This is the exact impression that comes across, fifteen minutes later, to the inhabitants of the first ranches that, on its outskirts, a dispossessed stretch of land they seem exiled to, nonetheless marks the edge of the town. Many surprised faces mark their arrival under the rain from the sleepy and utter misery of the settlement, the only variation from the tedious and inescapable exclusion where poverty relegates them. Ten or fifteen shacks of straw, branches, cans, bags, and cardboard — refuse from the nearby dump — half falling apart or possibly never completed or more likely repaired and reappointed every so often with the haphazard and heterogeneous material offered by that same trash heap, constantly at the edge of collapse and in any case inadequate for living or even dying in, crowded together in a barren field among four of five sparse trees so ragged that they seem infected by the poverty, and where a mess of knickknacks, busted chairs, dismantled wardrobes, rusted grates, broken toilets crumbling among the weeds, paper and plastic bags twisted and half-buried in the mud, trunks, animal and human excrement, leather, bones, and dead branches litter the narrow space between the structures, and where three or four chickens and a dozen dogs, all of them rawboned and afflicted, wander around. At the back of a plot of untilled ground, two thin horses, indifferent to the rain, nibble at the yellowed grass. The filthiness of the ground stretches over the fifteen or twenty meters to the water. The smell of rotten fish, of sewage, and of carrion rises from the riverbank, and the earth is covered with dirty paper, cardboard disintegrating in the rain, broken bottles and rusted cans, ashes clumped together by the humidity, and even the carcass of a dog, hardened and dried despite the rain soaking it, a carcass whose owner, in the previous weeks, had managed to suffer, die, rot, and dry out again, so that, at its death, what it left behind will end up as dust, returned to the earth, or as bone forever.
Some of the shacks are shaded near their doorways by a kind of eave propped up on a pair of twisted poles and under which a rickety chair, old crates, or a stack of two or three trunks serve as seats. Outside one of the shacks, a double car seat, on the ground, leans against the partition that frames up the entrance. The poles of an abandoned garden, in the open ground where the settlement ends, point, in parallel lines, toward the gray sky. Both adults and children watch them as they pass. Some come out of their shacks and stare openly, but, apparently, without interest. The multicolored anachronism they comprise — contrasting with the immense gray-brown blotch of the settlement, which also stains the vegetation, the animals, and the people — seems to activate slow, rusted sensory mechanisms in the inhabitants, consigned to some remote corner of their mind by lack of use. Gutiérrez, raising his free hand, offers a generalized greeting as they pass that the others fail to acknowledge, or acknowledge only later, behind the curtain of rain, when they have already passed and can no longer register it, not from suspicion or timidity, and much less so from aggression, but rather from stupor, from indecision, from indifference.
— I feel like a sideshow freak, Gutiérrez murmurs. I wish I’d never been born.
— It’s not so bad, Nula says, also in a low voice, prefaced by the same short, dry laugh that, as he emits it, he realizes he uses only with Gutiérrez, meant perhaps to display a self-control that, in fact, is far from authentic. But I know what you mean, he adds. My father was convinced that the real problem with the world isn’t poverty, but wealth, and that’s why he had to die.
Turning his head suddenly, Gutiérrez observes him carefully, but all he finds is Nula’s profile, because Nula, as though he hadn’t noticed anything, continues looking ahead, into the rainy space that separates them from a crop of saturated trees.
— Someone over there traded in his car, and so your father had to get murdered, mutters Gutiérrez, turning back toward the trees that obliterate the horizon at the end of the landscape. And, after a short pause, the litany, which Nula could see coming, starts up again: who’ve ransacked the planet and now seem determined to do the same thing to the whole solar system, all so that they don’t have to resole their shoes and instead buy themselves a new pair every month; who build luxury resorts in the poorest areas so they can water ski and scuba dive and get a tan in the middle of winter and stay in bungalows that simulate a primitive existence but where they serve all-you-can-eat breakfasts and lunches that Roman orgy-goers would be embarrassed by, and especially at night when they go clubbing and swap wives and then complain when the locals kidnap a handful of them that they never hear from again, they, who would ravage everything to see their privileges maintained or amplified and are inclined to do the same over the ruins of the whole universe simply from the voluptuousness their dominion arouses. And Nula, with resigned irony, thinks, Yeah, but he bought himself Doctor Russo’s mansion, two kilometers from a shantytown, and, according to Moro, you’d have to calculate his fortune by the millions.
Though they walk downstream, the direction the river runs is not indicated by anything on the surface but the tension created there by the many rough and parallel waves, riddled with the projectiles of rain that pierce them as, pushed by the southwest wind, they encounter the resistance of the current. This tension is so uniform and the fall of the drops so regular that the rippled surface of the water seems less like a medium whose impulse is renewed continuously by the opposing forces that push it in contradictory directions than like a fixed, gelatinous substance that, because of some hidden tremor, trembles and vibrates constantly, and the drops that strike it, despite being always new, seem always the same, captured for a gray but distinct instant.
When they reach the grove and start to cross it, the tall crowns of the eucalyptus planted in rows parallel to the river — they have to turn away from the riverbank slightly as they approach the center of the town — shelter them from the rain, but at the same time the rain seems more real among the trees than in the open; the bark of the trees seems lacquered by the damp, and the ochre trunks, dark and shining where they’re not covered with bark, soaked in water, make it more distinct, as do the drops that cascade from the branches, and the odor of eucalyptus that the water amplifies, and the soft but numerous sound that the drops, continuous and polyphonic, produce against the branches and the trunks, against the leaf bed rotting on the ground, against the earth. At their arrival, two or three toads, motionless at the foot of a tree, stiffen and puff up from anxiety, from anger, or from fear, and then immediately flee with ineffective and clumsy jumps in various directions, while in the treetops a tumult of leaves and wings produced by invisible birds — of considerable size judging by the sound’s intensity — indicates that the presence of Gutiérrez and Nula has not gone unnoticed. As they leave the grove they are able to make out, beyond a narrow ditch so choked with weeds that it’s impossible to tell if there’s water at the bottom, the first houses, on the first streets, which apparently follow the straight line that the municipality assigned them, but, lacking sidewalks or gutters or even trees to mark the boundaries between street and sidewalk, are not yet fully streets; there are only a few isolated houses, built of unplastered brick or adobe, two or three per block, constructed along the outer perimeter of the rectangular territories that delimit the blocks, as in so many other towns, whose outskirts, though included within the urban space by the geometric design that demarcated them before the town was chartered, before materializing into houses, streets, life — an abstract idea of the town, diagramed with a ruler, in the same imagination of those who projected it — are confused with the countryside. Where the sidewalks should be there are weeds that, in some cases, extend from the sandy street all the way to the edges of the houses; sometimes, because the inhabitants have pulled them up, but almost always because their simple coming and going has eliminated the weeds, a thin path of bare earth has been opened from the fence (when there is a fence) to the middle of the street.