We Branded Each and Every Animal

We set off at sundown: I won’t dwell on it, I won’t keep going on about the light or about how it softened everything, even the weeds that moments before had been rough and prickly, despite their flowers. Back then the pampa was a mass of thistles, their purple crowns taller than a grown man: from our perch on the wagon, the purple land rippled gently. The oxen, who led the way, ended up as flowery and thorny as the thistles themselves, they were four-legged plants, cow-cactuses, animals like the ones made by scientists, Rosa said. He groomed them because they deserved it, and I think the oxen loved him for that; they tended to follow him around a bit when he unyoked them. Otherwise, they seemed pretty indifferent to most things. Probably because of the weight of the yoke, poor creatures, dulled by work. We made our way silently following the subtle traces left by the passage of the Indian hordes, traces already getting overgrown with thistles. The Indians trod lightly like cats, with characteristic stealth and suddenness, leaving almost nothing behind. We were a bit afraid of them, but only a bit: Rosa was there, and he was half Indian, he said. He didn’t look it, he was white with a single eyebrow; he looked more Spanish, he was so hairy he looked like a Spanish cuy and he was very hardworking, his hands were never idle. He was only half Indian, his father’s mother was Guaraní and he spoke her language and could use it to bellow out a sapukái, as he proceeded to demonstrate: his eyes watered, the veins bulged on his neck, his face went red, and he howled, scattering the real cuys, sending the chimangos skywards, petrifying the cattle, cracking Liz’s face open with horror, and making Estreya bark himself hoarse at this sudden stranger; apparently it was a good sapukái. Rosa in full battle cry was really quite frightening, he transformed into someone else, the man with the gaucho knife, the man he claimed to be. There wasn’t much point in us explaining to him that we were heading for Tehuelche territory; he was convinced all Indians could understand one another, so it was no use arguing. It wasn’t the Indians, but the fort he was afraid of. He’d deserted a while back. How long ago? He said he didn’t really have much sense of time, but several summers and winters had passed, he’d come down from the north rounding up all the cattle he came across. Liz and I reckoned it must have been about ten years before. We wanted to keep the cows, we could make cheese, Liz said, who was convinced that prosperity only came to those who worked for it. She came up with a good ruse: we could brand all the cattle with the mark of the landowner who had sent Liz and the Gringo to Argentina to oversee his estancia. There was just one problem: we had no branding iron. I found one of those big rings which held up the wagon axles. It seemed just the job and we branded each and every animal. All three hundred and forty-seven of them. Needless to say we made slow progress: the cows, the wagon, the lack of a proper track apart from the Indian trail, which was easier on horseback, with the threat of a quaghole or vizcacha burrows at every step. Nothing helped us, least of all me. I didn’t want to get there. I wanted to live in the wagon forever, in this suspended interval of time, just the four of us without the Englishman; I wanted Liz without her husband, I wanted, I didn’t know what I wanted, I wanted her to love me, to find life impossible without me, to hold me tight, I wanted the pillow beside hers to be mine. I spun the animal branding out over three days, with ever-longer siestas, I plied everyone with plentiful whiskies from the three barrels in the wagon, I asked them questions so they would tell stories. Fear paralysed me: the wagon was like my childhood trunk if the trunk could have grown wheels and some friends had come along. It was another world, one that was truly mine. Everything else was a threat – La Negra, life with Fierro, that shack, cowering silently from all the brutality I’d suffered: no one there had anything to say except about land and meat, going on about cows, rain and drought, gossiping about which farmhand was mounting what girl, and whether so-and-so’s children were also his brothers and sisters as well as his father’s children and grandchildren, wondering whether the owner of the estancia would come or not, if he was coming whether he’d punish or reward, and whether or not there’d be another Indian raid. There wasn’t, they’d already pushed the Indians further and further towards to the desert, to where we were now. The old folk remembered how things had been before, when the Indians would appear like a whirlwind and leave everything dead behind them. They were worse than a plague of locusts: they killed men, cows, even dogs. It was said the reason there was no church was because they’d burnt it down with the people still inside. One of the old men, the one who had taken in my children, was a boy when it happened and he saw the whole thing from up a tree. He heard the screams, smelled the burning flesh, and waited, muted and frozen with fear, on the top branch for the divine lightning bolt that would strike down the heathens. He was up there for two days, and in the end he climbed down, absolutely terrified, but assuming that, for the moment at least, the Indians wouldn’t come back because there was nothing left to steal or kill. And convinced that the lightning bolt of God would have struck them down in the desert. He went to the fort and stayed there until the old guy from the big house returned and took him back, along with a couple of gauchos he’d brought together with the new cows, those beautiful white cows with reddish-brown patches which is how I remember cows being when I was little: English cattle that had been herded onto a ship. Most of the old folk I’d met had arrived after the times of the Indian raids. The Indians didn’t know how to speak, they used to say. They just howled like wild beasts, tore things apart like pumas, knew neither God nor pity, raped women because they had no notion of affection, they even made stew with white folks’ babies because they were more tender than their own: the darker they are, the tougher they are – it’s a well-known fact, said the gauchos, who also prided themselves on being tough; they were dark and macho, not like those lily-livered landowners, they said. That’s why they did the kind of job they did, because they were macho and tough. They laughed imagining the landowner’s blond fair-skinned son trying to round up cattle, break in a horse or bring down a ñandú with a swing of the bolas; they hadn’t lived under the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, nor the first owner of the estancia. The sons of the landowners spent their time in France, and on their rare visits, the gauchos treated them reverently, bowing to them, and calling them sir, if they’d had a tail it would’ve been between their legs. But curiously the gauchos were certain that in a one-to-one fight they’d win. And generally speaking they were right; if they’d fought with knives, the gaucho would’ve walked away unscathed. Or galloped away! quipped Rosa, who in the early hours after plenty of whisky regaled us with his story as if yielding to a lover: he bared his soul to us.