“Hasn’t he asked you yet?”
“What?”
“Whether you want to be a merchant or a rancher. The poor man has his illusions. Didn’t he mention the small pleasures of his old age?”
“Yes.”
“That’s to set the scene. He wants you to choose.”
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can. This damned revolution will be your career.”
“And what about you?” asked Baltasar, furious, seeing her uglier than ever.
“You know the answer to that, too. Don’t play the fool. While you go to your revolution, I stay here taking care of the old man. If I don’t, who will? Someone has to.”
Baltasar felt the reproach. Sabina’s eyes that night were filled with a burning desire.
“How I’d like to go off somewhere far away, too.”
Afterward, a pause during which the two of them looked at each other like strangers. To see if they could love each other only that way: “How I wish I could be like Mother — all she knew was how to make sweets. She who spent more on candles for the church than on food for the children. How she worried about which things she was going to leave us, how many cups, tea sets, or sterling-silver platters. And not only us. She thought about the generations to come. And at the same time, how sure she was that, once she was buried here, underneath the ombu, she would come back to see what had happened to the pot of honey, the biscuit, the silver teaspoon.”
“Why don’t you leave, then?” Baltasar asked her, understanding the comparison she was making between their lives, as well as the fear that lurked behind his sister’s words.
“Our father doesn’t say it, but he’d rather give me to some creole as a mistress than see me married to a half-breed. The problem is that in all this immensity there are no creoles.”
She looked at him with disdain and a bitter coquettishness, unconsciously rubbing her thigh.
[4]
“If my friends could just see me stuck here on this ranch, they’d be happy for me and pity me at the same time,” said the old man with humor, perhaps recalling the days when he was politically active in Buenos Aires, when he felt it was necessary to defend the Spanish Crown against the English. Not even the viceroy’s ineptitude could make him change his mind; the creole regiments were defending the same thing the viceroy defended.
“I fought against English Protestants, not Spanish Catholics. That would have been like fighting against ourselves.”
During his stay, Baltasar tried to observe and understand his father’s life. A life he did not want for himself: feudal, isolated, without recognized laws, and with no authority other than that which the patriarch managed to win for himself. Unlike other landowners, José Antonio Bustos was too elegant a man to resort to theatrics and demand his patriarchal rights. He exercised them discreetly, with an admirable sense of personal honor, and, as a result, his chaotic world took note and even obeyed him. It wasn’t easy, he said one day to Baltasar, not to brag but to teach his son, it wasn’t easy to gain the respect of men whose livelihood was smoking beef, of roving town criers and horse drovers, judges and royal attorneys, scribes and court clerks, horse dealers and common criminals … For each one, he said, one had to have a good word, a bit of pity, and some reason to be feared. Without the patriarch, José Antonio Bustos suggested, they’d all devour each other. And not out of hunger, but out of satedness. That was the enigma of this land as well as its paradox.
“Is there anything this country doesn’t produce?” said José Antonio. “A man can get a return of more than twenty times the value of his labor here. There are no forests to clear, as there are in North America. You can plant twice a year. The same field yields wheat for ten years without being exhausted. The only thing you have to be careful of is planting too much in one spot. If you do, the harvest will be overly abundant. And the cattle graze on their own.”
The father paused with a smile and asked his son: “Aren’t you worried about a country like this?”
“On the contrary. You confirm all my optimism.”
“I’d be more cautious. A country where all you have to do is spit for the land to produce may turn out to be weak, sleepy, arrogant, self-satisfied, uncritical…”
What Baltasar feared was that his father, the patriarch, a power so discreet and at times so ironic, would have to make a show of strength in a dramatic, forceful, theatrical fashion to regain his authority.
The opportunity came that winter, when the news was spread by two scouts on horseback, from the country to the general store, to the workshops and the fort, that the cimarrons were back. Baltasar remembered his dream on the stagecoach. He knew that a herd of wild horses could surround a man for days, not letting him pass, or drag along post-horses, endangering the lives of passengers and drivers. This was worse, José Antonio said. What? Come see tonight.
The old man gathered a small army of his best, his fiercest gauchos. He rounded up his men, ordered them to bring in the scattered cattle, tie the animals to the fence, and then have a squad of gauchos collect the old, useless horses. They were to slaughter the nags by the ravine just beyond the front of the ranch, so the cimarrons couldn’t miss the scent of the fresh blood.
José Antonio Bustos himself, mounted on his best horse, rode out. He ordered Baltasar to ride a barely broken stallion so the gauchos would look on him with respect. The troop of gauchos followed them on their own fast horses, half with lances ready, the other half with torches, all headed for the hollow where the caranchos, the vultures of the pampa, were already circling the spot where the old horses had been slaughtered. José Antonio ordered the place to be surrounded as cautiously as possible and then had the men attack without mercy the pack of wild dogs devouring the fresh, bloodied meat. The dogs, startled and barking, blinded by the torches, their muzzles and eyes red, couldn’t recognize a master but would attack with the same ferocity with which their terrorizing packs pursued the herds. Lanced and then clubbed to death, their bodies were tossed on top of the dead horses until there wasn’t a square foot in the hollow unsullied by blood or death.
“Didn’t I tell you?” José Antonio looked at his son. “There’s too much abundance here. Meat is just left to rot on the pampa. The dogs run off because they eat better in the wild. In two years they regress two centuries. They’re a plague. This hadn’t happened for a long time here. Then they started coming closer to towns. They have lost any fear they may have had, so we have to teach them a lesson.”
He ordered everyone to move on to the nearest caves.
There, José Antonio Bustos and his men found the dog cemetery packed with bones that glinted in the night. Cow and mule bones, but also the bones of dogs who’d died there, mad, wild, gorged with food. The patriarch ordered the cave sealed with mortar.
It was a rapid, efficient expedition. Baltasar understood the pride of the gauchos, and his respect for the old patriarch was renewed. The gauchos did not look at him. What had he done? Less than his sister, whom they found, when they got back to the house, standing in the drainage ditch. She was covered with blood, along with the servants and women from the farm, all engaged in an uncertain, dim action. Baltasar saw Sabina stained with blood, a knife in her hand, cutting the throats of dogs, which she then flung back into the ditch, which was filling up with carcasses. Watching his sister wield a knife with the strength and skill of ten men, Baltasar was suddenly aware that she loved knives. With what pleasure she sank hers into the throat of a dog, burying it right to the hilt, grasping the animal’s neck between her thumb and index finger, her female fingers implacable and eager. With what delight she pulled it out and plunged it into the animal’s guts, repeating the gesture of pleasure, feared love, closeness to the enemy body, to the heat of the beast.