By three in the morning the elders had set off back to Capitán Jourdan, and there were just a few young men left at the ranch, wondering what to do, since the food and drink had run out, and the guys from the city had already turned in. The next morning Bebe tried to convince his father to return to Buenos Aires with him. Things are gradually settling down, he said; personally he was doing all right. He gave his father a book, one of the many gifts he had brought, and told him that it had been published in Spain. Now I’m known throughout Latin America, he explained. But the lawyer had no idea what his son was talking about. He asked if he was married yet, and when Bebe said no, suggested he find himself an Indian woman and come to live at Alamo Negro.
An Indian woman, Bebe repeated in a tone of voice that struck the lawyer as wistful.
Among the gifts his son had brought was a Beretta 92 pistol with two clips and a box of ammunition. The lawyer looked at the pistol in amazement. Do you honestly think I’m going to need it? he asked. You never know. You’re really on your own here, said Bebe. Later that morning they saddled up the mare for Ibarrola, who wanted to take a look at the countryside; Pereda accompanied him on José Bianco. For two hours, the publisher held forth in praise of the idyllic, unspoiled life, as he saw it, enjoyed by the inhabitants of Capitán Jourdan. When he spotted the first of the ruined houses, he broke into a gallop, but it was much further away than he had thought, and before he got there, a rabbit leaped up and bit him on the neck. The publisher’s cry vanished at once into the vast open space.
From where he was, all Pereda saw was a dark shape springing from the ground, tracing an arc toward the publisher’s head, and then disappearing. Dumb-ass Basque, he thought. He spurred José Bianco, and, approaching Ibarrola, saw that he was holding his neck with one hand and covering his face with the other. Without saying a word, Pereda removed the hand from Ibarrola’s neck. There was a bleeding scratch under his ear. Pereda asked him if he had a handkerchief. The publisher replied in the affirmative, and only then did Pereda realize that he was crying. Put the handkerchief on the wound, he said. Then he took the mare’s reins and they made their way to the ruined house. There was no one there; they didn’t dismount. As they returned to the ranch, the handkerchief that Ibarrola was holding against the wound gradually turned red. They said nothing. When they got back, Pereda ordered his gauchos to strip the publisher to the waist, and they flung him onto a table in the yard. Pereda washed the wound, which he proceeded to cauterize with a knife heated until the blade was red-hot, then made a dressing with another handkerchief, held in place with a makeshift bandage: one of his old shirts, which he soaked in eau-de-vie, what little was left, more as a ritual than a sanitary measure, but it couldn’t do any harm.
When Bebe and the two writers came back from a walk around Capitán Jourdan, they found Ibarrola still unconscious on the table, and Pereda sitting beside him in a chair, observing him intently like a medical student. Behind Pereda, equally absorbed by the sight of the wounded man, stood the ranch’s three gauchos.
The sun was beating down mercilessly in the yard. Son of a bitch! shouted one of Bebe’s friends, your dad’s gone and killed our publisher. But the publisher wasn’t dead, and made a full recovery, except for the scar, which he would later display with pride, explaining that it had been caused by the bite of a jumping snake and the subsequent cauterization; he even said he felt better than ever, although he did return to Buenos Aires that night with the writers.
From then on, there were often visitors from the city. Sometimes Bebe came on his own, with his riding clothes and his notebooks, in which he wrote vaguely melancholic stories with vaguely crime-related plots. Sometimes he would come with Buenos Aires luminaries, usually writers, but quite often a painter, which pleased Pereda, since painters, for some reason, seemed to know much more about carpentry and brick-laying than the bunch of gauchos who hung around Alamo Negro all day like a bad smell.
On one occasion Bebe came with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was blonde and had steely blue eyes and high cheekbones, like an extra from the Ring cycle. The only problem with her, according to Pereda, was that she talked a lot. One morning he invited her to go for a ride. The psychiatrist accepted. He saddled up the mare, mounted José Bianco, and they headed west. As they rode, the psychiatrist talked about her job in a Buenos Aires mental hospital. She told him (and the rabbits that surreptitiously accompanied them for parts of the way) that people were becoming more and more unbalanced — studies had proven it — which led the psychiatrist to conjecture that perhaps mental instability was not so much a disease as a stratum of normality, just below the surface of normality as it was commonly conceived. All this sounded like Chinese to Pereda, but intimidated as he was by the beauty of his son’s guest, he refrained from saying so. At midday they stopped for a lunch of rabbit jerky and wine. The wine and the meat, a dark meat that shone like alabaster when touched by light and seemed to be literally seething with protein, fuelled the psychiatrist’s poetic streak, and, as Pereda noticed out of the corner of his eye, prompted her to let her hair down.
She began quoting lines from Hernández and Lugones in a well-modulated voice. She wondered aloud where Sarmiento had gone wrong. She ran through lists of books and deeds while the horses trotted imperturbably westward, to places Pereda himself had never reached on previous excursions but was glad to visit in such fine although occasionally tiresome company. At about five in the afternoon, they spotted the shell of a ranch house on the horizon. Enthused, they spurred their mounts in that direction, but at six they were still not there, which led the psychiatrist to remark on how deceptive distances could be. When they finally arrived, five or six malnourished children came out to greet them, and a woman wearing a very wide skirt that bulged voluminously, as if there were some kind of animal under it, coiled around her legs. The children kept their eyes fixed on the psychiatrist, who adopted a maternal attitude, though not for long, since she soon noticed, as she later explained to Pereda, a malevolent intention in their gaze, a mischievous plan formulated, so she felt, in a language full of consonants, yelps, and grudges.
Pereda, who was coming to the conclusion that the psychiatrist was not entirely in her right mind, accepted the skirted woman’s hospitality, and during the meal, which they ate in a room full of old photographs, he learned that the owners of the ranch had gone off to the city a long time ago (she couldn’t say which city), and the laborers, having ceased to receive their monthly pay-packet, had gradually drifted away too. The woman also told them about a river and flooding, although Pereda had no idea where the river could be, and no one in Capitán Jourdan had mentioned any kind of flooding. Predictably, they ate rabbit stew, which their hostess had prepared with an expert hand. As they were getting ready to go, Pereda pointed out the way to Alamo Negro, his ranch, in case they ever got tired of living out there. I don’t pay much, but at least there’s company, he said seriously, as if explaining that death came after life. Then he gathered the children around him and proceeded to dispense advice. When he had finished speaking, he saw that the psychiatrist and the skirted woman had fallen asleep on their chairs. Day was about to break when they left. The light of a full moon shimmered on the plain, and from time to time they saw a rabbit jump, but Pereda paid no attention, and after a long spell of silence he softly began to sing a song in French that his late wife had liked.
The song was about a pier and mist, and faithless lovers (as all lovers are in the end, he thought indulgently), and places that remain steadfastly faithful.