Tierra del Fuego (3 page)

“I think we have to stay here.”

“And do what?”

“Look for gold.”

Novak looked up. It was the first time the word “gold” had been mentioned since they had arrived, and it struck him as odd that Schaeffer had uttered it.

“Well, maybe, but in another part of the island. Popper has taken over the whole of this coast and is planning another expedition further south . . . To think that, ever since we first crossed the island together, killing Indians, I've been watching his back! And now I'm hiding out like a cornered rat, hoping he won't find me and hang me from a post!”

“We should never have gone against him,” Schaeffer said, poking the few coals still alight among the ashes. “You have to howl with the wolf, never against the wolf.”

“I howled plenty with the wolf. I commanded his army so that other men could wash his gold. Almost half a ton of gold in two years, in nuggets and dust! And in the end he said, ‘This is what I owe you for being my commander,' and threw me a few coins he'd minted himself!”

“At least they were solid gold and were worth what they weighed, not like those the governments make.”

“But who authorized him to mint his own coins and pay his men with them? And put his portrait on the postage stamps he invented? And make arbitrary laws and have a private army as if he were a real king? Who gave him that authority?”

“You did . . .” Schaeffer said, smiling sarcastically. “You liked being in command, just like when you were a sergeant. You liked putting men in uniform and hearing them call you commander. You felt like a general.”

“I did it to make the Indians respect us.”

“And after the Indians, we were next, so that we'd work for him without making demands. You helped him in that damned business because you thought he was going to give you a good cut, and then when you didn't get it, you went against him—and got me caught up in it, too. And to think he duped us with the same rag dolls you invented! . . .”

Schaeffer was referring to the colorful ruse utilized by the King of the Páramo to make his army appear much bigger than it was to the natives and the bands of men who were always prowling the Páramo in search of gold. Novak himself had manufactured a few straw dolls, dressed them in uniforms and tied them to the saddles of the horses. Then they were led in file by a single rider around the borders of his dominions, with wooden rifles over their shoulders. From a distance they looked like real cavalrymen, with the advantage that if they were shot they didn't fall . . . “Those soldiers look sick . . .” said a man who saw them from a distance and later came to work in the Páramo gold deposits. “Why are their faces all one color?”

So Popper had masks painted, with tufts of tussock grass stuck on them. Schaeffer smiled to himself bitterly, remembering the many times when, by order of the “commander,” he'd had to strap the dolls to the horses and send them trotting to make them look more alive.

What most haunted Novak's memory was that the same rag dolls he had invented had been used later to defeat his own forces during the skirmish in the Beta arroyo. Being familiar with the ruse, he had neglected his front and reinforced his rear, but, instead of the straw dolls, Julius Popper himself had approached from in front with all his men, while the dolls had appeared on his flanks. Thrown into confusion, Novak's men had retreated, and defeat had ensued.

The following day, Schaeffer saddled the horse they both used, and headed for the shore to realize his idea of making a shelter of whale ribs against the wind and rain.

As he rode toward the skeleton, the horse began to snort, suspicious of that strange white frame. Closer still, it drew up and refused to move. Schaeffer dug in his spurs, and the animal jumped to the side, almost throwing him. He dismounted, hobbled the horse, and walked up to the skeleton.

From close up, the size of the skeleton was even more impressive. The shape of the great cetacean, which must have been at least a hundred feet across, had been preserved intact. The bones of the head looked like a huge Roman chariot, the thorax like the hull of a boat, and the vertebrae of the tail like a monstrous snake buried in the sand.

Schaeffer walked for a while inside the arch of bones, stretching his arms up, calculating the dimensions of the animal, which were remarkable, even though the vertebrae were half buried in the gravel and sand. He looked at the ribs one by one, and then, coming back out from inside the skeleton, began to shake them, as a first step toward carrying out his plan. They were firmly embedded, but one of them yielded as he moved it from side to side. The motion of the sharp edges gradually made a hole in the ground. By hanging from one end, he finally managed to get the rib free. He wiped the sweat from his brow, placed the rib on the sand like a curved bench, and sat down on it. He thought he would rest a while and take the rib to where he had hobbled his horse. If he couldn't carry it over the saddle, he'd tie it to the horse and drag it to the cave. One rib one day, another rib the next day, until the shelter was done.

He looked at his leather coat, which he had taken off and thrown on the ground to work on the rib. Frayed at the edges, its brown color faded, it was more like a piece of his own skin, which, in that wasteland, had become equally discolored and cracked by the elements. “If only we could get rid of our bodies,” he thought, “and grow new ones!”

All at once, his eyes narrowed like those of a cat glimpsing a mouse's tail. He rubbed them, as if trying to wake from a vision, and getting stealthily to his feet—again like a cat—he crept closer, as if hypnotized by what he saw on his frayed ­jacket. It was black sand, apparently thrown up from the bottom of the hole when he had pulled the whalebone out.

He took it in his trembling fingers and combed through it. He couldn't believe his eyes, but his fingers told him it was true—it was iron oxide, the thin black sand typically found where there is gold. To Schaeffer, that bleak, remote area suddenly became the most beautiful, most attractive place on earth.

Stroking the black sand in the hollow of his hand, he approached the hole from which it had come. The sand and gravel had already covered it over again, and he started scrabbling at the ground with both hands, as if trying to force his way through to the center of the earth.

Reaching the bottom, his hands stopped as if they had grasped the world. With his fingers, he felt carefully below the ground, and recognized the velvety smoothness of the black sand. It was iron oxide all right, a substance so magnetic it had disoriented the compasses of the Nassau fleet, the first boats to drop anchor behind Cape Horn.

Schaeffer sank his hand in as far as it would go, until he touched the edge of the vertebra from which he had freed the rib and, using his hand like a pickax, went on extracting the evocative substance. He tipped some of it into the palm of his hand, and started moving it around religiously, as if his hand were a small pan. He meticulously examined every last grain of sand, but there was no gold, it was pure iron oxide. With lethargic gestures, as if he did not want to let even that sand escape, he half opened his fingers and let the grains run through them, to be blown away on the breeze. Around him, the area was once again desolate, the beach turned grayer, the choppy sea grew hostile, and the sky, in spite of the flashes of light through the wind-torn clouds, was like a merciless eye staring down at the scene.

But Schaeffer continued scrabbling away, now with his knife, now with his nails, like a frightened mole seeking refuge. He only stopped to wipe away the sweat, taking advantage of these moments to sift through the sand in his hand. In the end he had to admit failure, and he flung it away with a despondent cry of “Pure iron oxide!”

Midway through the afternoon, not being hungry and not even aware that noon had passed, he started moving more of the ribs, but the results were the same. Already exhausted and irritable, he tried a smaller one. The sun, still advancing between patches of clear sky and banks of cloud like the soul of man, cast light and shade over the whole area.

Tired, and with his nerves in shreds, he sat down again on a rib he had put down as a bench. He felt as weak as he had the night the bullet had gone through his leg. He looked at his leather coat, as crumpled as an old rag—exactly the way he himself felt, inside and out. But then, recovering, he again kneeled and started scrabbling, as if his life depended on it.

The great gold nugget of the sun was starting to retreat to the black sands of night when its last long rays converged on a few little points of yellow light in the palm of Schaeffer's hand. They were specks of gold, caught in his wrinkled skin when he blew away the darkness of the iron oxide!

He looked at them for a long time, until the suspiciously transparent drop still hanging from the tip of his nose became distended and fell, melting on the flakes of gold. He rubbed his eyes, no longer to stop seeing visions, but because there were tears in them. It was a long time since those eyes had wept.

The sun, as it went down, also left great nuggets of gold on the edge of the pan of the horizon—the golden cumulus that lit the ever-changing phantasmagoria of the Fuegian twilight.

But Schaeffer did not see the sunset. For him the sun was still in his hand, it was the same color, the color of the most coveted and malleable of metals.

 

Julius Popper may have invented his famous gold harvester, yoking the gold of the sea to his own ingenuity, but, out there on that remote rim of Tierra del Fuego, nature had also devised its own harvester.

It is a natural phenomenon of Tierra del Fuego that, whereas in other places the nuggets and flakes of gold are torn them from their beds of quartz and swept along by the rivers, on the Fuegian coast they are torn from the ocean bed and from the cliffs at high tide and swept along by the force of the waves.

Thanks to another phenomenon typical of the eastern edge of Tierra del Fuego, the land had risen and the sea receded, leaving the whale skeleton embedded in the middle of the beach. But before that, for how long nobody knew, the framework of bones, with its ribs and its fissures between the vertebrae, had acted as a strange kind of conduit and washer of gold.

With this unexpected find, the lives of the two men underwent an abrupt change. The first nuggets and flakes made it possible for Novak to go south to the port of Río Grande and buy tools to replace those that had been abandoned after the defeat in the Beta arroyo. He also stocked up with food and tobacco, a change from what nature provided for them, and bought a horse complete with Malvinas harness and gear for Schaeffer, which he used to transport the load.

But the breath of humanity started moving out of their hearts . . .

“According to custom, you get a third,” Schaeffer said, when, with the tools brought by Novak, they organized the work and divided up the first gold they had obtained.

“Why?” Novak asked, surprised.

“Because I found the deposit . . .”

“You call that a deposit? A few whale bones that collected the gold the sea threw up on the beach!”

“That's as may be, but it's mine. I was the one who found the skeleton, so the bones belong to me, and so does everything under the bones. You can have all the rest of the beach, and we can share the work on it, but not this. What if,” Schaeffer continued, unusually talkative, “what if tomorrow you were walking along and you came across a gold nugget, and I was walking behind you, would you share it with me? Would you?”

“It's not the same.”

“It is . . .”

Novak looked him up and down. He was more than six feet tall, and his square face, prominent chin and dark, childlike eyes gave him a sad, pensive look.

“I know what you're thinking,” Schaeffer said, with a smile that was half sly, half cruel. “‘I saved your life, and this is how you repay me!' Well, I can give it back to you if you like, how much will you pay me for it? But that's how gold is divided up.”

“Life can't be bought and sold,” Novak yelled, more in bitterness than in anger, “especially the life of a rogue like you!”

“Yes, you're right, life can't be bought and sold. But gold can.”

Novak wanted to leave then and there, and would have if his military training hadn't taught him to think before acting. You couldn't just abandon the field to the enemy like that. That would have been just what Schaeffer wanted—to have the gold all for himself! So he stayed, but the breath of humanity never came back into their hearts.

They did not spend much time together now in the cave, which Schaeffer had provided with a decent shelter from the wind and rain, using whale ribs with seal skins stretched over them, just as he had conceived it. Like two mistrustful beasts, they devoted all their energies, from morning to night, to the task of washing the gold. They would look at each other suspiciously, even when they were carrying water for their pans, and only talked to each other when they had to, beneath that sealskin awning between the rocks.

At the end of every day, they weighed the gold on a pair of scales they had made out of two small sticks, threads of guanaco fiber and two trays of dried guanaco hide, and divided it up in the proportions agreed on by Schaeffer. If occasionally the old warm breath touched the two men, this weighing and division of the gold soon blew it away.

Within a few weeks, the area had been completely dug up, the earth moved, and the bones pulled apart vertebra by vertebra. There was not a handful of sand or gravel that had not been sifted through the pans. One evening, as they finished their work, Novak said, “I'm getting out of here. There's nothing more to be had.”

“You're right,” Schaeffer said. “There's nothing more.”

They both stood there for a while, looking with surprise at all the gravel and sand they had dug up and at the heavy whale bones they had taken to pieces and moved.

“We turned over almost the entire beach!” was Schaeffer's final comment, before they walked away.