The Exiles and Other Stories Page 4

  “I beg your pardon,” he said with alarming calm, “this beam is quite well squared.”

  “Ah! you think it’s squared?” he exclaimed—forgetting Spanish usted in his wrath and reverting to Portuguese vosé. “You’re such a thief . . .”

  But he couldn’t finish. Longhi, with a hoarse cry discharging all his indignation—held in check till then by a strenuous act of will—had flung his lean and nervous hand at Alves’ face. The blow was hard and resounded like a rifle-shot. Alves staggered, lifting his arm to his bloodied mouth, and a second later was leaping backward, revolver in hand. He aimed at Longhi’s chest and let out a strident, sarcastic guffaw.

  “Ah-hah! It looks like it’s all over now, eh? Thief! Thief!”

  Longhi, his hands in his pockets again, stood still, white as a sheet, staring his accuser down.

  “Vosé are a coward!” bellowed Alves, whose wrath was inflamed still more by this new test of composure. “I’m going to kill you like a dog! Thief!”

  As he heard this insult for the third time Longhi’s arms moved convulsively, and Alves reacted instantly with the arm in which he was brandishing the revolver. One could see clearly, from the contraction of his face, that he was pulling the trigger. The shot was about to leave the gun when Guaycurú, in a tiger’s leap, fell upon Alves and, with a blow to his wrist, sent the revolver flying.

  But now things changed; it was no longer a question of Longhi.

  “Grab that bandit!” roared Alves.

  The peones, who would have wavered if it were the inspector, in a mad throng came pouncing on the Indian. In a moment he was down and bound.

  “The other one now! Grab me that other one!” he roared again, pointing at Longhi, who still had his hands in his pockets. Nobody moved.

  “Swine!” he yelled, his eyes shining with tears of impotent wrath, and rushing headlong for his revolver, which had fallen a step away from Longhi.

  But at the moment he was about to seize it, the inspector, with a tranquil motion, stepped on the firearm, and catching Alves by a shoulder, threw him violently aside. Alves let out a cry and fell on his back.

  There’s no way to describe the expression on the Brazilian’s face when he got up. Tears of rabid exasperation were running from his eyes.

  Longhi, calmly, bent over and picked up the revolver and threw it at the feet of Alves, who jumped on it with a hoarse cry of triumph and, aiming at the group of laborers, bellowed:

  “Grab that man! Anyone who doesn’t move I’ll blow off the top of his head.”

  The peones, cowed, headed for Longhi; but shrugging his shoulders he drew his revolver and told them calmly:

  “Act your age, stay put. You don’t have to . . .”

  A gunshot cut off his words, and was followed by a cry of pain from Longhi. His revolver fell, as a torrent of blood started flowing from his hand. Alves, whose marksmanship hadn’t failed him at that juncture, had just lopped off three of Longhi’s fingers with a single round, disarming him.

  “Quick, tie that man up!” he roared, turning his gun toward the laborers.

  Before Longhi could bend over, he found himself surrounded, smothered by a score of arms, and securely bound.

  “Take those two bandits to the old well!”

  The terrified laborers shouldered the two prisoners and started on their way.

  “Now we’ll see, seu Longhi!” Alves shouted after him sarcastically. “Don’t be afraid, vosé; there’s no water in the well . . . but there are some other, better things. As for the other one . . . Is the big anthill still there?” he asked the peones.

  As they heard this, an expression of extreme dismay took shape on all their faces.

  What torture did Alves have in store for his two victims, such as to give pause to laborers accustomed to his vengeance? That’s what we’re about to see. The band of men, with their prisoners, went on along the main trail as far as its first branching point, four hundred meters from the logging-camp.

  “Halt!” ordered Alves. “Leave those two lying on the ground!”

  The peones laid Longhi and the Indian down on the red earth of the trail and waited for new orders from their boss. We have to note that, ever since Alves’ revolver had been aimed at their chests for the second time, all wavering, all trace of conscience or humanity had vanished from their souls. Alves’ threats and his familiar angry voice had awakened the slavishness in them, and now they were ten automatons with brutish faces, spiritless, abject, who blindly obeyed that well-known voice.

  By now all sympathy for Longhi had left them; there was nothing in the world now but their boss’s orders, and so they were on the way to becoming accomplices and executors of the horrible torture to come.

  “See if there’s water in the well!” ordered the Brazilian. “If there is, get rid of it and dry the place with sand. I don’t want seu Longhi to catch a cold.”

  The laborers headed for the well, a well abandoned at four meters down, because no water had appeared. When it rained, of course, they could draw up a few liters or so. Bending over its mouth, they found it was dry.

  “Fine,” said Alves. “Less work.” And he gave the peones orders in a low voice. Four of them went to the camp, returning shortly with picks, shovels and a rectangular box. Alves opened it and took out two dark cylinders, addressing the inspector, who was stretched out on his back.

  “Seu Longhi!” he said, giving him a kick in the head. “Vosé don’t recognize this?”

  Longhi, who had his eyes closed against the sun, didn’t make a move.

  “That’s no way to be, seu Longhi! That’s not right! If you’d deign to open your eyes, you’d see that this is dynamite . . . dynamite, seu Longhi,” he affirmed politely. “All right; we’ll open your eyes later . . . and the anthill is full?”

  “Yes, boss,” replied a laborer.

  “Excellent; now it’s my turn.”

  And as he said this he went down to the bottom of the well.

  “Cut a thick tacuara!” he shouted from below. “Ten inches is long enough!”

  A moment later the piece of bamboo was on its way down. Alves made some moves at the bottom and after a while came up sweating.

  “Fine! Now throw in all those stones . . . the big ones first. Careful! Excellent.”

  When that was all done, Alves went down alone once more, put the sticks of dynamite inside the tacuara, implanted the fuse, and climbed out again. Under his surveillance the laborers went back to pitching stones, carefully covering the length of bamboo, and a half hour later the charge was ready.

  “Now the other one!” said Alves. “Strip him nude!”

  And in no time the Indian was naked.

  “Stir up the anthill!”

  Two peones went to the hill, but at the instant they were about to act Alves detained them.

  “Just a minute! Go get the big bottle that’s in the storeroom, the one with the green label.”

  When the laborer came back with the bottle, Alves addressed Longhi again with a smile of triumph.

  “Look, vosé! This we’ve got here is turpentine . . . And ants,” he added, gently patting the bottle, “are very fond of turpentine . . . only they blunder and get very angry, seu Longhi. Your so esteemed friend Guaycurú will remember this a bit.”

  Then the two peones each sank a stick into the anthill, violently stirring in all directions. The grey appearance of the hill was instantly transformed into deep black; millions of ants emerged in a fury, looking for the enemy that was attacking them. Alves sprinkled that formidable host with turpentine, and the laborers reinforced the bonds of the Indian.

  Suddenly Longhi, who for a moment hadn’t caught the sound of any voice, heard a horrible howl of pain, and shuddered violently. Another howl resounded more intensely still, one in which all the suffering a human creature can endure came bursting forth from the victim’s soul.

  “Fine, seu Guaycurú! Fine!” he heard Alves saying. “This is very good for learning how to respect bosses . . .”


  Despite his indomitable energy, a cold sweat drenched Longhi’s forehead.

  The torture had begun. The Indian, thrown naked into the midst of trillions of infuriated ants, was writhing with pain. His body was a monstrous black mass of ants, resembling a lump of coal. The turpentine, killing many of the ants, had aroused the rest, and their formidable pincers were devouring the Indian alive.

  When a minute was up—and a minute is horribly long in such circumstances—Longhi heard Alves say:

  “A moment of rest, now! Pull him out!”

  The Indian was removed and his cries diminished little by little, till they ended in muffled sobs, sobs of impotence and superhuman suffering, as felt by men whose strength is finally broken.

  Longhi still kept his eyes closed, and still hadn’t moved a finger. Yet within his heart, like a roaring sea, churned all the indignation and noble rage a manly breast can hold. But his turn had come.

  “Now seu Longhi,” Alves told him, turning toward him again, “now I’m going to teach you something you don’t know. You don’t know how to fly, right?”

  Longhi didn’t answer.

  “Seu Longhi, please, don’t be impolite!” Alves reproached him, with another kick in the head. “I’m talking to you!”

  The inspector’s face remained impassive; nothing but his pallor, that terrible pallor already known to Alves, had altered his stoic countenance. When the Brazilian noticed it he smiled with joy.

  “All right; that proves you’re hearing me, at least. Now, seu Longhi, it’s a question of flying. Within half an hour your protective self will be on the fly, something that didn’t figure in your magnanimous calculations. It’ll fly so well that maybe it’ll never come back, you hear? So, since it isn’t right for old acquaintances to part like that, without saying good-bye, let’s say good-bye, seu Longhi.”

  And abruptly raising his whip, he laid a horrible lash across the inspector’s face.

  “That’s my good-bye, canalla!” he bellowed violently, forgetting his politeness, while a streak of blood emerged on Longhi’s face. “Take along this remembrance of me! Hey, you!” he yelled at the laborers. “Put this character on top of the well.”

  The peones picked up Longhi and put him on top of the dynamite mine. When they filled the well with stones they had left a hollow so the inspector couldn’t roll away, a kind of coffin they now placed him in. A living tomb, so to speak, where Longhi would count off second by second his last moments of life, before being blown into pieces aloft.

  Once everything was ready, Alves approached the well and lit the fuse, which sputtered a moment and then went burning away, slowly, silently and fatally.

  “After a quarter of an hour,” said Alves, taking out his watch, “when there are just five minutes left, put the other one on the anthill again. It’s fair that Sr. Longhi should have some music.”

  One after the other, slow and relentless, Longhi felt his life’s last pendulum strokes gradually coming to an end.

  Suddenly the pure air was rent by that same horrible scream that signaled the torture of the Indian.

  “There are still five minutes left,” murmured Longhi.

  The screams continued, each more desperate than the last.

  Then he heard the noise of steps going away.

  “They’re leaving,” he said to himself. “In a minute I won’t be alive anymore.”

  And for the first time he felt a knot of anguish in his throat, as he thought about his mother.

  “Poor Mama!” he murmured. “She couldn’t have any idea what situation her son is in. If she . . .”

  A powerful explosion split the air. A furious vomit of stones erupted from the well, and the body of the inspector, thrown off to one side, fell onto a nearby netting of vines, tearing through them, and dropped heavily to earth.

  IV

  It was eleven o’clock at night. A fresh breeze was blowing along the trail, and the gloomy woods were getting lively with the wailing of wildcats, the flight of deer, and the grunting of boar. Sounding unexpectedly, the moan of a human being abruptly put an end to the concert. Then a broken voice called out softly:

  “Boss Longhi!”

  Nobody answered.

  “Boss Longhi!” repeated the same voice, broken by suffering, all that was left of the vigorous voice of a man. Slowly, almost invisible in the darkness of the night, a shadow came dragging itself up to the well. It stopped there for half an hour, then moved on to the edge of the woods. There’s no way to convey an idea of the tortures and horrible pain implied by the sight of a human being dragging himself along like that. He suddenly bumped into a hand and shuddered violently. The hand was cold, stiff, icy.

  “Boss, boss Longhi!” sobbed the Indian, letting his breast release all his love for the only person who had ever cared for him. He touched the inspector’s face and his noble, rigid body, and, giving in to despair, wept into the desolate night.

  The next day, at dawn, a laborer went to tell Alves that neither the Indian nor the inspector had died. Alves went off with him and found them stretched out next to each other. Despite his baseness of spirit, a chill ran through his body as he fixed his eyes on the Indian. What he saw was a deformed, swollen, bloody lump of a man, devoured by fever and babbling deliriously in a low voice. Alves moved closer and looked over Longhi’s livid body.

  “That man is dead,” he said.

  “No, he’s not dead,” countered the laborer. “His heart is beating.”

  “How can he have survived?” murmured Alves to himself. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “It looks like he’s got broken ribs.”

  Alves pondered for a moment and then went back to the camp.

  “Go and get those two characters!” he ordered.

  When he saw the two dying men before him—two vigorous males that in two hours his despotic cruelty had transformed into two wretched slabs of humanity—a ray of triumph, of all-embracing will, lit up his gaze. The violent jolts of the wagon, aggravating the Indian’s delirium, had made Longhi come to; he looked at Alves for an instant and then closed his eyes.

  “All right!” said Alves calmly. “Now you’ve had your lesson, seu Longhi. I hope you profit from it, and learn to show a little respect for men who haven’t done you a bit of harm. I assume something must have happened to you when the stones sent you flying and that maybe you’re going to die. But anyway I’ve got no desire to live under the same roof with a thiev-ing in-spec-tor; that’s how it is, seu Longhi. So right now I’m going to have you taken to the port and left on the bluff, and if within a week the steamboat comes by, all the better for you.”

  A moment later Longhi was riding the wagon again, unconscious, and was put down not at the port but at the hut of the wagon-driver, who took pity on him, at the risk of facing Alves’ wrath. But when he told him what he’d done, Alves shrugged his shoulders.

  “He won’t live for two hours anyhow.”

  But Longhi lived, and six months later, as the days went by, it was Alves’ fate to confront Longhi again, but perhaps in circumstances less favorable to him.

  How? Very shortly we’ll see.

  Miraculously saved from the explosion, Longhi had come out of it with a broken rib and horrible contusions on his back, besides the three fingers lopped off by the Brazilian’s bullet. The old woodsman took care of him like a father, and Longhi spent three weeks hovering between life and death. But his robust constitution won out, and finally one resplendent morning he was able to go outdoors, where he took a seat on a log. He was still very weak, but the warmth in the air and the sun that gilded the woods soothed him like a life-renewing balm; and for the first time after two months of fever, delirium, and lethargy, he was able to think clearly.

  In the nightmares he had in those two months the sinister figure of Alves had occupied a prominent place.

  He saw himself tied down over the explosive charge and the Brazilian laughing and kicking him in the head. And then the cowardly blow of the whip
, and the wailing of the Indian being eaten alive. All this torment, in a man who spent two months reliving extreme offenses, had profoundly embittered his spirit. In vain did he try to forget; an implacable thirst for revenge constricted his whole being. Oh, to make him suffer for a minute, even just a second, what he had suffered for two months! He dreamed of something monstrous for Alves, much more maddening than the infernal anthill, something that would yank bestial moans from his tortured flesh and soul . . .

  Here he stopped abruptly in the course of his thoughts.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Why not? Bestial . . . Ah, now we’ll see! Juan!” he called to the woodsman, who that morning had the shivers and was trembling by the fire.

  “Boss!”

  “Tell me: have you ever seen a tame jaguar?”

  “Never; can’t be done. A puma, yes.”

  “Yes, I know. But have you seen a tamed puma?”

  “I have. And not just one, a lot of them. What do you want to know for?”

  “Nothing; just curious.”

  The logger looked at him intently.

  “My compadre Cipriano has one,” he added.

  Longhi made a quick gesture, and that terrible pallor out of the past, when he was the man who made Alves lower his eyes, swept over his face.

  But this time Longhi’s pallor was due to physical debility. He lowered his head and shortly asked indifferently:

  “Is it big?”

  “No; still a kitten.”

  “Ah!”

  Another pause. All of a sudden the ex-lumber-inspector stood up, and walking laboriously up to the logger, put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Listen, Juan. I need to have your compadre sell me the lion.” His voice was still broken, but his firm and tranquil look was the same as before. “I’ve got nothing to give him now; you can’t doubt that. But I give you my word that I’ll pay him for it.”

  “I know, boss,” murmured Juan with deep respect. “You don’t need to tell me that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Better to say it. Will you see your compadre and ask him to sell it to me?”

  The woodsman lifted towards him his trusting and sternly devoted eyes.