then realizes he’s alone. He rubs his eyes to come to his senses. A moment later he knows the others have had a good laugh
at his expense, leaving him to sleep on the ground while they have gone back to their beds, once Arcangel put the guitar down—he can’t remember dropping off, he has no idea how he could have been sleeping so soundly that he didn’t hear them leave, wasn’t wary of these strangers.
He sits bolt upright and feels the blanket sliding off him, and realizes they put it there so he wouldn’t be cold. And then Eduardo’s voice behind him:
“You awake, kid? You should go inside.”
Joaquin gives a start and jerks around on his butt to face him.
“Hey, old man, aren’t you going to sleep?”
“I haven’t had a real night’s sleep in ages.”
“Did you put this blanket on me?”
“It’s cold, don’t you think?”
Joaquin stands up and wraps the cloth around him to preserve the warmth. His feet are frozen.
“Yup, I think it’s even colder than where I’m from.”
“The Andes. That’s where the damp comes from.”
“I’m going to bed.”
Eduardo nods, reaches for his pouch of tobacco, and Joaquin looks at him.
“Are you staying here?”
“I’ve got a few more to smoke, I think.”
“Okay.”
On the threshold he pauses.
“Thanks. For the blanket.”
He doesn’t say it, but he thinks: No one has ever done that for me.
Thousands of sheep, even more of them and whiter than the mother’s. You can’t see the ground for the herds, with a few brown rams dotted here and there. They smell different to Joaquin, there’s an intoxicating smell of dried turd, maybe the air sweeps away the stench of urine and sweat-clumped wool here, and Fabricio laughs.
“Look at them all with their asses to the wind. No need to ask which way the wind’s blowing.”
Whether they’re eating, sleeping, or playing, the sheep all stand facing the same way, their rumps to the west, their heads low or tucked in their shoulders to keep out of the gusts. From where they are, slightly above them, the gauchos can look down on them as if they were dominos stacked side by side in a huge box, and Joaquin imagines that if a gust of wind knocked over the first one, they’re so tightly packed that they’d all fall, one after the other, carried off by a pointless wave, prevented by their physical closeness from getting away—a sea of legs waving from upturned bellies: he bursts out laughing. The others look at him, he breaks off and says, “Shall we go?”
“Let’s go,” says Eduardo.
They join the herd, their criollos at a walk; Joaquin’s mount is the cream color of an unwashed ewe, weary and stoical, worn by years of working the steppe. But no doubt the horse hasn’t worked for a while now, because the muscles in his back have slackened, and when the twin runs a hand over his flank he can feel the ribs undulating beneath his palm, like unwelcome little waves. Fabricio notices his gesture and nods.
“Have to get that one back in shape. For two years now he’s been out there just wandering around the plain.”
“I can tell.”
“He’s a good nag, otherwise, I saw him at work when I first got here. Mosquito.”
He rides in front of him, snapping his fingers, and the horse snorts, shakes his head, and the gaucho laughs.
“A hundred more pounds and he’ll be a real devil.”
“Plain devil’s fine with me,” says Joaquin.
“I suspect it is.”
“You suspect?”
“Yup.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, we all know where you come from, kid.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“The men say your estancia is hell on earth.”
Joaquin turns toward the herds, not answering, puzzled. Hell. Shit, where’d they get that from, as if they knew the mother and the farm, to talk about where he came from as if it were an abyss—or maybe some of them had worked there as seasonal hands, he can’t place them, it would have been a long time ago because the mother decided years ago that her sons were enough to get the work done, but all the same, Joaquin has a good memory, especially for faces: did they ever come for the shearing? Hell.
The image of the old lady hounds him, with her outbursts and tantrums. Sometimes he and Mauro used to look at the statuette of the Virgin on the dresser and neither one of them could believe she was made from the same stuff as the mother, there wasn’t the slightest resemblance, so either they’d been lied to, or they’d been mistaken, but no one should try to make them swallow some story about some putative kinship: on the one hand that mass of flesh almost as wide as it was tall, with her thinning hair and her mastiff’s jowls, who only knows how to be silent or how to yell, and on the other hand that slender, smiling silhouette, just touching her made you feel better, no, honestly, no. For Joaquin and Mauro there are women, there are men, and there is the mother.
The Virgin in heaven and the mother in hell.
This morning he got up and got ready in a house without shouting, no one nagging in his ear to hurry up, you lazybones, no one grabbing his bowl of maté from him before he’s finished because there’s no more time, or bellowing for no reason before the day has even started, to spur them on, they’re always in a rush, and it’s never good and never enough. There’s something so different about this place that it leaves him stunned, just wait, it’s bound to change.
But all day long they split up the herds, drive them into their pastures to let a bit of wild grass grow elsewhere, you never know when you might need some sheaves of hay for injured or sick animals you’ve had to take back to the fold. All day long he is patient, relentlessly riding his ill-tempered cremello, sharing the contents of the pail Emiliano’s wife prepared for them, taking part in the bets about the evening’s menu. Don’t be stupid, says Eduardo, you’re going to eat up all your pay. —I won’t be getting any pay. —And what do you think, that we work just for the boss lady’s soup?
So for the first time he’ll have some money, pesos of his own, Emiliano confirmed it that evening, he said, To buy back your freedom, in a year you can leave, or stay on. And Joaquin can hardly believe it, not the fact of leaving, but that he’ll be paid, because in that instant the mother’s estancia shifts further away in his mind and represents nothing more that a minute preoccupation, giving way at last to a dream, if they don’t take it away from him, as always—but this time he hopes with all his might, because this world is different, he can tell, he can yearn for it, and as he runs behind the ewes, his mouth closed over an insane hopefulness, in his mind he cries, “Hell . . . hell!”
MAURO
Hay-making season is over. In the barn, there is a fragrance of dried grass. How such arid soil and poor pastureland are able to join forces to yield a fodder with this dizzying perfume: it never fails, every year, to astound the tall twin. He can also see how much room is left in the barn, and he knows the harvest was meager, the mother will have to buy four or five tons to make up the shortfall; maybe they won’t even need it, but if they wait it will be sold out and they won’t find any. It hasn’t rained in almost three months, the prairies are gray and yellow; the scant grass has not grown properly, yielding a thin, coarse hay that scratches the animals’ mouths. Sometimes in winter they have to remove a stem that has stayed planted like an arrow in an animal’s gum, causing it to chew the air and shake its head for days. When the season isn’t too cold, the herd has no appetite for such dreary food and they prefer to wander for hours, snuffling through the thickets of neneos—and Mauro knows he’ll have to bring back the herds scheduled for slaughter a few weeks earlier, to leave them in the healthy pastures so that the meat won’t have the acrid smell of those spiny plants.
With the end of his pitchfork he gathers the bits of hay that have fallen here and there, and piles them loosely in a corner: the important thing is not to let it go to waste. He tries to
work out just how short they’ll be exactly, but there are too many things he doesn’t know—how many sick animals they’ll have to bring back next season, or whether there will be rain or not, because without the rain the food crop won’t grow. Despite the heady smell of the hay, the dust makes him cough, dust from the earth they cannot help but harvest along with the grasses, because here, whatever you do, there is always dust—beneath the horses’ hooves, behind the carts, on the cows’ rumps. Mauro can feel the warmth of the forage he has just stored. In daytime, in the sun, it makes him and the others itch so badly they could scratch their flesh to shreds and clamber into the watering trough to calm the irritation, although none of them do, because they know that the moment their skin dries it will itch all the worse. So they learn to live with it, their skin shivers as if they had a fever, they endure the sweat and, for once, are glad of a bit of breeze to ease their burning arms and neck. In the evening red blotches still sting all the way to their cheeks.
On the other side of the barn the horses whinny suddenly and Mauro looks up, retreats soundlessly into the shadow. This is why he has been lingering here for an hour; he knew the little brother would be stupid enough to come. And surely he doesn’t even think about it anymore, otherwise he would not have bothered to open the stable doors to give some grain to the criollos, and yet he ought to remember that his older brother is horribly spiteful. But maybe he didn’t notice that Mauro overheard him that morning, when he and Steban were making fun of him, maybe the half-wit—who did see him behind the door and went pale—had actually obeyed the twin’s warning gesture, a finger to his lips: Shhh—and was too petrified to say anything to Rafael, too cowardly to warn him. And the little brother, so cheerful since Joaquin left: does he think his solitary, grieving older brother doesn’t realize that the kid has been imitating him? He thinks he’s well hidden when he cries out, and gives a thrust of his hips: Well! In the ass, Mauro, and in the ass, Joaquin! Yes, since this morning the tall twin has been waiting to grab him and give him a reason to think twice before he makes fun, he’s seething with rage, and if he followed his instincts he’d have rushed at his brother already, but the mother was behind him, she would have heard, he missed his chance. For hours he’s been ruminating, working all on his own, because Steban and the little brother would have noticed something just by looking at him, his clenched jaws working incessantly in his ravaged face, but he knows he’s right.
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