Chaco

by M.G. Warenycia

            The straw-blonde blades of the elephantine grass drew invisible lines across Tuco’s shins and calves, only coming to his attention when a bead of sweat found them. The tall grass and the desiccated quebracho trees that huddled in clumps across the savannah hid him from the aim of the Bolivian’s Mausers, but not from the heat and the thirst that was killing him as surely as any bullet. Tuco was not the type to despair easily, though, just as he was not one for dramatic displays of joy or pride – though there were exceptions. It was perhaps a fundamental trait of his people, this passivity that endured without complaint, suffered without self-pity. To a different fragment of his heritage – forgotten to living memory – he owed another side of his character, latent, but as irrepressible once erupted…just like the faint bluish muzzle that remained no matter how closely he shaved. It was fortunate he grew up in a countryside not unlike this harsh subtropical zone, except in being marred by the hand of plough-driving man. He observed the dense lines of acacia and wild olive, grey and green amid the yellow sea, which he knew meant a shallow creek, which ran with life-giving water and which – almost as important – curled around the thicket into which the recoiling enemy had fallen back. He trod onward, hunched and stealthy, the red dust mixing paint with his sweat, contemplating succour in water and blood…

            When the Colonel pinned the badge of brilliant cloth and noble bronze upon his chest, he had given a piece of paper to Tuco that, the Captain told him, explained that his country was grateful and proud for his fearless defiance of the risk of death, leading the charge when the platoon leader was down and the battle depended on coming to grips with the enemy and driving them from their emplacements. It was true, as well, that the men of the regiment credited Tuco with this quality, so vaunted by the nation that she now fed with bread and beef, and shod with leather, her very same children who, mere months earlier, she was content to witness toiling under the meridional sun with bared backs, sand flies and chiggers gnashing their naked and stone-scuffed feet. But the officers who mentioned Tuco in despatches and the comrades who slapped his muscled back did not understand what lay beneath the surface of that visage, impassive and unchanging as Machu Picchu’s stones. They thought that Tuco was unmoved by the risk of death. In fact, he was driven by hunger for a victory that could never be found on the battlefield alone. The hunger that impelled him was as savage and monomaniac as that which drove men from hardscrabble villages in Galicia and Extremadura to throw down their last doubloon for a rapier or arquebus and passage across the unfathomed ocean to lands more idea than place, trying their hand in a game whose stakes were conquest or death. The treasures that Juan de Solis and Jeronimo Cabrera sought were yellow and glittered; those which Tuco craved were black and liquid, and red and pulsing…

            Tuco had lived in the district of San Ignacio all his life. In fact, the entirety of his experience, from birth to adulthood, had occurred within a day’s ride from the Estancia Narvaez, on which his father worked until drinking himself to death somewhere in his forties. For boys born as he was, there was never a moment of choosing a job or career. One entered life and did the things incidental to its preservation with more or less regularity. For a few tedious years, as determined by some big men in Buenos Aires, Tuco and his ilk were imprisoned for a portion of each day in a large room where they were lectured on all manner of subjects in words seldom more comprehensible than those spoken by the priest at Mass. After this, one took to living – living full-time – which occasionally required an expenditure of sweat and pain. The priest had explained that this was a kind of tax upon sins which had been gathering interest on Man for a while (though some folks seemed remarkably unconcerned about paying this tax). Some laid bricks and some dug ditches; some carried heavy loads in the manner of donkeys, but by far the most toiled in the care and processing of crops grown on the properties of men – other men; men not like them; men who had much land. Most of all, it was in the maté plantations where the eons-old exchange of sweat for bread took place. Tuco was tough and uncomplaining. He did every task well, so that whereas the other lads were allowed to sweat and earn bread for a few months out of the year, between which intervals they drank themselves to sickness and spent themselves to beggary, Tuco remained where he was, month after month, year after year.

            The estanciero, on horseback in white suit and broad-brimmed hat, watching the shirtless, shoeless men growing wealth, saw this and was pleased. Tuco soon began to receive more silver and copper each month than the men who worked beside him and, because he did not use it to buy liquor or women, he worked strong and steady when drink and sickness made those beside him grow weak-limbed and slow…which added more coffee cans full of silver to the mine under the floorboards of his room.

            At rest breaks or relaxing after work, Tuco’s colleagues – mostly young men like himself, Indians and Mestizos, plus a smattering of the European migrants who had fallen through the cracks or reprised their old-country roles – shared a few topics of conversation, adjusted and reframed but never varying in their basic substance. Prominent among these was each man’s hypothesizing what he would do with his pay; a mental analgesic for the physical sufferings of their toil. This man would save up and buy a donkey and a cart, hiring himself to transport crops, wares or fuel. Another would accumulate the capital to buy a stock of goods and rent a small shop to sell them from. And this other would hoard away cash till he could purchase a plot of land to farm on his own account, with no estancia, no padrone looking over his shoulder from his high horse. Not maté if course, nor sugar.  Perhaps tobacco or vegetables for the market; maybe a few dairy cows, a flock of chickens…No man bandied about grand visions and gilded stratagems for becoming a big proprietor or figure of renown himself. Anyone who boasted he would have a hundred hectares of land or someday own a substantial enterprise and have doctors and lawyers for sons would have been scorned as a daydreamer; as one who was paradoxically both a fool for desiring the unfeasible and a snob for outshining their own humble goals (if only in the battleground of the imagination). He must be ambitious, therefore mad. The men whose likenesses stood in greening bronze in the town square and whose names lay graven in the gateposts of lichened manors had been mad, too, of course.

            Tuco listened to these lectures as if they were fresh each day, nodding and smiling as appropriate, leaving unremarked (because he never seriously pondered it) the fact that the donkey prices, the shop capital, and the children’s educations became cachaça and dice, dead cocks and slow horses. Each month born anew, the same transformation occurred as if by an immutable law of the universe. Tuco listened, but he never commented on such tales. He remained taciturn because he did not have any of his own to share. Although he worked harder and wasted his wages less than his comrades, he had not given a moment’s thought to what he would do with the accretion; not even the most superficial speculation. His stoic heart harboured neither bitterness nor aspiration.

            As an earthquake jolting the volcano from its millennial slumber, a chancing glance of a pair of feather-lashed black eyes set his dormant heart boiling, steaming up a pressure which no force of reason or circumstance could cool or divert. There was not a week where Tuco did not attend the market, if for nothing but boredom, and there were plenty of fine distractions parading about and haggling at the stalls. The estate, however, was the real hub of the local economy, where almost everyone, man and woman, boy and girl, who was not a thoroughgoing merchant or burgher served their turn when larders ran low, dresses for quinceañeras and weddings needed purchasing, or when the paterfamilias (if he was not already on the estate) took ill or died. In every seasonal shift and harvest gang, there were always a few comely maids; an ample bosom, a sturdily shapely waist…what would spur the transient lusts of a red-blooded workman or overseer, usually traded at modest price without much expense or shame, but one never saw a truly beautiful woman; one who would not look out of place on a painter’s canvas (unless he were that type of painter who likes to depict, as ethnographic records or declarations of avant garde tastes, figures overbearingly rustic). No beauty who would be described by that adjective without qualification. Hunger as he might in his heart and work-exhausted daze, even an untraveled man like Tuco understood the deficiencies of the plebeian beauty which, while it might surpass others in moments of fatigue, darkness and rum, but which a gentleman would feel no little shame for having drunk of when daylight comes…sultry and alluring though she might be in the simple, bust-enhancing garb of a free-spirited barmaid or washerwoman, even her most sodden paramour well knew she’d ill fit the balls and soirees of the planters and rubber barons, turning squat and ungainly in dresses not drawn for her figure, clomping flat-footed in heels, a crude satire of a ‘Lady’… beauty that blooms frank and vigorous, just long enough to secure – or give the sense of securing – a modest, stolid provider, before being rapidly effaced by a life of unremitting toil. The human face and form, so said the Sage of Turin, expresses the spirit within, and in a rude and practical land will flourish rude and practical faces, hands and feet. But this, oh, this fair maid he espied…bearing a basket of plucked maté leaves cushioned upon silky tresses so black they shone blue in the late-noon sun…this was a different kind of Beauty.

            Tuco knew nothing of the myths of Greece and Rome to bestow upon her, in his mind, one of the analogistic appellations the poets favour to write up a woman’s character in three or four syllables. Nonetheless, he knew that the lithesome statue turning a glance so innocently bewitching, not five paces in front of him under the eaves of the drying-house shed, was of a different order. One sight of her rendered most of the rest of her sex crass and cheap – mere females – in comparison. There was something in this belle – who differed in no aspect of blood or clothing or colour from any other lass who laboured upon the estate – something that he could not have explained in concrete terms…something that embodied the same essential nature one perceived, instinctively, in the estate house’s Iberian colonial elegance, at once opulent and timelessly at one with the soil that bore it; in the hummingbird that feeds upon flowers, as if its beauty is nourished from theirs, floating rather than flying as ordinary birds do; or in the music that wafted on special nights out across the fields from the balconies of the great houses, sprinkling the dregs of rhythmless dreamsounds on the palm-roofed huts of the workers’ settlement.

            It unsettled him when he comprehended the sensation stirred up by the sinuous motions of her tawny arms, the nimble padding of her dust-kissed feet, unshod yet dainty and smooth, and, above all, those eyes which struck the onlooker like obsidian-tipped arrows. The sensation was like that – indescribable and of more than material origins – which was produced by the strange music which he would never admit a fondness for to his friends and drinking partners, but which drew him, unfailingly, to the doorway of his barracks room, no matter how tired his body. He could not reconcile it; for the one was a sound, never simultaneously associated with any unique sight, and the other was a visual phenomenon, very real, of course, but profoundly detached from any noise, smell or other merely concrete sensory impression. Moreover, that strange music which pulled at his soul in ways he did not understand was, he knew, a thing of the aristocratic folks – his bosses and their kin – made in and imported from across the sea in Europe; something which belonged to the rich blancos and their world, and which he had no wish to possess as his own. Tuco, after all, was not a man who coveted things which belonged to others, even when he could easily take them for himself. The angelic being in front of him was an India, with the same copper skin, black hair, almond-shaped eyes, proud cheekbones and firm but quiet jaw as he. She had been born to people like his, nourished on maize and beans, dwelling under palm-thatch roves like he – though judging by her nude soles and the many patches on her once-fashionable clothes, her household circumstances were somewhat below his own frugal but secure level. All these thoughts and a hundred more sprouting therefrom invaded and seized control of Tuco…and he did not even know her name, nor had he heard her speak a single word.

            Tuco had to hurry back to the fields and did not see the woman again that day. It was payday, and he took some of his earnings – in a move quite out of character – and splurged on as scanty a meal he could design from the menu without looking out of place, at a restaurant run by Germans which was frequented by the foremen, lower managers and the skilled workmen when they had the cash and fancied themselves able to sit alongside their social betters. The exotic black-beam-in-white-plaster architecture came with equally exotic dishes: huge joints of pork stewed without spices and cutlets coated in batter, served on mounds of vinegar-soaked cabbage, with bottles of nauseatingly sweet wine. But someone who worked in those other departments of the estate, so near but so foreign to Tuco, would surely have some threads of a story at least; some information regarding this girl who was the most beautiful to have set foot on the estancia (and that included the proprietor’s three daughters, seen regularly in carriages and at fetes in town…alas, though sheltered from sun and work, and adorned with fine silks and jewels though they were, no effort of presentation can compensate for unfortunately ordinary natural endowments)…this girl who was not only fine to look at, but something of a mystery and hence doubly alluring.

            As Tuco hoped, Rosario, the bookkeeper, and Herr Dreyse, the junior superintendent of the packing warehouse, whose granite-chinned frauline was supervisor of the girls at the sorting tables (which presumably included the object of Tuco’s desire), gave him fodder for a week of sleepless nights and wandering daydreams. Tuco found himself growing tipsy as he bought glass after glass of wine, for he had to wait through anecdotes about the latest sensational crimes, the minor celebrations around the return of Senor Narvaez’ son from his studies in Spain, and the ups and downs of agricultural commodity prices. His concentration never wavered, though, and each half-whispered factum entered his brain as a fish into a weir.

            There was a good reason why Tuco had not seen the mystery maid before, either working on the estate or at market. The girl – whose name was Ximena, Ximena de Aguirre – was of a family as poor as the one Tuco was born into, whose distinguished name was its sole attribute of note. Her father, who none but the older managers recalled (and those only as hazy impressions) had died in a barroom knife-fight when Ximena was yet an infant. The wife of the lawyer who employed Ximena’s mother as a domestic developed a fear – which none of the tellers could say was unfounded – that the recently-widowed servant harboured designs upon her prosperous husband (inevitably futile, but offensive to household peace nonetheless), and so dismissed her. Too proud to endure her peers witnessing her degraded to broiling in the fields or slaving in the packing house (no other cash employment being conceivable for an illiterate Guarani woman in such parts), and with the last few yards of her family patrimony sold off to pay her husband’s debts, Ximena’s mother took the child with her to Buenos Aires, that they might make a new life in ‘the Paris of the Americas.’ Ximena would have been about three or four then. Mother and daughter never returned to visit. Their relatives, receiving no wires of money nor parcels of presents from the city, made no effort to remain in contact (in their defence, it would have been a challenge, as there were no proper roads nor a complete telegraph or telephone system in those days).

            Herr Dreyse’s wife had become fast friends with the girl’s mother (both mother and daughter did indeed work in the packing house, though that was tentative). The veneer of metropolitan polish on the once-ambitious India, acquired in the City of Fair Winds, was sufficient for the Munich-raised Frau Dreyse, who had some education in her homeland and found herself in a backwards corner of a wild and alien land, with the added impediment of being resented by the working women (whose language she hardly spoke) and gently kept at arms’ length by the Ladies with a capital ‘L’ who were wives or sisters of the more prestigious members of the European staff. Indeed, Senora de Aguirre had been to the Dreyse household twice already for coffee and dinner. Fond the Senora was of regaling her provincial audience with dramatic and colourful anecdotes about life in the capital (Frau Dreyse hung on to every word about the utopia to the south, more accessible than the one she left across the Atlantic). As long and seemingly rambling as the Senora de Aguirre’s stores were, curiously – now that Herr Dreyse thought about it – not from any chapter or snippet of the cumulative hours of women’s chatter he’d been forced by politeness to overhear could he say or even reliably conjecture what exactly it was that mother and daughter de Aguirre did in B.A….that is, for her employment…or, for that matter, how they lived and why it was they left to return to what was plainly a harder life, devoid of the comforts and conveniences of civilization that tempted the youth of the countryside as a candle tempts restless moths. The local grapevine, intricate as it was, did not sprawl far beyond the red soil floodplain and its maté plantations, but for feeble tendrils here and there. Whatever the reason, the Estancia Narvaez and the small town symbiotic with it witnessed a sight rarer than a modern-day vision of the Virgin: an eager rural youth gone to the Big City to seek her fortune and fame (or some vague idea generally related thereto), returned, sound in mind and body, to her native soil…albeit no longer a youth and more sullen than eager.

            Naturally, such a rare spectacle incited gossip, most of it salacious or defamatory to a greater or lesser degree – though the various popular theories, however accurate they might have been, lacked substantive proof and in no way jeopardized the Senora and Senorita de Aguirre’s position at the estate or at the shabby-but-semi-respectable boarding house of Madame Schneider at edge of town, where mother and daughter shared a suite. Public opinion was not yet settled on where to place the pair. Undoubtedly, they were possessed of neither wealth nor honour, and, without any effective extended family, had no illustrious kinfolk to attach themselves to for status. On the other hand, the mother’s haughtiness was backed with enough composure, half-cooked worldliness and sheer feminine venom to be treated with some distant deference in public (whatever people said when out of range of her baleful glare), and the daughter – were it not for her ethnic features – was as polished and refined as any of the middling sort of eligible bride coming off the boats from Naples, Danzig or Cadiz.

            Throughout his lecture, Herr Dreyse cocked eyebrows and suggestively altered his inflection, although all-in-all nobody could have gleaned very much from what, beyond the bare-bone facts, was really nothing more than a little fodder for idle talk. At intervals, Dreyse had seen fit to drop odd mentions of the notable charms of the younger de Aguirre. It might have been perfectly unintentional, but Tuco couldn’t help but detect in it a sort of hinting, boisterously encouraging or disheartening according to his turn of mind at the moment.

            From that day, Tuco was like a catfish ogling a duck upon the water, entranced by whatever fatal mysteries might lurk within his prize. He daydreamed, something he had not done since he was a boy, but his work did not suffer. On the contrary, he went about his tasks with redoubled energy, especially when his gang was set in any place where the mostly female-staffed packing house workers and domestics might pass by – for he could not be sure, on account of her looks and city-smoothed charms, that Ximena would not be switched to some activity in the big house (while he fretted for the health and tender hands of her, so vivacious yet wincingly delicate, scrambling in the dry leaves, sewing bags and tacking boxes, he shuddered with foreboding at the obvious alternative). Once, he had been sent from the field to visit the bookkeeper’s office – only a few dozen yards from the house – so that he might request the urgent dispatch of some extra horses to replace an exhausted team.

            Dragging out his steps as he came in view of the house, Tuco was certain he caught sight of Ximena’s face – he convinced himself there was no more chance of mistaking it among the sallow visages of the Casa than among the coarse mugs of the labourers – and she appeared to notice him, for her eyes expanded like ink drops on tissue and her image vanished as suddenly as he had noticed it. He hung around the bookkeeper’s office for as long as he could, feigning uncertainty as to the message he was tasked with delivering, and making small talk with the clerk on duty who, while on good terms with Tuco, felt compelled to offer a drink and a call to the doctor. Tuco nursed the tumblerful of whiskey, paying attention enough to shake his sweat-beaded head whenever the clerk proffered a chair or medical attention, keeping his eyes glued to the stucco-framed windows of the house. After twenty minutes with no results, Tuco reluctantly headed back to the fields. He did not see Ximena again that day and finally gave in and stopped Dreyse as he was going home for the evening, asking if Ximena had been in the packing section that day. No, Dreyse replied with a too-placid expression; she and her mother had taken ill…nothing serious; it was the chill weather of late and overwork…and had stayed home from work.

            Tuco nodded. He scarfed a meagre supper at a tavern in the village and, uncharacteristically, took several drinks before returning to his room for sleep. The unspoken angst he felt lasted for a few days. He caught scattered glimpses of Ximena as she ducked in and out below the awnings of the packing warehouse or ate lunch with the other girls under the mimosa tree in the yard, but he never managed to find her alone. He told himself that he would surely have the courage to speak to her then. He had never lost his voice or his head in front of a woman before, although deep down he knew it might happen now.

            There was snickering among the field hands; the replacement of the female name in the lyrics of a bawdy tune with ‘Ximena.’ The bookkeeper’s clerk must have made insinuations. Or Dreyse. The other hands saw it as quite juicy that one of their own who was held (whether he himself knew it or not) as being more disciplined, stronger and harder working than the rest of them (as better, in other words, than they at the only thing they were capable of being in this life), was showing such disgraceful weakness. Most of them had several women, all of whom they might call ‘wife,’ though they would not so much as take one of them out for a fancy dinner, let alone house and provide for them (beyond a few gaudy prizes when harvest pay came in), even if they could. They boasted all the louder for the fact that the one means left them to demonstrate their manhood chronically debilitated them.

            It was the night of St. Lawrence’s day, Lawrence being the patron saint of the estate owner for some reason lost in time, on which the family would put on a feast for the village. The notable burghers and the families of neighbouring ranches and estates would dine on silver and fine china in the Casa Narvaez, accompanied by a band brought in from the city, if possible, playing facsimiles of popular European operas (though there had occasionally been Tango at the insistence of the padrone’s fashion-minded son, who the father indulged reluctantly). The workmen and their families dined outdoors, on the grounds, served by liveried staff from the estate, to the alternately sprightly and melancholy music of gaucho and Guarani. The food was plentiful and good; Senor Narvaez was a hard businessman and a harder ruler, but he was beloved as a rich and genial uncle on feast days, for the wine of his cellars – almost too decent for the throats imbibing it – flowed as blood from a gutted steer, running dry only when all livers present were well and truly saturated. Tuco staggered into an ornamental grove to relieve himself. Turning around he saw, silhouetted by the twin lights of the moon and the glowing party in the house, a figure he could have confused for no other. What few words passed between the might have been solely in his head. He did not think to ask how or from whom Ximena had learned of his intentions, nor what she thought about them. Whether she was more drunk than him, or simply wilful to the point of madness, was a question he declined to probe.

            Unlike his colleagues, Ximena knew how to keep her mouth shut. There was none of the expected whispers and tittering when he ran across Ximena’s coworkers…a fact almost beyond belief. It was no ‘fling’ or ‘escapade,’ not this time. Other than that first night, she talked a lot when they were together, so many stories, that must have been dull and familiar to her but which sounded like fairy tales to him – mind, like the originals which Perrault and the Grimms softened, they were not necessarily quaint or happy in their endings. Ximena rarely spoke about her own thoughts and feelings regarding any specific person or matter, but it was clear even to Tuco’s blatantly unworldly mind that Ximena herself was a character in many of these dramas, albeit an unmentioned one. He was quite sure, too, that she knew and wanted that he should realize this. It made him fear for her and want to protect her. Sometimes, when he was swinging his billhook at work, he would imagine himself warding off the now-purely-physical tormentors of Ximena, and would suddenly lose his balance as he hacked with absurd force at a superfluous twig or shoot

            Almost as suddenly as things had begun, Tuco came to understand that he now must move to the next stage. After several trysts of pure, amorous passion, Ximena began to show reticence; to pull away and make excuses. Ximena began to speak, with watered eyes, of propriety and her latest confessions at church. Tuco understood what this meant. He had been saving as much as possible at every paycheque, for he had known that, in the natural course of things, it must come to this mixed boon and burden. After all, Ximena was no cheap tavern whore; no simple Indio girl who might be savoured for the price of a new print dress or bangle every couple weeks. No; Ximena de Aguirre was a Lady who had to be courted as such.

            It was a week before he could even pretend to himself the courage to visit the elder Senora de Aguirre at her lodgings in town. The studied reclusiveness of the woman and the foreign graces of her daughter outweighed what comfort he might have drawn from the peeling shutters and creaking floorboards long since stripped of varnish by the footfalls of thousands of continually shifting tenants. The taciturn, crab-faced lady at the front desk led him up the shadowed, lightless stairs to the third floor apartment occupied by his love and her mother.

            Senora de Aguirre stayed half-hidden in the chiaroscuro effected by the single oil lamp on the oval, doily-draped table and the closed, age-yellowed silk curtains. The hot, golden light threw jagged shadows across her face’s prominent bones, shading the deep-set eyes in total darkness. Tuco attempted perfunctory introductions in Spanish as proper as he could manage and placed his gifts upon the table. Modest gifts, but significant given his slender paycheque and, given the Aguirre’s circumstances, they ought to have been received gratefully – Tuco kept this thought to himself. The shadowed figure said a few canned pleasantries in return, thanking him in the most formal and insincere manner possible for his presents. No offer of coffee or tea was forthcoming…in light of the address and the Spartan, out-of-style furnishings of the room, Tuco couldn’t tell if it was the embarrassed modesty of poverty, or a sign of disapproval, and he took his leave gracefully (so he felt, anyways).

            That was a Saturday, and in the following week, Tuco saw Ximena a couple times, though she was busy with work (as was he), and if he jeopardized his job for an assignation, he would have killed his biggest attraction. Ximena did not press him. On the other hand, she was frustrating in her evasiveness when he tried to question her about her mother. A daughter who, though her natural charms would give her profligate freedom in independence (for so long as a dreamy young girl’s mind can foresee, at least), nonetheless chose to remain by her mother’s side, going so far as to migrate to a sultry backwater she barely had memory of – foregoing, in the process, even the faintest fantasy of being a dancer, singer, or motion picture starlet – such a daughter would not marry without her mother’s approval, no matter how much she loved him. Indeed, the very fact she did love a man would firm her resolve, for the greater her sacrifice of her own selfish desires, the more she could relish her filial piety, assuaging whatever guilt or insecurities lurked in her lonely child’s mind.

            Tuco tried to glean tidbits from his colleagues in the fields, but they knew no more than he. He grudgingly shovelled out precious cash at the German restaurant in the hope that Dreyse or some of the diners would have some news…the regulars at Frau Schneider’s table being more in the class of people who Senora de Aguirre would want to associate herself with (though her sights were probably higher and her means lower) than common workmen, maids and market vendors. Dreyse appeared sympathetic and defrayed the cost of Tuco’s drinks, but he reluctantly conferred that he had nothing to offer, either, for the elder de Aguirre had ceased to work in the packing house, while his wife’s supervisory duties had kept her from paying calls on her friend. As for the younger de Aguirre, she was working, yes, but frequently left early, what with her mother being ill and the hiring of a nurse being out of the question.

            This puzzled Tuco. He was sure Ximena would have told him if her mother’s condition was so bad. He would have gladly offered – and secretly hoped he would be given the chance – to chip in to pay for a nurse or housekeeper, at least in the daytime, so that Ximena could work her full shift with her mind at ease. All labour was cheap in the province, but the labour of a girl or woman paid to do the things that all women knew was much cheaper than the labour of a strong young man, experienced in various kinds of specialized farm and mechanical work. And with his and Ximena’s incomes together – and everyone who knew the packing warehouse commented on what a diligent worker she was – they would survive just fine…a simple life, yes, but free from want in any of the real necessities of life. In this country, with land vast and boundless beyond the capacity of the hands tending it, a sober man with strong arms who neither gambled nor whored would never find himself without bread for his stomach and a roof over his head, despite it being the middle of a Depression.

            Thus Tuco reasoned with himself as he strolled down the street leading from the German restaurant through the market square and on down to the estate workers’ residences. The theories and plans he had constructed evaporated like rainwater on paving stones when the sun breaks through the clouds. He saw Ximena. She was going about her shopping, judging by the bags and baskets of different sorts of goods loading down her arms and shoulders. Her face, her hair, her smooth copper skin were as always, but there was guilt and shame in those obsidian eyes…feelings like he’d never seen before nor assumed her capable of. Her broad, rouged lips hung open wordless, but words would have been superfluous. It was natural, Tuco accepted, that Ximena should do the shopping for her small household, seeing as her mother was infirm and probably embarrassed by the mocking sidelong glances and over-loud whispers of the market women delighting in her newfound equality with them. It was not natural, though, that Ximena’s bag and baskets should be filled so inordinately full with fresh apples and pears, imported whitefish in tins, assorted Dutch and French cheeses, jellies and jams, crisp baguettes and other delicacies. It was natural that the nimble-fingered, keen-eyed girl should sew and mend clothing, maybe doing seamstress work in her off hours. It was manifestly out of place that she should bear under her arms not bolts of thin cotton prints, but rolls of salt-white linens, polychrome sateen and airy taffeta – such as the buttercream ensemble cascading in lacy ruffles to her ankles. Her padding, tender soles he glimpsed not, even as she curled and rolled her feet beneath her as if to hide them under her skirt – his gaze was denied by point-toed patent leather heels, decorated by useless silver buckles and so shiny he could see his defeat reflected within them. He did not ask her any questions or even look deeply into those bewitching eyes. He knew he would find only more lies.

            Dreyse, Dreyse’s wife, the overseer’s clerk…all must have known. However, much as Tuco wanted to reproach them, they couldn’t have known for very long. The young squire, Senor Narvaes, fils, as the only son of a wealthy family, had always been of a wilful, capricious nature; something Narvaez, père, had hoped a proper education in Europe might cure. Perhaps he might find a wife among some titled family in Spain, someone who would bring a restorative to the old gentry lines so long intermixing with each other – the Casa Narvaez had no need for that which money alone could buy. A few years earlier, and with a few more offspring in the line of succession, the son’s eccentricities would have received stern rebuke from the tradition-minded old man; if it wouldn’t harm his health, it was still bad form that a gentleman should prefer arepas and frijoles to beef and bread. Time and distance allow for reflection, however, and as Papa Narvaez read in the belated newspapers about the situation in the old country and searched his son’s infrequent letters for clues that he might be infected (like the rest of the university students and young dilettantes in Madrid) with the germs of godless, anarchic communism, his heart’s capacity for tolerance expanded several-fold. Love at first sight may not be the wisest policy, but no one has yet succeeded in refuting it with logic. Besides, as his wife nudged him, the sooner he got married, the less chance there was he would take off in a fit of idle heroism, like the Posada’s third boy, who had turned his mother’s hair white and sent her to the Confessional every week after he sailed to join the Republicans, shuttering churches and teaching some undoubtedly sinful thing called ‘interpretive dance’ to Andalusian peasants. And it was not the case that any of their forebears, the brave cavaliers who conquered the Andes and submitted the Pampas to the plough had taken Indian women as wives. Was not there a drop of Guarani or Mapuche blood in the noblest and most venerable families in the country – in them more than in the new arrivals? What did it matter if she were three fourths Indian, or even four fourths? Somehow her poor mother (there would be some headaches, admittedly) had managed to infuse her with all the charms and elegance of a true lady, who, once she stayed out of the sun and put on some proper clothes, would not look out of place in their grade of Society.

            Tuco had quietly left the estate as soon as he could. Fate had not been without sympathy for Tuco, and soon provided him with an opportunity to avenge his failing as a man, to forget Ximena’s treachery, or, if he could not forget, to win her back when the slick-haired fop flung her aside, as Tuco knew he would, leaving her to run to the arms of a true man, one who had proven himself as men from the dawn of history and before have done. He had not been in Paraguay six weeks before it happened that war broke out with Bolivia. He felt at home in the country he’d never visited, more at home than on the estate for, while the plantation and village Narvaez were familiar, he was cursed to ever remain a half-stranger, whereas on the farm he’d tramped out to near Encarnación, almost everyone was his own people; the people of his mother and father, who bore their features, ate their food and sung their songs in unconscious defiance of the conquerors’ will.

            Tuco cared not how it began. That some professors from America and England claimed to have found oil in the Chaco was not irrelevant to him – there would be good jobs when the fighting was through and the Bolivians driven out, especially for men like him, who had rare mechanical skills. Jobs that would pay better than working the soil – Ximena would need him to be solid and strong in every way a man could be when the cad came to scorn her. He did not hate the ‘Bolitas’; he had seen, after the first battle, that, officers aside, they were men like him. Sometimes the enemy was well-armed, with Krupp cannons and Madsen guns. In one battle, his regiment had been scattered with the Bolivians sent in great, tortoise-like vehicles running on tracks like steam excavators, whose hide was impervious to rifle and pistol bullets as the mapinguari’s. On other occasions, he and his comrades had charged enemy trenches, shocked at the lightness of their casualties, till the position had been stormed and they discovered that the enemy soldiers had only a fistful of cartridges to their state-of-the-art German-made rifles. Some of the smaller-built among the dead ‘men’ on the other side wore bushy, unkempt beards – a yank and a tug revealed tender, smooth faces that had yet to sprout a whisker of their own.

            The fighting that interspersed the stultifying boredom was rough, to be sure; the tribal vengeances that two generations prior would have been carried out with fragile bows and leathern bolos, now enacted with machine guns, grenades and armed biplanes. Had not most of them wallowed in the same barbarity a decade and some prior, the foreign observe-advisors and journalists would have chalked it up to the influence of savage heredity which had not yet time to adjust its techniques to modern tools which multiplied man’s destruction capacity a thousand-fold. By the spring, the headlines in the world’s presses were already alluding to a ‘meat grinder’ and ‘the nightmare of the trenches’ in the same breath and would soon have occasion to speak of a ‘South American Verdun’ or a ‘South American Passchendaele.’ The abysmal poverty of the two landlocked nations party to the conflict became the greatest hope for mercy, as neither could afford the bullets and shells to keep up the killing for very long, and the bankrupt states of Europe had not the cash to waste on an amusing but distant cockfight.

            General Estigarribia, commander in chief of the Paraguayan forces, knew this and so had his First Division on a forced march up the Arce-Saavedre-Alihuatá road, deep into the belly of the Chaco Humedo, so that if a ceasefire came, there would be a goodly spread of flags and markers on the sandbox map – Chile, Argentina, and the big foreign companies in Buenos Aires and Valparaiso were waiting like vultures to pounce on the victor with contracts and investments. The wily general knew, also, that the Edenic voluptuousness of the country was deceptive: the verdure covering the ground as modestly as a bridal veil hid a thin red soil that would collapse under the demands of a flock of goats, not to speak of an army of men. Not that he would have been averse to ‘foraging’ off the civilian population like a Napoleon or a Sherman; it was not so clever a strategy where the civilians were few and what passed for farms were a few hillside gardens stabbed into the charred soil with a digging stick. The aggressive strategy was a sensible way to capture some map-named points, but it was inevitable that the enemy would notice the glaring flaw in it that kept the general awake at night.

            Never having seen a map of Paraguay, Tuco did not know what it meant when panicked word spread along the line that the fort at Alihuatá had fallen, except that the great serpent of men and trucks turned round and marched double-quick, and that the number of biscuits and bully beef tins handed out each day grew smaller and the water trucks no longer filled their canteens quite full. On their retreat, hamlets where they’d bivouacked were charred and empty, the men in ditches, the women in the forests or on their way to hunger and the brothel in some large town No panpipes or melancholy songs perforated the leaden, humid night air; only the snarling of carrion-fed pie dogs and the screeches of predatory nightbirds.

            After setting camp for the night in the bed of a dry ravine (so their fires would not show to the artillery arrayed across the plain), Tuco was called, drowsy with sleep and the extra rations of a fever-felled comrade, into the Colonel’s tent. He was to be promoted to sergeant, in command of fifteen men, for an assault the next day, where he would be in the first wave. The ribbons pinned to his shirt shone to him only because he imagined they would shine for the eyes of another. The enemy was here? Tuco could not help asking. No, his superior replied; but they would be coming, advancing across the plain – his subalterns learned this listening to the radio. Tuco wondered how men fighting war could be so foolish as to talk their plans on a radio. Mortal fear overrode the thin shell of discipline formed in a couple weeks’ training, though, and Tuco asked how they meant to fight the Bolivians in the open ground again, for his brother soldiers and the radio had told him of how the Bolivians massacred the Paraguayans at Alihuatá and Campo Jordán, largely through employing those metal cars with caterpillar tracks, into which they had put some of their machine guns. No bullet could pierce their hides, and if men tried to approach close enough to throw grenades at them, they would be cut down by the machine guns or the Bolivian infantrymen around them. Was it not safer to retreat to a town, where they could shelter behind walls of stone and adobe, and so give themselves a fair chance? He had seen how one third of the men of his regiment were no longer with them, and the Bolivians had so many more soldiers, no matter what they did; more men, perhaps, he fretted, than they had bullets. The Colonel rose up, laughing and smiling down at Tuco, clapping a hand on his shoulder as one is wont to do in explaining some fact to an earnest but naïve child. Tables had turned, or would be shortly, the Colonel said, fondling his moustache. They would have help now: Argentina, uncomfortable at seeing the fighting spilling out to its own borders (and eager for its share of the wealth of The Hunting Land) had decided to send money and weapons to their side, to help them fend off the Bolivians so numerous. They were sending men, too; volunteers – the 7^th Cavalry Regiment San Martin – with many rich men among them, some of whom were bringing great big rifles that folks used in far off places to hunt huge beasts called elephants; rifles which could put a bullet clean through the Bolivians’ metal monsters. The next day, when the Bolivians came rolling across the plain, they would await them at the ravine’s edge, in ditches and behind trees and boulders, kill their armoured cars, stop the advance, and then sweep over them like a brush fire. The Colonel clapped his hands and gulped a glass of brandy in premature celebration.

            It sounded fanciful, but the fanciful does not trouble the minds of men who have long lived outside the grey City, where people have grown trusting of the rules and textbooks by which humanity assumes the authority to dictate the conduct of the universe. He fell into sleep as easily on the eve of the great battle as a babe in the crib. Upon waking, there was, nonetheless, a strange residue of an unremembered dream. He recalled no unsettling sights, and there could not have been any nocturnal visions of disaster as would have waked him in a cold sweat. Still, he did not like that the feeling persisted through coffee and breakfast, no matter that the dawn arrived, revealing the landscape as obtusely bright and physical as he’d known it those past few months. And yet the curious sense of an impending something weighed on his nerves and made his fingers shake in lacing his boots and fumble twice as he loaded his rifle.

            The battle opened; it was as if the sky were covered by a sheet of invisible zinc drumming with a monsoon rain. But for the noise in the sky and the rumbling that came up through his feet and knees into his throat, the world was images and smells; ears were a superfluous annoyance. Events unfolded precisely as the Colonel had laid out. Onward came the men and boys of the enemy, the terror they must have felt being calmed by the olive-painted beasts crawling forward among them.

            The ivory trunks of the yatay palms, ramrod straight and arranged checkerboard fashion, flickered light and dark as the advancing army crossed in front of them. A minute more, and the Vickers tankettes emerged into open ground and Tuco lost count of the khaki-clad infantry swarming beside and behind them. Looking down his own side’s trenches from where he hunkered in a shallow gut, Tuco observed the allies the Colonel had spoken of with such enthusiasm – the Argentine volunteers of the 7^th Regiment San Martin, disappointingly unmounted, waiting behind hastily constructed mud and log parapets on the right flank. It was easy to recognize them, even at a distance, by their crisp uniforms tailored like gentlemen’s suits, flared trousers and pale complexions. The second Tuco looked back at the advancing Bolivians, the volunteers’ anti-tank rifles boomed like a summer thunderstorm echoing across the plain, and the rifles and machine guns rattled and burped into action. Most of the tankettes stopped in their tracks, as if on order. Ten or fifteen seconds later, smoke and fire licked out from their hatches and seams, the crew occasionally following, before the vehicles flared up like piles of dry tinder.

            Despite the focusing influence of battle, Tuco found his attention inadvertently wandering over to his allies on the right, rather than the foe ahead of him. It was the sensation when one is in a crowd, or a place rich in nostalgia, when one instinctively expects to run into an old friend.

            From an unseen dugout down the line came a cascading relay of whistle blasts. Tuco checked his rifle, slapped his waist to feel the grenades hooked to his belt, and shouted cheers to his squad. Up over the embankment they charged, hunching low and ploughing headlong through the chest-high grass and thorn-scrub. He was blind until he burst into the clearing beneath the towering palms. A quarter of his squad did not come out of the grass, but the enemy had suffered worse. Lines of blue shadow and golden rays painted heaps of still and quivering bodies, mown like so much hay by the accurate rifle fire of the volunteers. A few tankettes were smouldering; the survivors running headlong to positions along a farther line of forest, situated at the base of a small mesa a couple hundred yards away, from which an emplaced skirmish line was taking potshots to cover their comrades’ retreat.

             Passing noon, the sun compelled Tuco and his men to drain their canteens. The narrow-crowned yatays provided almost no shade, though their fat, hard trunks and the bushes around them would do against the Bolivians’ bullets. Tuco looked with disgust to see the Argentines from their right flank just now slowly marching up, taking positions well back of the edge of the yatay grove. A runner was arriving from the rear, though Tuco guessed his message before he arrived and breathlessly poured out the report that the Bolivians were dug in in the next wood (so said the aircraft observers…though what could they know of the strength of an infantry position from in the sky?), which rose up in that direction. It was open ground in front; the Colonel did not want a frontal assault. There was a stream, though, in a shallow gully which curved around the left of the Bolivian position (Tuco could tell this from the vegetation; no need for an aeroplane). Tuco’s squad would go with Lieutenant Haber’s company through the ravine, outflank the Bolivians, and turn them to flight before they could bring up artillery or mortars. The Argentine marksmen on the right would give covering fire in order to pin the Bolivians and draw their fire while the maneuver was under way, of course.

            The straw-blonde blades of the elephantine grass drew invisible lines across Tuco’s shins and calves…The stream ran beside and around behind the Bolivian positions. Tuco, half-dead from heat, thirst, and sheer muscular exhaustion by the time they reached, could not believe that the enemy had not noticed eighty men staggering like heavily laden zombies to within a grenade’s throw. But, there they were, each bolita lying or crouching in the cool purple shade of the wood, calmly plugging away at the Argentineans across the field in front of them; not doing much damage, perhaps, but utterly safe themselves. Until Tuco’s men avalanched upon them at point blank range, that is. It was an affair of bayonets, grenades, daggers, shovels, fingers and teeth…not the sort of war which would appear on an Art Deco recruitment poster…

            Bolivian positions, further into the wood, held out, the odd sniper claiming an unlucky fellow who stood too long in the open, but the bulk of them were once more streaming back, split by the mesa. The full heat of the afternoon had burnt out whatever fight was left in either side. Tuco, his part played, the adrenaline spent, flopped into a half-finished foxhole at the base of a spreading acacia tree, accompanied by the corpses of a pair of Bolivian machine gunners. Resting his back on the parapet, he stared out from the forest’s twilit noon at the grassland which broke again at the edge of the forest island, through which the defeated Bolivians were scurrying. The prairie, dotted by the odd clump of thorny acacias and ragged quebrachos, stretched into an infinite horizon. The distant sky had grown dark, a blend of chalky ultramarine and purple, presaging rain, yet the sun struck the mesa with an uncanny brightness. He could hear the not-quite-extinguished battle popping ad cracking, but the whizz of bullets into the dirt a few metres away could not convince his mind of its relevance. His attention was concentrated exclusively on the mesa. It glowed radiantly, a curious deep, matte maroon colour which Tuco was sure could not be the natural hue of the stone.

            He opened his eyes. He was on his side, in the bottom of the shallow foxhole, facing into the dirt. Reflexively touching his head, though he felt no pain, he wondered how long he had been sleeping. He got up on his knees, peering over the parapet. The scene looked unchanged; the carnage exactly as he’d left it. A few of his platoon were visible here and there, quenching their thirsts behind cover or trading shots with the Bolivians lingering in the far corners of the wood. The Argentine volunteers, along with some Paraguayan troops carrying disassembled mortars and machine guns, were still crossing the open ground on the other side, between the wood Tuco’s men had just captured and their original positions. He was not surprised at all by what he saw among the ranks of friendlies, gingerly picking their way over the seized ground – though this very lack of surprise almost scared him at first. There, pointing directions to a mortar team as they advanced was a face familiar, even though Tuco had never seen it except before it had meaning to him. The glossy, knee-high boots, polished by some Indio boy orderly that morning and no doubt to be polished again when the sun fell; the gold braid on the weighty cuffs and on the stiff peaked cap, the glint of the mother-of-pearl grip of the pistol in the belt holster, and, above all, that face – refined, sensitive yet arrogant; the firm but delicate jaw and thoughtful eyes emanating the gentle fatalism of one who has succeeded by the mere fact of being his self. Tuco contemplated this discovery and wondered what to make of it. Then he looked at the hand gesturing to the mortar crew, fingers soft and uncalloused…as he studied this hand as best he could from the distance, the sun flamed upon something on it the way it flamed upon the queer mesa silently watching the scene, and Tuco knew what he must do…knew what he would do. The breech of his rifle opened; a stack of brazen bullets slotted in, sparkling as they vanished into the black belly of the Mauser. The Bolivian troops used the same rifles, firing the exact same ammunition as the Paraguayans. Solid, accurate guns, German-engineered. Precise far beyond the abilities of the chuño-fed conscripts who used them. At not even one hundred metres, on a steadily advancing target, a spot of red on the clean, pressed light-grey fabric told he could not have missed…

            Ordinarily, it bothered Tuco to see officers – rich men and the sons of rich men – being decorated with ribbons and medallions symbolizing the bravery belonging to the silent peons and barrio youths rounded up and traded for glory. He knew little of the dogmas preached by the trade unionists and professors, but he was conscious of his own manhood. He did not protest now, however. He stood, graven faced in the attentive ranks, as the General spoke into a microphone rigged up in front of the post office at the nameless settlement nearest the late battlefield. The General congratulated his boys (there were boys among them, but grizzled veterans, too) on their glorious victory, laying out strings of allusions and metaphors which produced no images in the soldiers’ minds. The General only regretted that it had come at the cost…numerically insignificant, but a sorrowful loss to the nation…of Lieutenant X, Major de Y…as well as one of the brave young souls whose sense of honour and love of freedom inspired them to come and fight as loyal friends of Mother Paraguay, Lieutenant Narvaez, 7^th Cavalry Regiment San Martin….

            Tuco wore the sun-and-grime patina of the genuine grognard as naturally as he wore a campesino’s straw hat. Thus, his platoon mates came to the conclusion that he had been picked off by a Bolivian sniper during the night march through hostile territory. It was more credible than the truth, which no one would have bought besides the most cynical staff officer: that the indomitable Sergeant Tuco had deserted the ranks while much war remained to be fought.

            In a country corrupt and disorganized in the best of times (and now preoccupied with war), it was not hard for an unimportant man, no different in aspect from the average seasonal labourer, to move about unmolested by the forces of law and order. Crossing the border presented no obstacles, either, as Misiones was not formally incorporated into the Argentine state, and tropical backwaters run by Big Papa-Uncle types are not known for sophisticated bureaucracies and well-regulated customs controls. Spending freely to travel fast, Tuco was only a couple days behind the unfortunate Lieutenants personal effects (sending the body was impossible). Not wanting to create unnecessary difficulties, he lodged in a town several kilometres from the estate. Events of note in such parts are few enough that, posing as an itinerate labourer seeking hire on an estate, he could not avoid hearing, again and again, the news about the Casa Narvaez’ owner’s son having been killed on the battlefield. The other boarders at dinner, coarse working-class types like Tuco, agreed that the whole great war between Bolivia and Paraguay was a fool’s errand, the why and wherefore of which escaped them (mostly from want of reading), but it made the beans stick in his throat when Tuco saw the wistful glaze in rugged miners’ and cattlemens’ eyes when they reflected on how the old man’s only son, raised soft and spoiled how he was, nonetheless had so gleefully signed up to kill and die, meeting his end with his boots on, gun in hand, no shame to his conquistador forebears, real or imagined.

            The iron-grey sky was spilling an icy deluge, mudding the laterite roads and making each step an effort of will. Tuco was nonetheless grateful for the weather. It was an excuse to shroud himself in a long poncho as he made his way up the main street of the village he called home. None recognized him. It was as the returning soldier wished. He had on him a few days’ biscuits, dried beef, a Bible, a gold ring set with a diamond in the new-fangled fashion, and a Colt pistol from a dead Bolivian machine gunner’s holster.

            He detoured from the main road to cut through a maté field he’d worked planting. The field, whose bushes were high and full, stood on a slight elevation. It gave fine vantage of the immediate grounds of the estate – the great house, stables, garage and other outbuildings, and the ornamental gardens. The lilies sagged their waterlogged heads and the colours of the roses were dulled from the rain and cloud. The weather was matched in mood by the sombre military men in their grey cloaks who bowed to the assembled crowd and presented the arranged effects of the deceased Lieutenant Narvaez to his father. The old man’s face was white as his shirt, his suddenly aged frame drooping like his rain-soaked moustache. The old man’s trembling hands were usurped, though, by arms frail and feminine, belonging to one whose manifest grief was as profound as his own – but oppositely expressed. The woman’s ivory complexion was rendered more dramatic by the curtains of intricate black lace and silk that billowed around her frame, much reduced since Tuco had glimpsed her last, and her posture and motions would have convinced anyone she was a European lady – and an aristocrat at that – at least from a distance. There was no mistaking the face, though, and those brilliant almond-shaped eyes flashing a light which could not have come from the rain-muffled sun. She could not have seen him; he knew that, but he saw her clearly in those eyes, and in the wail, at once angelic and terrifying, which pierced the rain, and wind, and his soul.

           The funeral, such as it could be in the absence of a casket, proceeded with a satisfying combination of grief and decorum. The priest, who had known the departed when he was an altar boy, intoned the ritual phrases in correct and sublime Latin, the somber mood broken only once. Who would be so ignorant as to go hunting grouse or hare in such weather, and on such a day? But the mourners, in accord with the religious atmosphere of the occasion and with their minds on more important matters, were charitable enough to forgive the insensitivity of someone who was probably a sporting tourist come up from the city for the weekend; someone who could never know their hearts.

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