Blood Makes Noise (18 page)

The boy studied the trammeled grass and the hoofprints embedded through it. The herd had lingered about the ombu, much like his father and he, then clearly moved south, southwest. The boy pointed.

“A very good guess. But you must remember to be sure of a track’s age. Here, feel the edges of each hoofprint. Hard. Baked by the sun for at least four days. And look for the dung heaps. There are none. The birds and beetles have already torn them apart. You are right that the herd was here, and they left in that direction. But they left a week or more ago, and so may not even be the herd we’re tracking.

“Time is measured differently out here, Alejandro. Tracks, animals, people. They all fade slower in this place, and so you must be wary of being led astray by ghosts. For nothing disappears here, my son. It dries and bakes and remains. Forever. These tracks are ghosts.”

The boy nodded seriously, and his father squeezed his shoulder. “You’ll be a
rastreador
yet. You have the look and you have the perception. I think you perceive many things, Alejandro.”

Such was his father’s world: a practical place full of practical rules and practical heroes. A true
rastreador
, or pampa tracker, was highly prized by his fellow gauchos: a man, in a place devoid of landmarks, who could read the subtleties of earth unchanging and orient himself unfailingly. He could track cattle across twenty thousand square leagues of pampa or find the nearest water by chewing blades of grass. If an estancia produced a single
rastreador
a generation, it was considered fortunate. They were mostly Indians when the gauchos first arrived in this place. But the Indian culture was gone now. Trammeled and dried like the hoofprints and dung heaps.

When the meal was finished, his father brewed
mate
. They drank through perforated metal straws and settled on a blanket for a siesta.

When the father woke, his son wasn’t beside him. He rose, walked stiff-legged toward where he saw the boy, nearly a mile off, crouched among blades of tawny grass heaving with breeze. The boy had his back to his father and didn’t seem to hear him approach. Clearly he was trying to read the land, and his father smiled proudly, for the boy had located the first stragglers of the herd, far on the horizon. So young, yet so clearly perceptive. A true
rastreador
. He was about to step forward, clasp his son’s shoulders, and congratulate him…

When he heard the boy mumbling.

The same three foreign words over and over. And his father recognized the words, saw that his son was not studying the cattle but the sea of grass itself, listening to it, and something caught in the man’s chest.

“Alejandro!”

The boy spun around as if caught.

“What are you doing?”

“I…I was looking for the cattle.”

“Come here.”

The boy rose to his feet, anxious without knowing why.

“What do those words mean, Alejandro?”

“It’s for reading”—he felt the withering stare of his father—“the future?”

His father’s face erupted, and it frightened the boy. “
Where did you learn this!
” The boy shrunk back with a stammer, and his father felt instantly ashamed. He reached for him, stroked his reddish hair.

“They may seem just words, my son, but they are pagan and not Christian. Do you understand?” The child nodded. “There’s a good boy.” His father produced a taffy the boy gleefully devoured. They returned to the horses. The boy’s tongue relaxed with the joy of the taffy and spoke before he had regained control of it.

“Father, where’s my mother?”

His father stiffened, and the boy saw a brief shadow cross his face.

“You know your mother’s dead.”

They caught up with the main herd that afternoon, flicking tails under a cloud of flies punch-drunk with the day’s heat. They drove the cattle a few miles east, his father feeling awkward and the boy guilty without understanding.

At dusk they camped, dropping their gear haphazardly, for all the land was the same here, and ate
puchero
under powerful stars. His father anchored the horses with a cow bone, like ships on an unprotected sea, said a few empty words about constellations, and together they fell into troubled sleep.

It was like the night itself stroking his brow, easing itself into his mind and waking him slowly. When his eyes finally opened and groped for purchase on the eternity all around him, they found not the night but his mother, stroking his brow.

“Alejandro.”

He stiffened in terror, his child mind gridlocking on the half-conscious impossibility of it. She reached for his hand, and his only protest was a small whine that must have touched some portion of his father’s nightmare, for he stirred and dug his teeth into his lip.

Into the open she took him. Not far, for the open was everywhere here. The woman stopped and the boy waited, head down, fearful.

“What is it, Alejandro?”

“Are you really my mother?”

“Yes, Alejandro. I am.”

“Then are you dead?”

The boy was prepared for anything but the shivering, miserable tears that coursed down her face. She sank to her knees, and
the cry was hopeless and inhuman, and the boy, against all his expectations, took the woman into his small arms and held her, feeling a hole in him open and fill at the same moment.

“Mommy…”

And she jerked him away at the ends of her arms, so suddenly his head lolled. Her eyes were at once flat fierceness, and the boy crashed back to here, now, and he was scared.

“A boy should not live without his mother,” she droned metallically. “A boy cannot live without his mother…”

She released him and was already far away in a place deep inside herself.

When an owl hooted it split the night hideously. The boy’s guts spun and he couldn’t stand.

“Tell me…about the owl…”

She turned quizzically at the boy, as if noticing him for the first time, and her voice was lifeless.

“The call of the owl means death.”

His father found him there before dawn, curled in the dirt, weeping. He gathered the boy up, carried him in his arms on horseback all the way to their shack, whispering over and over into his son’s feverish, pallid face, “It was just a dream, Alejandro. Just a dream…”

He stayed in bed the next day, let his father fuss over him with a fearful caution that put wariness at the edges of the boy’s thoughts.

By dusk he felt better, restless, and joined his father for a barbecue with the other families and a group of traveling gauchos from another estancia. The laughter, the sharp cackle of the bonfire, felt distant to him, as if experienced through cotton, and he sat apart as men roared with drink, children scrabbled a game of
taba
in clotted earth, and women fussed over a steer slaughtered freely from the estancia, an ancient privilege.

When the iron plates had been cleared and laid in greasy stacks, the community settled themselves on cow skulls around the fire for the
payada
. As with the
rastreador
, each ranch produced a true
payador
, a minstrel, once a generation. That a distant estancia had also produced one, that both were here tonight, sent excitement through the small crowd, for of course there would be a contest.

Each gaucho considered himself a poet, and such qualities were highly prized and severely judged in others, making such a contest a rough, dangerous event.
Payadas
always produced a winner, but if dragged out too long could just as easily end up being decided by knives as words.

The local village champion was Agosto, ancient and red-faced, with a high-parted snow-white mane. He rose now, dressed extravagantly in maroon trousers and satin sash, and unslung his four-string
viguela
. Tradition demanded a gesture of hospitality, and Agosto called out to his opponent a greeting in verse, welcoming him to their fertile land. The visiting combatant, a hatchet-faced stranger, replied with exaggerated politeness, thanking his host.

With the formalities dispensed with, the true contest began. The format was relaxed but generally involved one contestant calling out a question in verse to his opponent, the latter being judged on the speed and wit of his reply. The opening musical query was Agosto’s:

      
Someone who brags of his valor

      
Yet in danger backs away

      
Is like a paltry poncho

      
Little wool and lots of fringe

To which the stranger replied immediately:

      
No one with the scabbard only

      
Can back down a good gaucho

      
A lasso with such conceit

      
Will not bring down the cattle

There were hoots of approval from the village. Though Agosto was the local boy, he carried no special favor in such a contest.

The taunts between
payadores
escalated and followed the tradition of hurling sharpened maxims of The Life at one another:

      
—One who ignores omens found in bleached bones shows fool’s courage.

      
—The wider the wound, the prouder lies the dead man.

      
—He who laughs last, lives.

The contest continued over an hour with no clear advantage gained.

When at last the crowd grew exhausted of the deadlock, the contest shifted to the next movement. More gnarled logs were laid on the fire, flames jumped and caught careless moths, and the two men each began their ballads. Sung in formal verse, like a Greek epic, they drew on themes close to their audience: the land, the people, their ways.

Agosto followed classic lines and told the well-worn story of the Montoneros, gaucho guerrillas who fought the independence wars against Spain in the last century. It regaled the bravery of great-grandfathers, the character of the men themselves—melancholy, like the ballad itself.

      
Nothing in life endures

      
The good and the bad do die

      
Only a sad and lonely grave

      
Will cover us all impartially.

That never failed to draw tears from his unabashedly sentimental audience, and Agosto hung on to it for all it was worth, stinging his chords, raising his voice from sadness to declaration, to howl of pride. The acclaim was unanimous when Agosto finished and bowed humbly. Even the earth roared approval, as a rolling gust caught the trees and hissed accordance.

But the contest wasn’t finished and now the stranger, dressed in layers of black that accented the spectral narrowness of his frame, rose. From the first distant notes, his audience recognized his subject as the dark side of The Life—his invocation of the night, of
mandinga
—and his true subject, the
amborgana
, Indian witch.

      
With you, your dog, and my horse

      
We will ride the
pampa

      
There to brew bitter
mate

      
And wait for amborgana

The
amborgana
was evil, a caster of curses, and came in many seductive forms. As the ballad described the Indian witch’s feral beauty and dark sexual power, the stranger’s voice warbled and spellbound the crowd. Even the wind seemed to pause and settle among them, rapt, as the ballad told of how this witch, a shadow off the pampas, came to the village and there seduced a local gaucho.

The boy looked at his father, suddenly tense. The audience had become stock still.

      
She bore only a son

      
But was no mother

      
Not even human

      
An enchantress.

The story burbled luridly in recounting her power over the simple gaucho, her liaisons, spells, and all manner of composting evil. When the good villagers in the poem finally turned against her, as they must, the stranger’s voice took on urgency.

      
And the village rose and lay naked the witch

      
And drove her into the wine dark night

      
Beyond the edge of the world

      
Forever banished

      
But still, when the southern winds blow

      
Her name carries in the dreams

      
Of gauchos tortured by
mandinga

      
Isiola.

      
The witch.

So fast—a blur—the boy’s father shot forward and tackled the
payador
to the ground. A haunting moan escaped the
payador
’s lungs as Alejandro’s father pummeled the stranger with fists, and at once the boy understood it all and fled, terrorized, into darkness, crashing into gates, crawling now, feverish, finding only by accident the door of their shack.

There, the boy sank into his cot, let the claw of delirium reach darkly for him…

And felt the breath of his mother.

“Alejandro,” she wept.

He didn’t move. Couldn’t.

“Your name is Isiola…your name is Isiola…”

“Yes, my son.”

“You’re a witch.”

“I am a mother. And I am a ghost.” Her face, wet and hot with tears, stung close. “A boy should not live without his mother. And he cannot live with a ghost. Do you understand?”

Her breath was so steady.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he choked.

His mother then lifted his chin gently, kissed him once on the lips…

And cut the boy’s throat ear to ear.

They caught her a mile from town, stoned her as she uttered a curse of destruction on them all, and buried her where she fell. According to
amborgana
custom, her head was cut off, laid on a termite hill, and she was never spoken of again.