AT THE TIME, I couldn’t foresee what was coming, though if I’d had my wits about me it would have been a different story. Then I could have made plans, could have arranged to be in Paris, Rio or Long Beach, could have been in the hospital, for that matter, having my trick knee repaired after all these years. Anything, even dental work, would have been preferable to what fell out. But before I go any further I should tell you that there are no hotels in the Magallanes region, once you leave the city, and that we have consequently developed among us a strong and enduring tradition of hospitality — no stranger, no matter how personally obnoxious or undeserving, is turned away from the door. This is open range, overflown by caracara and condor and haunted by ñandú, guanaco and puma, a waste of dwarf trees and merciless winds where the unfamiliar and the unfortunate collide in the face of the wanderer. This is to say that three weeks to the day from the conclusion of Don Pablo’s fiesta, Mr. John Longworth arrived at the Estancia Castillo in all his long-nosed splendor, and he arrived to stay.
We were all just sitting down to a supper of mutton chops and new potatoes with a relish of chiles and onions in a white sauce I myself had instructed the cook to prepare, when Slobodan Abarca, my foreman and one of the most respected huasos in the province, came to the door with the news that he’d heard a plane approaching from the east and that it sounded like Don Pablo’s Cessna. We hurried outside, all of us, even the servants, and scanned the iron slab of the sky. Don Pablo’s plane appeared as a speck on the horizon, and I was astonished at the acuity of Slobodan Abarca’s hearing, a sense he’s developed since his eyes began to go bad on him, and before we knew it the plane was passing over the house and banking for the runway. We watched the little craft fight the winds that threatened to flip it over on its back at every maneuver, and suddenly it was on the ground, leaping and ratcheting over the greening turf. Don Pablo emerged from the cockpit, the lank raw form of John Longworth uncoiling itself behind him.
I was stunned. So stunned I was barely able to croak out a greeting as the wind beat the hair about my ears and the food went cold on the table, but Bob Fernando Jr., who’d apparently struck up a friendship with the North American during the fiesta, rushed to welcome him. I embraced Don Pablo and numbly took John Longworth’s hand in my own as Isabela looked on with a serene smile and Paloma gave our guest a look that would have frozen my blood had I only suspected its meaning. “Welcome,” I said, the words rattling in my throat.
Don Pablo, my old friend, wasn’t himself, I could see that at a glance. He had the shamed and defeated look of Señora Whiskers, our black Labrador, when she does her business in the corner behind the stove instead of outside in the infinite grass. I asked him what was wrong, but he didn’t answer — or perhaps he didn’t hear, what with the wind. A few of the men helped unload Mr. John Longworth’s baggage, which was wound so tightly inside the aircraft I was amazed it had been able to get off the ground, and I took Don Pablo by the arm to escort him into the house, but he shook me off. “I can’t stay,” he said, staring at his shoes.
“Can’t stay?”
“Don Bob,” he said, and still he wouldn’t look me in the eye, “I hate to do this to you, but Teresa’s expecting me and I can’t—” He glanced up then at John Longworth, towering and skeletal in his huge flapping trenchcoat, and he repeated “I can’t” once more, and turned his back on me.
Half an hour later I sat glumly at the head of the table, the departing whine of Don Pablo’s engine humming in my ears, the desiccated remains of my reheated chops and reconstituted white sauce laid out like burnt offerings on my plate, while John Longworth addressed himself to the meal before him as if he’d spent the past three weeks lashed to a pole on the pampas. He had, I noticed, the rare ability to eat and talk at the same time, as if he were a ventriloquist, and with every bite of lamb and potatoes he tied off the strings of one breathless sentence and unleashed the next. The children were all ears as he and Bob Fernando Jr. spoke mysteriously of the sport of basketball, which my son had come to appreciate during his junior year abroad at the University of Akron, in Ohio, and even Isabela and Paloma leaned imperceptibly toward him as if to catch every precious twist and turn of his speech. This depressed me, not that I felt left out or that I wasn’t pleased on their account to have the rare guest among us as a sort of linguistic treat, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before he switched from the esoterica of an obscure and I’m sure tedious game to his one and true subject — after all, what sense was there in discussing a mere sport when the sky itself was corrupted?
I didn’t have long to wait. There was a pause just after my son had expressed his exact agreement with something John Longworth had said regarding the “three-point shot,” whatever that might be, and John Longworth took advantage of the caesura to abruptly change the subject. “I found an entire population of blind rabbits on Don Pablo’s ranch,” he said, apropos of nothing and without visibly pausing to chew or swallow.
I shifted uneasily in my chair. Serafina crept noiselessly into the room to clear away the plates and serve dessert, port wine and brandy. I could hear the wind at the panes. Paloma was the first to respond, and at the time I thought she was goading him on, but as I was to discover it was another thing altogether. “Inheritance?” she asked. “Or mutation?”
That was all the encouragement he needed, this windbag, this doomsayer, this howling bore with the pointed nose and coconut head, and the lecture it precipitated was to last through dessert, cocoa and maté in front of the fire and the first, second and third strokes of the niñitos’ bedtime. “Neither,” he said, “though if they were to survive blind through countless generations — not very likely, I’m afraid — they might well develop a genetic protection of some sort, just as the sub-Saharan Africans developed an increase of melanin in their skin to combat the sun. But, of course, we’ve so radically altered these creatures’ environment that it’s too late for that.” He paused over an enormous forkful of cheesecake. “Don Bob,” he said, looking me squarely in the eye over the clutter of the table and the dimpled faces of my little ones, “those rabbits were blinded by the sun’s radiation, though you refuse to see it, and I could just stroll up to them and pluck them up by the ears, as many as you could count in a day, and they had no more defense than a stone.”
The challenge was mine to accept, and though I’d heard rumors of blind salmon in the upper reaches of the rivers and birds blinded and game too, I wasn’t about to let him have his way at my own table in my own house. “Yes,” I observed drily, “and I suppose you’ll be prescribing smoked lenses for all the creatures of the pampas now, am I right?”
He made no answer, which surprised me. Had he finally been stumped, bested, caught in his web of intrigue and hyperbole? But no: I’d been too sanguine. Calamities never end — they just go on spinning out disaster from their own imperturbable centers. “Maybe not for the rabbits,” he said finally, “but certainly this creature here could do with a pair…”