Where the Bird Sings Best (32 page)

Shoske interrupted it: “Sister, you have to know: papa and mama are dead.”

Moisés and Sara Felicidad clung to Jashe, holding her up in their arms.

“When you left, I felt very alone, like a shadow that had lost its body. Not having anyone to follow, I felt non-existent. A short time later, César arrived looking for work. He came from Russia. He was a schoolteacher, but tired of the jokes his students made about his limp, he decided to change countries. Remember how our parents were: two complicated people fighting all their lives to be simple. They believed in good and evil spirits, in magic, in the powers of every animal, object, or plant, but because of a fear that extended to the entire Universe, they submerged themselves in ignorance. They never read a book or talked to each other. They spoke only to communicate practical things. When they had nothing to do, they were mute, one next to the other, staring at the fire or the clouds in the sky.

“César, because of his invasive character, which perhaps comes from his name, even if he’s a terrible peasant because of his leg, stayed here, taking on the task of filling our heavy idle moments with an incessant chatter. I learned everything they didn’t teach me from him. Reading, for example. Without knowing how it happened, we became engaged and soon after married. About the same time you gave birth to Sara Felicidad, I gave birth to Salvador Luna. He would have been the same age as her, but he died, strangled by the umbilical cord. We were so sad that we decided to live in Russia, in order to forget.

“We were about to leave, when my father said to me, ‘Dear Shoske, you are the only relative left to us. You’ve been an obedient, perfect daughter. Now that you’re leaving, we have nothing left to do in this life. We’ve lost interest. We need you for one final service. Your mother and I, even though we’re in good health, have decided to die. No, don’t think we’re going to commit suicide. In no way. We are going to abandon existence, that’s all. You will bury us. To live, you have to love. When you stop loving, life is over.’

“What could I say to them? They had already made their decision, and nothing or no one could have convinced them to change their minds. They had a good meal, bathed, put on their Sabbath clothes, lay down on top of the bed holding hands, looked at each other for the last time, closed their eyes, and after a long wheeze, they died. Don’t suffer for their sake, Jashe, because, just as I’m telling you, they passed from one life to the other with complete ease.

“César, back in his village, went back to giving classes in the school. The boys made fun of him again. After a few months, an agent from the Jewish Colonization Association came around and, in the name of Baron Mauricio de Hirsch, proposed that we emigrate to Argentina. They would give us passage and fertile land. They assured us that the Russian authorities, happy to get rid of its Jews, would give us passports and exit visas. Finally, we would possess a corner of the planet where we could throw down roots! The moment of the new Exodus had come. We accepted the voyage with pleasure, and here you have us, on the Promised Pampa. At least we’re back together. God knows what he’s doing.”

César Higuera, seeing the consternated faces of Moisés and Jashe, brusquely stood up, opened the window, insulted the wind that barked crossing the plain, closed the window, sat down again, angrily chewed a piece of cat meat, and, taking long swallows from the bottle, launched into a speech:

“The powerful go mad, and we poor pay the broken dreams. Baron Hirsch, for most of his life, was a Jewish aristocrat, a citizen of the world, equally comfortable in Bavaria, Belgium, France, Austria, and England. Thanks to his privileged connections, he was in no way affected by the bloody persecution we had to tolerate. He lived on the margin of our disasters until his son Lucien, thirty years old, was cut down by death.

“That the Cossacks massacred our children by the thousands had not the slightest importance. But that such a thing should happen to him, the possessor of one of the greatest fortunes in Europe, that he should lose a son—and not from a shot or a beating but from a sickness so that he died in his bed—was a disaster that all Jews, present and future, should remember! Shit! What does he know about life, real life, the one you have to earn with the sweat of your brow? What does he know about the poor multitudes of the world when he inherited from his banker father and grandfathers an immense fortune made even larger by the dowry of his wife, also the daughter of bankers?

“A man like that, immersed in international business, dealing with powerful governments, intoxicated by the heights, manages to forget the fifty-six years his compatriots have been stoned, insulted, stripped of rights. Only when he loses Lucien does the pain that invades him in torrents open his eyes: ‘Good heavens, others suffer as well!’ But vanity closes them: ‘To honor my deceased son, I will mobilize millions of dollars in order to become the new Moses. I will be the father of another immense migration. And even if Jews have not had their own land for centuries and have developed their mental faculties, this does not mean that they can’t be magnificent peasants. Their pale hands, their shriveled bodies, and their brains that navigate in the meanders of the Kabbalah are ideal for covering the soil of Argentina with vineyards and fig trees. Those lands are for sale precisely because no native dares to farm bottomless swamps, sandy stretches, and steppes invaded by scrub, where torrential rains are followed by droughts, plagues, and windstorms. I will give them a new home there as free farmers on their own land, ignorant, long-suffering, giving their lives to the land, that is, buried alive. Without creating political problems that hurt my prestige, they can become useful citizens for the nation that tolerates them. I am good, I am grandiose, I am a great benefactor; my name will shine in all Jewish encyclopedias, and my son Lucien will be applauded for centuries for his inspiring death.’

“Nonsense! Even if this place is, as its name suggests, between two rivers, like the ancient holy land, this pampa will not be ours or anyone else’s. It can’t be farmed. Given his influence among the Turks (it was he, after all, who built for our eternal enemies a railroad line through the Balkans to Constantinople, with immense financial success), it would have been better if the Baron had sent us to Palestine. That money he invested here, trying to become a prophet, could have opened the doors of Eretz Israel.”

Shoske corked the almost empty bottle and interrupted him: “Shut up, César! You’re drunk again. Stop insulting the dead. At least in his way Baron Maurice tried, mistakenly it’s true, to help us. There are others who wouldn’t give a hair off their ass for their compatriots in dire need. Enough rage. We’re not going to stay here forever. We’ll figure out a way to save, and our children, because we shall have them, will become educated—they’ll get to be doctors, engineers, architects—and will have the life a human being deserves. Now, let’s stop jabbering and go to sleep, because early tomorrow morning begins another rough day.”

That first night, Jashe, Sara Felicidad, and Moisés slept next to the kitchen on the cement. At dawn, the crowing of an army of roosters awoke them. It was colder than ever, and a torrential rain mixed with hail as big as eggs bombarded the zinc roof, transforming the house into a drum. Shoske put some wood on the fire.

“The annual hail. At midday, the rain will stop and an invasion of mosquitoes will begin. Take these strips of veil to protect yourselves. Soon you’ll get used to it. Sometimes I have my entire face covered by them, but I don’t waste time scaring them off. There will be so much mud that we won’t be able to work today. Let’s drive the cart to town. We’ll buy another bed. When night comes, we’ll put plugs of wax in our ears so we can carry out our conjugal obligations without hearing one another. But my niece will have to sleep outside. We’ve been thinking of getting her a wooden barrel, hot when it’s cold and cold when it’s hot.”

Back from the general store, they hung a curtain between the two beds and put the barrel behind the house. Moisés installed a little window in it and a door through which you’d have to crawl. Jashe covered the inside with a floral print cloth and put a straw mattress on the curved floor. Sara Felicidad entered that small space, which she saw as a palace, and the years began to run by. Years struggling against annual monsoons, droughts, parasites, floods that would destroy everything growing, windstorms that little by little blew away the topsoil, leaving enormous sand dunes. Years trying to decipher the signs that announced cold or heat, storms, fires that would burn up dried out brush. Years building low dikes to stop the advance of the sand; installing mills, tanks, reservoirs, sheds; spending almost everything they earned on maintenance; at the same time carefully rotating crops in order not to exhaust the soil.

And when they thought they’d overcome the attacks of nature and everything seemed flourishing, along would come locusts trying to eat even the last green leaf. The hungry hordes would advance in thick rows, five hundred or even a thousand yards wide and twenty or thirty yards deep, covering half a mile a day. They had to channel that voracious army using metal fences vectored toward a long ditch they’d urgently prepared, digging day and night. The jumping creatures would fall in, getting tangled up among themselves because of their long, spurred legs. They killed them by covering them up with dirt, smashing them with sacks filled with sand, or burning them with kerosene.

The smoke that the burning wings of the insects gave off had an aphrodisiac effect. Losing their reason for a moment, the two couples would also fall into the mile-long ditch and thrash about on top of the cushion of dying insects that gave off a deafening buzz announcing the end of the world. The couples would get up ashamed, their bodies covered with dead locusts, sculptures so strange that all the dogs would start howling. When, on the way, they passed by Sara Felicidad, who could not avoid seeing the epileptic tumbling and celebrated it with jubilant laughter, Jashe slapped her and ordered her into her barrel with nothing to eat until the following day.

Time passed, and their four faces were becoming wrinkled, their shoulders bowed, and their characters embittered. César and Moisés, after serious conversations, reached the conclusion that it was useless to cultivate vegetables, wheat, corn, grape vines, or fruit trees. If they wanted to emerge from poverty, they had to become cattlemen. Even though it was an almost sacred tradition to not spend it, they convinced Jashe and Shoske that they should invest the rest of the inheritance in the purchase of sheep, which were the white gold of the pampa.

Once again, they plowed the land and simultaneously planted alfalfa and rye. The rye would sprout first and, until spring, protect the alfalfa, which, weaker, would be planted between the furrows of rye. Then the fragile but perennial plant would continue for about five years, while the strong but short-lived plant would die that year. Jashe and Shoske understood the language of rye and alfalfa: they would one day be widows. That thought united them more than ever.

When the crops were growing well, the two men made a trip. They visited Río Negro, Viedma, Patagones, anywhere they might buy sheep or cattle at a decent price. By preference they went to zones where there was a drought or the grass was thin. The fifty gold coins, the three rings, and the watch enabled them to buy 1,500 thin sheep and some Lincoln rams for breeding. When they got back, they set about fattening the animals and then sold them to refrigerated meat companies for four times what they’d paid. They also retained lots of lambs. They picked up a hundred cows, almost skin and bone, and a pair of bulls, to which they quickly added sheep, lambs, capons, and young rams. They learned to work the land to fight erosion, choosing crops more and more appropriate for fattening cattle. And the business grew.

The two sisters announced they were pregnant, and eight months later they gave birth on the same day, Shoske a boy and Jashe a girl. Two dark-skinned children, Jacobo the First and Raquel the First. A year and a half later, again on the same day, they gave birth again, Shoske a boy and Jashe a girl. Another two dark-skinned children, Jacobo the Second and Raquel the Second.

During that good period, they had to employ Russian peons, perhaps the same Cossacks who’d martyred them during the pogroms. Now they were thankful, people who worked ten-hour days for a few pesos and a piece of roast meat. When the sun came up, Jashe, carrying her daughters, each one of whom was sucking on a bosom, followed by Shoske, also feeding her boys, came to Sara Felicidad’s barrel. Jashe, disgusted, observed Sara Felicidad asleep with her nose stuck in the yellow wool wig of the dancer doll.

“Wake up, woman. Yes, even though you’re young, you’ve turned into a woman because of your menstruation. The Russian peons never stop taking suspicious looks at you. One of these days you might be raped, and to make sure there are no witnesses they’ll kill all of us. That mane of blonde hair, those blue eyes, and your white skin are too attractive. Put this infusion of walnut on your hair, start wearing these dark glasses, and stop bathing so the dirt makes you as dark as us. Also, bend over when you walk, because you’re too tall, a giant like your dead father.”

My mother smiled, sang a ballad in her heart, dyed her hair, put on the glasses, bent over, stopped bathing, and only came out of her barrel at night to go to the kitchen to eat the leftovers. She knew she just didn’t fit in with the family and tried to pass unnoticed. When everyone slept, she would use some interior singing to attract frogs by the thousands. They would come out of the swamps to croak around her, following her silent melody. They opened their jaws wide, hoping that the fireflies would fall into their throats. In the darkness, those mouths filled with light looked like the stars in the firmament. The Earth disappeared for Sara Felicidad, and she felt herself floating in a space without beginning or end. Like one more star.