E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten
Gallardo Land of Smoke
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78227-404-9
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-404-9
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Sara Gallardo was a celebrated and prizewinning Argentinian writer, born in Buenos Aires in 1931. Her first book was published in 1958, and by the time she died in 1988, she had published novels, short stories, children's books, and essays. Written after the death of her second husband, Land of Smoke was the first of her books to be translated into English. Her novel January has just been published by Archipelago.
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Things have changed now. In those years, life wasn’t enough for us to finish off the Spaniards.
I once met a grenadier whose foot teemed with maggots; he pulled them out with a tiny stick. He’d say ‘Another one, go die,’ day in and day out. If you look at it the right way, all of us were just like him. Day in and day out the same obsession: to finish off the Spanish in America. They were the maggots that fed on liberty, and vice versa. We were the maggots eating away the empire, without mercy.
I was left for dead in a terrible place, the Andean cordillera. Very high up, some mountain range in Peru.
I’m from the pampa. The crags, the wind, the condors big as I am, the paper sky… I’m terrified of the mountain. With the regiment I could bear it. But when I opened my eyes in the silence, and found myself alone…
The condor landed on the rock and fixed its round eye on me.
‘If I stop looking, it will start,’ the idea came to me. What would start? What I’d seen so many times before: eyes gouged out, the fluttering, the greedy naked necks sinking, emerging bathed in green stuff. Amidst the feathers, the corpse seemed to move.
‘If I stop looking…’ And I did stop, for who knows how long. I had my wounds to keep me busy.
The sun, too. At that height you can’t imagine what the sun is like. The shadow either. Look for shelter and you find ice, look for warmth and you step in a bonfire. And so you die in two different ways, and the mountain stays indifferent.
Without the cordillera, without condors, without sun, without shade, I’d still have had the wounds: my broken leg, my broken arm, my broken ribs, something on the side of my face.
And the thirst. The thirst was worse than all the rest put together.
Around me were snowy peaks, hunks of raw flesh and pampas the colour of gold, false as death.
Why was I alone? A horseshoe near my foot and a cannon were my company. Not a corpse, a voice or a gun in sight. And the condor waiting.
I thought: I’m dead. The pain proved me wrong.
I came to understand that I’d fallen off a cliff, no doubt the mule’s fault. We’d always hated each other. It probably fell out of pure spite, dragging me and pieces of stone along, the cannon falling off its back along the way. It was certain it had gone on falling a long way – the horseshoe was its farewell letter – and a flurry of activity by the condors suggested it was lying further down. If I could have felt joy, I would have.
I suppose those condors served as a signal.
When I opened my eyes the light had changed. A gag choked me, my tongue. A mushroom slid past, or a turtle (I started to think I was dead again). No, it was a human figure under a leather hide, furtive, hunched over, armed. He fought the condors for what was left of the mule.
I said, ‘For the love of God…’
No voice came from me.
I yelled, ‘Brother, for the love of God.’
My next memory is darkness. I’m no longer thirsty, and am bound like a salami. A little noise: chac chac. My tinderbox. A small flame leaps up. I see a being, a gleam of bald forehead. Crouching, he starts a fire. Flames rise. Leaning over the flame, he sobs.
Daytime. The place turns out to be a cave. I’m still bound, for medicinal purposes, with furry strips of hide. Rocks close off the entrance. At certain times, I hear them moving; close my eyes, peer. The being wrapped in pale furs closes the entrance again; before looking at me he focuses on the embers, far more interesting to him than I was.
Why is it so hard for me to say ‘the man’? His emotion by the fire, his care for me were very human. His baldness suggested the blood of a white man. But something about him frightened me. More than anything, his refusal to speak.
With him I changed. Usually spontaneous, I became cunning. Usually courageous, I started to fear. Usually grateful, I was forced into resentment.
Two more memories. The days when he smoked the pieces of mule snatched from the condors, the taste of mush he fed me with. When I recovered, I found out the mush was mule meat he had chewed.
Months passed. I came to know his scowling light-blue eyes, close-set by his beaky red nose. A giant crouched before the fire. I wanted to make him talk, so I told stories, I sang, I even recited ten-line verses, but to no effect. Deaf and dumb I thought, but that wasn’t it. How many times had I startled him with the sound of my voice, making him turn his back with fury? My struggle was to make him speak, his, to remain silent. Since he couldn’t convince me, he once threw a stone at me. Small, but effective enough on my wounds. I accepted his silence. It meant renouncing friendship.
Spanish, I decided. Basque, a mountaineer. A deserter. Or someone like me, a left-over. What made me think so? His Basque appearance, his features. And a certain intuition.
I came to think my uniform was what prevented him from talking. A maggot gnawing on the empire. But up there, what did any of that mean?
It meant nothing. For me, he went against all that was human. Despite having saved me with so much effort, we were enemies. Because of that, because of the silence.
But why did he want to remain so silent?
When he wanted to sleep he disappeared into a corner. I imagined the cave formed an elbow shape; I later confirmed it.
Fear, as if all the evil of the mountain were concentrated in him, made me pretend to be weaker than I was even after I started to recover. Only when he left and all the noise ceased, except the wind and murmurs at those heights, did I have the courage to sit up.
Then I crawled, groaning, understanding that complete health was still far off, and that I had to yield to time and my host in order to escape alive.
Yield, what a word. Yielding for me had always meant talking, saying one’s name, telling things to each other.
When I could take a few steps, I saw his bedding, his treasures: the cannon, straps, remains of uniforms, weapons both patriotic and Spanish, the mule’s harness, stone tools.
I spent hours and hours alone. He went out to hunt. I understood he did so in anticipation of winter. Winter! I’d been wounded in spring, and already at that time the cold was almost unbearable in the bivouac, let alone on the marches. Winter. I clung to the cave as if it were my mother’s womb. Dying is no strange thing. But on the mountain…
Let’s jump ahead to the first snowfall.
The cave was deeply cold.
Every time he went out, I sat up. The dizziness was overwhelming, I leaned on the rock. I flexed my arms and legs. Or rather one arm and one leg. The others were stiff as a couple of stakes. I’d sworn to be stronger than them and spent hours rubbing them, forcing them to yield. They resisted, but there was progress. That progress was my fixed idea, the meaning of my days.
A difference in the light made me peek outside. I saw fresh snow. I saw footprints.
Almost round. A cubit in diameter. The toe detached, the rest blurry. Barefoot, biped footprints. To judge by the sinking of the snow, the owner’s weight was proportional.
I trembled like a hare. I imagined the monster’s sense of smell, my own weakness. I imagined my saviour outside, and me at his mercy. I was about to drag myself away in search of the sabre when the stones at the entrance moved. I backed away towards the coals, prepared to set fire to the blanket as a first defence; but as soon as I made out the hand wrapped in strips of wool, my cunning took precedence, I threw myself on the ground under the blanket, I pretended to sleep.
This time he looked closely at me before checking the fire. It’s true I wasn’t in the same place as usual, but in that weather it was natural to seek warmth. He wanted to make sure of something about me. His breathing was controlled, not agitated. He had seen the footsteps and now wanted to make sure I was sleeping. He knew about the monster. He was only concerned to know if I knew too.
He shook me. I pretended to wake up although my pulse was leaping. He pointed at my corner. I pointed at the coals. Immediately, so as not to be caught in the trap of speaking in signs, I said:
‘Starting today I’m going to sleep by the fire.’
He shook his head, the grey locks of hair on his balding crown sweeping his shoulders. He grabbed the blanket and threw it into my corner.
There followed a time that saw some changes. My legs began to work better, my arm responded. It was something he seemed to be waiting for. He started some blacksmithing work, which in the beginning I didn’t understand, using musket barrels as tongs, stones as anvils. And fire, of course. He sewed a pair of bellows out of hides before my eyes without my realising what it was for. I began to admire him.
As a slave-driver, first of all. I had noticed how people from the mountains,...
