Tierra del Fuego (10 page)

And the strange thing was that even the cook, Villegas, was in a good mood that night and smiled cordially as Seaman Alvarez recalled how they had stolen the sheep on the Desertores islands.

Dámaso Ramírez, aware, as any good skipper should be, of everything that happened on his ship, had noticed that, since that night on the Desertores, the cook's character had undergone a curious change. He had watched him over the five days they had been sailing, and found it hard to account for the way such an intractable personality had been transformed.

Villegas was laughing now as Alvarez described their adventures on the Desertores, chasing sheep in the darkness and the drizzle. In spite of being sixty-three, he had run like a little boy and had cornered his animal in the
quila
bushes.

Villegas, on the other hand, had walked a short distance and had almost stumbled over a ewe that had recently given birth. He had grabbed her and pushed her in the direction of the shore. The lamb started bleating and following its mother. Afraid that the bleating would give him away, Villegas had been about to kick it. But then he had stopped, and something had impelled him to take it in his arms. Then he had tied a rope to the ewe and pulled her to the lighter.

In the lighter, he hobbled the ewe's legs, and she stayed where she was, perfectly calm. Villegas sat down in the stern with the lamb in his arms, and waited for Alavrez. The night was pitch black, and the drizzle made it feel damp. The roar of the breakers occasionally subsided, and in the silence, the waves could be heard lapping against the side of the lighter, as if turning from curses to moans against the defenseless breakwaters. The lamb lifted its head in the darkness, trying to find its mother, and, not seeing her, started to shiver and bleat again. But this time, its bleating, no louder than that of a baby seal, was drowned by the noise of the breakers and could not be heard from a distance. Villegas held it close to his chest, wrapping it in the end of his woolen poncho. The lamb rested its muzzle in the man's armpit and calmed down. From time to time he passed his hand over the newborn's curly wool, and a kind of affectionate contact was established between the man and the little animal. He felt as if, in the middle of that dark, drizzly night, in the bleakness of that last rim of the Desertores archipelago, he had touched something soft and tremulous, weak and tender, and it was a sensation he had not felt for a long time.

He remembered how, when he was a child, his mother had held him to her breast in the same way, and, as he cuddled the little animal, he could feel its breathing, throbbing gently like a warm heart.

Once on board the schooner, he continued taking care of the lamb. First he fed it with its mother's milk, and then, after he had had to kill the mother before she lost weight due to the lack of grass and put out her meat to air on the rigging, he grated potatoes and extracted the liquid from them to replace her milk. Then the lamb started to eat other things, like mashed potatoes or dipped bread. Whenever they put in at a harbor, the first thing Villegas did was to take the lighter ashore in search of herbs, especially wild celery from the islands, in order to vary the food for his “orphan,” as he had taken to calling it affectionately.

The little animal started to be seen as a kind of mascot of the
Huamblín
. An unusual mascot—while most of the other schooners and boats had dogs, the
Huamblín
would reach Puerto Edén with a lamb frolicking on deck.

But the most remarkable thing of all was the change in the cook's character. He stopped muttering to himself in his narrow kitchen in the forecastle, stopped slamming the iron plates down on the table when he was serving meals, even stopped throwing leftovers in the sea instead of keeping them in case anyone was hungry—now he would offer them to the men at odd times, just as he did to his “orphan.”

Because the orphan was indeed his, and his alone. With his knife he had slit its mother's throat, but, by feeding it, he had replaced her. The lamb was his, and he could not help feeling jealous whenever he saw one of the other men giving it something to eat and the lamb licking that man's hands, the way it licked his.

The little animal had virtually recognized him as its master, and returned his affection, picking him out from the others and running after him like a lapdog.

That was why something like his old grim expression appeared on his face that night in Puerto Balladares, when Seaman Alvarez said, half in jest, finishing his story about the theft of the sheep, “We'd do better to barter that lamb to the Alakaluf Indians in Puerto Edén and get a good otter hunting dog in exchange . . . It isn't such a good idea to keep a piece of evidence like that on board!”

“We could have bought it!” Villegas replied promptly.

“Oh, sure, someone's going to sell us a sheep!” Alvarez said, with a mischievous look on his face.

“Why don't we eat it?” Almonacid, the engineer, suggested.

“It's too small!” one of the divers said.

“To me, this lamb is worth more than any dog or any otter skin.”

“You went to all that trouble to get meat,” a fat diver muttered, “so why not eat it?”

“The skipper asked for a sheep! I brought this lamb on my own account! I didn't save its life to give it to you!”

“Not that there's much meat on it!” another diver said, adding slyly, “But I agree it's not a good idea to leave evidence lying around! An otter hunting dog would be better!”

Fuelled by the liquor, the conversation continued circling around the relative value of a dog and a lamb.

“I remember when I worked as a coastguard,” one of the divers said, “we once had to find a settler we'd lost touch with, on Dawson Island in the Straits of Magellan. You wouldn't believe the things that had happened to him! First, his wife had died in childbirth . . . Then his house burned down with his three little children in it . . . And we finally found him out in the snow, frozen to death! And you know what we found beside him? His two dogs! His two dogs, lying next to the corpse! What other kind of animal dies like that at its master's side?” And the diver concluded sententiously, “Only a dog dies with its master!”

“One time, coming out of the Trinidad channel,” the skipper said, “we came across a boat that had run aground on those rocks that stick out of the sea . . . The whole crew had abandoned her apart from the dog, which was still on board, standing in the bow and howling, as if calling the men back.”

Outside, a gust of wind passed over the waters of Puerto Balladares, and the schooner turned around its anchor, making the chains creak in the hawsehole.

“A dog helps man to hunt other animals,” Alvarez said. “And last but not least, if you're short of food, you can always cook it.”

“I don't think I could eat dog meat,” one of the divers said.

“It's obvious you've never been hungry . . .” Alvarez replied.

“Have you tried it?”

“Yes, and it's delicious . . .” He cast a sidelong glance at Villegas. “It's as good as this lamb will taste when it's a few months older!”

Seaman Ruperto Alvarez was the oldest man on board, and yet he was the most youthful and talkative of them all. Tall and well built, with a nose broken in a fight, bright eyes and a permanent smile below his trimmed black mustache, he did not look his age and was “a jack of all trades.” Although sixty-three years old, he was the one who climbed the mainmast when the sail got stuck up there in the middle of a storm. No one ever saw him angry or sad. He was like a big, aged child, for whom life was a game.

“A few years ago,” he said, “I went across the border to look for work . . . I remember it took me two months to walk from the Pacific to the Atlantic. I left Talcahuano, went up the Neuquén and came down through Comodoro Rivadavia in Argentina.

“One afternoon, feeling tired, I came to a tavern near the border, and when the owner saw me he asked me, ‘Do you know how to kill a lamb?' ‘How could I not know something like that?' I replied. ‘Come inside, then,' he said, and he took me to a shed where there was a black dog on a chain . . . ‘That's the lamb,' he said, pointing to the dog, which looked well fed. I felt a bit sorry for it, so I said, ‘Why do you want me to kill it?' ‘Shhhh, it's for them!' he replied, and pointed inside the tavern at the seven priests I'd seen in passing, sitting at a table in their black cassocks!

“‘I'm not killing this dog,' I said . . . ‘All right,' he said, ‘if I kill it, will you skin it for me?' ‘Yes, I replied, ‘I can skin it!' The man picked up a stick and hit it on the head. The dog fell dead without so much as a bark, he drained the blood, and I skinned it. Then he roasted it in a clay oven and served it to the priests . . . They polished off the whole animal, even licked their fingers at the end and said how tender the lamb was! I had some, too, and it really was delicious. The meat was as white as lamb! Just the way the cook's lamb will be in a while!”

And he gave Villegas a sidelong look and laughed. The cook's eyes flashed for a moment, then he stooped and went through the door to the kitchen.

 

The
Huamblín
continued sailing by day and putting in to harbor by night along the open coast of the Taitao Pensinsula, the cape of which, the Tres Montes, is the visible part of the deepest rock on the planet. At length, she crossed the dreaded Gulf of Penas, entered the broad, majestic waterway of the Messier Channel, made her way through the labyrinth of little islands of the Angostura Inglesa, which is so narrow that it is impossible for more than one vessel to pass through it at any one time, and finally dropped anchor in the waters of Puerto Edén, set deep in the northern shore of the Paso del Indio.

The place surely owed its name to its beauty. After the oceanic plains of the Gulf of Penas, the Messier Channel is a broad waterway that advances between gray walls of rock. At the entrance to it, the current swells like a vein that has been squeezed, and then the somber pass opens out onto an untouched, primeval world, where everything seems massive and strange to human eyes. At the far end of this landscape of cosmic grandeur, the verdant islands of Puerto Edén on the western shore of the Paso del Indio form a veritable oasis of beauty, and, just as that surrounding world seems to have only recently emerged from the waters, the seafarer has the feeling here that he will encounter the first men on earth . . .

The islands, however, are cold and damp, and the ground is covered with age-old peat, five feet thick and as porous as soft cork. From this blanket of moss and lichen rises a luxuriant forest of oaks, cinnamon, cypress and laurel. But the beaches and shallows are full of fish and shellfish, allowing an equally primitive race, the Alakaluf, to take refuge there.

Where did these primitive men come from? Nobody knows! After crossing the deserted, stormy waters of the south Pacific, they were the first human beings to arrive in that cold oasis amid the Andean peaks formed by the sea. They are different than the other Magallanes Indians, and the Yaghans of Tierra del Fuego gave them the curious name of “men of the west with knives of shell,” which is the literal meaning of the word “Alakaluf.” The white man brought alcohol and syphilis to that virgin world, but the Indians, although now degenerate, have preserved the custom of cutting the umbilical cord of the newborn baby with a mussel shell.

Other “men of the west” in that region regress to a level lower even than animals . . . That afternoon, when the
Huamblín
dropped anchor in Malacca cove, well inside Puerto Edén, the shame of one of the crimes committed by fishermen and hunters on the unfortunate Alakaluf—swooping down on their huts like bandits, attacking the men and raping the women and girls—still seemed to float in the air.

“It isn't only the mussel fishers who do that,” one of the divers said in defense of his profession, as they discussed this incident that night aboard the
Huamblín
.

“They waited until the flight sergeant was away before they attacked the Indian women,” one of the men who had come on board from land explained. He was young, panted as he spoke, and described the attack on the women as if it were happening there and then, right in front of him. His eyes grew wider as he continued, and his gestures more gruesome.

“Who were they?” one of the men from the
Huamblín
asked.

“No one knows,” the young man replied. “We suddenly heard noises from the Indian tents during the night . . . Curses and struggling . . . Then women and girls screaming . . . But then the noise died down and everything was quiet again.”

“And where was the sergeant?”

“He'd gone to hunt otters with the young men . . . He gives them uniforms like sailors, and makes them march and raise the flag. Then he takes them out to hunt otters. He keeps all the skins, of course . . .”

“Men are alone a lot of the time around here . . .” another mussel fisher who was on the
Huamblín
as a visitor remarked. “They see the Indian women and . . . well, an ugly Indian woman is better than other things.”

“What do you mean?” Dámaso Ramírez cut in. “What the filthy bastards could get up to between themselves?”

“Worse than that . . . Once I saw a group of seal hunters tying a female seal on the shore of an island . . . to relieve themselves . . .”

“And I suppose you were one of them?”

“I was with them, yes, but I wasn't in the mood. One of them went crazy later . . . He'd wake up screaming, saying the skinned seal was pursuing him . . .”

“What do you mean, skinned?”

“The brutes skinned the seal afterwards, when she was still half alive, to sell the fur . . . But the next day, there was no sign of her on the shore. Even without her skin, she'd dragged herself to the sea . . . That was why she was pursuing the seal hunter and driving him crazy, like people who die in shipwrecks and torment those who did them wrong . . .”