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CHAPTER 1

ON THE MOUNTAIN

Things have changed now. In those years, life wasn't enough for us to finish off the Spaniards.

I once met a grenadier whose foot teemed with maggots; he pulled them out with a tiny stick. He'd say 'Another one, go die,' day in and day out. If you look at it the right way, all of us were just like him. Day in and day out the same obsession: to finish off the Spanish in America. They were the maggots that fed on liberty, and vice versa. We were the maggots eating away the empire, without mercy.

I was left for dead in a terrible place, the Andean cordillera. Very high up, some mountain range in Peru.

I'm from the pampa. The crags, the wind, the condors big as I am, the paper sky ... I'm terrified of the mountain. With the regiment I could bear it. But when I opened my eyes in the silence, and found myself alone ...

The condor landed on the rock and fixed its round eye on me.

'If I stop looking, it will start,' the idea came to me. What would start? What I'd seen so many times before: eyes gouged out, the fluttering, the greedy naked necks sinking, emerging bathed in green stuff. Amidst the feathers, the corpse seemed to move.

'If I stop looking ...' And I did stop, for who knows how long. I had my wounds to keep me busy.

The sun, too. At that height you can't imagine what the sun is like. The shadow either. Look for shelter and you find ice, look for warmth and you step in a bonfire. And so you die in two different ways, and the mountain stays indifferent.

Without the cordillera, without condors, without sun, without shade, I'd still have had the wounds: my broken leg, my broken arm, my broken ribs, something on the side of my face.

And the thirst. The thirst was worse than all the rest put together.

Around me were snowy peaks, hunks of raw flesh and pampas the colour of gold, false as death.

Why was I alone? A horseshoe near my foot and a cannon were my company. Not a corpse, a voice or a gun in sight. And the condor waiting.

I thought: I'm dead. The pain proved me wrong.

I came to understand that I'd fallen off a cliff, no doubt the mule's fault. We'd always hated each other. It probably fell out of pure spite, dragging me and pieces of stone along, the cannon falling off its back along the way. It was certain it had gone on falling a long way – the horseshoe was its farewell letter – and a flurry of activity by the condors suggested it was lying further down. If I could have felt joy, I would have.

I suppose those condors served as a signal.

When I opened my eyes the light had changed. A gag choked me, my tongue. A mushroom slid past, or a turtle (I started to think I was dead again). No, it was a human figure under a leather hide, furtive, hunched over, armed. He fought the condors for what was left of the mule.

I said, 'For the love of God ...'

No voice came from me.

I yelled, 'Brother, for the love of God.'

My next memory is darkness. I'm no longer thirsty, and am bound like a salami. A little noise: chac chac. My tinderbox. A small flame leaps up. I see a being, a gleam of bald forehead. Crouching, he starts a fire. Flames rise. Leaning over the flame, he sobs.

Daytime. The place turns out to be a cave. I'm still bound, for medicinal purposes, with furry strips of hide. Rocks close off the entrance. At certain times, I hear them moving; close my eyes, peer. The being wrapped in pale furs closes the entrance again; before looking at me he focuses on the embers, far more interesting to him than I was.

Why is it so hard for me to say 'the man'? His emotion by the fire, his care for me were very human. His baldness suggested the blood of a white man. But something about him frightened me. More than anything, his refusal to speak.

With him I changed. Usually spontaneous, I became cunning. Usually courageous, I started to fear. Usually grateful, I was forced into resentment.

Two more memories. The days when he smoked the pieces of mule snatched from the condors, the taste of mush he fed me with. When I recovered, I found out the mush was mule meat he had chewed.

Months passed. I came to know his scowling light-blue eyes, close-set by his beaky red nose. A giant crouched before the fire. I wanted to make him talk, so I told stories, I sang, I even recited ten-line verses, but to no effect. Deaf and dumb I thought, but that wasn't it. How many times had I startled him with the sound of my voice, making him turn his back with fury? My struggle was to make him speak, his, to remain silent. Since he couldn't convince me, he once threw a stone at me. Small, but effective enough on my wounds. I accepted his silence. It meant renouncing friendship.

Spanish, I decided. Basque, a mountaineer. A deserter. Or someone like me, a left-over. What made me think so? His Basque appearance, his features. And a certain intuition.

I came to think my uniform was what prevented him from talking. A maggot gnawing on the empire. But up there, what did any of that mean?

It meant nothing. For me, he went against all that was human. Despite having saved me with so much effort, we were enemies. Because of that, because of the silence.

But why did he want to remain so silent?

When he wanted to sleep he disappeared into a corner. I imagined the cave formed an elbow shape; I later confirmed it.

Fear, as if all the evil of the mountain were concentrated in him, made me pretend to be weaker than I was even after I started to recover. Only when he left and all the noise ceased, except the wind and murmurs at those heights, did I have the courage to sit up.

Then I crawled, groaning, understanding that complete health was still far off, and that I had to yield to time and my host in order to escape alive.

Yield, what a word. Yielding for me had always meant talking, saying one's name, telling things to each other.

When I could take a few steps, I saw his bedding, his treasures: the cannon, straps, remains of uniforms, weapons both patriotic and Spanish, the mule's harness, stone tools.

I spent hours and hours alone. He went out to hunt. I understood he did so in anticipation of winter. Winter! I'd been wounded in spring, and already at that time the cold was almost unbearable in the bivouac, let alone on the marches. Winter. I clung to the cave as if it were my mother's womb. Dying is no strange thing. But on the mountain ...

Let's jump ahead to the first snowfall.

The cave was deeply cold.

Every time he went out, I sat up. The dizziness was overwhelming, I leaned on the rock. I flexed my arms and legs. Or rather one arm and one leg. The others were stiff as a couple of stakes. I'd sworn to be stronger than them and spent hours rubbing them, forcing them to yield. They resisted, but there was progress. That progress was my fixed idea, the meaning of my days.

A difference in the light made me peek outside. I saw fresh snow. I saw footprints.

Almost round. A cubit in diameter. The toe detached, the rest blurry. Barefoot, biped footprints. To judge by the sinking of the snow, the owner's weight was proportional.

I trembled like a hare. I imagined the monster's sense of smell, my own weakness. I imagined my saviour outside, and me at his mercy. I was about to drag myself away in search of the sabre when the stones at the entrance moved. I backed away towards the coals, prepared to set fire to the blanket as a first defence; but as soon as I made out the hand wrapped in strips of wool, my cunning took precedence, I threw myself on the ground under the blanket, I pretended to sleep.

This time he looked closely at me before checking the fire. It's true I wasn't in the same place as usual, but in that weather it was natural to seek warmth. He wanted to make sure of something about me. His breathing was controlled, not agitated. He had seen the footsteps and now wanted to make sure I was sleeping. He knew about the monster. He was only concerned to know if I knew too.

He shook me. I pretended to wake up although my pulse was leaping. He pointed at my corner. I pointed at the coals. Immediately, so as not to be caught in the trap of speaking in signs, I said:

'Starting today I'm going to sleep by the fire.'

He shook his head, the grey locks of hair on his balding crown sweeping his shoulders. He grabbed the blanket and threw it into my corner.

There followed a time that saw some changes. My legs began to work better, my arm responded. It was something he seemed to be waiting for. He started some blacksmithing work, which in the beginning I didn't understand, using musket barrels as tongs, stones as anvils. And fire, of course. He sewed a pair of bellows out of hides before my eyes without my realising what it was for. I began to admire him.

As a slave-driver, first of all. I had noticed how people from the mountains, people from Europe, worked as if they had no hearts, constantly. He had me at the bellows for thousands of hours. He wanted to turn my cannon into something else. And he did. We did. We made a couple of shovels, or something of the kind.

That reminds me how hard we shovelled snow away.

Sometimes I thought the footsteps had been a hallucination. Sometimes I heard a noise and jumped up to defend myself. I imagined my sabre snapping like a piece of straw in a bear's paws. A mastodon seemed to rush at me, I could see its huge tusks. One day it was furry, another day covered in scales, yet another day a giant that could grab a man in each hand and slice their heads off with one bite. The fire was my plan: I'd throw embers in its eyes to begin with, then right after, a torch at its snout, chest and belly. I could hear its shriek. I could hear it draw back, bent over with claws withdrawn.

I never spoke about him.

Alone, kneading hides, making leather fastenings, sewing and smoking meats (my activity was domestic; my going out was frowned upon), I had time to think. I imagined many things. The light of day keeps us balanced. I lived in shadows. I imagined my man had domesticated the monster and made it hunt for us. I imagined too much. Taking the wind as an excuse I surrounded my bed with stones, projectiles I wanted to have at hand.

That night I jumped towards them. A horrible voice woke me. It cried out with a thousand echoes. The monster. No. The embers gave off a calm light under the dark vaults. Everything was calm. Except that voice and those echoes, that language not spoken by any people, in which recognisable words floated: María Luisa, Cayetano.

My companion was dreaming in Basque.

I got used to so much in that time that growing accustomed to his dreams needed no otherworldly effort. What did come from another world were his voice and his language, those echoes. And the cold.

During one of my inspections I discovered a hole covered with gravel and, very worn-out, the military document of Miguel Cayetano Echeverrigoitía, born in Hornachuelos, Biscay, soldier of the Fourth Infantry of the King's Hunters. How clever I felt. I even laughed. At his mercy, for a moment I felt I was his master.

This awoke in me the urge to talk, after being reduced for so long to monosyllables. It took an unexpected form: I told racy jokes. They had never amused me before; you hear too many of them in the bivouacs. One by one I repeated all those I knew. I meant to wake something in him, I didn't know well what. Laughter. That's it, laughter. Which after words is the most human thing of all (if you except betrayal). I felt that laughter, a smile, could be the dawn of a word. One word and the wall of his madness could fall.

I see him now as I did that night, under the reddish light, a bone from which he's sucking the marrow stuck in his mouth like a flute. He didn't find the jokes funny. His breathing grew agitated. I regretted having possibly stirred his lust. I became silent, and very sad.

I set a date for speaking to him about the monster. 'Tomorrow, at the crack of dawn.'

Dawn is the mountain's cruellest lie. It seems innocent, even beautiful.

But that day there was no dawn. I woke without light. The snow blocked us. No chance of shovelling.

We were buried.

He seemed calm. I decided to be so too. If I had to die it would be with dignity. My only objection was that if it was my fate to die on the mountain, why hadn't it happened before, on the ravine between the cannon and the horseshoe; why go through this relationship in the cave and this healing, just to come to the same end? At least there were no condors, and that was something. There was ...

I knew by heart what there was. Provisions, smoked; hanging herbs; piles of fuel. My Basque had worked as hard as a sailor.

I had always trusted I would be out of there before we had to consume certain provisions I had smoked during the summer and fall. Snakes, for example, that my companion had snatched from the condors, by throwing stones deadly as lightning bolts. I faced eating them philosophically, thinking of them as nourishment that would give me strength.

Then began the kind of cohabitation that leads to murder, that of two people who are walled in.

We lived wrapped in furs and clinging to the fire we kept burning in a pit. We wrapped our heads in strips of uniform from different regiments, covered in frost, our eyes not showing; we covered our legs and feet in saddle blankets stuffed with straw and goat hair. Outside the wind was, I don't know, say, like the mountain turned into air, tumbling. We were amoebas in its belly, ready to be evacuated into nothingness.

Maggot of the empire, maggot of liberty, writhing a little longer, but for how long? What for?

And without speaking.

He ruled, he was the master of the house. No objections. What to eat, what to drink, what to make, when to exercise, everything, everything done in silence.

What to drink? Ah, yes. Every meal was completed with a tisane. Mine, I discovered, was only for me. It had a bitter taste, the roots of a blackish vegetable.

It took me a while to realise it was a narcotic. I began to sleep a lot and would wake up feeling heavy, still dreaming. I dreamt, I went about drowsy all day. Better this way, I thought. Even the cries of 'María Luisa, Cayetano!' no longer woke me.

I was asleep the night the monster entered the cave. Asleep the hours it took him to dig away the snow outside, the days it took to reach the entrance, asleep when it dragged aside the rocks to open a path. The wind did not put out the fire. We didn't die of cold. Because a hand had been there to surround the embers with stones, close the opening from the inside, let the monster out, and close the rocks again. The hand of an accomplice of the monster.

I noticed the changes the next day. Light came through the cracks, a wall of stones circled the fire, the rocks at the entrance were arranged in a different way. And there was a certain smell.

My waking was observed with such attention that I understood: it was life or death. I decided to be an idiot.

I exulted, 'Ah! The snow outside has melted!'

The alliance of Don Miguel Cayetano Echeverrigoitía with a monster of an unknown species was enough to erase the effects of his narcotic. I channelled my exaltation. Bending over the stones I had been striking for weeks to get something like an axe, I forced my nervous system into a rhythm as regular as the blows. But my companion was perceptive and able to notice the change.

I realised, as if I saw it written in letters on the wall, that my death had been decreed, that everything depended on my ability to pretend. That my axe, the hides I had kneaded and sewed, the meats I had smoked, my own flesh, to be smoked, would be used for the survival of the one who had saved me. The despotism of winter was about to reveal its secret. My life depended on that discovery. I decided to delay it, to be the most idiotic of idiots.

But since curiosity is common in idiots and in others, I decided not to drink the tisane. For this, I counted on my companion's modesty, which made him turn his back as soon as one went towards the pit and the heap of sandstone. There my tea met its end, and its steam was no different from what usually came from that place.

I pretended to feel the greatest drowsiness, I lay down to sleep. And I did sleep, just as I did all the nights that followed, because I had no more news of the monster. I almost even forgot it existed. It began to seem another hallucination.

But it wasn't possible to forget everything. Through heavy shovelling we kept open the excavation that had led it to our door. I felt as if I'd die of fatigue. And the white immensity outside made me feel as if I'd die of sorrow. Not to ask about the miracle that had opened that gap was almost, almost suicide.

I made a comment about the good luck that had brought that 'melting'. It produced a ferocious, attentive stare. Leaning over my shovel, I seemed innocent. My wretched condition as a man of the plains could explain away most things.

Did I say that curiosity is common to many? Yes it is. Even to monsters.

My man had made something like rackets for his feet. He managed to go outside without going far, so that a great snowfall wouldn't cut him off from the cave. Which meant I went back to spending my hours alone. Such relief.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Land of Smoke"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The Heirs of Sara Gallardo.
Excerpted by permission of Pushkin Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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