One can easily imagine the elegies those pious souls dedicated to the deceased pampa-brown. Franky Amundsen stared at it, apparently immersed in a morose meditation that finally yielded this heart-rending aphorism:
— That’s the way it goes!
— Poor old hack, said Bernini, giving the corpse a kick. Its owner left it here to croak — out of sight, out of mind.
— Must have been some ignorant gringo, protested Del Solar. No criollo would abandon his cob so heartlessly.11
The entire group agreed with him. Thus encouraged, Del Solar began to curse the destiny of criollo horsedom. It had figured heroically in all the nation’s great episodes, but had now fallen into the coarse hands of city coachmen. The magnitude of its dishonour was plain to see in the noble steed they beheld before them, victim of a treacherous urbanism that was threatening to ensnare in its web all that was pure in the Argentine tradition. In his rapture, he quoted these memorable verses from a song already in the minds of the adventureres:
Dear little criollo horse,
short in stride
and long in wind.12
Del Solar concluded by taking off his hat in reverence to the fallen beast. The others followed suit, revealing just how close their hearts were to the seraphic spirit of Saint Francis. Then, as though the blood of Martín Fierro were coursing through his veins, Franky Amundsen spoke out in solidarity with his guide: treacherous urbanization notwithstanding, the virtues of the centaur still glowed in our race, for within every Argentine there was a horse in potentia, as had just been revealed by the brilliant orator who had preceeded him. Adam, with no more audience than Schultz and the night, improvised a confused elegy featuring late afternoons in Maipú, radiant dawns, and a hundred horses beating the resonant earth like a drum at high noon on days whose paradisal taste still lingered, as he put it, on the tongue of his soul.
Franky Amundsen understood that so much melancholy risked breaking the spirit of his comrades. He pulled out a flat, gleaming metal bottle, marvellously fitted to his back pocket and endowed with a capaciousness that looked promising even to the least clinical eye. One by one the expeditionaries made use and abuse of the prodigious bottle. Then, prompted by their guide, they set out once more, not without taking their leave of the dead pampa-brown with a final glance. But no sooner had they set out than Del Solar stopped short as if in alarm.
— We’re screwed! he said as he turned to his comrades.
— What is it now? asked Franky.
— We’re lost!
This unpleasant news was not well received. The heroes muttered and grunted their discontent in a distinctly unfriendly way.
— Hell of a guide! Franky griped.
— It’s because of you guys! shouted Del Solar aggressively. All your goddamned arguing put me off the trail.
The injustice of these words exacerbated the group’s discontent to the point of mutiny. The darkness rumbled with hostile voices, malevolent laughter and threats of mass desertion. But then the astrologer Schultz intervened.
— Just a minute! he cried and turned to the guide. Let’s see, now. Where did the trail start?
— Just off Colodrero Street, Del Solar answered.
— In what direction does the street go?
— Northeast, assured Pereda, who as a sterling criollista carried the map of Buenos Aires etched upon his grey matter.
— Does the trail go in the same direction as the street? insisted Schultz.
— No, replied Del Solar. It veers off to the right.
— A lot?
— I’d say about forty degrees.
— Hmm, Schultz concluded, that means the trail follows an almost perfect northerly direction. He tilted his head back and seemed to search for something in the starry vastness.
— The Southern Cross! he exclaimed at last. Its main axis runs between the stars Alpha and Gamma, and right now it is almost perpendicular to the horizon. So Gamma marks the direction we must take.
His observations concluded, Schultz set off decisively, taking over as head of the platoon without a thought for the former guide, who brooded silently over his failure. The men now marched with the confidence inspired by science, their adventurous spirit renewed. The earth stretched out wide and free beneath their feet, and the southern sky enveloped them in the scrutiny of its stars. Although they could see nothing in the dark, their ears picked up myriad sounds from the night — beating feathers, clacking coleopteran wings, rustling leaves, creaking branches, the whole set of instruments being employed by invisible entities to sculpt the hard block of silence. The men breathed the strong odour of autumnal fields, the aroma of earth heavy with seed. A rush of wind, from who knows what far-off place, suddenly lashed the faces of the heroes, prompting various conjectures as to its origin and meaning. Adam Buenosayres, who made an image out of everything,13 took it for the very breath of the pampa. Samuel Tesler scented in that wind an “enormous freshness of Flood,” alleging a sense of smell directly inherited from his forefather Noah. Del Solar, drinking the wind in great draughts, was quick to smell fragrant haystacks, autumn stubble in April fields, crumbling cowflaps, damp clover patches, and little peaches baking in smoky ovens. And though Franky cast doubt on their freakish olfactory capacity, in truth they were filled with legitimate pride at the thought of their immense Argentine homeland, naked and virgin, like a child just delivered from the Creator’s hands. Pride turned to tenderness when the poet Buenosayres, transported in dreams to the eclogues of Maipú, began to sing:
In my poor old shack
vidalitá
there is no peace
ever since he’s been gone
vidalitá
the master of my soul.14
Del Solar, in thrall to nostalgia for the north country, answered with this one:
Oh, to be a dog,
my little dove,
so as not to be able to feel,
Farewell, sweet life!
Dogs don’t take any offence,
my little dove,
they just sleep it all away,
Farewell, sweet life!15
Franky Amundsen chimed in with this sentimental ditty:
An old woman was taking a leak
(so long, I’m on my way)
underneath a wagon
(who will be her love!)
and the oxen took off running
(so long, I’m on my way)
thinking it was a rainstorm
(who will be her love!).16
But the contest would not have been complete without the voice of Luis Pereda. With fine grace, giving it his all, he threw to the winds the following verses:
From up yonder I have come /
(not a word of a lie)
stepping on the flowers
(let’s go, sweetie, under the walnut tree):
Since I’m a sensitve lad
(not a word of a lie)
I’m all worn out from love
(let’s go, sweetie, under the walnut tree).17
Unfortunately, not all the adventurers of Saavedra had surrendered to such wholesome lyricism. Among the seven there was one who shut his ears to the Muses’ call, his attention taken up by base speculations of a scientific nature. I refer to the illustrious and never-sufficiently-praised pipsqueak Bernini. This man (if such we may call five-foot-nothing of indisputably human stature) had corrected the stingy hand Nature had dealt him in terms of physique by diligent devotion since childhood to the most curious of sciences. The two heterogeneous races responsible for his gestation fought within him, so he said, the most ferocious battle. While his Anglo-Saxon side tended toward a severe pragmatism manifesting in ghastly orgies of rationalism, his Latin side, thanks to a subliminal process invariably involving liquid spirits, impelled him to frequent fits of Dionysian frenzy that amounted to so many slaps across the left cheek of the goddess Reason. With one and the same bow, the young hero played medicine, history, geography, numismatics, sociology, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Word has it that when he read the Critique of Pure Reason, he had made Kant sweat bullets by scribbling marginal notes such as “You’re talking through your hat, old man” and “Gotcha there, Mannie old boy,” among other equally trenchant objections. However, those who admired the pipsqueak’s erudition had recently been lamenting his weakness for an unholy genre of statistics whose smuttiness was incompatible with scientific decorum. As I was saying, then, Bernini, oblivious of the others’ chatter, was mentally turning over some original conceit. And it was surely no mere trifle, for the mental exertion had Bernini breathing heavily, his arms jerking forward then dropping again, heels digging into the ground — signs of agitation soon noticed by his companions.