There is not one lone guilty man; there is no man that does not carry out, wittingly or not, the plan traced by the All-Wise. All mankind now shares in Glory.
My hand fails when I will it to write a further abomination. The initiates of the Sect, upon reaching a certain age, are mocked and crucified on the peak of a mountain, to follow the example of their masters. This criminal violation of the Fifth Commandment should be met with the severity that human and divine laws have ever demanded. May the curses of the Firmament, may the hatred of angels ...
The end of the manuscript has not been discovered.
The Night of the Gifts
It was in the old Café Águila, on Calle Florida near the intersection of Piedad,* that we heard the story.
We were debating the problem of knowledge. Someone invoked the Platonic idea that we have already seen all things in some former world, so that "knowing" is in fact "recognizing"; my father, I think it was, said that Bacon had written that if learning was remembering, then not knowing a thing was in fact having forgotten it. Another member of the group, an elderly gentleman, who was no doubt a bit lost in all that metaphysics, decided to put in his two cents' worth. He spoke with slow assurance.
I've never been able to understand that business about Platonic archetypes. Nobody remembers the first time they saw yellow or black, or the first time they tasted some fruit—most likely because they were little and had no way of knowing they were at the beginning of a long, long series. There are other first times, of course, that nobody forgets. I could tell you fellows the memory of a certain night I often cast my mind back to—April 30, of '74.
Summers were longer in the old days, but I don't know why we'd stayed till such a late date at the place that some cousins of ours owned a few leagues from Lobos—Dorna, their name was. That was the summer that one of the laborers, a fellow named Rufino, initiated me into the customs of the country life. I was about to turn thirteen; he was a good bit older, and he had a reputation for being hot-tempered. He was quite a hand with a knife; when they practiced with burned sticks, the one that invariably wound up with a black smear across his face was the other fellow. One Friday he suggested that he and I might go to town on Saturday night for some fun. I jumped at the chance, of course, though I had no very clear idea of what fun he might be referring to. I warned him I didn't know how to dance; he said dancing was easy to learn. After dinner, must have been about seven-thirty, we headed out. Rufino had spruced himself up like a fellow on his way to a party, and he was (porting a knife with a silver handle; I left my little hatpin of a knife at home, for fear of being joshed some about it. It didn't take us long to come in sight of the first houses. Have any of you fellows ever been to Lobos? Just as well; there's not a town in the provinces that's not just like all the others—even to the point of thinking it's different. The same dirt streets with the same holes ¡n them, the same squat houses—as though to make a man on horseback feel all the taller. We pulled up at this one corner in front of a house painted light blue or pink, with the name La Estrella painted on it. There were horses tied to the hitching post, with nice saddles, all of them.
The front door was open a bit, and I could see a crack of light. Off the back of the vestibule there was a long room with plank benches all along the walls and between one bench and another all these dark doorways that led who knew where. An ugly little yellow dog scurried out yapping to make us feel welcome. There were quite a few people; half a dozen women wearing flowered housecoats were wandering around. A respectable-looking woman, dressed in black from head to toe, looked to me to be the owner of the house. Rufino walked up and said hello to her, then gestured toward me.
"I've brought you a new friend," he said, "but he's not much of a rider yet."
"He'll learn, don't worry your head about it," the lady replied.
That abashed me, of course. To cover my embarrassment, or maybe to make them see I was just a boy, I sat down on the end of a bench and started playing with the dog. On the kitchen table they had lit some tallow candles stuck in bottles, and I also remember the little wood stove in one corner of the room, at the back. On the whitewashed wall in front of me was a figure of the Virgen de la Merced.
There was a good bit of joking, and somebody was strumming at a guitar—not that it did him much good. Out of sheer timidity, I didn't say no to the gin somebody offered me, which burned my mouth like red-hot coals. Among the women there was one that seemed different to me from the others. They called her the Captive. There was something kind of Indian-featured about her, but she was as pretty as a picture—that sad-eyed look, you know. Her hair was in a braid that reached all the way to her waist. Rufino saw that I was looking at her.
"Tell us that story about the Indian raid again, to freshen up our memories some," he said to her.
The way the girl talked, there mightn't have been another soul in the room, and somehow I got the feeling there was nothing else she could think about, that this was the only thing that had happened to her in her whole life. She told the story this way—
"When they brought me from Catamarca I was just a little girl. What could I know about Indian raids?
On the ranch they were so afraid of them they wouldn't even mention them. Gradually I learned about the raids, almost like they were a secret that nobody was supposed to tell—how Indians might swarm down like a thundercloud and kill people and steal the animals. Women, they carried off to the interior, and did terrible things to them. I tried as hard as I could not to believe it. Lucas, my brother, who later got speared, swore it was all lies, but when something's true, you know it the first time you hear it. The government sends them things—tobacco, mate, liquor, hierba—to keep them quiet, but they have crafty leaders—spirit men—that warn them off it. If a chief of theirs orders it, they think nothing of storming down on a fort. The forts are scattered.... From thinking about it so much, I almost wished they'd come, and I would sit and look out in the direction where the sun goes down. I never learned about keeping track of time, but I do know there came frosts and summers and branding seasons and the death of the foreman's son, and then they did come. It was like the very wind off the pampas brought them. I saw a thistle flower in a ravine and I dreamed of the Indians. The next morning it happened. Like in an earthquake, the animals knew it before we did. The whole herd was skittish, and birds were flying through the air every which way. We ran to look out in the direction I always looked in ..."
"Who brought you the warning?" somebody asked.
The girl still seemed far away. She just repeated her last words.
"We ran to look out in the direction I always looked in. It was like the whole desert had up and started moving. Through those thick rods of the wrought-iron fence we saw the dust clouds before we saw the Indians. They were on a raid. They were slapping their mouths with their hands and yelping. There were rifles in Santa Irene, but all they were good for was stunning them and making them all the madder."
The Captive's way of speaking was like a person saying a prayer, from memory; but out in the street I could hear the Indians coming across the plain, and their yelping. Then a door banged open, and they were in the room—you'd have thought they'd ridden their horses inside, into the rooms of a dream. It was a bunch of drunken brawlers from the docks. Now, in my memory's eye, they look very tall. The one in the lead gave Rufino, who was by the door, an elbow for his trouble. Rufino turned pale, said not a word, and stepped off to one side. The lady, who'd not moved from her place, stood up.