I went and milked one of the runaways, who was quite docile about it and seemed relieved. I knew a fair bit about cows, although I’d never really stopped to look at their faces. The runaway and I looked at each other, she batted her eyelashes in what I took to be gratitude, as if the milk had been weighing her down. I kept looking and saw in her round, untroubled eyes, her good cow eyes, an abyss, a deep longing for pasture, for a track, for fields of sunflowers even. All this I seemed to glimpse in her pupils along with her urge to lick her calf. She began licking the calf there and then and I looked down and got on with my milking and decided to give her a name, I called her Curry. When I’d finished, both the calf and Estreya started suckling. Estreya had hardly ever had milk in his life and he went at it delightedly until he was sated and lay on his back with his paws curled up, his tail waggling on the ground in ecstasy.
Rosario the gaucho introduced himself again while he laid the fire and prepared a spit for cooking the beef, he paused briefly to tear off a piece of the animal’s stomach lining that was a bit dry but still flexible, and he filled it with the milk I gave him and fed the lamb, who then went to sleep at his feet by the fireside. ‘The lamb’s called Braulio. He’s male,’ Rosario pointed out.
That it was male was obvious. I was the one Rosario was probably confused about, with my men’s clothes and my smooth cheeks. And Liz calling me ‘Jo’. I didn’t offer any explanation, I just helped him gather firewood and stroked the lamb while Estreya sniffed at it in wonder. The way the gaucho had nursed the little lamb was so touching. Yet when he’d built the fire, he stood up, unsheathed his knife, grabbed a calf, stunned it with a stone to the head and slit its throat. Its mother’s distressed moaning made us all feel awful. Rosario surprised me once again with his tenderness: after having killed the calf he went up to the cow and stroked it, asking her forgiveness and feeding her some grass from his hand. The cow carried on lowing dolefully and stumbling around, butting other calves with her head. She was looking for her own calf, which by now was splayed over the fire. I thought for a moment about my little ones, my little boys, but barely, I couldn’t afford to think too much, or cry or let anything drag me back to my life in the shack: I was leaving that behind.
So now we were four with Rosario, Estreya, me and my Liz, as I’d started calling her. Rosario carried on with his asados, his feeding bottles made of tripe, and his little orphans: as well as Braulio, he soon adopted a hare, a cuy and a young foal. They all walked along behind the gaucho as if he was a mother duck and they were his ducklings. At night, before spreading out his poncho if he was sober enough – or collapsing wherever if he wasn’t – he would tell us scraps of his life which we’d already half-guessed, having seen how he was. His father died young, his mother was left alone with eight mouths to feed, his stepfather was as vicious as a puma among hens and Rosario, old beyond his years, was forced to flee that cruel life aged ten, pushed to the door by the tip of his stepfather’s knife, to nurse his wounds elsewhere. With a limp, and grey before his time, the poor lad was still looking for someone to look after him in that vast nothingness: so we took him in. He stayed with us, looked after us and we looked after him. He laughed at my men’s clothing but he understood, he said that he thought it was a good thing me dressing like a man, it was like carrying a knife, all women should carry them the way all men do. We knew he was talking about his mother and how he’d have preferred her to have grown a beard if it meant she’d have stayed a widow with him by her side instead of that monster. After another caña, Rosario demanded more English to make him laugh and Elisa, Elizabeth, sang him her songs or told him stories, and he laughed as if ‘two monkeys were dancing minuets upside down’. Then he’d wake up rough, hungover as Liz put it, so she’d lace his mate with whisky and Rosario would come back to life and thank her in the same faltering English every day: ‘Tank you señora for cure me.’
By Dint of Force
Liz carried on with her stories about Great Britain. When she went to London, the sky was leaden and smoky from the locomotives and factories, and the almost incessant rain had a sharp tang to it. The air she breathed was damp and grey, with a strange orangey tint, and so heavy and thick that she could almost see it. Yet as soon as she left the city behind, the light gleamed on unbroken fields of grass that stretched all the way to cliffs pounded by the sea. The land ends abruptly there, as if England had been cut off from the rest of the world with an axe, as if the land had been forcibly condemned to an insularity which those of us who live there, we, the British, darling, try to overcome by dint of force, making ourselves the centre, organising the world around us, being the motor, market and matrix of all nations. Here in Argentina we’re so far removed from that other island which rises up sustained by its weaponry, its steamships, its machines invented to dominate the world with ever faster production. That island where metal goods reign as intractably as the railroads laid down all over by royal decree so that the fruits of men’s labour migrates from fields, mountains and jungles to ports, ships and finally into her own port, to the all-devouring mouth of Kronos. That mouth where everything becomes fuel for its own insatiable speed: from the still-warm hairs on a cowhide to the frozen facets of diamonds, from stretchy rubber to crumbling coal. The power of Great Britain isn’t in armies or banks: our strength comes from speed, beating the clock, trailblazing, cutting production times, faster ships, machine guns, banking transactions made in a matter of days, above all the power of the railways dividing the earth, heading for every port laden with imperial manufacturing and returning with spoils and fruits from every land.
Everything was still possible in that languid time of the pampas, during our chats over Rosario’s asados. He was constantly amused at the sound of English; ‘what’s your word for that, señora?’ he’d ask Liz, and explode with laughter whenever she answered ‘cow’, ‘sky’, ‘horse’, ‘fire’ or ‘Indians’, scattering the birds who were picking ticks off the runaway cows. He would merrily gnaw at a rack of ribs and – in gaucho fashion – wash it all down with caña. Then over pudding he’d start talking to his horses. He was sorry, he said, but the horses couldn’t go travelling with Liz because where she came from, wagons moved by themselves. ‘Wheels move with rods over there, you poor horses would be out of a job! You’d be up shit creek! You’ll just have to stay here with me; where the Gringa comes from, they don’t need the likes of you,’ and he’d pat them fondly. We laughed too and Estreya ate out of his hand and curled up in Rosario’s lap as if he was still just a puppy. Liz sent Rosario off to bed and he did as any gaucho would: he took his poncho and the sheepskin off his saddle and lay down with the animals. He’d taken a shine to Estreya and together they slept out under the stars with Braulio.
We went, just the two of us, into the warm, yellowish fug of the wagon. Liz snuffed out the candles, stripped me of the Gringo’s clothes, wiped me down with a damp sponge, dried me, put a petticoat on me, lay down in my arms and went to sleep, as if she hadn’t noticed the goose bumps all down my body, nor caught the urgent smell of desire that hung in droplets from the hairs of my pubis until they spread slowly and languorously down my thighs.
That’s Also Something You Eat and Drink with Scones
The desert framed the scene, a brownish plain, the same in all directions, a flat