You may not have heard of Horacio Quiroga. You'd be forgiven for this, but you're also really missing out. I was first introduced to him when I studied Latin American literature at University in Córdoba in Spain.
Quiroga was born in Salto, Uruguay in 1879 and had an incredibly tragic life: just after Quiroga was born his father accidentally fired a rifle he was carrying and died; two of his siblings died from cholera and his friend, Federico Ferrando, died when Quiroga accidentally shot him while helping him prepare for a duel. Quiroga's wife also killed herself after a period of deep depression. Quiroga remarried but after he became ill his wife left him, taking their daughter with her. Quiroga eventually killed himself by drinking cyanide.
Unsurprisingly, he was obsessed with the themes of death and the wildness of nature, both of which surrounded him in the Amazon rain forest - the rain forest is really the main character of his stories, it is omnipotent and omnipresent: like death, nature is connected to a tragic and sinister beauty and has a stifling power which man cannot overcome.
I've translated a few of Quiroga's stories and I've included my translation of 'El Desierto' (The Deserted) here.
'The Deserted' contains autobiographical elements and the reader cannot help but think that Quiroga feels the same pain for his dead wife and the same concern for his children as Subercasaux, the protagonist. Quiroga presents us with a dangerous landscape that demands respect but which kills without a care for the loyalty of its inhabitants. He combines this personification of exotic Latin American nature with fantasy and horror, something he does in all of his stories. Even his style and narrative structure are affected by this nature and the role the jungle plays in the lives and deaths of his characters. Quiroga lived a life hidden in the jungle and his surroundings gave him life but, as his characters and Quiroga himself discovered, life in the jungle always comes with a price.
The Deserted
The canoe slid on, clinging to the edge of the forest, or what might be forest in that darkness. More by instinct than from any real evidence, Subercasaux felt its proximity: the darkness was a single impassable block that began at the rower’s hands and continued up to the zenith. The man knew his river well enough to know where he was; but on such a night, and beneath the threat of rain, tying up the canoe between pointed bamboo shoots or decomposing grasslands was very different from docking in his own small port. And Subercasaux wasn’t alone in the canoe.
The atmosphere was charged to a suffocating degree. When he turned his head to one side he found a bit of air to breathe. And in that moment, clear and distinct, some drops rang out against the canoe.
Subercasaux raised his eyes, searching the sky in vain for a bright shock or the crack of a lightning strike. As had been the case the whole afternoon, not even a lone rumble of thunder could be heard.
‘Rain the whole night through,’ he thought. And returning to his companions, who were still silent in the stern, he said quickly, ‘put on your capes and do them up properly.’
The canoe now advanced, bending branches as it went and two or three times the portside oar slid over a submerged bough. But even with the threat of breaking an oar, Subercasaux didn’t lose contact with the foliage, because to move even five metres from the shore could mean crossing and recrossing in front of his port all night long, without ever seeing it.
Literally bordering the forest of water flowers, the rower continued advancing. Now the drops were falling more heavily but also more sporadically. They stopped sharply, as if they had fallen from some unknown place. And they started up once more, large, isolated and warm, to cut through the same darkness and the same atmospheric depression once more.
‘Wrap yourselves up well,’ Subercasaux repeated to his two companions, ‘we’ve arrived.’
In effect, the opening of their port had just come into view. With two vigorous strokes he launched the canoe onto the clay and, while he was tying the boat to a stake, his two silent companions jumped out onto the ground which was easy to see, despite the darkness, for it was covered with a myriad bright glowworms which made the path sway with their red and green lights.
The soaked clay glowed up to the top of the hill which the three travellers were climbing in the rain, now solid and constant. But then the darkness separated them again; and enveloped the search for the sulky they had left leaning on its wooden shafts.
That phrase, ‘one doesn’t even see hands placed beneath eyes’ was apt. And on such nights the fleeting brilliance of a match has no other use than to worsen the disorienting darkness, even making us lose our balance.
Nonetheless, they found the sulky, but without the horse. And leaving his two companions by a wheel as guards, immobile under their turned-up hoods and crackling with rain, Subercasaux went spying into the depths of the forest trail, where he found his horse tangled up in the reins, naturally.
Subercasaux hadn’t taken more than twenty minutes to find and bring back the animal but when he called out: ‘are you there, chiquitos?’ in order to orient himself to the sulky, he heard ‘yes, piapiá’ in reply.
For the first time that night it occured to Subercasaux that the two companions he’d abandoned to the night and the rain were his children. Five and six years old, their heads didn’t reach the top of the wheel and, together, dripping water from their hoods, they waited quietly for their father to return.
Finally they went home, happy and chatting. The moments of worry and danger having passed, Subercasaux’s voice was very different to the one he used to speak to his children when he had to direct them like adults. His voice had lowered two tones; and, on hearing the tenderness of these voices, nobody would believe that the one who now laughed with the children was the same harsh-voiced man of half an hour earlier. And the two who spoke now, in truth, were Subercasaux and his daughter, as the little boy – the younger – had fallen asleep on his father’s knees.
Generally, Subercasaux rose when the day grew light; and although he did it silently, he knew very well that in the next-door room his son, an early riser like him, had been waiting with eyes wide open for some time to hear his father before he got up. And then the invariable routine of morning greetings would start from one room to the other:
‘Good morning, piapiá!’
‘Good morning, darling hijito.’
‘Good morning, piapicito I adore.’
‘Good morning, little white lamb.’
‘Good morning, little mouse with no tail.’
‘My little racoon!’
‘Piapiá armadillo!’
‘Little cat face!’
‘Little viper tail!’
And they carried on in this charming style. Until, now dressed, they went to drink coffee beneath the palm trees. All while the little lady slept on like a stone, until she was woken by the sun on her face.
With his two children molded in personality and education by his hand, Subercasaux considered himself the happiest father on Earth. But he’d earned this title with worse pain than married men usually know.
Suddenly, as things that are devised for their terrifying injustice come to pass, Subercasaux had lost his wife. He was immediately alone with two children he barely knew in the very house built by him and decorated by her, where every nail and every brushstroke were a sharp reminder of shared happiness.
The next day, on opening the wardrobe by chance, he knew what it was to unexpectedly see the white clothes of his now-buried wife; and hanging up, the dress she hadn’t even had time to wear.
When, with eyes fixed and dry, he burnt the letters he’d written to his wife, he understood the urgent and fatal necessity of destroying every last vestige of the past if he wanted to continue living. She’d cared for those letters from her days as a girlfriend much more than any of her city suits. And that same evening, broken and rent of sobs, he knew, finally, what it is to hold in your arms a child who struggles to be free to play with the cook’s son.
Hard, very hard all that…But now he laughed with his two cubs who, with him, made one single person, given the curious way in which Subercasaux educated his children.
Essentially, the children didn’t fear darkness or solitude, or anything that terrifies babies brought up between their mother’s skirts. More than once, night fell before Subercasaux had returned from the river and the children lit the hurricane lamp to wait for him without anguish. Or they would wake up alone in the middle of a furious storm which blinded them through the glass, to return to sleep straight away, sure and confident of their papá’s return.
They feared nothing, except what their father warned them they should fear – and, first on the list, naturally, were vipers. Although free, breathing health itself and stopping to watch everything with their big happy cub-eyes, they wouldn’t have known what to do for a moment without their father. But if, when he left, he warned them that he was going to be away a while, the children were happy to stay and play together. In the same way, if, during their long walks together through the monte or the river, Subercasaux had to break away for minutes or hours, they would improvise a game which would always keep them in the same spot, thus paying for their father’s confidence in them with blind and happy obedience.
Because of him they could ride a horse to gallop, the boy since he turned four. They knew exactly – as every independent child does – the limit of their strengths, and they never surpassed it. Sometimes, they would go alone up the Yabebirí, to the pink sandstone cliff.
‘Be very certain of the terrain, and only then sit down,’ their father had told them.
The cliff rose up perpendicular to twenty metres of deep and shady water which refreshed the cracks at its base. There, on top, in miniature, Subercasaux’s children got closer, feeling the stones with their feet. And sure at last, they sat, letting their sandals play over the abyss.
Naturally, Subercasaux had achieved all of this in successive stages and with an anguish to match.
‘One day a child will be taken from me,’ he said to himself, ‘and the rest of my days will be spent asking myself if I was right to raise them this way.’
Yes, he was right. And among the scarce comforts of a father who remains alone with orphans, the biggest is to be able to educate the children in accordance with one single type of character.
Subercasaux was, therefore, happy; and the children felt inextricably linked to this man who played with them for hours, taught them to read with big red letters and weights of red lead on the floor, and sewed up the rips in their trousers with his enormous hardened hands.
Subercasaux had retained the habit and the taste for stitching from sewing bags in el Chaco when he used to be a cotton planter. He sewed his clothes, his children’s clothes, revolver holsters and the canoe sails; all with shoe maker’s thread and stitched up with a knot. It meant that that his shirts could fall open at any section, except where he’d put his waxed thread.
When it came to games the children agreed that their father was a maestro, particularly at running on all fours; he did it so extraordinarily that it made them shout with laughter.
Beyond his fixed occupations, Subercasaux had experimental concerns which changed track every three months, so his children, always by his side, knew about a selection of things that children of their age don’t usually know. They had seen – and sometimes assisted with – animal dissections, the fabrication of creolina and the extraction of rubber from the monte to patch up their waterproofs. They had seen their father dye their shirts with all colours, build eight thousand kilo levers to study cements, make superphosphates, orange wine, Mayforth driers and hang, from the monte to the bungalow, a wire lane suspended ten metres from the ground, with carriages attached which flew the children down to the house.
At that time, the latest descent of the Yabebirí’s waters had left a deposit or seam of white clay exposed that had drawn Subercasaux’s attention. From the study of this clay he’d moved on to studying other clays the country had to offer which he baked in his ceramic ovens – naturally built by his own hand. And if he had to find clues about how to bake them, vitrify them and more with shapeless samples, he preferred to try with pots, masks and fantasy animals, all of which his children successfully helped him with.
At night time, and on very dark stormy evenings, he entered the lively factory. Subercasaux lit the oven early, and the testers, shrunk by the cold and rubbing their hands, sat down in its heat to model.
But Subercasaux’s small oven easily reached a thousand degrees in two hours, and every time he opened the door to feed it, a real blast of fire leapt out of the white-washed home and burnt his eyebrows. For this reason, the ceramic makers retired to a corner of the workshop, until the frozen wind, which whistled in through the bamboo shoots of the wall, forced them back again, table and all, to warm up with their backs to the oven.
Except for the bare legs of the children which now received blasts from the fire, all was well. Subercasaux felt a weakness for these cubs that were stuck in the past; the girl usually modelled fantasy hats and the little boy made vipers without fail.
Sometimes, however, the monotonous rumble of the oven didn’t inspire them much and then they turned to the gramophone. It had the same records as when Subercasaux got married, and the children had pounded them with every available needle, nail, bamboo shoot and thorn that they themselves sharpened. Each took it in turns to be in charge of the machine, which consisted of automatically changing the record without even lifting their eyes from their clay and resuming their work straight away. When all of the records had gone by it was the other’s turn to do it all over again. They no longer listened to the music because they knew it by heart, but the noise entertained them.
At ten, the ceramic makers gave their work up as finished and got up to proceed with the first critical examination of their masterpieces. Absolutely no comments were allowed until everyone had finished their examination. And what drew the eye then, was the jubilation the little lady’s ornamental fantasies provoked and the enthusiasm which the unending collection of the boy’s vipers aroused. After this, Subercasaux extinguished the oven fire and, holding hands, they all ran home across the frozen night.
Three days after the nocturnal walk we’ve related, Subercasaux remained without a maid; and this incident, trivial and without consequence at any other time, changed the lives of the three exiles to the extreme.
In the first moments of his solitude, Subercasaux had counted on the help of an excellent woman to raise his children, the same cook who cried and found the house too lonely upon the death of her mistress.
The next month she’d gone, and Subercasaux suffered continual frustrations trying to replace her with three or four bad-tempered girls dragged from the monte, and who only took three days to find the character of their master too harsh.
In effect, Subercasaux was somewhat at fault and he knew it. He spoke with the girls only when necessary and only to make himself understood; and what he said was too full of masculine precision and logic. For example, when they swept the dining room, he warned them that they must also sweep around every table leg. And that, put briefly, exasperated the girls and tired them out.
In the space of three months he couldn’t even get one girl to clean the plates. And in these three months, Subercasaux learnt something more than how to bathe his children.
He learnt – not to cook because he already knew that – but to scrub pans with the sand from the patio, crouching down in the frozen wind that turned his hands purple. He learnt to interrupt his work at any moment to rescue the milk that was boiling over or to open the smoking oven; and he also learnt to bring three buckets of water from the well at night – not one less – to clean the dishes.
This problem of the three obligatory buckets constituted one of his nightmares, and it took him a month to realise he couldn’t do without them. Naturally, in the first days, he had put off the cleaning of pans and plates which built up beside each other on the floor, in order to clean everything at once. But after losing a whole morning crouching down scraping burnt saucepans (they were all burnt), he opted for: cook-eat-wash, three successive acts whose delights married men also know nothing of.
In truth, he had no time for anything, especially on the short winter days. Subercasaux had conferred the tidying of the two rooms on the children which they carried out one way or another. But he himself didn’t have enough enthusiasm to sweep the patio, a chore that was scientific, radial, circular, and exclusively feminine. He knew that in the monte the patio was the heart of a ranch’s wellbeing, but it tested his patience too far.
In that untouched loose sand, converted into a cultivation laboratory by rains and ardent sun, the piques propagated so much that they could be seen crawling over the children’s bare feet. Although he always wore stormboots, Subercasaux paid a heavy price to the piques. Rain-spattered in the hallway or blinded by the sun on the patio, he had to spend whole hours after lunch with his son’s feet in his hands, sorting out his almost constant limping. When he finished with the little boy it was his turn; and when he’d finally finished, the boy called him back because three new piques had drilled holes in half the skin on his feet.
Fortunately, the little lady seemed to be immune, her little nails didn’t tempt the piques; seven out of ten belonged to the boy and only the remaining three to his father. But these three turned out to be too much for a man whose feet were his means of life in the monte.
In general, piques are less offensive than vipers, uras and even bariguís. They tiptoed over skin and suddenly plunged down with speed; when they reached flesh they made a sack to fill with eggs. Neither the extraction of the pique nor its nest was usually distressing and nor did the wounds bleed more than necessary. However, in a hundred piques there’s one which carries infection, and take care with that one.
Subercasaux couldn’t reduce one which he had in a toe, the insignificant little toe of his right foot. From a little pink hole, a swollen and excruciating crevice which bordered the nail had appeared. Iodine, bicarbonate, oxygenised water, formaldehyde, he’d tried everything. He still put shoes on but he didn’t leave the house; and his inexhaustible exhausting trips to the monte were now condensed to rainy afternoons of slow and taciturn walks around the patio, during which the sky would clear with the appearance of the sun, and the forest, silhouetted against the light like a shadow theatre, encroached on the untainted air, close enough to touch the eyes.
Subercasaux recognised that if his life had been different he would have managed to overcome the infection, which only required a bit of rest. The invalid slept badly, agitated by shivering and intense pains in the early hours. When the sun came up, he finally fell into a heavy sleep and, in this moment, he’d have given anything to be able to stay in bed until eight o’clock, at the very least. But the boy was just as much of an early riser in winter as he was in summer, and Subercasaux got up, feverish, to light the Primus and prepare the coffee. Then, lunch: the scrubbing of pots. And for fun, after that: the never-ending story of his son’s piques.
‘This can’t go on much longer,’ Subercasaux finally said, ‘I must find a maid at any cost.’
But how? During his years as a husband this terrible preoccupation with the maid had become one of his daily worries. The maids came and went, like we’ve said, without saying why – and that when there was still a mistress of the house. Subercasaux abandoned all his jobs and for three days he didn’t get down from his horse, galloping over potholes from Apariciocué to San Ignacio, after the most useless girl who would want to clean nappies. Finally, one afternoon, Subercasaux came out of the monte with a halo of horseflies around his head and his horse’s neck fraying with blood, but triumphant. The girl came the next day on her father’s horse with a bundle; and after exactly a month she left with the same bundle, on foot. And Subercasaux put down the machete and the hoe once more to go and find his horse, which was now sweating motionless on the ground.
Those were bad excursions, which had left a bad taste and which he now had to start all over again. But where to go?
Subercasaux, depressed by the rain, had already heard the far-off thunderclaps from the forest during his nights of insomnia. Usually spring in Misiones was dry and winter was very rainy. But when the routine is reversed – and this is always to be hoped for with the Misiones climate – the clouds pour out one metre of water in three months; one metre out of the one thousand five hundred millimetres that should fall throughout the year.
They now found themselves almost surrounded. El Horqueta, which cut off the path to the Paraná coast, no longer had a bridge and could only be passed at the ford by horses which trembled as the water fell in rapid foam over round stones and quicksand. That was on normal days; because when the creek took to collecting the waters of seven day's worth of storms, the ford remained submerged under four metres of fast water stretched out in deep lines which quickly separated and wreathed into a whirlpool. And the settlers of the Yabebirí, confined to horses when faced with the flooded scrublands, watched dead deer float by, spinning round and round. And that for ten or fifteen days.
El Horqueta was offering a place to cross by the time Subercasaux decided to go out; but in his state he didn’t dare go so far by horse. And in the depths, as far as the Cazador stream, what could he find?
He then remembered a burly adolescent he’d had once, clever and hard working like few others. The day he arrived he’d told him, scrubbing a saucepan on the ground and laughing, that he would stay a month because his boss needed him, but not one day more because it wasn’t work for men. The young man lived in the mouth of the Yabebirí, opposite the Isla del Toro; something which proposed a serious journey, because if the Yabebirí descended and ascended playfully, eight hours of continual rowing could crush the fingers of anyone who’s no longer in the prime of life.
Subercasaux had made up his mind, however. And despite the threatening weather, he went up to the river with his children, with the happy look of someone who finally sees open sky. At every instant the children kissed their father’s hand, as if it were something they always did when they were happy. Despite his feet and everything else, Subercasaux had stored all his enthusiasm for his children; but for them it was something very different, being with their Piapiá when they crossed the monte swarming with surprise and then ran barefoot along the coast on the warm and springy mud of the Yabebirí.
There, what they’d already expected was waiting for them: the canoe full of water, which had to be emptied with the usual scoop and the insect guards that the children always wore across their chests when they went to the monte.
Subercasaux was so overwhelmed by hope that he didn’t worry enough about how wrong the muddied water looked in a river which usually gave good visibility of depths up to two metres.
‘The rains,’ he thought, ‘they haven’t dug their heels into the south east yet…They’ll take another day or two to swell.’
They carried on working. Positioned in the water on both sides of the canoe, they bailed out steadily. To begin with Subercasaux hadn’t dared remove his boots, which the deep mud sucked in to the point of causing him great pain every time he wrenched his feet free. Finally, he removed his boots, and, with his feet bare and sinking like wedges in the pestilent mud, he finished emptying the canoe, turned it over and cleaned the base; all in two hours of feeble activity.
Finally ready, they left. For an hour the canoe glided onwards, faster than the rower would have liked. He rowed badly, his weight only on one foot and his naked heel hurting against the edge of the support.
Like this he shot forward in a rush because the Yabebirí was now running at full speed. The pieces of wood swollen with bubbles which started to gather in the pools and the whiskers of straw which gathered in the roots finally made Subercasaux understand what was going to happen if he delayed, even by a second, in turning the prow back to his port.
New hopes of a maid, another burly adolescent – finally, some rest!... – were lost. He rowed, therefore, without losing a stroke. Only he could fully appreciate the four hours of torturous worry and fatigue it took to go back up a river that he had gone down in one, and constantly beneath an atmosphere so tense that breaths yearned in vain. When they arrived at the port, the frothing lukewarm water had already risen two metres up the beach. And coming down the canal were half-sunken dried branches whose points bobbed in and out of the water.
The travellers arrived at the bungalow when it was already nearly dark, although it was only just four o’clock, and just as the sky finally let go of its immense store of water with a single lightning strike which stretched from the zenith to the river. They had dinner straight away and, exhausted, went to bed beneath the clamour made by the downpour hammering on the zinc with implacable violence all night long.
When the sun came up, a deep shiver awoke the owner of the house. Until this moment he’d slept with a leaden heaviness. Unusually, since he’d first injured his toe, his foot hardly hurt at all, despite the exhaustions of the day before. He wrapped the raincoat which was thrown over the head of the bed around himself and tried to go back to sleep.
Impossible. The cold passed right through him. The ice inside him radiated out to all his pores which were transformed into holes of spiky ice, and which he could feel whenever his skin touched his clothes. Rolled into a ball, with deep rhythmic currents of cold washing down his spine, the invalid watched the hours pass without managing to warm up. Happily, the children still slept.
‘I can’t do stupid things like I did yesterday when I’m in this state,’ he repeated. ‘These are the consequences…’
Like a faraway dream, like a happiness of inappreciable rarity that he once enjoyed, he imagined that he could spend all day in bed, finally warm and relaxed, while, on the table, he heard the noise of the cups of milky coffee that the maid – that first great maid! – was handing to the children…
To stay in bed till ten at least!...In four hours the fever would pass, and his waist wouldn’t hurt so much…What did he need, all in all, to cure himself? A little rest, nothing more. He’d repeated it to himself ten times…
And the day drew on, and the invalid thought he could hear the happy noise of cups, between the deep pulsations of his leaden temple. What happiness to hear that sound!...He would rest a little, finally…
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‘Piapiá!’
‘My darling son…’
‘Good morning piapicito I adore! You’re not up yet? It’s late piapiá.’
‘Yes, my love, I’m now getting up…’
And Subercasaux got dressed quickly, throwing his laziness in his own face for it had made him forget his children’s coffee.
The water had stopped, finally, but the least gust of wind couldn’t sweep away the humidity that remained. At midday the rain started again, the warm rain, calm and monotonous, in which the valley of el Horqueta, the fields and the scrublands, dissolved into a foggy and miserable layer of groundwater.
After lunch, the children entertained themselves by remaking their provision of paper rowing boats, which they had worn out the evening before. They made a hundred of them which they arranged one inside the other like cartons, ready to be launched in the wake of the canoe on the next trip. Subercasaux took advantage of the occasion to stretch out a moment on the bed, where he regained his trigger-like position, keeping himself still with his knees raised up to his chest.
Once more, in his temple, he felt an enormous weight which kept him glued to the pillow, to the point that the pillow started to form an integral part of his head. How good to be here! To stay, one, ten, a hundred days without moving! The monotonous murmuring of the water on the zinc lulled him to sleep, and in its noise he distinctly heard, clear enough to make him smile, the tinkling of the cutlery which the maid was sorting hurriedly in the kitchen. What a maid he had!...And he heard the noise of the plates, dozens of plates, cups and pans which the maids – there were ten now! – scrubbed and rubbed with dizzying speed. What joy to find oneself finally warm in bed, with no worries, not even one!...When, in which past time, had he dreamt of being ill with a terrible worry?...What an idiot he’d been!...And how good it is here, hearing the noise of hundreds of sparkling clean cups.
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‘Piapiá!’
‘Chiquita…’
‘I’m hungry, Piapiá!’
‘Yes, chiquita; right away…’
And the invalid went into the rain to prepare coffee for his children.
Without knowing exactly what he’d done that afternoon, Subercasaux saw the night arrive with immense delight. He remembered, yes, that the burly adolescent hadn’t brought the milk this afternoon, but he had looked over his wound for a long while without seeing anything particular in it.
He fell into bed without getting undressed and in a short time the fever took hold of him again. The young man who hadn’t come with the milk…What madness!...He was well now, perfectly well, resting.
With only a few more days of rest, with a few hours, no more, he’d be cured. Of course! Of course!...There is a justice despite everything…And also a bit of recompense…for one who had loved his children as he did…But he would get up healthy. A man can fall ill sometimes…and need a bit of rest. And how he rested now, to the lullaby of the rain on the zinc!...But a month wouldn’t have passed already?...He should get up.
The invalid opened his eyes. He only saw darkness poked at by shining points which swelled out and retracted rhythmically and which came towards his eyes, moving swiftly up and down.
‘I must have a very high fever,’ the invalid said to himself. And he lit the hurricane lamp on the bedside table. The damp wick sparked for a long time but Subercasaux didn’t take his eyes from the ceiling. From far away, very far, a memory came to him, the memory of a similar night when he was very ill…What stupidity!...He was fine, because when a man, suffering only from fatigue, has the happiness to hear from his bed the dizzying tinkling of movement in the kitchen, it’s because the mother watches over her children…
He woke up again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the lit lamp, and after a concentrated effort of attention he became aware of himself again.
In his right arm, from the elbow to the tips of his fingers, he now felt a deep pain. He wanted to lift the arm but couldn’t. He threw off the raincoat and saw his pale hand, patterned with violet lines, frozen, dead. Without closing his eyes, he thought a while about what that meant, along with his shivers and the contact the open veins of his wound had made with the infected mud of the Yabebirí. And then he came to the definitive realisation, clear and absolute, that all of him was going to die – that he was dying.
He achieved an inner silence, as if the rain, the noises and the very rhythm of all things had suddenly returned to infinity. And, as if he was already detached from himself, he saw, from miles away, a bungalow totally isolated from all human aid, where his children, without milk and alone, remained abandoned by God and by men in the most wicked and terrible of desertions.
His hijitos…
With a supreme effort he tried to block out that torture which, hour after hour, day after day, made him feel the destiny of his adored children. He thought in vain: life has superior strengths which escape us…the Lord provides…
‘But they won’t have anything to eat!’ his heart shouted in tumult. And he would stay there, dead, witnessing such unprecedented horror…
But, despite the pale light of day which was reflected on the wall, the shadows began to absorb him again with their spinning white points which retreated and came forth to throb in his eyes…Yes! Of course! He’d been dreaming! Dreaming such things shouldn’t be allowed…now he went to get up, relaxing.
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‘Piapiá!...Piapiá!...My lovely piapicito!...’
‘My son…’
‘Aren’t you getting up today, piapiá? It’s very late, we’re very hungry, piapiá!’
‘My chiquito…I’m not getting up yet…You two get up and eat biscuits…There are still two in the tin…And come back after.’
‘Can we come in now, piapiá?’
‘No, my love…After I'll make coffee…I’ll call you.’
He heard the laughter and chattering of his children who got up, and after, a noise in crescendo, a spiralling tinkling which radiated from the centre of his brain and crashed against the sides of his pain-filled head in rhythmic waves. And he heard nothing more.
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He opened his eyes again, and on opening them he felt his head fall to the left with an ease which surprised him. He didn’t feel any murmur now. He only felt how increasingly difficult it was to gauge the distance of objects…And his mouth wide open so he could breathe.
‘Chiquitos…Come now…’
Immediately the children appeared in the half-open door; but faced with the lit hurricane lamp and the appearance of their father, they approached silently with eyes wide open.
The invalid still had the courage to smile, and the children’s eyes widened further at the sight of that grimace.
‘Chiquitos,’ Subercasaux said to them when he had them at his side, ‘listen to me carefully, my chiquitos, because you’re now grown up and can understand everything…I am going to die, chiquitos…But don’t be distressed…soon you’ll be adults and you’ll be good and honourable…And you’ll remember your piapiá then…understand well, my darling hijitos…In a little while I will die and you will no longer have a father…You’ll be alone in the house…But don’t be frightened and don’t be afraid…And now, goodbye, my hijitos…Now give me a kiss…One kiss each…But gently, chiquitos…A kiss…for your piapiá.
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The children left without touching the half-open door, and went to play in their room, avoiding the drizzle out on the patio. They didn’t move from there. Only the little lady gave a clue to the magnitude of what had just happened by screwing up her face with her arm from time to time. The little boy distractedly scratched at the window frame without understanding.
Neither made a sound.
But neither could a sound be heard from the room next door, where, for the past three hours, their father, dressed and with shoes on underneath the raincoat, had been lying dead in the light of the lamp.
Glossary
Bariguí: a type of gnat which thrives in wet places with high humidity levels.
Chiquito/a: in Spanish words can be made into nicknames or endearing terms by adding the suffix ‘ito/ita’ which makes the term diminutive. ‘chico/a’ means boy/girl so chiquito/a means little boy/girl.
Creolina: a type of pesticide used as disinfectant and insecticide.
Hijito: an endearing term for ‘son’ which comes from ‘hijo’. Subercasaux often uses it in the plural meaning ‘my little children’.
Monte: Can mean ‘hill’ or ‘forest’ but in this context most likely means ‘scrubland’.
Piapiá: an endearing nickname for father that comes from ‘papá’. Quiroga uses this nickname in many of his stories involving fathers and their children.
Pique: a type of small flea that burrows under the skin and causes infection.
Sulky: a carriage with two wheels, one seat and two wooden shafts which are attached to a horse’s harness, very common in the countryside.
Ura: Larvae of a fly which grows under the skin of animals or in the bark of some trees.