The Exiles and Other Stories Page 9

  In fact, after four days of mugginess and threats of a massive storm, settling into a drizzle of sleet with clear skies to the south, the weather grew calm. Then the cold began, a quiet and piercing cold, barely perceptible at noon, but already nipping the ears at four o’clock. Without transition the country passed from the whiteness of daybreak to the almost dizzying splendor of a winter noon in Misiones, only to freeze in the darkness of the first hours of night.

  The first of those mornings, Rienzi, half-frozen with cold, went out for a walk at dawn and came back in a little while as frozen as before. He looked at the thermometer and spoke to Drever, who was getting out of bed.

  “You know what temperature we’ve got? Six degrees below zero.”

  “It’s the first time that’s happened,” Drever answered.

  “So it is,” agreed Rienzi. “Everything I see here is happening for the first time.”

  He was referring to his mid-winter meeting with a pit-viper, and where he least expected it.

  The next morning it was seven below zero. Drever began to doubt his thermometer, and got on his horse to go verify the temperature at the home of two friends, one of whom tended a small official weather station. There was no doubt about it: it was actually nine below zero; the difference from the temperature recorded at his house was due to the fact that Drever’s meseta, being very high above the river and open to the wind, was always two degrees warmer in winter—and two degrees cooler in summer, of course.

  “We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Drever on his return, unsaddling his horse.

  “That’s right,” confirmed Rienzi.

  The next day, as dawn was breaking, a boy arrived at the bungalow with a letter from the friend who tended the weather station. It read as follows:

  “Please record the temperature on your thermometer today when the sun comes out. The day before yesterday I sent in the figure we noted here, and last night I got a request from Buenos Aires to correct the temperature I transmitted. Down there they’re scoffing at nine below zero. What’s your reading now?”

  Drever waited for sunrise, and wrote in his answer: “27th of June: nine degrees below zero.”

  The friend then telegraphed the figure recorded at his station to the main office in Buenos Aires: “27th of June: eleven degrees below zero.”

  Rienzi saw something of the effect such cold can have on almost tropical vegetation; but fully confirming it was kept in store for him till later on. In the meantime, his and his friend’s attention were cruelly drawn to the illness of Drever’s daughter.

  V

  Since a week earlier the girl hadn’t been feeling well. (This, of course, was noted by Drever afterward, and became one of the distractions of his long periods of silence.) She’d been a bit listless, very thirsty, and her eyes smarted when she ran.

  One afternoon, when Drever was going out after his midday meal, he found his daughter lying on the ground, exhausted. She had a fever well above normal. A moment later, Rienzi arrived and found her in bed, with burning cheeks and her mouth wide open.

  “What’s the matter with her?” he asked Drever in surprise.

  “I don’t know . . . a fever of 39 plus.”3

  Rienzi bent over the bed.

  “Hi, little lady! It looks like we won’t play any cable-car today.”

  The little girl didn’t answer. It was typical of the child, when she had a fever, to shut out all pointless questions and just barely respond with curt monosyllables, in which you could spot the character of her father for miles.

  That afternoon Rienzi took care of the furnace, but came back every now and then to see his helper, who was then the tenant of a little blond nook in her father’s bed.

  At three o’clock the girl’s temperature was 39.5, and 40 at six. Drever had done what you have to do in such cases, even giving her a bath.

  Now, bathing, nursing, and caring for a five-year-old child, in a house made of planks and put together worse than a furnace, during icy-cold weather, is no easy task for two men with calloused hands. There are questions of little shirts and other tiny clothes, drinks at set times, details that lie beyond the powers of a man. Nevertheless, with their sleeves rolled up their hardened arms, the two men bathed the child and dried her. Of course they had to heat the room with alcohol, and later change the cold-water compresses on her head.

  The little girl had yielded a smile as Rienzi was drying her feet, and this seemed to him a good omen. But Drever feared a stroke of pernicious fever—the end of which one never knows in lively temperaments like hers.

  At seven her temperature rose to 40.8,4 dropping to 39 for the rest of the night and climbing again to 40.3 the next morning.

  “Bah!” said Rienzi with a carefree air. “The little lady is tough, and it won’t be this fever that’ll cut her down.”

  And he went off to the furnace whistling, because it was no time to start thinking foolishness.

  Drever said nothing. He walked back and forth in the dining room, pausing only to go in and see his daughter. The girl, consumed by fever, persisted in her curt, monosyllabic responses.

  “How do you feel, little one?”

  “Fine.”

  “Aren’t you hot? You want me to pull down the bedspread a bit?”

  “No.”

  “You want some water?”

  “No.”

  And this without deigning to turn her eyes in his direction.

  For six days Drever slept a few hours in the morning, while Rienzi did the same at night. But when the fever stayed threateningly high, Rienzi would see the father’s silhouette looming motionless beside the bed, and at the same time realize that he wasn’t sleepy. Then he’d get up and make coffee, which the two men drank in the dining room. They would urge each other to rest a while, but a mute shrug of the shoulders was their common response. After which one of them would start looking over the titles of the books for the hundredth time, while the other stubbornly rolled cigars at a corner of the table.

  And always the baths, the heating, the cold compresses, the quinine. The girl fell asleep sometimes with one of her father’s hands in hers, and no sooner did he try to withdraw it than the child felt his move and tightened her fingers. So Drever would remain sitting motionless on the bed for a good while, and—since he had nothing to do—gazing constantly at the poor little wasted face of his daughter.

  Then from time to time a delirium, with the child suddenly propping herself up on her arms. Drever would quiet her down, but the girl rejected his touch, turning the other way. After that her father would resume his walking, and go drink some of Rienzi’s ever-present coffee.

  “How is she?” asked the latter.

  “About the same,” answered Drever.

  Sometimes, when she was awake, Rienzi came in and strove to lift everyone’s spirits with jokes about the little scamp who was playing sick and had nothing wrong with her. But even when she recognized him the girl stared at him gravely, with the sullen fixity of high fever.

  The fifth afternoon Rienzi spent at the oven working—which served as a good distraction. Drever called him in for a while and went to take his turn at feeding the fire, automatically throwing stick after stick of firewood into the hearth.

  At daybreak the fever went down more than usual, went down still more at noon, and at two in the afternoon, with her eyes shut, the child was lying motionless, except for an intermittent contraction of the lip and little tremors that sprinkled her face with tics. She was cold, her temperature below normal now at only 35 degrees.5

  “An attack of cerebral anemia, almost for sure,” replied Drever to a questioning look from his friend. “Some luck I’ve got . . .”

  For three hours, on her back, the girl continued her feverish grimaces, surrounded and singed by eight bottles of boiling water. For those three hours Rienzi walked very quietly around the room, watching with a frown the image of the father sitting at the foot of the bed. And in those three hours Drever became fully aware o
f how huge a place in his heart was occupied by that poor little thing left over from his marriage, and whom the next day he would probably take out to lie beside her mother.

  At five o’clock Rienzi, in the dining room, heard Drever getting up; and with a still more wrinkled brow he went into the bedroom. But from the door he could see the gleaming forehead of the girl, who was drenched in sweat—and out of danger.

  “Finally . . . ,” said Rienzi, with his throat foolishly contracted.

  “Yes, finally!” murmured Drever.

  The girl was still literally bathed in sweat. When after a moment she opened her eyes, she looked for her father, and when she saw him extended her fingers toward his mouth. Then Rienzi drew near:

  “So? . . . How we doing, little lady?”

  The girl turned her eyes toward her friend.

  “You recognize me, now? I bet you don’t.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who am I?”

  The child smiled.

  “Rienzi.”

  “Fine! That’s what I like . . . No, no. Go to sleep now . . .”

  At last they went out to the meseta.

  “What a little lady!” said Rienzi, making long lines in the sand with a stick. Drever (six days of nervous tension capped by those three final hours is too much for a father by himself) sat down on the teeter-totter and dropped his head on his arms. And Rienzi withdrew to the other side of the bungalow, because he saw his friend’s shoulders were shaking.

  VI

  Her recovery was really swift from then on. Over cup after cup of coffee on those long nights, Rienzi had come to the conclusion that, unless they replaced the first two condensation chambers, they would always get more pitch than necessary. So he decided to use two large casks in which Drever had prepared his orange wine, and with the help of their laborer had everything ready by nightfall. He lit the fire, and after entrusting it to the care of the native went back to the meseta, where from behind the panes of the dining room the two men gazed with rare pleasure at the reddish smoke which again rose up in peace.

  They were in conversation, at midnight, when the half-breed came to tell them that the fire was coming out another way, that the oven had buckled in. The same idea came to both of them at once.

  “Did you open the air intake?” Drever asked him.

  “I did,” replied the native.

  “What firewood did you put in?”

  “The load that was right there . . .”

  “Lapacho?”

  “Yes.”

  Rienzi and Drever exchanged a look, and then went out with the laborer.

  It was all very clear: The upper part of the oven was covered with two layers of sheet-metal on L-iron supports, and as insulation they’d spread two inches of sand on top. In the first firing section, which was licked by the flames, they’d shielded the metal with a layer of clay over wire mesh; reinforced clay, let’s call it.

  Everything had gone well as long as Rienzi or Drever kept watch over the hearth. But the laborer, in order to speed up the heating for the good of his bosses, had opened the door of the ash-pan all the way, just when he was feeding the fire with lapacho. And since lapacho is to fire as gasoline to a match, the extremely high temperature attained had swept away the clay, the wire mesh, and the metal top itself—leaving a hole through which the blaze arose, compressed and roaring.

  That’s what the two men saw when they got there. They pulled the firewood out of the hearth, and the flaming stopped; but the breach was still vibrating, white-hot, and the sand fallen onto the furnace was blinding when stirred up.

  There was nothing more to do. Without speaking, they headed back toward the meseta, and on the way Drever said:

  “To think that with another fifty pesos we could have built a really good oven . . .”

  “Bah!” countered Rienzi after a moment. “We did what was right to do. With a perfect installation we wouldn’t have found out a lot of things.”

  And after a pause:

  “And maybe we’d have built something a little bit pour la galerie . . .”

  “Could be,” agreed Drever.

  The night was very mild, and they sat for a long while smoking at the doorway into the dining room.

  VII

  The temperature was too mild. The weather broke up, and for three days and three nights it rained out of a storm from the south, which kept the two men shut up inside the swaying bungalow. Drever took advantage of the time to finish off an essay on creolina—which as a killer of ants and parasites was at least as strong as its namesake derived from pit-coal tar. Rienzi, apathetic, spent the day going from one door to another to look at the sky.

  Till on the third night, while they were in the dining room, and Drever was playing with his daughter as she sat on his knees, Rienzi got up with his hands in his pockets and said:

  “I’m going to leave. We’ve already done what we could do here. If you can raise a few pesos to work on the project, let me know and I can get you what you need in Buenos Aires. Down there at the spring, you could set up three furnaces . . . Without water you can’t do anything. Write me, when you manage that, and I’ll come up to help you. At least”—he concluded after a moment—“we can have the pleasure of being sure that there aren’t many guys in the country who know what we do about charcoal.”

  “I think so too,” confirmed Drever, still playing with his daughter.

  Five days later, under a radiant noonday sun, and with the sulky ready at the gate, the two men and their helper went to take a last look at their work, which they hadn’t approached since the accident. The laborer took off the top of the oven, and like a scorched cocoon the furnace appeared, dented and twisted in its sheath of wire mesh and grey clay. From the oxidation of the fire the sheets removed were quite thick around the breach opened by the flames, and at the slightest contact their surface peeled off in blue scales, with which Drever’s little girl filled the pocket of her apron.

  From right where he was, along the entire border of the adjacent and surrounding woods and into the distance, Rienzi could assess the effect of nine-below cold on tropical vegetation with warm and shiny foliage. He saw the banana plants rotted into chocolate pulp, collapsed within themselves as though inside a pillowcase. He saw yerba plants that were twelve years old—thick trees, in short—scorched to their roots forever by the cold white fire of the frost. And in the orange grove, which they entered for a final gathering of fruit, Rienzi looked in vain overhead for the usual glitter of gold, because the ground was totally yellow with oranges. On the day of the great freeze they had all fallen when the sun came out, with a muffled thumping that pervaded the woods.

  So Rienzi was able to fill up his sack, and since time was running short they headed for the port. The girl made the trip on Rienzi’s lap, keeping up a very long dialogue with her friend.

  The little steamboat was already leaving. Face to face, the two men looked at each other, smiling.

  “A bientôt,” said one.

  “Ciào,” answered the other.

  But the parting of Rienzi and the girl was a lot more expressive.

  When the steamboat was already veering downstream, she still cried out to him:

  “Rienzi! Rienzi!”

  “What, little lady?” they could manage to hear.

  “Come back soon!”

  Drever and the girl remained on the beach till the little steamboat was hidden behind two massive outcroppings of the Teyucuaré. And as they were slowly going up the bluff, Drever in silence, his daughter held out her arms for him to pick her up.

  “Your furnace burned out, poor daddy! . . . But don’t be sad . . . You’ll invent a lot more things, my darling little engineer!”a

  Notes

  1 Jules Huret, a French travel authors who wrote a book about northeastern Argentina, published in 1911.

  2 Probably the Swiss chemist Heinrich Schwarz, a contemporary of Quiroga.

  3 Over 102° F.

  4 About 105.4° F.


  5 Equivalent to 95° F.

  The Wilderness

  The canoe glided along the edge of the woods, or what might seem to be woods in all that darkness. More by instinct than from any clue, Subercasaux felt its nearness, for the gloom was a single impervious block, starting at the rower’s hands and extending up to the zenith. The man knew his river well enough so as to not be unaware of where he was, but on such a night, and under threat of rain, landing his craft in the midst of piercing tacuara canes and patches of rotten reeds was very different from going ashore in his own little port. And Subercasaux was not alone in his canoe.

  The atmosphere was sultry to the point of asphyxiation. In no direction his face might turn could he find a little air to breathe. And at that moment, clearly and distinctly, some raindrops pattered in the canoe.

  Subercasaux raised his eyes, looking vainly into the sky for a tremor of brightness or the fissure of a lightning bolt. All afternoon, and now as well, one could not hear a single thunderclap.

  “Rain for the whole night,” he thought. And turning to his companions, who kept silent at the stern:

  “Put on your rain-capes,” he said briefly. “And hold on tight.”

  In fact, the canoe was now bending branches as it moved along, and two or three times the portside oar had skidded on a submerged limb. But even at the price of breaking an oar, Subercasaux stayed in contact with the foliage, since if he got five meters offshore he could go back and forth all night in front of his port, without managing to see it.

  Skimming the water at the very edge of the woods, the rower advanced a while longer. The drops were falling more densely now, but also at greater intervals. They would cease abruptly, as if they had fallen from who-knows-where, and then begin again, large, warm, and separate, only to break off once more in the same darkness and the same atmospheric depression.

  “Hold on tight,” repeated Subercasaux to his two companions. “We’ve made it home.”

  For he had just caught a glimpse of the mouth of his port. With two vigorous strokes of the oars he propelled the canoe onto the clay bank, and as he fastened the craft to its post his two silent companions jumped to the ground, which in spite of the darkness was easy to see, since it was covered with myriads of shiny little worms that made its surface undulate with their red and green fires.