The Exiles and Other Stories Page 10

  As far as the top of the bluff—which the three travelers climbed in the rain, at last compact and uniform—the soaking clay shone phosphorescently. But then they were shut in again by the darkness, and in its midst had to search for the sulky they’d left resting on its shafts.

  The saying “You can’t even see your hands in front of your eyes” is made to order. And on such nights the momentary flash of a match is of no use but to deepen the dizzying darkness right afterward, to the point of making you lose your balance.

  They found the sulky, nevertheless, but not the horse. And leaving his two companions on guard next to one of the wheels—where they stood motionless under their drooping capes, noisily spattered by rain—Subercasaux went off among the painful thorns to the end of the trail, where he found his horse, tangled up in its reins, of course.

  He hadn’t taken more than twenty minutes to look for the animal and bring it in, but when he sought his bearings in the vicinity of the sulky—saying: “Are you there, kids?” and hearing: “Yes, daddy”—Subercasaux became fully aware, for the first time that night, that the two companions he had abandoned to the night and the rain were his two children, aged five and six, who didn’t stand as high as the hub of the sulky wheel, and who were huddled together, dripping water from their rain-capes, and calmly waiting for their father to return.

  Finally they were on their way home, chattering and happy. When moments of worry or danger had passed, Subercasaux’s voice was very different from the one he used to speak to his youngsters when he had to address them as grown-ups. Now it had lowered by two tones, and no one there would have thought, upon hearing the tenderness of their voices, that the man then laughing with the children was none other than the one with the curt and harsh accent of a half an hour before. And now the real talkers were Subercasaux and his daughter, since the little boy—the baby of the family—had fallen asleep on his father’s knees.

  II

  Subercasaux usually got up at daybreak; and though he did it noiselessly, he was well aware that in the next room his boy, as much of an early riser as he was, had been lying with his eyes open for quite a while, waiting to hear his father before he got out of bed. And then the unchanging ritual of morning greetings would begin, passing from one bedroom to the other:

  “Good morning, daddy!”

  “Good morning, my dear little boy!”

  “Good morning, darling little daddy!”

  “Good morning, spotless little lamb!”

  “Good morning, little mouse with no tail!”

  “My little raccoon!”

  “Little daddy armadillo!”

  “Little cat-face!”

  “Little snake-tail!”

  And in this colorful style it would go on for a good while longer—till, once they were dressed, they would go have coffee under the palms, while the little lady kept on sleeping like a stone, till the sun in her face awakened her.

  With his two young children—in their temper and training handiwork of his own—Subercasaux considered himself the happiest father on earth. But this he had achieved at the cost of greater grief than usually experienced by married men.

  Abruptly, as things happen that are inconceivable for their appalling unfairness, Subercasaux had lost his wife. He was suddenly left alone, with two little children who hardly knew him, and in the same house, built by him and fixed up by her, where every nail and every brushmark on the wall was a sharp reminder of shared happiness.

  The next day he found out, when he chanced to open the wardrobe, what it is to all of a sudden see your already buried wife’s underthings; and on a hanger, the dress that she never had time to try out.

  He went through the urgent and fateful need, if you want to go on living, to destroy every last trace of the past, when with his eyes set and dry he burned the letters he had written to his wife, and she had saved since their courtship with more devotion than her big-city clothes. And that same afternoon he found out, at last, what it’s like to be finally worn out from sobbing, and hold back in your arms a young child who’s struggling to get loose so he can go play with the cook’s little boy.

  Hard, that was terribly hard . . . But now he was laughing with his two kids, who along with him formed a single person, given the uncommon way in which Subercasaux brought up his children.

  The youngsters, for example, had no fear of the dark, nor of being alone, nor of anything that contributes to the terror of babies raised at their mother’s skirts. More than once night descended when Subercasaux still wasn’t back from the river, and the children lit the wind-lantern to wait for him, unworrying. Or they would wake up alone in the middle of a furious storm that kept them blinded behind the windowpanes, only to go back to sleep again at once, secure and confident of their daddy’s return.

  They feared nothing, except what their father warned them they should fear; and at the top of the list, naturally, were snakes. Free as they were, exuding health and stopping to look at everything with eyes as big as those of happy puppies, they wouldn’t have known what to do for a moment without their father’s company. But if, when he left, he let them know he was going to be gone for such and such a time, the kids were content to stay and play together. Similarly, if on their long joint trips through the woods or on the river Subercasaux had to go off for some minutes or hours, they would quickly improvise a game, and wait for him unfailingly in the same place, in this way repaying, with blind and cheerful obedience, the confidence their father placed in them.

  They went horseback-riding on their own, and this from the time the boy was four years old. Like all free creatures, they were perfectly aware of their limits, and never went beyond them. Sometimes, alone, they would get as far as the Yabebirí, to the pink sandstone cliff above the river.

  “Make sure of the terrain and sit down afterward,” their father had told them.

  The cliff rises straight up to a height of twenty meters from deep and shaded waters which cool the crevices at its base. There on top, tiny as they were, Subercasaux’s youngsters would approach the edge, testing the stones with their feet; and, once secure, sit down and let their sandals frolic over the abyss.

  Naturally, Subercasaux had achieved all this in successive stages, each one of them charged with its own anxieties.

  “Some day a kid’ll get killed on me,” he said to himself. “And for the rest of my days I’ll be asking myself if I was right to bring them up this way.”

  Yes, he was right. And among the few consolations of a father left alone with motherless children, the greatest is being able to raise them in accordance with a single course of conduct.

  Subercasaux was therefore happy, and the children felt warmly bound to that big man who would play with them for hours on end, teach them to read on the floor with large heavy letters made of red lead, and sew up the rips in their pants with his huge toughened hands.

  From sewing gunnysacks in the Chaco, when he was a cotton planter there, Subercasaux had retained both the custom of sewing and his pleasure in it. He sewed his own clothes, those of his children, the holsters for his revolver, and the sails of his canoe—all with cobbler’s thread, and knotting every stitch. So it was that his shirts could tear at any point except where he had tied his waxen thread.

  When it came to games, the children both recognized their father as a master, especially in his way of running on all fours—so outlandish that it made them shout with laughter right away.

  Since in addition to his regular activities Subercasaux was a restless experimenter, whose interests took a new tack every three months, his children, constantly at his side, were acquainted with a lot of things not usually known to children of that age. They had seen—and sometimes helped in—the dissection of animals, the making of creolina, the extraction of latex from trees to seal their raincoats; they had seen their father’s shirts dyed all sorts of colors, the construction of eight-ton outworks for the study of cements, the making of superphosphates, orange wine, yerba dryers of the M
ayfarth type, and the suspension of a car-cable from the woods to the bungalow, hung at ten meters above the ground, along which the youngsters would then go flying down to the house in little cable-cars.

  Around that time Subercasaux had been attracted to a vein or deposit of white clay left exposed by the last great retreat of the Yabebirí. From the study of this clay he had gone on to the others of the region, which he fired in his pottery-ovens—constructed, of course, by him. And if he had to get data on cooking, vitrification, and the like, using specimens of no particular form, he preferred to experiment with pots, masks, and imaginary animals, in all of which his children helped him with great success.

  At night, and on stormy afternoons when it was really dark, the factory moved into high gear. Subercasaux would light the oven early, and the experimenters, shrunk by the cold and rubbing their hands, would sit down in its warmth to model clay.

  But the smaller of his ovens easily generated 1,000°C in two hours, and at this point, every time they opened the door to feed it, a veritable bolt of fire that burned their lashes came out of the white-glowing hearth. So the ceramics-makers would retreat to a far end of the workshop, till the icy wind that came whistling in between the shafts of tacuara in the walls would drive them back, workbench and all, to get cooked with their backs to the oven.

  Except for the youngsters’ naked legs, which now took the blasts of heat, everything went along well. Subercasaux had a weakness for prehistoric pots; the little girl preferred to model fancy hats; and the boy, without fail, made snakes.

  Sometimes, however, the monotonous snore of the oven didn’t cheer them up enough, and then they turned to the gramophone, and the same old records in use since Subercasaux’s marriage, which the kids had abused with all sorts of needles, nails, thorns, and bits of tacuara that they themselves would sharpen. By turns, each of them would take charge of attending the machine, which amounted to automatically changing records without even lifting their eyes from the clay, and resuming their work right away. When all the records had been played, it was another’s turn to repeat exactly the same operation. They didn’t even listen to the music anymore, since they knew it perfectly by heart; but the noise entertained them.

  At ten o’clock the ceramics-makers considered their task concluded, and rose to proceed for the first time to the critical inspection of their works of art, since till all of them had finished not the slightest commentary was allowed. And then it was quite a sight to see the jubilation over the ornamental fantasies of the little lady, and the enthusiasm aroused by the boy’s relentless collection of snakes. After which Subercasaux would put out the fire in the oven, and all holding hands they would run through the icy night to their house.

  III

  Three days after the nocturnal canoe-trip we’ve told about, Subercasaux was left without a servant girl; and this incident, trifling and inconsequential anywhere else, altered the life of the three exiles in the extreme.

  In the first moments of his bereavement Subercasaux had been able to count on the help of a fine woman to raise his children, the same cook who wept and found the house too lonely at the death of her mistress.

  The next month she left, and Subercasaux went through all sorts of grief to replace her with three or four sullen girls pulled out of the back country, and who’d only stay a few days, because they found their boss’s character too harsh.

  Subercasaux, as a matter of fact, was partly guilty, and he admitted it. He spoke with the girls just barely enough to make himself understood, and what he said had an excessively masculine logic and precision. When they swept the dining room, for example, he cautioned them to also sweep around every leg of the table. And this, expressed so sparingly, exasperated and fatigued the girls.

  For the space of three months he couldn’t even get a girl to wash the dishes for him. And in those three months Subercasaux learned a bit more than how to bathe his children.

  He learned, not how to cook, because he already knew that, but how to scour pots and pans with the very sand of his patio, squatting in the icy wind, which made his hands turn blue. He learned to interrupt his work again and again to run and take the milk off the fire or open the smoking oven; and he also learned to bring in three buckets of water (not a one less) from the well at night, to wash his kitchenware.

  This problem of the three inescapable buckets was the substance of one of his nightmares, and it took him a month to realize that he couldn’t do without them. In the first days he had naturally put off cleaning pots and dishes, which he piled up side by side on the floor, so as to wash them all at once. But after wasting a whole morning on his haunches scraping burned cooking vessels (they all got burned), he opted for cook-eat-and-scrub, a three-step process the delights of which aren’t known to husbands either.

  He really had no time left for anything, especially during the short days of winter. Subercasaux had entrusted the children with keeping the two bedrooms in order, a job they did passably well. But he himself didn’t feel he had spirit enough to sweep the patio: a scientific, radial, circular, and exclusively feminine task, which—though he knew it was basic to well-being in huts in the wilderness—transcended his patience.

  In that loose, undisturbed sand, turned into a plant-laboratory by the climate of alternating rains and burning sun, the sand-fleas spread so much that you could see them crawling over the shoeless feet of the children. Subercasaux, though he always wore stromboots, paid a heavy tribute to the fleas. Almost always lame, he would have to spend a whole hour after the midday meal with his boy’s feet in his hands, blinded by sun in the patio or on the veranda and splattered by rain. When he finished with the youngster it was his own turn; and when he stood up at last, with bended back, the boy would call him again because three new fleas had bored deep into the skin of his feet.

  Luckily, the girl seemed to be immune; there was no way her little toenails could tempt the fleas, seven out of ten of which fell by right to the boy and only three to his father. But those three were too many for a man whose feet were the key to the rustic life he led.

  Sand-fleas, in general, are more harmless than snakes, botflies, and even the little barigüís. They walk high on their legs across the skin, and all of a sudden pierce it swiftly, going down to the raw flesh, where they make a little pouch that they fill with eggs. Neither the extraction of the flea nor of its nest is usually troublesome, nor do its bites go bad more than might be expected. But for every hundred clean fleas there’s one that carries an infection, and with that you have to be careful.

  Subercasaux had such an infection in one of his toes—the insignificant little toe of his right foot—and couldn’t manage to subdue it. From a little pink hole it had grown to a swollen and terribly painful split along the edge of his toenail. Iodine, bichloride, hydrogen peroxide, formaldehyde—there was nothing he had failed to try. He wore his shoes, however, but didn’t leave the house; and his endless labors in the woods were now reduced, on rainy afternoons, to slow and silent walks around the patio, when as the sun went down the sky would clear, and the woods, outlined against the light like a shadow pantomime, would come nearer and nearer in the superbly pure air till it touched your very eyes.

  Subercasaux realized that in other living conditions he could have conquered the infection, which only called for a little rest. The afflicted man slept badly, shaken by chills and sharp pains late at night. At daybreak he would finally fall into a very heavy sleep, and at that moment would have given anything to stay in bed till even as late as eight o’clock. But the little boy was as much of an early bird in winter as in summer, and Subercasaux would get up shaking with fever to light the Primus stove and prepare the coffee. Then there was the midday meal, and the scrubbing of pots. And for diversion, at noon, the endless saga of his youngster’s fleas.

  “Things can’t go on this way,” Subercasaux finally said to himself. “At all costs I have to get a maid.”

  But how? During his married years this terrible concern wit
h servant girls had been one of his regular anxieties. The girls would come and go, as we’ve said, without saying why, and this when there was a lady of the house. Subercasaux would abandon all his tasks and stay on his horse for three days, galloping along the trails from Apariciocue to San Ignacio, after any useless girl who might want to wash the diapers. At last, some day at noon, he would emerge from the woods with a halo of horseflies around his head, and his horse’s neck ragged and bloody—but triumphant. The girl would arrive the next day, astraddle behind her father, with a bundle; and exactly a month later would leave with the same bundle, on foot. And Subercasaux would again put aside his hoe or machete to go get his horse, already waiting and sweating motionless in the sun.

  Those were bad experiences, that had left him with a bitter taste, and now had to start up again. But which way would he go?

  During his nights of sleeplessness Subercasaux had already heard the distant rumbling of the woods, battered by rain. Spring is usually dry in Misiones, and winter very rainy. But when the pattern is reversed—something always to be expected of the climate in Misionesthe clouds disgorge a meter of rain in three months, of the meter and a half supposed to fall in all the year.

  They were already almost hemmed in. The Horqueta, which cuts across the road to the shore of the Paraná, had no bridges at all at that time and was passable only at the wagon ford, where the water fell in foamy rapids over round and shifting stones, trod by horses quaking with fear. And this under normal conditions; for when the stream had to take on the rain of a seven-day storm, the ford was submerged under two fathoms of racing water, strung out in deep bands which suddenly broke up and coiled into whirlpools. And the settlers from the Yabebirí, detained on their horses before the flooded grassland, watched dead deer go by, revolving as they floated on. It was like this for ten or fifteen days.