The Insufferable Gaucho (3 page)

With the money he had left, he went to Coronel Gutiérrez and bought
himself a mare and a colt. The mare would let itself be ridden, but the colt was
not much use for anything and had to be treated with extreme caution. Sometimes,
in the evening, when he was sick of working or sitting around, Pereda went into
Capitán Jourdan with his gauchos. He rode José Bianco; the gauchos rode the
mare. When he entered the store a respectful hush would fall over the clients,
some playing cards, others playing draughts. When the mayor, who was prone to
depression, turned up, there would always be four brave volunteers for a game of
Monopoly that lasted until dawn. The habit of playing games (not to speak of
Monopoly) seemed ill bred and dishonorable to Pereda. A store is a place where
people converse or listen in silence to the conversations of others, he thought.
A store is like an empty classroom. A store is a smoky church.

Some nights, especially when gauchos from out of town or some
disoriented traveling salesman turned up, Pereda felt a powerful desire to start
a fight. Nothing serious, just a scrap, but with real knives, not chalked
sticks. Other nights he would fall asleep between his two gauchos and dream that
his wife was leading their children by the hand and scolding him for the way he
had let himself lapse into brutishness. And what about the rest of the country?
replied the lawyer. But that’s no excuse,
che
, rejoined Mrs. Pereda,
née Hirschman. At which point the lawyer was obliged to agree, with tears
welling up in his eyes.

In general, however, his dreams were peaceful, and when he woke up in
the morning he was in good spirits and keen to start work. Although, to tell the
truth, not a lot of work was done at Alamo Negro. The repairing of the ranch
house roof was a disaster. In order to start a kitchen garden, the lawyer and
Campodónico bought seeds in Coronel Guttiérez, but the earth, it seemed, would
accept no foreign seed. For a time, the lawyer tried to get the colt, which he
called “my stud horse,” to cover the mare. If the mare had a filly, all the
better. That way, he imagined, he could soon build up a breeding stock that
would lead the recovery; but the colt didn’t seem to be interested in covering
the mare, and although he searched for miles around, Pereda couldn’t find a
sire, since the gauchos had sold their horses to the slaughterhouse, and now got
around on foot, or on bicycles, or hitched rides on the endless dirt tracks of
the pampas.

We have fallen, we’re down, Pereda would say to his audience, but we
can still pick ourselves up and go to our deaths like men. He too had to set
rabbit traps to survive. In the evenings, when he left the house with his men,
he would often let José and Campodónico empty the traps, along with a new
recruit known as The Old Guy, while he set off alone for the ruined village.
There he found some young people, younger than his gauchos, but so nervous and
disinclined to converse that it wasn’t even worth inviting them for a meal. The
wire fences were still standing in some places. Occasionally he would go to the
railway line and stay there a long time, without dismounting, he and José Bianco
both chewing grass stalks, waiting for the train to pass. And often it didn’t,
as if that part of Argentina had been erased from memory as well as from the
map.

One afternoon, as he was vainly attempting to get his colt to mount
the mare, he saw a car driving over the plain, coming directly toward Alamo
Negro. The car pulled up in the yard and four men got out. At first he didn’t
recognize his son. Nor did Bebe realize that the old guy in
bombachas
with a beard, long tangled hair, and a bare chest tanned by the sun was his
father. Son of my soul, said Pereda, hugging him, blood of my blood, vindication
of my days, and he could have gone on like that if Bebe hadn’t stopped him to
introduce his friends, two writers from Buenos Aires and the publisher Ibarrola,
who loved books and nature, and had financed the trip. In honor of his son’s
guests, that night the lawyer had a big bonfire built in the yard and sent for
the foremost of Capitán Jourdan’s guitar-strumming gauchos, warning him
beforehand that he was to do strictly that: strum, without playing any song in
particular, in accordance with the country way.

Campodónico and José were dispatched to fetch ten liters of wine and a
liter of eau-de-vie, which they brought back from Capitán Jourdan in the mayor’s
van. A good supply of rabbits was laid in, and one was roasted for each person
present, although the the meat didn’t seem to find much favor with the visitors
from the city. That night there were more than thirty people gathered around the
fire, besides Pereda’s gauchos and his guests from Buenos Aires. Before the
party began, Pereda announced that he didn’t want any fighting or unruly
behavior, which was quite unnecessary, since the locals were peace-loving people
who had to steel themselves to kill rabbits. All the same, the lawyer considered
setting aside one of the multitudinous rooms so that people could lay down their
knives, large and small, before taking part in the festivities, but on
reflection he decided that such a measure really would be a little
excessive.

By three in the morning the elders had set off back to Capitán
Jourdan, and there were just a few young men left at the ranch, wondering what
to do, since the food and drink had run out, and the guys from the city had
already turned in. The next morning Bebe tried to convince his father to return
to Buenos Aires with him. Things are gradually settling down, he said;
personally he was doing all right. He gave his father a book, one of the many
gifts he had brought, and told him that it had been published in Spain. Now I’m
known throughout Latin America, he explained. But the lawyer had no idea what
his son was talking about. He asked if he was married yet, and when Bebe said
no, suggested he find himself an Indian woman and come to live at Alamo
Negro.

An Indian woman, Bebe repeated in a tone of voice that struck the
lawyer as wistful.

Among the gifts his son had brought was a Beretta 92 pistol with two
clips and a box of ammunition. The lawyer looked at the pistol in amazement. Do
you honestly think I’m going to need it? he asked. You never know. You’re really
on your own here, said Bebe. Later that morning they saddled up the mare for
Ibarrola, who wanted to take a look at the countryside; Pereda accompanied him
on José Bianco. For two hours, the publisher held forth in praise of the
idyllic, unspoiled life, as he saw it, enjoyed by the inhabitants of Capitán
Jourdan. When he spotted the first of the ruined houses, he broke into a gallop,
but it was much further away than he had thought, and before he got there, a
rabbit leaped up and bit him on the neck. The publisher’s cry vanished at once
into the vast open space.

From where he was, all Pereda saw was a dark shape springing from the
ground, tracing an arc toward the publisher’s head, and then disappearing.
Dumb-ass Basque, he thought. He spurred José Bianco, and, approaching Ibarrola,
saw that he was holding his neck with one hand and covering his face with the
other. Without saying a word, Pereda removed the hand from Ibarrola’s neck.
There was a bleeding scratch under his ear. Pereda asked him if he had a
handkerchief. The publisher replied in the affirmative, and only then did Pereda
realize that he was crying. Put the handkerchief on the wound, he said. Then he
took the mare’s reins and they made their way to the ruined house. There was no
one there; they didn’t dismount. As they returned to the ranch, the handkerchief
that Ibarrola was holding against the wound gradually turned red. They said
nothing. When they got back, Pereda ordered his gauchos to strip the publisher
to the waist, and they flung him onto a table in the yard. Pereda washed the
wound, which he proceeded to cauterize with a knife heated until the blade was
red-hot, then made a dressing with another handkerchief, held in place with a
makeshift bandage: one of his old shirts, which he soaked in eau-de-vie, what
little was left, more as a ritual than a sanitary measure, but it couldn’t do
any harm.

When Bebe and the two writers came back from a walk around Capitán
Jourdan, they found Ibarrola still unconscious on the table, and Pereda sitting
beside him in a chair, observing him intently like a medical student. Behind
Pereda, equally absorbed by the sight of the wounded man, stood the ranch’s
three gauchos.

The sun was beating down mercilessly in the yard. Son of a bitch!
shouted one of Bebe’s friends, your dad’s gone and killed our publisher. But the
publisher wasn’t dead, and made a full recovery, except for the scar, which he
would later display with pride, explaining that it had been caused by the bite
of a jumping snake and the subsequent cauterization; he even said he felt better
than ever, although he did return to Buenos Aires that night with the
writers.

From then on, there were often visitors from the city. Sometimes Bebe
came on his own, with his riding clothes and his notebooks, in which he wrote
vaguely melancholic stories with vaguely crime-related plots. Sometimes he would
come with Buenos Aires luminaries, usually writers, but quite often a painter,
which pleased Pereda, since painters, for some reason, seemed to know much more
about carpentry and brick-laying than the bunch of gauchos who hung around Alamo
Negro all day like a bad smell.

On one occasion Bebe came with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was
blonde and had steely blue eyes and high cheekbones, like an extra from the Ring
cycle. The only problem with her, according to Pereda, was that she talked a
lot. One morning he invited her to go for a ride. The psychiatrist accepted. He
saddled up the mare, mounted José Bianco, and they headed west. As they rode,
the psychiatrist talked about her job in a Buenos Aires mental hospital. She
told him (and the rabbits that surreptitiously accompanied them for parts of the
way) that people were becoming more and more unbalanced—studies had proven
it—which led the psychiatrist to conjecture that perhaps mental instability was
not so much a disease as a stratum of normality, just below the surface of
normality as it was commonly conceived. All this sounded like Chinese to Pereda,
but intimidated as he was by the beauty of his son’s guest, he refrained from
saying so. At midday they stopped for a lunch of rabbit jerky and wine. The wine
and the meat, a dark meat that shone like alabaster when touched by light and
seemed to be literally seething with protein, fuelled the psychiatrist’s poetic
streak, and, as Pereda noticed out of the corner of his eye, prompted her to let
her hair down.

She began quoting lines from Hernández and Lugones in a well-modulated
voice. She wondered aloud where Sarmiento had gone wrong. She ran through lists
of books and deeds while the horses trotted imperturbably westward, to places
Pereda himself had never reached on previous excursions but was glad to visit in
such fine although occasionally tiresome company. At about five in the
afternoon, they spotted the shell of a ranch house on the horizon. Enthused,
they spurred their mounts in that direction, but at six they were still not
there, which led the psychiatrist to remark on how deceptive distances could be.
When they finally arrived, five or six malnourished children came out to greet
them, and a woman wearing a very wide skirt that bulged voluminously, as if
there were some kind of animal under it, coiled around her legs. The children
kept their eyes fixed on the psychiatrist, who adopted a maternal attitude,
though not for long, since she soon noticed, as she later explained to Pereda, a
malevolent intention in their gaze, a mischievous plan formulated, so she felt,
in a language full of consonants, yelps, and grudges.

Pereda, who was coming to the conclusion that the psychiatrist was not
entirely in her right mind, accepted the skirted woman’s hospitality, and during
the meal, which they ate in a room full of old photographs, he learned that the
owners of the ranch had gone off to the city a long time ago (she couldn’t say
which city), and the laborers, having ceased to receive their monthly
pay-packet, had gradually drifted away too. The woman also told them about a
river and flooding, although Pereda had no idea where the river could be, and no
one in Capitán Jourdan had mentioned any kind of flooding. Predictably, they ate
rabbit stew, which their hostess had prepared with an expert hand. As they were
getting ready to go, Pereda pointed out the way to Alamo Negro, his ranch, in
case they ever got tired of living out there. I don’t pay much, but at least
there’s company, he said seriously, as if explaining that death came after life.
Then he gathered the children around him and proceeded to dispense advice. When
he had finished speaking, he saw that the psychiatrist and the skirted woman had
fallen asleep on their chairs. Day was about to break when they left. The light
of a full moon shimmered on the plain, and from time to time they saw a rabbit
jump, but Pereda paid no attention, and after a long spell of silence he softly
began to sing a song in French that his late wife had liked.

The song was about a pier and mist, and faithless lovers (as all
lovers are in the end, he thought indulgently), and places that remain
steadfastly faithful.

Sometimes, as he walked or rode José Bianco around the dubious
boundaries of his ranch, Pereda thought that nothing would ever be the same
unless the cattle returned. Cows, he shouted, where are you?

In winter, the skirted woman turned up at Alamo Negro with the
children in tow, and things changed. She was known to some people in Capitán
Jourdan and they were pleased to see her again. The woman didn’t talk much but
there could be no doubt that she worked harder than the six gauchos Pereda had
on the payroll at the time, loosely speaking, since he often went for months
without paying them. In any case, some of the gauchos had what could be called
an idiosyncratic conception of time. They could adapt to a forty-day month
without any major headaches. Or to a four-hundred-and-forty day year. None of
them, in fact, Pereda included, wanted to think about time. By the fireside,
some of the gauchos talked about electroshock therapy, while others spoke like
professional sports commentators, except that they were commenting on a match
played long ago, when they were twenty or thirty and belonged to some gang of
hooligans. Sons of bitches, thought Pereda tenderly, with a manly sort of
tenderness, of course.