On Heroes and Tombs
After a while Bucich talked to him about his childhood, about hunting pumas and guanacos and foxes and wild boar, and going on canoe trips with his father.
“My old man never gave up the idea of finding gold,” he added with a laugh. “And even though he became a settler and raised sheep, the minute he got a chance he’d go off prospecting again. In ’03 he managed to get as far as Tierra del Fuego with a Dane, Masen, and a German, Oten. They were the first white men ever to cross the Río Grande. Then they went back north to the lakes by way of Last Hope. Looking for gold all the while.”
“And did they find any?”
“What do you think? The whole thing was just a big fairy tale.”
“And what did they live on?”
“On whatever fish and game they could catch. Afterward my old man went to work for Masen on the boundary commission. And one time when he was out near Lago Viema he met one of the first settlers in those parts, an Englishman named Jac Liveli, who said to him: “Listen, Don Bucich, there’s a fine future waiting for you here, believe me. Why don’t you settle down here instead of wandering all over looking for gold? What’s gold around here is sheep-raising, and I know what I’m talking about.”
And then Bucich fell silent.
In the stillness of the freezing-cold night the hoofbeats of the retreating cavalry can be heard. Heading ever northward.
“In ’21 I was working as a day laborer in Santa Cruz, when the great general strike broke out. It was mass slaughter.”
He fell into a pensive mood again, chewing on the dead cigar. From time to time he waved to a trucker going in the opposite direction.
“It looks as though lots of people know you,” Martín remarked.
Bucich smiled with prideful modesty.
“I’ve been hauling on National 3 for more than ten years, kid. I know it better than the palms of my own hands. Three thousand kilometers from Buenos Aires to the straits. That’s life, kid.”
Gigantic cataclysms threw up the cordilleras of the northwest, and for more than 250,000 years winds blowing toward the border from the regions that lie beyond the western peaks have been carving out marvelous and mysterious cathedrals.
And the Legion (what is left of it) continues its gallop northward, with Oribe’s forces in hot pursuit. Wrapped in his cape, rotting and stinking, the general’s bloated body rides with them on his dapple gray charger.
The weather was changing. It had stopped drizzling, a strong wind was blowing from inland (Bucich said), and the cold penetrated to one’s very bones. But the sky was crystal clear now. As they went farther southwest the pampa became more and more open, the landscape began to be imposing, and the very air seemed more decent to Martín. He felt useful now too: when they had to stop to change a tire, he built the fire and brewed their maté. And so their first night came on.
Thirty-five leagues to go still. Three days’ march at full gallop, with the corpse that stinks and distills the liquids of putrefaction, with sharpshooters in the rear guard covering their retreat, comrades who perhaps have little by little been decimated, run through with lances, or had their throats slit. From Jujuy to Huacalera: twenty-four leagues. Only thirty-five leagues to go now, they tell themselves. Only four or five days’ march, with God’s help.
“I’m the kind that doesn’t like eating my meals in roadside inns, kid,” Bucich said as he parked the truck in a cleared spot along the side of the highway.
The stars shone brightly in the cruelly cold night.
“It’s my way of doing things, kid,” he explained proudly, giving the Mack a few affectionate little pats with his huge ham hands, as though it were a beloved horse. “When night falls, I stop. Except in summer, when I keep driving because it’s cool then. But that’s always dangerous: you get tired, you fall asleep, and wham! That’s what happened to big fat Villanueva, last summer near Azul. I don’t mind telling you that if I stop it’s not so much for my own sake as for the sake of the others on the road. You can imagine what could happen with a rig as big as this one. It could flatten somebody else on the road like a pancake.”
Martín started making the fire. As Bucich laid the meat on the grill he remarked:
“A nice little broiled rib steak, you’ll see. My trick is to buy when the meat’s just been butchered. Nothing from a freezing plant, kid, always remember that: it draws all the blood out. If I were the government I swear by this cross I’m wearing that I’d pass a law against frozen meat. You can take my word for it, that’s why there’s so much sickness going around nowadays.”
“But wouldn’t meat spoil in the big cities if it weren’t for freezing plants?” Martín asked.
Bucich took his cigar out of his mouth, waggled his finger back and forth in front of his face, and said:
“That’s all a bunch of lies. The whole system’s a money-making proposition. If they were to sell it straight away, nothing would happen—do you follow me? You have to buy it just as soon as it’s butchered. And how’s it going to spoil then? Can you tell me that?”
As he shifted the meat over the fire in such a way that the wind wouldn’t fan the flames and burn it, he added, as though he had been following the same train of thought:
“Take it from me, kid, people in the old days were healthier. They may not have had as many frills as people do nowadays, I’ll grant you, but they were healthier. Do you know how old my dad is?”
No, Martín didn’t know. He looked at Bucich in the firelight, smiling, squatting on his heels, with his dead cigar in his mouth, already flushed with pride at what he was about to reveal.
“He’s eighty-three. And I’d be lying if I told you he’d ever been to a doctor in his life. How about that?—can you believe it?”
Then they sat down by the fire on a couple of wooden boxes, not saying anything, waiting for the meat to get done. The sky was crystal clear, and the cold intense. Martín sat there staring thoughtfully at the flames.
Pedernera orders a halt and speaks with his comrades: the corpse is becoming more and more bloated and the stench is unbearable. It will be necessary to remove the flesh so as to be able to keep the bones and the head. Oribe will never get the head.
But who is willing to do the deed? And even more important, who is capable of doing it?
Colonel Alejandro Danel will do it.
They then take the body down off the horse and lay it on the bank of the stream; the general’s garments have been stretched so taut by the swelling flesh that it is necessary to cut them off with a knife. Then Danel kneels down and unsheathes his hunting knife. For a few moments he contemplates the grossly deformed dead body of his leader. The men who have formed a silent circle round about him also contemplate it. And then Danel sinks his knife into the flesh that has already begun to rot. The Huacalera carries several pieces of flesh downstream, as the bones gradually pile up on the cape.
Lavalle’s soul sees Danel’s tears and reflects thusly: “You are grieving for me, but you must feel grief for yourself and for the comrades who are still alive. I do not matter now. What was rotting within me you are now cutting away and the waters of this river will carry it far away; soon it will help a plant to grow, and perhaps with time it will turn into a flower, a fragrance. So you see, this should not make you sad. And what is more, in this way all that will remain of me is my bones, the only thing in us that is like unto stone and eternity. And I am comforted by the thought that you are keeping the heart. It has been such a faithful companion to me in adversity! And yes, the head too. That head that the learned doctors said was worthless. Perhaps they said that because it repelled me to ally myself with foreigners or because this long retreat seemed absurd and pointless to them, because I could not make up my mind to attack Buenos Aires when we were so close that we could see its domes; those intellectuals who did not know that in the days when I saw once again the countryside where I had ordered Dorrego executed by a firing squad the memory of him tormented me, and it torments me even more now that I have seen th
at country folk were with him and not with us, when they sang:
Cielito y cielo nublado
por la muerte de Dorrego …fn3
Yes, comrades, it was those same men of learning who made me commit a crime, because I was very young then and really believed that I was doing my country a service, and even though it hurt me terribly, because I loved Manuel, because I had always been fond of him, I signed that death sentence that has caused so much bloodshed in these eleven years. And that death was a cancer that devoured me, in exile and then after that all during this senseless campaign. You, Danel, who were with me at that moment, know very well what heartache it cost me to do what I did, how much I admired Manuel’s courage and intelligence. And Acevedo knows it too, and many other comrades who are now gazing on my mortal remains here. And you also know that it was they, the men with brains, the thinkers, who persuaded me to do it, with insidious letters, letters that they wanted me to destroy immediately. They were the ones. Not you, Danel, not you, Acevedo, not Lamadrid nor any of those of us who have nothing but an arm to take up a saber and a heart to confront death.”
(The bones have now been wrapped in the cape which was once sky blue but which today, like the spirit of these men, is little more than a filthy rag. One would be hard put to say what it represents; it is but one of those symbols of the feelings and the passions of men—sky blue, red—that in the end turn back into the immortal color of earth, that color that is both more and less than the color of dirt, for it is the color of our old age and the ultimate fate of all men, whatever their ideas. The general’s heart has already been put in a little flagon filled with brandy. And these men have put away in one or another of the pockets of their ragged garments some little memento of that body: a tiny bone, a lock of hair.)
“And you, Aparicio Sosa, who never sought to understand anything, because you were content merely to be loyal to me, to believe in what I said or did without any need for explanations, you who took care of me from the days when I was an impudent, arrogant young cadet; you, quiet Sergeant Aparicio Sosa, Sosa the black, Sosa the pock-marked, the one who saved me in Cancha Rayada, the one who possesses nothing save his love for this poor defeated general, nothing save this cruel and hapless country: I would like them to think of you.
“What I mean to say is …”
(The fugitives have now placed the bundle containing the bones in the general’s leather trunk and tied the trunk on the dapple gray charger. But they hesitate as to what to do with the flagon with the heart inside it, until finally Danel gives it to Aparicio Sosa, the one whom the death of their leader has left feeling most helpless and abandoned.)
“Yes, comrades, to Sergeant Sosa. Because that is like giving it to this land, this cruel land, soaked with the blood of so many Argentines. This valley through which Belgrano came north twenty-five years ago with his little improvised band of irregulars, a little improvised general himself, as frail as a young girl, his one strength his courage and his fervor as he confronted the seasoned Spanish forces, for a country that as yet we had no clear idea of, a country that even today we still have no really clear idea of—what it is exactly, how far it extends, who it really belongs to; whether to Rosas, to us, to all of us together, or to nobody. Yes, Sergeant Sosa: you are this land, this age-old valley, this American loneliness, this nameless despair that torments us amid this chaos, in this fight between brothers.”
(Pedernera gives the order to mount their horses. Shots, dangerously close now, can already be heard coming from the rear guard; too much time has been lost. And he says to his companions: “If luck is with us, we’ll be crossing the border four days from now.” That is to say, a distance of thirty-five leagues that can be covered in four days march at a desperate gallop. “If God is with us,” he adds.
And the fugitives disappear in a cloud of dust, as the sun beats down on the valley, while to their rear other comrades die for them.)
They ate in silence, sitting on the wooden boxes. When they were through, Bucich made maté again. And as they drank it he gazed up at the starry sky until finally he worked up his courage to make a confession he had been wanting to make for some time.
“I don’t mind telling you straight out, kid: I would have liked to be an astronomer. Why does that surprise you?”
A question he added simply because he was afraid Martín might laugh at him, since there was nothing in Martín’s face that indicated the least surprise.
Martín said no, that didn’t surprise him—why should it?
“Every night when I’m on the road, I look at the stars and say to myself: I wonder who lives in those worlds? Mainsa the German claims there are millions of people living on them, that every one of them is like the earth.”
He lit a cigar, took a deep puff on it, and sat there lost in thought. Then he went on:
“Mainsa was the one who told me that the Russians have invented some terrible things you wouldn’t believe. Here we are, quietly eating our broiled steak, and they send out some sort of ray all of a sudden, and it’s curtains for us. A death ray.”
Martín handed him his maté gourd and asked who Mainsa was.
“My brother-in-law. My sister Violeta’s husband.”
And how did he know all those things?
Bucich sipped his maté calmly, and then explained with great pride:
“He’s been a telegraph operator in Bahía Blanca for fifteen years. So he knows everything there is to know about weapons and death rays. He’s German, and that tells you everything.”
They said no more then, until finally Bucich rose to his feet and announced: “Okay, kid, it’s time to turn in,” hunted up the gin jug, took a swig, looked up at the sky, and added:
“It’s a good thing it hasn’t been raining down here. We’re going to have to do thirty kilometers over a dirt road tomorrow. What am I saying?: sixty really. Thirty up plus thirty back.”
Martín looked at him: a dirt road?
“Yes, we’re going to have to go a little bit out of our way, because I have to see a friend in Estación de la Garma. I’ve got a godchild there who’s sick, really sick. I’m taking him a little toy car.”
He searched around in the cabin of the truck, brought out a box, opened it, and showed Martín the present with a proud smile. He wound the little car up and tried to make it go on the ground.
“It doesn’t run very well on the ground, of course. But on a wooden floor or on cement it goes like a champ.”
He put it away again very carefully, as Martín looked at him dumbfounded.
They are galloping furiously toward the border, because Colonel Pedernera has said: “We must reach Bolivian soil this very night.” They can hear the shots from the rear guard behind them. And the men are wondering how many comrades and which ones of those who have been covering this seven-day headlong flight of theirs have been overtaken by Oribe’s men.
Then they cross the border in the middle of the night and they can at last tumble wearily out of the saddle and finally rest and sleep in peace. Yet it is a peace as desolate as the peace that reigns in a dead world, in a territory laid waste by catastrophe, over which there hover silent, sinister, famished vultures.
And the next morning when Pedernera gives the order to mount their horses and ride on to Potosí, the men climb into the saddle but sit there for a long time looking toward the south. All of them (Colonel Pedernera among them)—one hundred seventy-five faces, brooding, silent men, and one woman as well, looking toward the south, toward the land known as the United (United!) Provinces of the South, toward the part of the world where these men have been born, where they have left behind them their children, their wives, their mothers. Forever?
All of them look toward the south. Sergeant Aparicio Sosa too, with his little flagon containing his leader’s heart clasped tightly to his breast.
As does Lieutenant Celedonio Olmos, who joined the Legion at the age of seventeen, along with his father and his brother, who now lie dead in Quebracho Herrado,
to fight for ideas that one writes with a capital letter; words that little by little become blurred, words whose capital letters, age-old shining towers, have been gradually reduced to ruins by the ravages of time and men.
Then finally Colonel Pedernera realizes that they have looked long enough and gives the order to march. All of them pull on the reins of their mounts and turn them northward.
They ride off now in a cloud of dust, in the mineral loneliness, in that desolate region of the planet. And soon the eye can no longer make them out; they are mere dust amid dust.
Nothing remains in the valley now of that Legion, of those wretched remains of the Legion: the echo of the pounding hoofs of their mounts has died away; the clods of earth that they kicked up in their furious gallop have returned to the earth’s bosom, slowly but inexorably; Lavalle’s flesh has been borne southward by the waters of a river (to be turned into a tree, a plant, a fragrance?). All that will remain is the dim memory, growing dimmer with each passing day, of that phantom Legion. On moonlit nights—an old Indian recounts—I too have seen them. First you hear the jingle of spurs and the neighing of a horse. Then the horse appears, a very spirited one, with the general astride it, a charger as white as snow (that is how the Indian sees the general’s horse). The general is wearing a great cavalry saber and a high-crested helmet, a grenadier’s helmet. (Poor Indian, if you only knew the general was only a man in rags and tatters, with a dirty straw hat and a cape that had already forgotten the symbolic color it once was. If you only knew that that hapless mortal had neither the uniform of a grenadier nor a high-crested helmet, nor anything else! If you only knew he was simply a miserable wretch among countless other miserable wretches!)
But it is like a dream: one moment more and he suddenly disappears in the darkness of the night, crossing the river and heading for the hills to the west …
Bucich showed him where they were going to sleep in the trailer, laid out the mattresses, and wound the alarm clock, saying: “We’ll have to set it for five o’clock,” and then walked a few steps away to piss. Martín thought it his duty to piss alongside his friend.