A Bunch of Short Dark Hapsburgs

Hernández was showing us the man of the future, which he embodied: I am paved roads, I am steam power, I am economy of the pampas, I am seed of civilisation and progress in this fertile and brutish land, untouched by the plough, only galloped over by savages who seem to have no sense of history other than as ghosts and thieves, a mere puff of smoke with no notion of anything except sowing vandalism left right and centre; they seem to float above the ground, if it weren’t for the fact that they rob and burn everything the white man’s work puts in front of them, you’d think they didn’t exist, that they’re a folk tale like the El Dorado our ancestors went after. The gauchos, who are usually a mixture of Indian and Spaniard, didn’t even inherit their European grandfathers’ dreams of piles of gold. Nor did they inherit the Indians’ way of going about, always treading as lightly as hares. Nothing. They were good soldiers for the nation, that’s for sure, gauchos are brave, but now there aren’t any wars except the ones to conquer the frontier yard by yard with the slow weapons of agricultural work. And they’re just not interested. They haven’t the least notion of construction, they live all hugger-mugger in mouldy hovels. They have no taboos; if they don’t lie down with their mothers it’s only because they prefer them young, although you can’t even be sure of that, I’ve had three cases, no, wait a minute, Hernández consulted his ledger, four cases of men having relations with their mothers: you should see how their kids turned out, stunted, bow-legged, with skinny arms, one of them even squired son-brothers with underbites, a bunch of short dark Hapsburgs, illiterate, and toothless by the age of thirteen, that’s what I get in return for giving those little brutes food, work and schooling, the Colonel exclaimed, roaring with laughter. And I had to train them using harsh methods because school or no school, you can’t spare the rod. Have you seen Miss Daisy? I brought one of those gringa schoolteachers that President Sarmiento is so keen on down here to teach, and only three or four gauchos learnt anything at all, the others couldn’t even write their names after a whole year. Anyway, she got raped by five of them all at once, they whipped her until one of her lovely little sky-blue eyes popped out, they knocked three of her teeth out and pulled out half her hair. I had seen her in passing, yes, a lame cross-eyed and half-bald gringa. I didn’t ask about her limp, what was the point. I’d also sent those men to the other school and I have to give them credit for trying to improve the race: the little half-gringo bastards they produced turned out to be better workers; there’s no point pretending otherwise, said Hernández eyeing up Liz so lecherously it was as though he had the stiff cock of a dog on either side of his nose. That gringa is tough, she was in bed for a week, and she was clever enough to insist on keeping her position as their teacher and on asking me to spare the men’s lives, imagine my dear, I was in such admiration of her mercifulness. As soon as she could stand, she got up bright and early and went to where the gauchos were, the gauchos for whose lives she had wept in my arms. You can’t imagine how much she had changed in just a few hours; barely overnight, where those blue eyes used to be she now had a gash on one side and a fountain of hate on the other, her remaining eye isn’t even blue anymore, it turned the colour of eternal ice, it’s terrifying, try and catch a glimpse when you see her. She got the men out of their cell and ordered that the five of them be stretched out between stakes on the ground. She formed a star shape with their bodies and left them to roast in the sun; hours later, maybe fourteen hours later – and this was in the height of summer – she had some buckets of water thrown over them, and as night fell she let them have some water to drink. In the sky the fluffy red clouds looked like ticks, thousands of blood-sucking ticks bunched up there against the emerging colours of orange and hot purple, and that fateful sky really should have told us what was coming but no, the gauchos asked her for forgiveness, por favor, Miss, we’re sorry, we didn’t mean to, it’s just that you’re so pretty and we’d drunk so much caña, we want to marry you, Miss, all five of us, we want to be your servants, forgive us. Miss Daisy ordered that they be given something to eat, some mush and a drop of caña, the gauchos took hope, thank you Miss, gracias, we will always be grateful to you Miss, and, feeling encouraged, they even smiled, and the Miss in question looked at them through the frozen nothingness of her empty eye and her full eye without saying anything. She sat down in the middle of the star shape made of men and asked to be brought a stout branch and a knife, and there she sat, sharpening the stick while they watched her and became less and less capable of speech, and more and more pale, more and more prone to sobbing, and their mothers and women and children gathered round to sob too, and even their horses seemed to be crying at what they had coming to them, the unleashed fury of Miss Daisy. Even I weakened slightly in my resolve to allow her to choose their punishment; there are some things you just don’t do to a man, whatever the crime, but I had given my word that I would respect the fate that she had chosen for her aggressors. I thought that she would choose mercy; how wrong a man can be, even a man of my age and experience! The other gauchos looked like they would protect the men, I had to get in the middle with my shotgun and all my officers had to stand in their way, all eleven of us were armed and we had to intervene, it was the closest we have ever come to a mutiny here at Las Hortensias. What can I say? I didn’t fire a single shot because the gauchos were in the right. They kept still until the gringa got tired and went back to her sick bed. Then we lowered our weapons and the gauchos went to get the bodies of the dead men, so encrusted in their own shit and dried blood that they had to be dragged out of the muck and scrubbed clean in order to be able to put them back in the ground again. If only they’d been that clean, white and cold in the first place, they’d have avoided ending their days as dirty, hot-blooded darkies. I myself wept that night.

Liz nodded while he spoke, from time to time she would rest her hand on his shoulder, she called him a hero and said you’re a true patriot, and she kept filling his glass because if the Colonel had pricks where other people have eyes, he also had ten thirsty camels where other people have mouths, his mouth was basically an end point, a pool of whisky where all his pricks drowned. Well handled! said Liz. She had Hernández wrapped around her little finger. What have you done with the degenerates and their mothers? she asked him. I am forcing them to learn in the tough part of the school, which I was telling you about, where we beat it into them, Miss Daisy’s school. She runs both schools but I have a feeling that the fear she inspires in them means those darkies will never learn anything, ever. And where is the other school? Over there behind those trees, Hernández said, pointing to a flat patch of ground cleared of scrub. He called out and one of his clean and coiffed gauchos appeared. Hernández ordered him to escort the ladies, which made the gaucho snigger. Hernández sniggered too at which point I drew my knife and he said to me no, no my lad, no offence, I’m not calling you a señora; what I meant was your sister is lady enough for two, and he sent us to visit the school for disobedient gauchos.

The blonde woman and her bastard twins were in charge there. The boys had turned out fierce and quite white and it was exactly for that reason – because nothing was right unless it was like their mother – that they hated gauchos. They imagined what they could have been if it hadn’t been for those five men killed in a bloody and shit-filled star. They wanted to go back to the United States with their mother and be cowboys in Minneapolis. Let’s go back home, momma they would say to her, as if there was any back for them to go to beyond Hernández’s estancia.