Tooth and Claw

  “Mucho gusto en conocerle,” he said, and his Spanish was very good indeed, but for the North American twang and his maddening tendency to over-pronounce the consonants till you felt as if he were battering both sides of your head with a wet root. He was dressed in a fashion I can only call bizarre, all cultural differences aside, his hands gloved, his frame draped in an ankle-length London Fog trenchcoat and his disproportionately small head dwarfed by a pair of wraparound sunglasses and a deerstalker cap. His nose, cheeks and hard horny chin were nearly fluorescent with what I later learned was sunblock, applied in layers.

  “A pleasure,” I assured him, stretching the truth for the sake of politesse, after which he made his introductions to my daughter with a sort of slobbering formality, and we all went in to dinner.

  THERE WAS, as I soon discovered, to be one topic of conversation and one topic only throughout the meal—indeed, throughout the entire three days of the fiesta, whenever and wherever Mr. John Longworth was able to insinuate himself, and he seemed to have an almost supernatural ability to appear everywhere at once, as ubiquitous as a cockroach. And what was this penetrating and all-devouring topic? The sky. Or rather the hole he perceived in the sky over Magallanes, Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic, a hole that would admit all the poisons of the universe and ultimately lead to the destruction of man and nature. He talked of algae and krill, of acid rain and carbon dioxide and storms that would sweep the earth with a fury unknown since creation. I took him for an enthusiast at best, but deep down I wondered what asylum he’d escaped from and when they’d be coming to reclaim him.

  He began over the soup course, addressing the table at large as if he were standing at a podium and interrupting Don Pablo and me in a reminiscence of a salmon-fishing excursion to the Penitente River undertaken in our youth. “None of you,” he said, battering us with those consonants, “especially someone with such fair skin as Paloma here or Señora Antofagasta, should leave the house this time of year without the maximum of protection. We’re talking ultraviolet-B, radiation that increases by as much as one thousand percent over Punta Arenas in the spring because of the hole in the ozone layer.”

  Paloma, a perspicacious girl educated by the nuns in Santiago and on her way to the university in the fall, gave him a deadpan look. “But, Mr. Longworth,” she said, her voice as clear as a bell and without a trace of intimidation or awe, “if what you say is true, we’ll have to give up our string bikinis.”

  I couldn’t help myself—I laughed aloud and Don Pablo joined me. Tierra del Fuego is hardly the place for sunbathers—or bikinis either. But John Longworth didn’t seem to appreciate my daughter’s satiric intent, nor was he to be deterred. “If you were to go out there now, right outside this window, for one hour unprotected under the sun, that is, without clothing—or, er, in a bikini, I mean—I can guarantee you that your skin would blister and that those blisters could and would constitute the incipient stages of melanoma, not to mention the damage to your eyes and immune system.”

  “Such beautiful eyes,” Don Pablo observed with his customary gallantry. “And is Paloma to incarcerate them behind dark glasses, and my wife too?”

  “If you don’t want to see them go blind,” he retorted without pausing to draw breath.

  The thought, as we say, brought my kettle to a boil: who was this insufferable person with his stabbing nose and deformed head to lecture us? And on what authority? “I’m sorry, señor,” I said, “but I’ve heard some far-fetched pronouncements of doom in my time, and this one takes the cake. Millenarian hysteria is what I say it is. Proof, sir. What proof do you offer?”

  I realized immediately that I’d made a serious miscalculation. I could see it in the man’s pale leaping eyes, in the way his brow contracted and that ponderous instrument of his nose began to sniff at the air as if he were a bloodhound off after a scent. For the next hour and a half, or until I retreated to my room, begging indigestion, I was carpet-bombed with statistics, chemical analyses, papers, studies, obscure terms and obscurer texts, until all I could think was that the end of the planet would be a relief if only because it would put an end to the incessant, nagging, pontificating, consonant-battering voice of the first-class bore across the table from me.

  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…”

  I leaned out from my chair and looked down the length of the table to where Señora Whiskers, that apostate, sat with her head in the madman’s lap. “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  Paloma was watching, Isabela too; Bob Fernando Jr. and the little ones sat rigid in their chairs. “Call her to you,” he said.

  I called. And the dog, reluctant at first, came down the length of the table to her master. “Yes?” I said.

  “Do you see the way she walks, head down, sniffing her way? Haven’t you noticed her butting into the furniture, scraping the doorframes? Look into her eyes, Don Bob: she’s going blind.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I awoke to a sound I’d never before heard, a ceaseless rapid thumping, as of a huge penitential heart caught up in the rhythm of its sorrows. Isabela awoke beside me and I peered through the blinds into the courtyard that was still heavy with shadow under a rare crystalline sky. Figures moved there in the courtyard as if in a dream—my children, all of them, even Paloma—and they fought over the swollen globe of a thumping orange ball and flung it high against an orange hoop shrouded in mesh. They were shouting, crying out in a kind of naked joy that approached the ecstatic, and the trenchcoat and the nose and the shrunken bulb of the bobbing head presided over all: basketball.

  Was I disturbed? Yes. Happy for them, happy for their fluid grace and their joy, but struck deep in my bowels with the insidiousness of it: first basketball and then the scripture of doom. Indeed, they were already dressed like the man’s disciples, in hats with earmuffs and the swirling greatcoats we’d long since put away for winter, and the exposed flesh of their hands and faces glistened with his sunblock. Worse: their eyes were visored behind pairs of identical black sunglasses, Mr. John Longworth’s gift to them, along with the gift of hopelessness and terror. The sky was falling, and now they knew it too.

  I stood there dumbfounded at the window. I didn’t have the heart to break up their game or to forbid the practice of it—that would have played into his hands, that would have made me the voice of sanity and restraint (and clearly, with this basketball, sanity and restraint were about as welcome as an explosion at siesta time). Nor could I, as dueño of one of the most venerable estancias in the country, attempt to interdict my guest from speaking of certain worrisome and fantastical subjects, no matter how distasteful I found them personally. But what could I do? He was clearly deluded, if not downright dangerous, but he had the ready weight of his texts and studies to counterbalance any arguments I might make.

  The dog wasn’t blind, any fool could see that. Perhaps her eyes were a bit cloudy, but that was to be expected in a dog of her age, and what if she was losing her sight, what did that prove? I’d had any number of dogs go blind, deaf, lame and senile over the years. That was the way of dogs, and of men too. It was sad, it was regrettable, but it was part of the grand design and there was no sense in running round the barnyard crowing your head off about it. I decided in that moment to go away for a few days, to let the basketball and the novelty of Mr. John Longworth dissipate like the atmospheric gases of which he spoke so endlessly.

  “Isabela,” I said, still standing at the window, still recoiling from that subversive thump, thump, thump, “I’m thinking of going out to the upper range for a few days to look into the health of Manuel Banquedano’s flock—pack up my things for me, will you?”

  THIS WAS LAMBING SEASON, and most of the huasos were in the fields with the flocks to discourage eagle and puma alike. It is a time that never fails to move me, to strengthen my ties to the earth and its rejuvenant cycles, as it must have strengthened those ties for my father and his father before him. There were the lambs, appeared from nowhere on tottering legs, suckling and frolicking in the waste, and they were money in my pocket and the pockets of my children, they were provender and clothing, riches on the hoof. I camped with the men, roasted a haunch of lamb over the open fire, passed a bottle of aguardiente. But this time was different, this time I found myself studying the pattern of moles, pimples, warts and freckles spread across Manuel Banquedano’s face and thinking the worst, this time I gazed out over the craggy cerros and open plains and saw the gaunt flapping figure of Mr. John Longworth like some apparition out of Apocalypse. I lasted four days only, and then, like Christ trudging up the hill to the place of skulls, I came back home to my fate.

  Our guest had been busy in my absence. I’d asked Slobodan Abarca to keep an eye on him, and the first thing I did after greeting Isabela and the children was to amble out to the bunkhouse and have a private conference with the old huaso. The day was gloomy and cold, the wind in an uproar over something. I stepped in the door of the long low-frame building, the very floorboards of which gave off a complicated essence of tobacco, sweat and boot leather, and found it deserted but for the figure of Slobo
dan Abarca, bent over a chessboard by the window in the rear. I recognized the familiar sun-bleached poncho and manta, the spade-like wedge of the back of his head with its patches of parti-colored hair and oversized ears, and then he turned to me and I saw with a shock that he was wearing dark glasses. Inside. Over a chessboard. I was speechless.

  “Don Bob,” Slobodan Abarca said then in his creaking, unoiled tones, “I want to go back out on the range with the others and I don’t care how old and feeble you think I am, anything is better than this. One more day with that devil from hell and I swear I slit my throat.”

  It seemed that when John Longworth wasn’t out “taking measurements” or inspecting the teeth, eyes, pelt and tongue of every creature he could trap, coerce or pin down, he was lecturing the ranch hands, the smith and the household help on the grisly fate that awaited them. They were doomed, he told them—all of mankind was doomed and the drop of that doom was imminent—and if they valued the little time left to them they would pack up and move north, north to Puerto Montt or Concepción, anywhere away from the poisonous hole in the sky. And those spots on their hands, their throats, between their shoulderblades and caught fast in the cleavage of their breasts, those spots were cancerous or at the very least pre-cancerous. They needed a doctor, a dermatologist, an oncologist. They needed to stay out of the sun. They needed laser surgery. Sunblock. Dark glasses. (The latter he provided, out of a seemingly endless supply, and the credulous fools, believers in the voodoo of science, dutifully clamped them to their faces.) The kitchen staff was threatening a strike and Crispín Mansilla, who looks after the automobiles, had been so terrified of an open sore on his nose that he’d taken his bicycle and set out on the road for Punta Arenas two days previous and no one had heard from him since.