brave. I think it was with that story and that discussion that we reached the third week of our journey. We rested, we washed again, this time in an almost crystalline river with just a pair of herons for company. Nor did I know what a desert was, even though I realised that so much emptiness couldn’t have been the natural state of this pampa. I didn’t know that a desert was exactly that, a territory with no population, no trees, no birds, without almost any sign of life in the day except for us. I thought desert was the name of the place where nobody lived but Indians. Either way, the desert was getting more and more frightening; we started having nightmares, sometimes even in the daytime. I began writing in order to fend off these nightmares. Liz would teach me my letters and tell me what prayer to say at bedtime. I still know some. ‘Dear Lord, please send us un amigo. And save us from the quagholes’.
And if trust in our prayers wasn’t enough to send us off to sleep, Liz and I would drink a whisky, that elixir of life in Britain, water from Scotland’s water and above all, she explained to me, earth from Scotland’s earth, which turned barley into this nectar. They soaked the grain in hot water and left it till it sprouted. Then they dried it using a smoke made with tree branches, with sticks and sometimes with peat, a kind of earth made of plants that haven’t become earth yet. We could make whisky. We really could: we just had to get some grain, some oak barrels and funnels, some stills with long iron tubes. The snag is how long you have to wait: it takes whisky twelve years in the barrels before it’s ready. I liked whisky and I also liked the fact that I liked it: I wanted to be British too.
Lost in Thought, into the Muck I Sank
I told Liz, redheaded Liz – my new friend, my first ever – about it all, about the second beginning of my life, the only beginning that matters to me. The other one I don’t remember, but if I do, I forget all about it again thanks to the whisky, my new languages, the river, the voices from my house, my dog, the rain and the bees. The river devoured that past but a quaghole could have swallowed it whole. I’d heard of wagons, armies, mules, cities made of stone, silver and gold, Spanish galleons full of men armed with arquebuses, I’d heard of so many things that the mud could swallow. That’s why the Indians walked so lightly and didn’t dare put anything other than tents on the ground and didn’t use furniture other than sheepskins and animal hides, or so I thought. Anyway, we had to follow the Indian trail, so sure was Liz that her estancia lay in the direction of the Indian hordes. Inside her wagon, already our wagon by then, she had a compass and a great big map all folded up on itself: it showed the continents, seas, rivers, the mountains in brown, and the plains like my pampa in green. Not a single route marked in the direction we were heading. That was what the compass was for, to know where the North is, that icy land, the hat on top of the planet, pulling like a magnet, which is a piece of metal that attracts other pieces so much that they stick together. Not long after that, during our long spell in the desert, I learned it was called a brújula in my language. We’re like the children of Israel, Liz would say, but instead of raining down manna on us, every so often God makes cuys and armadillos appear from under our feet. They did spring from the ground, she was right, not thanks to any miracle, but because I smoked them out of their burrows. After giving them a sharp whack with a stick, and without looking into their little eyes, so like ours, I dispatched the poor things straight onto the grill. Having just found out about the spherical nature of the world, I reckoned the animals must come out of the ground because in the South, Jehovah sends us food from below, rather than making it fall from the heavens via miracles and gravity. If you really think about it, it’s even more miraculous the way our food pops out of the earth and offers itself to us, defying gravity. Though, to be fair, it didn’t actually offer itself to us. They kicked, squealed, and bit us, the little varmints, never giving themselves up or giving in.
I felt I’d lived outside everything, outside of the world that fitted snugly into the wagon along with Estreya and Liz, a world that was already becoming second nature. I learnt what a compass was, the same way I learnt to wear a petticoat and write the alphabet. A bit like learning to swim, that was my new life: thrown into deep water. Our journey too was something like sailing, following in the wake of the Indians, the same route along which the military forts had been built. Oscar the Gringo would be in one of them. So would Fierro, but whatever it took I was planning to stay in the world of the compass, which was his world, Liz’s husband’s I mean, who’d been a sailor. So was Liz in a way. Following the path of the Indian hordes, I began avoiding the quagholes like someone avoiding rocks at sea. We learnt how to find out if the Indians were close by examining the dung left by their animals. It was always dry until one fateful day, when what we wanted – and feared – happened: I stepped in a huge pile of steaming dung in my little Victorian lace-up boots and, lost in thought, into the muck I sank.
When I wasn’t chatting to Liz or playing with Estreya I was always lost in thought, living in a daydream. Up until that point my life had been absent somehow. My life hadn’t been my own, maybe that was why I was always so far away, maybe not, I don’t know. The damp smelly dung jolted me out of it. The Indians were near. Or a couple of their animals had run away. We didn’t know. I got into the wagon. I took off my dress and the petticoats and I put on the Englishman’s breeches and shirt. I put on his neckerchief and asked Liz to take the scissors and cut my hair short. My plait fell to the ground and there I was, a young lad. Good boy she said to me, then pulled my face towards her and kissed me on the mouth. It surprised me, I didn’t understand, I didn’t know you could do that and it was revealed to me so naturally: why wouldn’t you be able to do that? It’s just that back where I came from women didn’t kiss each other, though I did remember cows sometimes mounting other cows. I liked it, Liz’s imperious tongue entered my mouth, her spicy, flowery saliva tasted like curry and tea and lavender water. I would have liked it to go on longer, but when I grabbed her tight by the hair and pressed my tongue between her teeth she pushed me away.
I wasn’t sure if that kiss was a British custom or an international sin. I didn’t care, Liz loved me, that much was clear, and even if it wasn’t, there was no going back. From then on, I kept watch, I was always on my horse and stuck close to Estreya, who was also transformed. He went on the alert, becoming a guard dog in the blink of an eye, just like I’d become a boy with a shotgun. Suddenly there was a clap of thunder and I dashed into Liz’s bed for the rest of the watch.
The Morbid Light of Dead Men’s Bones
It poured with rain and the water swept away the merciful dust: all was mud and protruding bones. White bones, pearly and iridescent like a devil’s lantern, the morbid light of dead men’s bones, of mortal remains, of skeletons. Bad sign, said Liz, and I was inclined to agree. Those white bones tinged with a bluish gleam by flashes of lightning were the bones of men and women. Some were already bleached and bare as if scrubbed and polished by an army of skilled craftsmen. Others were not, and they slowly decomposed like little suppurating mounds. My Englishwoman was indignant: Savages! They should bury them. Only animals leave dead bodies lying about. She was right, only savages leave the dead unburied, to be picked at by chimangos. My people were savages, and the pampas a sickening dung heap of Indians and white men.
Tank You Señora for Cure Me
The rain stopped and we had two or three days of flat horizon, and of being pulled between the fear of being seen and the hope that we would meet others along the way. Until suddenly, against that endless backdrop of the horizon, the earth rose up like tempestuous waves in a storm. We weren’t thrown off, but I reined in hard and the sudden standstill nearly caused the wagon to spew out the half of England we were carrying. Our bodies bore the brunt, as our belongings struck us, not that we felt it, so horror-struck were we by the sight of the pampa erupting. The earth shook itself up, sweeping skywards in spirals that merged and thrust themselves towards the wagon, blinding us. The three of us and our oxen and horses stayed so still that within seconds it had engulfed us like a solid mass of dust, punctured by the unearthly cries of the few birds that live in the pampas and by Estreya barking at the brown cloud from under the feet of the oxen, who were frozen to the spot. Then, as if the birds were lightning and cattle thunder, we heard the low rumble of a stampeding herd. We shook, everything
