The Whip and the Rod

No door was closed to us. Hernández showed us everything with patrician pride. Stiff and drying out like hides in the sun, skin cracked, eyes shut, faces contorted in pain: that’s how we found the gauchos in Campo Malo, the place that Hernández kept for outcasts. Being sentenced to death was primarily for deserters and murderers, the worst crimes that could be committed at Las Hortensias. Everything else, including stealing, was considered a minor offence, punishable by spread-eagling between four stakes, by the stocks, or by whipping with knotted, wetted reins. What you couldn’t do was leave. Or kill. The death sentence that awaited murderers was to be put inside the hide of a freshly slaughtered cow, a method they called the beef roll. The poor wretch would be rolled in the cow’s skin, stitched inside it and left outside in the blazing sun: slowly the hide would tighten, smothering him as it dried, hour after hour, until he was dead.

After being punished – unless the punishment was death – each gaucho was squeezed into a small space containing only hides and dirt then bound hand and foot, like cattle snagged with bolas, so that the damned idlers couldn’t just lie down to sleep. The Little Daisies explained their methods to us, they were only about fifteen, but every bit as tough as their momma: they would cover the men’s eyes with blinkers and gag them with bridles, then throw them to the ground, and lash their bodies with whips. The men were bloodied bundles, speckled black and blue from all the flies they couldn’t swat, and they were kept like that because they do not want to learn. They were kept in punishment boxes after their day in the stocks, or the stakes, and were left to do a week of penance so that they would be reformed. Then they were allowed to go, and off they went, like this stupid nigger, for example – the taller of Miss Daisy’s offspring kicked the skinned head of a gaucho on flesh so raw it hurt to see it – who ran off to his mother’s house, so that he could suck the tits of that whore of a witch who was his mother and wife in the same body. And we had others, a couple of them managed to escape from us, like that bone-idle man who sang instead of working, and who learnt his letters so he could write down his songs and then went around saying that the bossman had stolen his poems and we gave him a taste of the whip and the rod and then we gave him a bit more and he wouldn’t stop saying that the songs were his, and we had him ready to be broken in, you know ma’am, a horse in front to pull him one way and a horse behind for the other way, and we were going to have one horse run towards Great Britain and one towards Indian Territory, but that scumbag larva escaped. We knew he was a worm because he wriggled free somehow. It doesn’t really matter if we find him or not, what do we care about that Indian piece of shit and all these damn Indians? they said, spitting on the men, and there was something so menacing about them, they were so full of themselves, so proud of what they were showing us, whereas I just wanted to get out of there, to get out of earshot of the pleas for mercy uttered by the weak voices of the dying men. Liz congratulated the boys, she told them that if she was their mother she would be so proud of them, what good boys, muy bien, hardworking and with such lovely English manners. The Little Daisies were thrilled; they stopped hitting and swearing for a while and they saw us to the door of Campo Malo.

On the rest of the estancia – the Campo Bueno was it called? – work seemed to bring happiness to everyone. The world is like a woven cloth, Liz began, what is brilliant here is like a weave that only shines because it has a warp of flesh and blood, which is Campo Malo, and that’s the way it’s always been, and that’s the way it will remain until we all know our place in the weaving process. In this particular pattern, the gauchos and the chinas – who didn’t do gymnastics because at that time of the morning they were giving breakfast to their children – worked with dedication from eight in the morning until eight at night. They would sing ‘See our beloved flag that waves/its emblem is our beacon/Oh Argentina fought so braaaaave/to give us all our freedom!’ and would do their work by parts. What I mean is that no one did a whole job, no one finished what they started. The washerwomen, for example, sat at the sides of huge basins, the first ones soaked and soaped the clothes. They would pass them down the line to the next group of women who would scrub them with brushes. They in turn would pass them along to be rinsed. And finally the white shirts, shining like the sun, would be hung out to dry by dark-skinned women. It was the same at the furnace: one man would stoke the fire, another would heat the metal until it was soft enough, one would hammer it into the desired shape and plunge it into cold water and another would take it out all sleek and shiny and put it up on a stand. In just one day I saw hundreds of horseshoes being made using this formula: the Colonel wanted to invent a new speed on the pampa, he’d been to Great Britain and the United States of America and he wanted for the Argentines something of the forceful zeal of the Anglos. Only men worked in the furnace and, when the foreman was out of earshot, these men sang songs as they stared at the chinas: ‘A cap the girl frog was a’knitting/to give to a boy frog one day/Well mind how you go little girl frog/For this frog needs a roll in the hay’.

The Colonel held another huge dinner that night and ended up blind drunk on wine again. The patriarch’s head hadn’t even hit the table before Liz sprang from her chair and led me, practically shoving me, to her bed. It wasn’t that I minded, I was merely trying to ask, trying to understand why she was acting so queer with me, she had been so different during our journey. But you like it, don’t you? she interrupted, giving me one last shove. I fell onto the bed with a bounce and she rushed to get my clothes off like she was rushing to put out a fire. She took her clothes off as well and continued with my education: this time she began gently, stroking my whole body, front and back, with her hands, her mouth, her tongue, her nose and she even stuck her nipples into all my holes. I was lost for words, even though this woman had taught me so many of them as we crossed the desert, inside the wagon, by the fire, under the ombú trees, and drinking caña with Rosa. The chinas knocked at the door and came in, I hid while they filled the tub with hot water, Liz asked them to bring some tea, which they did, and then they went away. She grabbed me all over again and stuck me in the bath and got in herself, and then she did something no one had ever done to me: she turned me round, sinking her breasts onto my shoulder blades, biting me hard on the back of my neck like a dog carrying its pup across a river, she never once let go of me, with one hand she began to rub my nipples and with the other my cunt, she parted my buttocks, and leaning there, she grabbed my hand and taught me to touch myself, she sucked my fingers, she put them on my clitoris, using my hand as if it were hers until I found my own rhythm, she opened my arse a bit more and then penetrated me with her fist while she bit me harder and harder and kept squeezing my breasts. I stopped touching myself, I grabbed the sides of the tub with both hands and allowed myself to be filled up with this new pleasure, almost stinging, a pleasure made of needles and pins, she made me howl like an animal in her arms. I came in my arse, pledged her eternal love, and then sucked her till I nearly drowned.