The Exiles and Other Stories Page 8

  The damp firewood was now flaming anew, and the huge eyes of the children were shining again. We went outside for a moment. The night had cleared up, and we’d be able to find the trail. Our shirts were still a little smoky—but anything was preferable to that meningitis laugh . . .

  We got home at three in the morning. Some days later the father came by, and told me the boy was doing all right, that he was getting out of bed already. Healthy, in a word.

  Four years after this, while I was up there again, I had to help take the census of 1914, in the sector of Yabebirí-Teyucuaré. I went by way of the river, in the same canoe, but this time just rowing. Again, it was afternoon.

  I went by the hut in question and didn’t find a soul. On the way back, at twilight, I saw no one either. But twenty meters up ahead, standing on the stream-bank in front of the dark banana grove, was a naked boy, about seven or eight years old. His legs were extremely skinny—the thighs even more than the calves—and his belly was enormous. In his right hand he held a fishing pole, and his left was clutching a half-eaten banana. He looked at me without moving, and without deciding whether to eat or let his arm drop all the way.

  I spoke to him, without effect. But I pressed on, asking him about those who’d lived in the hut. Finally he burst out laughing, as a thick stream of spit dribbled down to his belly. It was the boy with the meningitis.

  I rowed out of the inlet. Furtively, the boy had followed me down to the beach, admiring my canoe with wide-open eyes. I pulled at the oars and let myself drift away in the backwater, still within sight of the twilight idiot who couldn’t make up his mind to finish his banana, out of admiration for my white canoe.

  Note

  1 Collins machetes were made in Hartford, Connecticut, until the company was sold after World War II. The name is still used by other manufacturers, but their machetes are of inferior quality. An authentic Collins could hold up as long as a half-century, and many are still in service.

  The Charcoal-Makers

  The two men set the sheet-metal contrivance on the ground and sat down on it. From the place where they were to the trench it was still thirty meters, and the big box was heavy. This was their fourth halt—and last, since close-by the trench cast up its scarp of red earth.

  But heavy too was the midday sun on the bare heads of the two men. The harsh light bathed the landscape in a livid eclipse-like yellow, with no shadows or contours. Light from a noonday sun, a Misiones sun, in which the two men’s shirts were gleaming.

  From time to time they looked back toward the route they had covered, then instantly lowered their heads, blinded by light. One of them, moreover, displayed the stigma of the tropical sun in his premature wrinkles and the intricate crow’s-feet about his eyes. After a while they both got up, took hold of the four-handled barrow again, and step by step arrived at last. Then they slumped down on their backs, in the peak sunlight, and shielded their faces with their arms.

  The contrivance was really heavy, the weight of four galvanized sheets fourteen feet long, held together by fifty-six feet of L and T irons an inch and a half thick. The product of a difficult craft, but one that was etched to the core of our men’s minds, for the contrivance in question was a furnace for making charcoal that they had built themselves, and the trench was nothing other than the circular-heating oven, also a result of their work alone. And by the way, though the two men were dressed like laborers and spoke like engineers, they were neither engineers nor laborers.

  One was called Duncan Drever and the other Marcos Rienzi—of English and Italian parents respectively, though neither of them had the slightest sentimental predilection for the stock he came from. They thus personified a type of South American that has appalled Huret,1 along with so many others: the son of Europeans who makes fun of his inherited motherland as boldly as he does of his own.

  But Rienzi and Drever, stretched out on their backs with their arms over their eyes, weren’t laughing on this occasion, because they were fed up with working for a month from five in the morning on, more often than not in cold that had dropped to the freezing point.

  And this was in Misiones. At eight o’clock, and till four in the afternoon, the tropical sun had its way; but no sooner did the sun go down than the temperature started to drop along with it, so fast you could follow the mercury’s fall with your eyes. At that hour the region would begin to freeze, and literally; so that the thirty degrees centigrade of noon were reduced to four at eight in the evening, and then at four in the morning came the galloping descent to one below, two below, three below. The night before it had gone down to four below, with the resulting disarray of Rienzi’s geographical knowledge, for he couldn’t manage to get his bearings in that carnival climatology—which had little to do with weather reports.

  “This is a subtropical country with sweltering heat,” Rienzi would say, tossing away the tin-snips scorched with cold and going off to take a walk. Because before the sun comes out, in the glacial twilight of the frosted countryside, working with bare steel tears the skin off your hands quite readily.

  Nevertheless, not once in all that month did Drever and Rienzi abandon their furnace, except for the rainy days, when they studied modifications on the blueprint, freezing to death. When they decided on distillation in a closed container, they already knew just about what to expect in connection with the various systems of direct firing—including that of Schwartz.2 Once they were firmly committed to their furnace, the only thing that never varied was its capacity in cubic centimeters. But its form and fit, lids and condenser, the diameter of the smoke-pipe—all that had been studied and restudied a hundred times. At night, when they retired, the same scene was acted out again and again. They would talk in bed for a while about this or that, whatever had nothing to do with their current task. Then the conversation would cease, because they were sleepy. At least they thought they were. After an hour of deep silence, one of them would raise his voice:

  “I think seventeen ought to be enough.”

  “I think so too,” the other would answer right away.

  Seventeen what? Centimeters, rivets, days, spaces, anything at all. But they knew perfectly well that the topic was their furnace, and what it was they were referring to.

  II

  One day, three months earlier, Rienzi had written to Drever from Buenos Aires, telling him that he wanted to go to Misiones. What could they do up there? It was his idea—despite the public hallelujahs about the industrialization of the country—that a small industry, properly conceived, could work out well, at least during the 1914 war, which was then in progress. What did he think of that?

  Drever answered: “Come on up, and we’ll look into the matter of charcoal and tar.”

  To which Rienzi replied by getting on the boat for Misiones.

  Now the distillation of wood by firing is an interesting problem to resolve, but one requiring a lot more capital than Drever could have at hand. To tell the truth, his capital consisted of the firewood on his land and what he could do with his tools. With this, as well as four sheets of metal left over from when he put up his shed, and the help of Rienzi, it was possible to give it a try.

  So they tried. Since when wood is distilled the gases don’t work under pressure, the materials they had were good enough. With T-irons for the frame and L-irons for the openings, they assembled the rectangular furnace, about fourteen feet long by two and a quarter wide. It was tedious and dogged work, since on top of the technical difficulties they had to deal with those resulting from the lack of materials and some of the proper tools. The first fitting, for example, was a disaster: there was no way to match those brittle, jagged edges. So they had to put it together with rivets, at one per centimeter, which amounts to 1,680 just for joining the sheets lengthwise. And since they didn’t have any rivets they cut 1,680 nails—and a few hundred more for the frame.

  Rienzi riveted from the outside. Drever, squeezed inside the furnace with his knees at his chest, sustained the blows. It’s no sec
ret that to flatten nails you need a lot of patience—and there inside the box Drever ran out of his with bewildering speed. Every hour they would change places, and as Drever came out cramped and bent, rising jerkily to his feet, Rienzi would get in to put his patience to the test against the skidding of the rebounding hammer.

  That’s the way they worked. And the two men were so set upon doing what they wanted that they didn’t let a day go by without bruising their fingernails. With the usual adjustments on days when it rained, and the inevitable commentaries at midnight.

  During that month they had no recreation—this from the urban point of view—but to penetrate the woods on Sunday mornings with their machetes. Drever, who was used to that life, had a firm enough wrist to cut only what he wanted to; but when Rienzi was the one who was breaking the trail, his comrade was very careful to stay four or five meters back. Not that Rienzi’s grip was bad; but it takes a long time to learn to use a machete. Then again, they had the daily distraction provided by their helper, Drever’s daughter. She was a five-year-old blonde, and motherless, because after three years in the region Drever had lost his wife. He had raised her by himself, with infinitely greater patience than that demanded by the furnace rivets. Drever wasn’t a mild-mannered person, and he was hard to get along with. Where that rugged man had gotten the tenderness and patience needed to raise his daughter alone and come to be idolized by her, I don’t know; but the truth is that when they were walking together at twilight, one could hear dialogues like this:

  “Daddy!”

  “Sweetheart . . .”

  “Is your furnace going to be ready soon?”

  “Yes, sweetheart.”

  “And you’re going to distill all the firewood in our woods?”

  “No; we’re just going to see what we can do.”

  “And you’re going to make some money?”

  “I don’t think so, baby.”

  “Poor darling daddy! You can never earn much money.”

  “That’s the way it is . . .”

  “But you’re going to run a nice test, daddy. Nice like you, dear little daddy!”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “I love you very much, very much, daddy!”

  “Yes, sweetheart . . .”

  And Drever’s arm would come down over his daughter’s shoulder, and the child would kiss her father’s rough and broken hand, so big that it covered her whole breast.

  Rienzi wasn’t one to waste words either, and the two could easily be regarded as unapproachable. But Drever’s little girl was pretty familiar with that sort of people, and she’d burst out laughing at Rienzi’s terrible scowl, every time he tried, by frowning, to put an end to his helper’s daily demands: somersaults on the grass; piggyback rides; swings, trampoline, teeter-totter, cable-car—not to mention an occasional pitcher of water on her friend’s face when he stretched out on the grass in the sun at noon.

  Drever would hear a curse and ask what caused it.

  “It’s that damned little scamp!” Rienzi would shout. “All she can think of is . . .”

  But faced with the prospect—remote as it was—of an injustice on his own or her father’s part, Rienzi would hasten to make peace with the child, who, from a squat, would make fun of Rienzi’s face—washed as clean as a bottle.

  Her father played with her less; but with his eyes he would follow his friend’s lumbering gallop around the meseta, toting the little girl on his shoulders.

  III

  It was quite a strange trio—the two long-striding men and their blonde, five-year-old assistant, who went out and came back and went out again, from the meseta to the oven. Because the girl, raised and taught without leaving her father’s side, knew all the tools one by one, and more or less how much pressure you need to split ten coconuts all at once, and what smell could rightly be called that of pyroligneous acid. She knew how to read, and everything she wrote was in capital letters.

  Those two hundred meters from the bungalow to the woods were crossed time and again while the oven was being built. With firm steps at dawn, or sluggish at noon, they came and went like ants along the same path, with the same winding course and the same bend to avoid the outcropping of black sandstone just above the grass.

  If their choice of heating system had been difficult, getting it to perform went far beyond what they had imagined.

  “It’s one thing on paper and another in the field,” said Rienzi with his hands in his pockets, every time a painstaking calculation—of the gas volume, air-intake, surface of the grate, or firing chambers—turned out to be useless on account of their poor materials.

  Naturally, what they’d decided upon was the riskiest course possible in that order of things: spiral heating in a horizontal furnace. Why? They had their reasons, and we’ll let them be. But the truth is that when they lighted the oven for the first time, and right away the smoke came out of the chimney, after having been forced down under the furnace four times—when they saw this the two men sat down for a smoke in silence, watching it with a rather distracted air, the air of men of character viewing the success of a hard job to which they’ve given all their effort.

  It was finally done! The accessory installations—the gas-burner and tar-condenser—were child’s play. The condensation was assigned to eight wine-casks, since they had no water; and the gases were conveyed directly to the hearth. So Drever’s little girl had the chance to marvel at that thick stream of fire coming out of the furnace, where there was no fire.

  “How pretty, daddy!” she’d exclaim, standing still with surprise. And planting kisses on her father’s hand, as she always did:

  “You know how to do so many things, my darling daddy!”

  Whereupon they’d go into the woods to eat oranges.

  Of the few things that Drever had in this world—apart from his daughter, of course—the most valuable was his orange grove, which earned him no income at all, but was a delight to behold. Planted originally by the Jesuits, two hundred years before, the grove had been invaded and overgrown by the forest, and in its underbrush the orange trees went on sweetening the air with the scent of their blossoms, which at twilight spread all the way to the paths of the open countryside. The orange trees of Misiones have never met with any disease; it would be hard to find an orange with a single blemish. And for beauty and delicious flavor, that fruit is beyond compare.

  Of the three visitors to the grove, Rienzi had the biggest appetite. He could easily eat ten or twelve oranges, and when he went back to the house he always carried a loaded sack over his shoulder. Up there people say that a frost favors the fruit, and just then, at the end of June, they were already sweet as syrup, a fact that somewhat reconciled Rienzi to the cold.

  This Misiones cold—which Rienzi hadn’t expected, and had never heard tell of in Buenos Aires—hindered the firing of the first batches of coal, causing an extra-large expenditure of fuel.

  In the interests of good organization, they would light the oven at four or five in the afternoon. And since the time required for complete carbonization of wood is normally no less than eight hours, they had to feed the fire till twelve or one in the morning, down deep in the pit before the red mouth of the hearth, while behind them a mild frost was settling in. Though the heating was impaired, the condensation proceeded wonderfully in the icy air, and this enabled them to get a 2 percent yield of tar on the first try, which was very gratifying in view of the circumstances.

  Either one or the other had to oversee the process constantly, since the casual laborer who cut their firewood persisted in his ignorance of that way of making charcoal. He would intently observe the various parts of the apparatus, but shake his head at the least allusion to putting him in charge of the fire.

  He was a mestizo, a big lean fellow with a sparse moustache, who had seven children, and would never answer a question, however easy, without first consulting the sky for a while, whistling aimlessly. Then he’d reply: “Could be.” In vain had they told him to add fuel with
out worrying, till the opposite lid of the furnace sputtered when he touched it with a wet finger. He laughed heartily, but wouldn’t accept the job. So the come-and-go from the meseta to the woods continued at night, while Drever’s little girl, alone in the bungalow, amused herself behind the windowpanes trying to make out, in the flashing of the hearth, whether it was Rienzi or her father who was stirring up the fire.

  At one time or another, some tourist going by at night toward the port, to board the steamboat that would take him to the Iguazú, must have been more than a little surprised at that glare coming up from underground, amid the smoke and steam from the exhaust pipes: a lot of solfatara and a bit of hell, which would soon afflict the imagination of the native laborer.

  The latter’s attention was keenly attracted to the selection of the fuel. When in a certain sector he discovered a “noble wood for burning,” he would take it to the oven in his wheelbarrow, as impassive as if he were unaware of the treasure he was conveying. And faced with the stoker’s delight, he would turn his head aside indifferently—to smile to his heart’s content, as Rienzi liked to say.

  There thus came a day when the two men found themselves with such a stock of highly combustible woods that they had to decrease the intake of air at the hearth, air that now came in whistling and vibrated under the grate.

  Meanwhile, the output of tar increased. They recorded the percentages of coal, tar, and pyroligneous acid obtained from the most suitable woods, though it was all done grosso modo. On the other hand what they took down very carefully—one by one—were the disadvantages of circular heating for a horizontal furnace; on this they could admit to being experts. The expenditure of fuel didn’t interest them muchand besides that, with the temperature at the freezing point most of the time, it wasn’t possible to make any calculation at all.

  IV

  That winter was extremely harsh, and not only in Misiones. But from the end of June onward things began to look really strange, and the region suffered to the very roots of its subtropical being.