The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Page 7

  Suddenly he felt freezing cold up to his chest. What could it be? And his breathing, too . . .

  He had met the man who bought Mister Dougald’s timber, Lorenzo Cubilla, in Puerto Esperanza on a Good Friday . . . Friday? Yes, or Thursday . . .

  The man slowly stretched the fingers of his hand.

  “A Thursday . . .”

  And he stopped breathing.

  A Slap in the Face

  Acosta, the steward of the Meteor, the ship that steamed every two weeks up the Upper Paraná, knew one thing very well, and it was this: nothing is as swift, not even the river itself, as the explosion caused by a demijohn of caña among thirsty workers on a work site. His adventure with Korner, then, took place in a territory he knew very well.

  By absolute rule—with only one exception—the law on the Upper Paraná does not permit caña at a work camp. The company stores don’t sell it, nor is a single bottle tolerated, whatever its origin. At the work camps, there are resentments and bitter feelings it is best not to recall to the mensú, the contracted workers. One hundred grams of alcohol per man would, even after only two hours, result in a completely militant camp.

  An explosion of such magnitude was contrary to Acosta’s own interests, and for this reason he exercised his ingenuity in acts of minor contraband, drinks issued to the workers on the ship itself as the workers debarked at each port. The captain knew it, as well as all the passengers, composed almost exclusively of owners and foremen of the work camps. But as the astute trafficker never administered more than a prudent amount, everything went along very well.

  Well, one day misfortune dictated that at the insistence of a particularly boisterous group of peons, Acosta relaxed slightly his usually rigid prudence. The result was uproarious good nature, so merry that the workers’ trunks and guitars were flying through the air as they debarked.

  The scandal was serious. The captain and almost all the passengers descended from the ship, feeling that a new “dance” was necessary, but this time the dance of the whip on the wildest heads. This procedure is customary, and the captain had a swift and sure arm. The storm ceased immediately. Even so, the captain ordered one of the more rebellious of the mensú tied by the foot to the mainmast, and everything returned to normal.

  But now it was Acosta’s turn. The owner of the work camp in whose port the steamship was docked accosted the steward: “You and you alone are responsible for this situation: for ten miserable centavos, you spoil the peons and cause this row!”

  The steward, being a mestizo, temporized.

  “Shut up! You should be ashamed!” Korner continued. “For ten miserable centavos! I promise you that as soon as we reach Posadas, I’m going to report this trickery to Mitain!”

  Mitain owned the Meteor, which failed to impress Acosta in the least. Finally, he lost patience.

  “When you come right down to it,” he responded, “you don’t have anything to do with this. If you don’t like it, complain to anyone you want. In my office, I do whatever I want.”

  “We’ll see about that!” shouted Korner, preparing to go on board. But as he was going up the ladder he saw over the bronze handrail the worker tied to the mainmast. Whether or not there was irony in the prisoner’s eyes, Korner was convinced there was, and he recognized in the dark little Indian with the cold eyes and pointed mustache a peon he had had some trouble with three months before.

  He walked to the mainmast, rage turning his face even redder. The worker, still smiling, watched him approach.

  “So it’s you!” Korner said. “Everywhere I go, I find you in my way! I’ve forbidden you to set foot in my work camp, and yet that’s where you’ve just been . . . , buddy!”

  The worker, as if he hadn’t heard, continued to look at him with his little smile. Then Korner, blind with rage, struck him in the face, first the left side, then the right.

  “Take that . . . buddy! That’s the only way to treat friends like you!”

  The mensú turned livid and stared at Korner, who heard this word: “Someday. . . !”

  Korner felt a new impulse, to make the worker swallow his threat, but he managed to contain himself and went on board, hurling invectives against the steward who had brought this hell to the work camp.

  But this time it was Acosta’s turn to take the offensive. What was the worst thing he could do to this Korner of the red face and the sharp tongue, and to his damned work site?

  It didn’t take him long to find the answer. On the very next trip upriver, he was very careful to provide surreptitiously one or two demijohns of caña to the peons debarking in Puerto Profundidad (Korner’s port). These mensú, even louder than most, hid the contraband caña in their trunks, and that very night trouble erupted at the work camp.

  For two months every ship descending the river after the Meteor had gone up invariably picked up four or five wounded men in Puerto Profundidad. Korner, desperate, could not localize the incendiary, the supplier of the contraband caña. But after a time Acosta considered it discreet not to feed the fires anymore, and there was no more machete swinging in the camp. A neat piece of business, after all, for the trafficker who had conceived and won vengeance, especially considering it was on Korner’s bald head.

  Two years passed. The mensú who had been slapped in the face had worked at various work sites but had never been permitted to set foot in Puerto Profundidad. Because of the old dispute with Korner and the episode at the mainmast, the Indian had become non grata to the management. The mensú, in the meantime, overcome by his native laziness, spent long idle periods of time in Posadas, living by the pointed mustache that inflamed the hearts of the female mensualeras. His manelike head of hair, a fashion uncommon in the extreme north, enchanted the girls who were seduced by the oil and the violently scented lotions.

  One fine day the mensú decided to accept the first contract that came his way, and again he went up the Paraná. He had soon cancelled out his advance, but he had a magnificent strength; he tried one port after another, hoping to get where he really wanted to go. But it was in vain. In every camp they accepted him gladly, except in Profundidad: there, he wasn’t needed. Then he was seized by a new attack of lassitude and exhaustion, and he again spent several months in Posadas, his body enervated and his mustache saturated with essences.

  Three more years went by. During this period the worker went up the Upper Paraná only one time, having finally concluded that his current means of livelihood was much less fatiguing than jobs upriver. And, although the former extreme exhaustion of his arms was now replaced by constant fatigue in his legs, he found that to his pleasure.

  He did not know, or at least he did not frequent, any part of Posadas except Bajada and the port. He never left the workers’ district; he went from one woman worker’s shack to another, then to the tavern, then to the port to celebrate the chorus of shouting at the daily embarkation of the contract workers; then night would find him at the five-centavos-a-dance dance halls.

  “Eh, amigo!” the peons would shout to him. “You don’t like your hatchet anymore! You like that dancing girl, eh, amigo!”

  The Indian would smile, satisfied with his mustache and his shining hair.

  One day, nevertheless, he perked up his ears alertly when he heard some labor contractors offering splendid advance salaries to a group of recently debarked contract workers. They were making the offer for a leased site at Puerto Cabriuva, almost at the falls of Guayrá, next to Korner’s establishment. There was much wood in the barranca there, and they needed men. Good daily pay, and a little caña, of course.

  Three days later, the same contract workers who had just returned exhausted from nine months’ hard labor again boarded ship, after having debauched fantastically and brutally their two hundred pesos of advance pay in forty-eight hours.

  These peons were not a little surprised to see the “pretty boy” amongst them.

  “Eh, amigo, where’s the party!” they yelled at him. “So it’s the hatchet again, is it?” />
  They reached Puerto Cabriuva, and that very afternoon this crew was assigned to the rafts.

  Subsequently, they spent two months working beneath a burning sun, moving huge trees from the barranca down to the river, using levers, in backbreaking efforts that stretched the neck tendons of the seven workers taut as wire.

  Then came the work in the river: swimming, twenty fathoms of water beneath them, towing the trees, lining them up, immobilized in the branches of the treetops for hours on end, with only their heads and arms above the water. After four to six hours, the men would climb back on the raft or, to be more accurate, would be hoisted onto it, since they would be frozen from the cold water. It isn’t strange, then, that the manager would always keep back a little caña for such occasions, the only times when the law was infringed upon. The men would take a drink and return again to the water.

  Our mensú, then, played his part in this rough business and then descended the river to Puerto Profundidad on the enormous log raft. Our man had counted on this fact so he could get off at that port. In fact, in the work-site office, they either did not recognize him or they had been blind to his identity because of the urgency of the job. What is certain is that, once the raft was secured, they commended to the mensú, along with three other peons, the job of driving a herd of mules to Carrería, several miles farther inland. That was all the mensú wanted, and he left the following morning, driving his little herd along the main road.

  It was very hot that day. Between the two walls of the forest, the red dirt road was dazzlingly bright. The silence of the jungle at that hour seemed to augment the dizzying shimmer of air over the volcanic sand. Not a breath of air, not a cheep from a bird. Beneath the leaden sun that had silenced even the cicadas, the herd, crowned by an aureole of horseflies, advanced monotonously along the road, heads hanging low from drowsiness and the burning light.

  At one o’clock the peons stopped to prepare maté tea. A moment later they spied their patrón coming toward them along the road. He was alone, on horseback, wearing a large pith helmet. Korner stopped, asked the peon closest to him two or three questions, and then recognized the Indian, stooped over the water kettle.

  Korner’s sweaty red face turned a shade darker, and he rose in his stirrups.

  “Hey, you! What are you doing here?” he shouted, furious.

  Unhurriedly, the Indian rose to his feet.

  “You don’t seem to know how to speak to a man,” he answered, walking toward his patrón.

  Korner pulled out his revolver and fired but missed. The upward swing of a machete had tossed the revolver into the air, the index finger still gripping the trigger. An instant later Korner was on the ground, the Indian on top of him.

  The peons had stood by frozen, obviously stunned by their companion’s audacity.

  “Go on,” he shouted to them in a choked voice, not turning his head. The others continued with their duty, which was driving the mules as they had been ordered, and the herd disappeared down the road.

  The mensú, then, still holding Korner against the ground, tossed the man’s knife aside and leapt to his feet. In his hand he held his patrón’s elk leather whip.

  “Get up!” he said.

  Korner rose, bleeding and babbling insults, and lunged toward the mensú. But the whip struck his face with such force that he fell to the ground.

  “Get up,” the worker repeated.

  Again, Korner got to his feet.

  “Now, get going.”

  And as Korner, maddened by indignation, again lunged toward the Indian, the whip fell across his back with a dry and terrible thud.

  “Get going.”

  Korner walked. He was humiliated, almost apoplectic, and his bleeding hand and fatigue had overcome him, yet he walked. At times, nevertheless, he stopped and shouted a storm of threats, overcome by the magnitude of the affront. The worker seemed not to hear. Only again the terrible whip fell across Korner’s shoulders.

  “Get going.”

  They were alone on the road, walking toward the river, both silent, the mensú a little behind Korner. The sun burned down on their heads, their boots, their feet. There was the same silence as there had been that morning, filtered through the same vague buzzing of a lethargic jungle. The only sound, the occasional crack of the whip on Korner’s back.

  “Get going.”

  For five hours, kilometer after kilometer, Korner sipped to the dregs the humiliation and pain of his situation. Wounded, choking from momentary surges of apoplexy, several times he attempted to stop. In vain. The mensú said not a word, but the whip fell again, and Korner walked.

  Since the sun was setting, and in order to avoid the work-camp office, they abandoned the main road for a path that also led to the Paraná. With this change Korner lost his last hope for help, and he fell to the ground, determined not to walk a step farther. But the whip, wielded by an arm accustomed to the hatchet, began to fall.

  “Get going.”

  At the fifth whiplash, Korner arose, and during the final quarter hour the blows fell untiringly every twenty steps upon the back and head of Korner, who was staggering like a sleepwalker.

  Finally they reached the river and walked along the shore until they came to the raft. Korner was forced to climb upon it, walk, as well as he could, to the farthest extreme, and there, at the end of his strength, he fell face down, his head between his arms.

  The mensú approached.

  “Now,” he said, “this is so you’ll learn to speak to a person properly. And this is for slapping people in the face.” And the whip, with terrible and monotonous violence, fell unceasingly on Korner’s back, carving out bloody strips of hair and flesh.

  Korner lay motionless. Then the mensú cut the ties of the raft and climbed into a wooden boat. He tied one end of the rope to the stern and then poled vigorously.

  As slight as was the tug upon the enormous craft of tree trunks, the first effort sufficed. Imperceptibly the raft eddied out into the current, and the mensú cut the rope free.

  The sun had gone down. The atmosphere, stifling two hours before, was now funereally quiet and cool. Beneath the still green sky, the raft, spinning, drifted downstream, entered the transparent shadow of the Paraguayan coast, and emerged again, now only a dot in the distance.

  The worker also floated downstream, but obliquely, toward Brazil, where he would remain to the end of his days.

  “I’m going to miss the old gang,” he murmured, as he bound a rag around his exhausted wrist. And with a cold glance at the raft, moving toward inevitable disaster, he concluded, under his breath, “But he’ll never slap anyone in the face again, the damned gringo!”

  In the Middle of the Night

  One day during flood season I found myself being carried by the full and foaming waters of the Upper Paraná from San Ignacio toward the sugar mill at San Juan on a current that was six miles wide in the channel and nine across the shoals.

  Since April, I had been waiting for the flood. My roaming in a canoe up and down the Paraná at low water had finally wearied the Greek. The Greek is an old sailor from the English navy who had probably before that been a pirate on the Aegean, his native sea, and who, more certainly, had been a brandy smuggler in San Ignacio for more than fifteen years. This was my river master.

  “All right,” he said to me when he saw the swollen river. “You can pass now for half a sailor, half a regular sailor. But there’s still something you don’t know, and that’s the Paraná when it’s flooded.” He pointed, “You see those rocks above the El Greco millstone? Well, when the water reaches that point and you can’t see any of the rocks on the shoals, then you can boast about having navigated the Teyucuaré and feel you’re worth something when you get back. Take along an extra paddle; you’re sure to break one or two. And get one of those thousand tins of kerosene from your house and seal it well with wax. Even so, you may very well drown.”

  And so, calmly, I was letting myself be carried toward the Teyucuaré but wit
h an extra paddle because of the Greek’s advice.

  At least half the tree trunks, rotten straw, scum, and dead animals that come downriver in a great flood get trapped in the deep backwater of the Teyucuaré. There they await the coming of the high water; they appear to be solid ground, edging up on the banks, slipping along the shoreline like a piece of land broken loose. That whole backwater is actually a Sargasso sea.

  Little by little, as they drift in wider and wider circles, the tree trunks are caught in the current and tumble downstream, whirling and dipping, finally plunging and somersaulting along the final rock shoals of the Teyucuaré where cliffs rise eighty meters on both sides.

  These cliff faces enclose the river perpendicularly, narrowing its channel to a third its former width. Then the Paraná joins these waters, seeking an exit, forming a series of rapids almost unnavigable even in low water unless the boatman is unusually alert. Neither is there any way to avoid the rapids since the central current of the river precipitates itself through the narrows formed by the cliffs, widening into a tumultuous curve pouring into the lower pool defined by a steady line of foam.

  Now it was my turn to ride with the current. I sped like a breeze over the rapids and was caught in the churning waters of the channel that dragged me first stern-first, then bow-first. I had to be extremely judicious in my use of the paddle, digging on first one side and then the other to maintain equilibrium, since my canoe was only sixty centimeters across, weighed some thirty kilos, and had a skin of only two millimeters at the thickest point. A good hard rap of the knuckles could seriously damage it. But offsetting these drawbacks, it achieved a fantastic maneuverability that had allowed me to forge my way up and down the river, from south to north and east to west, never, of course, forgetting for a moment my craft’s instability.