If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

  “Let me tell it from the beginning,” he said, gasping. “When you have got to Oquedal, and have said: I am Nacho, son of Don Anastasio Zamora, you will have to hear many things about me, untrue stories, lies, calumny. I want you to know...”

  “The name! My mother’s name! Quickly!”

  “Now. The moment has come for you to know....”

  No, that moment did not come. After having rambled in vain prefaces, my father’s speech was lost in a death rattle and was extinguished forever. The young man who was now riding in the darkness along the steep roads above San Ireneo was still ignorant of the origins with which he was about to be reunited.

  I had taken the road that flanks the deep chasm, high above the dry stream. The dawn, which remained suspended over the jagged edges of the forest, seemed to open to me not a new day but a day that came before all the other days, new in the sense of the time when days were still new, like the first day when men understood what a day was.

  And as the day grew bright enough for me to see the other side of the chasm, I realized that a road ran along there, too, and a man on horseback was proceeding parallel to me, in the same direction, with a long-barreled army rifle hanging over one shoulder.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “How far are we from Oquedal?”

  He didn’t even turn around; or, rather, worse than that: for an instant my voice made him move his head (otherwise I might have believed he was deaf) but he immediately returned his gaze to the road before him and went on riding without deigning me an answer or a sign of greeting.

  “Hey! I asked you a question! Are you deaf? Are you dumb?” I shouted, as he continued swaying in his saddle with the gait of his black horse.

  There was no knowing how long we had been advancing in the night, paired like this, separated by the steep chasm of the stream. What had seemed to me the irregular echo of my mare’s hoofs resounding from the rough limestone of the other bank was, in reality, the clatter of those hoofs accompanying me.

  He was a young man, all back and neck, with a tattered straw hat. Offended by his inhospitable behavior, I spurred on my mare, to leave him behind, to remove him from my sight. I had barely passed him when for some unknown reason I was inspired to turn my head toward him. He had slipped the rifle from his shoulder and was raising it to aim it at me. I immediately dropped my hand to the butt of my carbine, stuck in the saddle holster. He slung his rifle over his shoulder again as if nothing had happened. From that moment on, we proceeded at the same pace, on opposite banks, keeping an eye on each other, careful not to turn our backs. It was my mare who adjusted her gait to that of the black stallion, as if she had understood.

  The story adjusts its gait to the slow progress of the ironbound hoofs on climbing paths, toward a place that contains the secret of the past and of the future, which contains time coiled around itself like a lasso hanging from the pommel of a saddle. I already know that the long road leading me to Oquedal will be less long than the one left for me to follow once I have reached that last village at the frontier of the inhabited world, at the frontier of the time of my life.

  “I am Nacho, son of Don Anastasio Zamora,” I said to the old Indian huddled against the wall of the church. “Where is the house?”

  Perhaps he knows, I was thinking.

  The old man raised his red eyelids, gnarled as a turkey’s. One finger—a finger as thin as the twigs they use to light the fire—emerged from beneath the poncho and pointed toward the palace of the Alvarado family, the only palace in that heap of clotted mud that is the village of Oquedal: a baroque façade that seems to have happened there by mistake, like a piece of scenery in an abandoned theater. Someone many centuries ago must have believed that this was the land of gold; and when he realized his error, for the palace, barely built, began the slow destiny of ruins.

  Following the steps of a servant who has taken my horse into his keeping, I pass through a series of places that ought to be more and more interior, whereas instead I find myself more and more outside; from one courtyard I move to another courtyard, as if in this palace all the doors served only for leaving and never for entering. The story should give the sense of disorientation in places that I am seeing for the first time but also places that have left in my memory not a recollection but a void. Now the images try to reoccupy these voids but achieve nothing except to assume also the hue of dreams forgotten the instant they appear.

  In sequence, there are a courtyard where carpets are hung out for beating (I am seeking in my memory recollections of a cradle in a sumptuous dwelling), a second courtyard cluttered with sacks of alfalfa (I try to awaken recollections of an estate in my early childhood), a third courtyard with the stables opening off it (was I born among the stalls?). It ought to be broad daylight and yet the shadow that envelops the story shows no sign of brightening, it does not transmit messages that the visual imagination can complete with sharply defined figures, it does not record spoken words but only confused voices, muffled songs.

  It is in the third courtyard that the sensations begin to assume form. First the smells, the flavors, then the sight of a flame that illuminates the ageless faces of the Indians gathered in the vast kitchen of Anacleta Higueras, their smooth skin, which could be very old or adolescent: perhaps they were already old men in the time when my father was here, perhaps they are the children of his contemporaries, who now look at his son the way their fathers looked at him, as a stranger who arrived one morning with his horse and his gun.

  Against the background of the black fireplace and the flames, the tall form of a woman is outlined, wrapped in a blanket with ocher and pink stripes. Anacleta Higueras is preparing me a dish of spiced meatballs. “Eat, son, you’ve been traveling sixteen years finding your way home,” she says, and I wonder whether “son” is the appellative an older woman always uses in addressing a youth or whether instead it means what the word means. And my lips are burning from the hot spices Anacleta has used to flavor her dish, as if that flavor should contain all flavors carried to their extreme, flavors I cannot distinguish or name, which now mingle on my palate like bursts of fire. I review all the flavors I have tasted in my life to try to recognize this multiple flavor, and I arrive at an opposite but perhaps equivalent sensation which is that of the milk for an infant, since as the first flavor it contains all flavor.

  I look at Anacleta’s face, the handsome Indian countenance which age has barely thickened without carving a single wrinkle on it; I look at the vast body wrapped in the blanket, and I wonder if it was to the high terrace of her now sloping bosom that I clung as a baby.

  “You knew my father, then, Anacleta?”

  “If only I had never known him, Nacho. It was not a good day, the day when he set foot in Oquedal...”

  “Why not, Anacleta?”

  “From him nothing but evil came to the Indian people ... and good did not come to the white people, either.... Then he disappeared.... But the day when he left Oquedal was not a good day, either....”

  All the Indians have their eyes glued on me, eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

  Amaranta is the daughter of Anacleta Higueras. Her eyes are slanting, broad, her nose fine and taut at the nostrils, lips thick in a curving line. I have eyes like hers, the same nose, identical lips. “Is it true that we look alike, Amaranta and I?” I ask Anacleta.

  “All those born in Oquedal look alike. Indians and whites have faces that can be confused. We are in a village of a few families, isolated in the mountains. For centuries we have married among ourselves.”

  “My father came from outside....”

  “Yes. If we do not love foreigners we have our reasons.”

  The mouths of the Indians open in a slow sigh, mouths with few teeth and no gums, rotting and decrepit, skeletons’ mouths.

  There is a portrait I saw in passing through the second courtyard, the olive-colored photograph of a young man, surrounded by wreaths of flowers and illuminated by a little oil
lamp. “The dead man in that portrait also looks like one of the family,” I say to Anacleta.

  “That is Faustino Higueras, may God keep him in the shining glory of His archangels!” Anacleta says, and a murmur of prayers rises from among the Indians.

  “Was he your husband, Anacleta?” I ask.

  “My brother he was, the sword and the shield of our house and of our people, until the enemy crossed his path....”

  “We have the same eyes,” I say to Amaranta, overtaking her among the sacks in the second courtyard.

  “No, mine are bigger,” she says.

  “The only thing to do is to measure them.” And I move my face to her face so that the arcs of our eyebrows meet; then, pressing one of my eyebrows against hers, I move my face so our temples and cheeks and cheekbones press together. “You see? The corners of our eyes end at the same point.”

  “I can’t see anything,” Amaranta says, but she doesn’t move her face.

  “And our noses,” I say, putting my nose against hers, a bit sideways, trying to make our profiles coincide, “and our lips...” I groan, mouth closed, because now our lips are also attached, or, rather, half of my mouth and half of hers.

  “You’re hurting me,” Amaranta says as I press her whole body against the sacks and feel the tips of her budding breasts and the wriggle of her belly.

  “Swine! Animal! This is why you’ve come to Oquedal! Your father’s son, all right!” Anacleta’s voice thunders in my ears, and her hands have seized me by the hair and slam me against the columns, as Amaranta, struck by a backhand slap, moans, flung on the sacks. “You’re not touching this daughter of mine, and you will never touch her in your life!”

  “Why never in my life? What could prevent us?” I protest. “I’m a man, and she’s a woman.... If destiny decided we were to like each other, not today, someday, who knows? Why couldn’t I ask her to be my wife?”

  “Curse you!” Anacleta shouts. “It can’t be! You can’t even think of it: you understand?”

  Is she my sister, then?—I ask myself. What keeps Anacleta from admitting she’s my mother? And I say to her, “Why are you shouting so much, Anacleta? Is there perhaps some blood tie between us?”

  “Blood?” Anacleta recovers herself; the edges of the blanket rise until her eyes are covered. “Your father came from far away.... What blood tie can he have with us?”

  “But I was born in Oquedal ... of a woman from here....”

  “Go and look elsewhere for your blood ties, not among us poor Indians.... Didn’t your father tell you?”

  “He never told me anything, I swear, Anacleta. I don’t know who my mother is....”

  Anacleta raises her hand and points toward the first courtyard. “Why wouldn’t the mistress receive you? Why did she make you sleep down here with the servants? It was to her your father sent you, not to us. Go and present yourself to Dona Jazmina, say to her: I am Nacho Zamora y Alvarado, my father sent me to kneel at your feet.”

  Here the story should portray my spirit shaken as if by a hurricane at the revelation that the half of my name always hidden from me was that of the masters of Oquedal, and that estancias vast as provinces belonged to my family. Instead it is as if my journey backward in time merely coils me in a dark vortex where the successive courtyards of the Alvarado palace appear, one set in the other, equally familiar and alien to my deserted memory. The first thought that comes to my mind is the one I proclaim to Anacleta, grabbing her daughter by a braid. “Then I am your master, the master of your daughter, and I will take her when I please!”

  “No!” Anacleta shouts. “Before you touch Amaranta I’ll kill you!” And Amaranta draws away with a grimace that bares her teeth, whether in a moan or a smile I do not know.

  The dining room of the Alvarados is dimly lighted by candlesticks encrusted with the wax of years, perhaps so that the peeling stucco decorations and the tattered lace of the hangings cannot be noted. I have been invited to supper by the mistress. Doña Jazmina’s face is covered by a cake of powder that seems on the verge of coming loose and falling into the plate. She is also an Indian, under her hair, dyed a copper color and waved with a curling iron. Her heavy bracelets glitter at every spoonful. Jacinta, her daughter, was reared in a boarding school and wears a white tennis sweater but is like the Indian girls in her glances and movements.

  “In this room at that time there were gaming tables,” Doña Jazmina relates. “At this hour the games began and could even last all night. Some men lost whole estancias. Don Anastasio Zamora had settled here for the gambling, for no other reason. He always won, and the rumor had spread among us that he was a cheat.”

  “But he never won any estancia,” I feel obliged to point out.

  “Your father was the sort of man who, no matter what he had won during the night, had already lost it at dawn. And besides, with all his messes with women, it didn’t take him long to go through what little he had left.”

  “Did he have affairs in this house, affairs with women...?” I venture to ask her.

  “There, down there, in the other courtyard, he went hunting for them, at night...” Dona Jazmina says, pointing toward the Indians’ quarters.

  Jacinta bursts out laughing, hiding her mouth with her hands. I realize at this moment that she looks exactly like Amaranta, even if she is dressed and has her hair fixed in an entirely different fashion.

  “Everybody resembles everybody else, in Oquedal,” I say. “There is a portrait in the second courtyard that could be the portrait of all....”

  They look at me, a bit upset. The mother says: “That was Faustino Higueras.... By blood he was only half Indian; the other half was white. In spirit, however, he was all Indian. He was with them, he took their side ... and so he met his end.”

  “Was he white on his father’s side, or his mother’s?”

  “You ask a lot of questions....”

  “Are all the stories of Oquedal like this?” I say. “White men who go with Indian women ... Indian men with white women...”

  “Whites and Indians in Oquedal resemble one another. The blood has been mixed since the time of the Conquest. But masters should not go with servants. We can all do as we want, our class, with anyone of our own kind, but not with them ... never.... Don Anastasio was born of a landowning family, even if he was poorer than a beggar....”

  “What does my father have to do with all of this?”

  “Ask them to explain to you the song the Indians sing: After Zamora passes ... the score is even.... A baby in the cradle ... and a dead man in the grave...”

  “Did you hear what your mother said?” I say to Jacinta, as soon as we can talk by ourselves. “You and I can do anything we want.”

  “If we wanted. But we don’t want.”

  “I might want to do something.”

  “What?”

  “Bite you.”

  “As for that, I could gnaw you clean as a bone.” And she bares her teeth.

  In the room there is a bed with white sheets; it is not clear whether it is unmade or has been turned down for the night, shrouded in the thick mosquito net that hangs from a canopy. I thrust Jacinta among the folds of the gauze, and it is not clear whether she is resisting me or drawing me on; I try to pull up her clothes; she defends, herself, ripping away my buckles and buttons.

  “Oh, you have a mole there, too! Just like me! Look!”

  At that moment a hailstorm of blows rains down on my head and shoulders, and Doña Jazmina is on us like a fury. “Let go of each other, for God’s sake! Don’t do it! You can’t! Separate! You don’t know what you’re doing! You’re a scoundrel, like your father!”

  I pull myself together as best I can. “Why, Doña Jazmina? What do you mean? Who did my father do it with? With you?”

  “Lout! Go to the servants! Out of our sight! With the servant women, like your father! Go back to your mother! Go on!”

  “Who is my mother?”

  “Anacleta Higueras, even if she doesn’t want to admit
it, since Faustino died.”

  The houses of Oquedal at night huddle against the earth, as if they felt pressing on them the weight of the moon, low and shrouded in unhealthy mists.

  “What is this song they sing about my father, Anacleta?” I ask the woman standing motionless in a doorway like a statue in a niche of a church. “It mentions a dead man, a grave....”

  Anacleta takes down the lantern. Together we cross the cornfields.

  “In this field your father and Faustino Higueras had a quarrel,” Anacleta explains, “and decided that the two of them were one too many for this world, and they dug a grave together. Once they had decided they had to fight to the death, it was as if the hatred between them were spent: and they worked in harmony, digging the ditch. Then they stood there, one on one side of the ditch, one on the other, each grasping a knife in his right hand, with the left wrapped in his poncho. And one of them, in turn, would leap over the grave and attack the other with blows of the knife, and the other would defend himself with the poncho and try to make his enemy fall into the grave. They fought like that till dawn, and no dust rose any more from the ground around the grave because it was so soaked with blood. All the Indians of Oquedal formed a circle around the empty grave and around the two young men, gasping and blood-stained, and they all were silent and motionless so as not to disturb the judgment of God, on whom the entire fate of them all depended, not just that of Faustino Higueras and Nacho Zamora.”

  “But ... I am Nacho Zamora....”