The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Page 14

  The combat—rather, the extermination—continued furiously amidst hisses and the hoarse barking of Daboy, who seemed to be everywhere at once. One after another they fell without mercy—but they had not sought mercy—their heads crunched between the dog’s jaws or crushed by the men. They were massacred before the cavern where they had held their last Congress. And among the last to fall were Cruzada and Ñacaniná.

  Not one was left. Triumphant for the day, the men sat down and contemplated the total massacre of the species. Daboy, panting at their feet, showed some signs of poison in spite of being powerfully immunized. He had been bitten sixty-four times.

  As the men rose to leave, for the first time they noticed Anaconda, who was beginning to revive.

  “What is this boa doing here?” the new director asked. “This isn’t her territory. From the looks of it, she took on the Royal cobra, and in her way, avenged us. If we could save her, we’d be doing a great thing. She seems terribly poisoned. Let’s take her along. Perhaps some day she’ll save us from this whole lot of vipers.”

  So they left. On a pole between their shoulders they carried a wounded and exhausted Anaconda, who was thinking of Ñacaniná, whose destiny, with a little less arrogance, could have been similar to hers.

  Anaconda did not die. She lived a year with the men, inquisitive, observing everything about her, until one night she escaped. But the story of the long months of this voyage up the Paraná, beyond Guayrá, still further to the lethal gulf where the Paraná assumes the name of the river Death, the strange life that Anaconda lived, and the second voyage she undertook with her brothers upon the dirty waters of a great flood—this story of rebellion and the assault of the water plants belongs to another story.

  The Incense Tree Roof

  In the state of Misiones, around and amidst the ruins of San Ignacio, the second capital of the Jesuitical empire, rises the present town of the same name—San Ignacio. It is composed of a number of small properties hidden from each other by trees. At the edge of the ruins, on a bare hill, rise a few rude houses bleached blinding white by the sun and lime but graced at sunset with a magnificent view of the valley of the Yabebirí river. There are stores in the district, more than the heart could desire, to the point that it is impossible for a new road to open up without a German, a Spaniard, or a Syrian setting up shop on the spot. All the public offices are located within the space of two blocks: the police station, the justice of the peace, the city offices, and a coeducational school. As a note of local color, there is a bar constructed on these same ruins—overrun, as you know, by vegetation—a bar created in the days of the fever for yerba maté, the tea that became the national drink of the area, when the plantation foremen coming down the Upper Paraná toward Posadas eagerly debarked in San Ignacio to sit, blinking tenderly, before a bottle of whiskey. I have related the characteristics of that bar in another story so we won’t go into that again today.

  But in the time we’re talking about, not all the public offices were actually located in the town. Between the ruins and the new port, a half-league from each, on a magnificent mesa chosen for the private delight of its inhabitant, lived Orgaz, the chief of the Bureau of Records, and this public office was located in his house.

  Orgaz’s house was made of wood, with a roof of incense tree shingles layered like slate. This is an excellent arrangement if you use dry shingles that have been drilled for nail holes ahead of time. But when Orgaz raised his roof, the wood was newly split, and he drove the nails right through the shakes, with the result that the wooden shingles split and curled up at the ends till the bungalow roof resembled a sea urchin. Every time it rained, Orgaz had to change the position of his bed eight or ten times, and all his furniture was marred with whitish water spots.

  We have emphasized this detail of Orgaz’s house because the sea-urchin roof was what absorbed the chief of the Bureau of Record’s energies for four years, scarcely allowing him time, during brief periods of respite, to sweat through his siesta time stringing wire or to disappear into the bush, reappearing a couple of days later with leaves and twigs in his hair.

  Orgaz was a great nature lover, who, during his bad moments, spoke very little and listened to others with an attentive but slightly insolent air. He was not liked in the town, but he was respected.

  In spite of Orgaz’s absolute sense of democracy and his feeling of brotherhood and even, at times, hilarity with the genteel men—all in correct breeches—of yerba and authority, there was always an icy barrier separating them. No one could say there was the least trace of haughtiness in any of Orgaz’s actions. But it was precisely this—haughtiness—of which he was accused.

  Certain incidents, however, had given rise to this impression.

  In the first days of his arrival in San Ignacio, when Orgaz was not yet an official and was still living alone on his plateau constructing his spiny roof, he received an invitation from the director of the school to visit the establishment. The director, naturally, felt flattered to do the honors of his school for an individual of Orgaz’s culture.

  Orgaz set out the following morning wearing his usual blue pants, boots, and linen shirt. But his route took him through the bush, where he came upon an enormous lizard he wanted to catch alive. So in order to take it with him, he tied a string of liana around the lizard’s belly. He emerged from the bush, finally, at the door of the school where the director and his teachers were awaiting him; but he made his grand entrance in torn shirt sleeves, dragging his lizard by the tail.

  Also, during that time, Bouix’s burros helped foment the opinion that was growing about Orgaz.

  Bouix was a Frenchman, who had lived thirty years in this country and considered it his own. His animals ranged free, devastating his hapless neighbor’s plantings. The dumbest calf in Bouix’s herds was still smart enough to rub his head up and down for hours to loosen the strands of a wire fence. They didn’t have barbed wire in those days. And when it was introduced, there were still Bouix’s burros, who would throw themselves beneath the lowest strand and dance on their sides until they worked their way beneath the fence. But no one complained: Bouix was justice of the peace in San Ignacio.

  When Orgaz arrived there, Bouix was no longer judge. But his burritos didn’t know that, and every evening they would trot down the road looking for a tender planting; when they found one they would stand and examine it across the wire, their lips tremulous and their ears laid back against their heads.

  When it came his turn to be devastated, Orgaz bore it patiently; he strung some wire, and occasionally would get up in the middle of the night to run naked through the dew, chasing the burritos who had come up as far as his tent. He went, finally, to complain to Bouix, who solicitously called all his sons together to request they take better care of the burritos who were bothering “poor señor Orgaz.” The burritos continued to run loose, and Orgaz returned a couple of times to see the taciturn Frenchman, who once again commiserated and clapped his hands to summon his sons . . . with the same result as before.

  Then Orgaz placed a sign on the main road that read:

  Warning! The grass in this pasture is poisoned!

  For ten days he had peace. But the following night he again heard the stealthy little steps of the burros ascending the hill, and a little later he heard the rac! rac! of leaves being torn from his palms. Orgaz lost his patience, and, again running out naked, he shot the first burro he saw.

  The following morning he sent a boy to inform Bouix that at dawn he had found a dead burro at his place. Bouix himself did not go to verify this unlikely happening but sent his eldest son, a great brawny boy as tall as he was swarthy, and as swarthy as he was somber. This gloomy boy read the sign as he came through the gate, and in bad humor he strode up the hill to where Orgaz stood waiting for him with his hands thrust in his pockets. Scarcely bothering to greet him, Bouix’s delegate approached the dead burro. Orgaz, in his turn, also moved closer. The boy circled the burro a couple of times, examining him from
every angle.

  “Yep. He died last night, all right,” he muttered finally. “Wonder what he could have died of?”

  In the middle of the burro’s neck, as resplendent as the day, the enormous gunshot wound shouted the truth to the sun.

  “Who knows? Poison, I guess,” a calm Orgaz replied, his hands still buried in his pockets.

  But the burros disappeared forever from Orgaz’s fenced fields.

  During his first years as chief of the Bureau of Records, all San Ignacio protested against Orgaz, who had vigorously set aside all the traditional arrangements and installed his office a half-league from the town. In a small dirt-floored room, darkened by the gallery and by a great mandarin orange tree that almost blocked the doorway, his clients inevitably had to wait for Orgaz, since he was never there—or else he would come in with his hands covered with the black material he used to repair his roof. There the recorder would note down the information as quickly as possible on any old scrap of paper and leave the office before his client, to climb back on his roof.

  Actually, this roof was Orgaz’s principal occupation during his first four years in Misiones. In Misiones it rains—I’m here to tell it—hard enough to put two layers of zinc to the test. And Orgaz had constructed his roof with shingles soaked by the rains of a long autumn. Orgaz’s plantings were literally stretching toward the sky, but his roof shingles, too—submitted to the effects of sun and humidity—curled upward at their outer edges, giving the sea-urchin effect we’ve mentioned.

  Seen from below, from within the dark rooms, the dark wood roof had the unusual effect of being the lightest part of the room, since each curled-up shingle acted as a skylight. The shingles, furthermore, were covered with countless daubs of red lead, a packing that Orgaz had applied between the cracks with a hollow length of bamboo where the water poured, not dripped, onto his bed. But the strangest sight was the lengths of cord that Orgaz had used to caulk his roof, which now, hanging loose and weighted with pitch, hung motionless like snakes, reflecting slivers of light.

  Orgaz had tried everything he could think of to mend his roof. He tried wedges of wood, plaster, Portland cement, dichromate glue, and pitch and sawdust. After two years of calculations in which he never achieved, as had his most remote ancestors, the pleasure of finding himself sheltered by night from the rain, Orgaz concentrated his attention on the element burlap/bleck. This was a true discovery, and our hero then replaced all the ignoble patches of Portland cement and pressed sawdust with his black cement.

  Anyone coming to the office or passing by in the direction of the new port was sure to see the recorder on his roof. After every repair, Orgaz would await a new rain and, without many illusions, go inside to observe its efficacy. The old skylights would hold up rather well, but new cracks would open that dripped—naturally—on the spot where Orgaz had just placed his bed.

  And in this eternal struggle between poverty of recourse and a man who wanted above everything else to achieve man’s oldest ideal—a roof that would harbor him against rain—Orgaz was surprised where most he had sinned.

  Orgaz’s office hours were seven to eleven in the morning. We have already seen how, in general, he attended to his duties. When the recorder of the Bureau of Records was in the bush or working in his cassava plantings, the boy summoned him by starting the turbine of the ant-killing machine. Orgaz would come up the hill with his hoe on his shoulder or his machete in his hand, wishing with all his soul that it was one minute past eleven. One second past the hour, there was no way to force the recorder to attend to the problems of his office.

  On one of these occasions, as Orgaz was climbing down from the bungalow roof, the cowbell on the front gate rang. Orgaz glanced at the clock: it was five after eleven. Consequently, he went calmly to wash his hands in the basin on the big whetstone, paying no attention to the boy, who was saying to him, “There’s a man here, Patrón.”

  “Tell him to come tomorrow.”

  “I told him, but he says he’s the inspector from the Department of Justice. . . .”

  “That’s different; tell him to wait a minute,” Orgaz replied. And he continued to rub grease on his bleck-covered forearms, while the frown deepened on his forehead.

  In fact, he had reason enough to frown.

  Orgaz had solicited the positions of justice of the peace and of recorder in order to make a living. He had no love for his duties, although he administered justice—sitting on one corner of the table with a wrench in his hands—with perfect equity. But the Bureau of Records was his nightmare. Every day he was supposed to enter in the books, and in duplicate, all records of births, deaths, and marriages. Half the time he was called from his tasks in the field by the turbine, and the other half he was interrupted in the act of studying, on his roof, some cement that was finally going to afford him a dry bed. So he would hurriedly note down this demographic information on the first piece of paper he found and then flee the office.

  Then there was the endless problem of calling witnesses to sign documents, since every peon would offer as his witness some weird person who had never been out of the bush. These were some of the vexations that Orgaz had somehow resolved his first year but which had tired him once and for all of his duties.

  “We’re caught out,” he said to himself as he finished removing the bleck from his arms and, out of habit, cast about for an idea. “If I get out of this, I’ll be lucky. . . .”

  He went finally to his dark office where the inspector, with great interest, was observing the disorderly table, the two chairs, the earthen floor, and a sock hanging from the roof poles that had been carried there by the rats.

  The man knew who Orgaz was, and for a while the two chatted about things foreign to the office. But when the inspector coldly began to discuss the question of duties, it was a very different matter.

  In those days the record books were kept in the local offices, where once a year they were inspected. At least, that’s what was supposed to be done. But, in practice, sometimes years passed without an inspection—as many as four, in the case of Orgaz. So the inspector was faced with twenty-four books of the Bureau of Records, twelve of which were still unsigned, and twelve of which were totally blank.

  The inspector slowly leafed through book after book, never looking up from his inspection. Orgaz, sitting on the corner of the table, was silent. The visitor did not exempt a single page; one by one he slowly turned the blank pages. There was no sign of life in the room—although the room was charged with purpose—except the persistent swinging of Orgaz’s boot.

  “Well,” the inspector said, finally, “Where are the documents relating to these twelve empty books?”

  Half turning, Orgaz picked up a biscuit tin and, without a word, emptied it, covering the table with scraps of paper of every kind and appearance—particularly a rough paper still bearing traces of Orgaz’s herbariums. Those little pieces of paper—covered with grease pencil, yellow, blue, red, used to mark wood in the bush—created an artistic effect that the inspector considered for a long moment. And then for another moment he looked at Orgaz.

  “Well!” he exclaimed. “This is the first time I’ve seen books like these. Two entire years of unsigned records. And the rest in a biscuit tin. There’s only one thing for me to do.”

  But because of the signs of hard labor on Orgaz’s work-roughened hands, he relented a little.

  “You’re really something!” he said. “You’ve not even taken the trouble to change the age of your two witnesses every year. You’ve given it the same in all four years and all twenty-four record books. One witness is always twenty-four and the other thirty-six. And this mess of papers. . . . You are a state official. The state pays you to carry out your duties. Isn’t that true?”

  “That’s true,” Orgaz replied.

  “Well. For even the hundredth part of this, you should be removed from office this very day. But I don’t want to take action. I will give you three days.” He added, looking at his watch, “Three day
s from now I will be in Posadas and will board my boat for the night at eleven. I’ll give you until ten o’clock Saturday night to bring me the books, in order. If not, I’ll take action. Understood?”

  “Perfectly,” Orgaz answered.

  And he accompanied his visitor to the gate, who then waved brusquely and galloped away.

  Orgaz slowly walked back over volcanic gravel, which rolled beneath his feet. Black, blacker than the patches on his roof, was the task that awaited him. He made mental calculations: so many minutes for each record—the time it would take to save his position and with it the freedom to continue his “hydrofugic” experiments. Orgaz’s only resources were those purveyed by the state for keeping the Bureau of Records books up to date. He had, then, to regain the good will of the state. . . . His position was dangling by a fine thread.

  Consequently, Orgaz finished removing the pitch from his hands and sat down at his table to fill in the twelve large books of the Bureau of Records. Alone, he would never have completed his task in the allotted time, but his boy helped him, dictating the information to him.

  His helper was a twelve-year-old Polish boy, red-haired, his skin orange with freckles. His eyelashes were so blond they were invisible, even in profile, and he always wore his cap pulled down to his nose because the light hurt his eyes. He lent his services to Orgaz and cooked the food they ate together beneath the mandarin orange tree.

  But during those three days the assay kiln the young Pole used for cooking was idle. The boy’s mother was commissioned to bring baked cassava to the plateau every morning.

  Face to face in the barbecue-hot dark office, Orgaz and his secretary worked without rising, the chief naked to the waist and his assistant with his cap pulled over his eyes, even in the dark interior. For three days the only sounds heard were the singsong schoolboy chant of the young Pole, echoed by Orgaz’s bass repeating the last words of each phrase. From time to time they ate a biscuit or some cassava as they continued their task. They worked this way till late afternoon. And when Orgaz would drag himself past the bamboos to bathe, his weary body spoke very clearly of his fatigue.