It was a fresh massacre, four or five days old at most, but almost nothing was left of the six bodies that lay strewn across the camp. Chimango caracaras and crested ones, and black and red-headed vultures pecked at wild dogs in dispute over the abandoned remains; the big cats, already sated, had stripped them almost completely, leaving bones and bits of hair and fingernails, and now swarms of black and red ants were busying themselves with ungainly and stubborn speed, with the dried filaments that the packs of stronger, faster animals had deigned to leave, having come out of nowhere and then vanished once more. The Indians had left whatever they could not carry to a beast fiercer than all the others: fire. A great circle of ash interrupted the unending pastureland, marking the place where the bonfire had burned. Digging about in the ash, we found several warped pieces of iron and a few chunks of wood, all blackened along one side, where the embers had formed, and thus crumbled easily in the fingers. The bones were already bleached by the morning sun, save for those parts near the joints where strands of flesh still remained and where, accordingly, the ants were seething. In three or four days the bodies had reached, from the net of tissue and blood where they once struggled, from the constant pull and throbbing of doubt and passion gnawing at them, a freedom from the grueling chicanery of the particular and reached the immutability of universals through the white simplicity of their bones, passing first from subject to object and now, rediscovered by human eyes, from object to symbol. As we buried them, though several soldiers did cross themselves, it occurred only to the Indian Sirirí to pray, but his eyes were blazing as he did. Doubtless, the god he addressed must have been a double entity able to receive both his humble prayers and his raging thoughts; Josesito’s crimes seemed to reach a part of Sirirí deeper than compassion or morality, home to a humiliation opposite to the chief’s; if Josesito could not endure the Christians’ arrogant superiority, perhaps what Sirirí could not support was feeling that he could not truly be one of them. That symmetry contained an irreconcilable antinomy, and I am sure that Josesito would have met Sirirí’s hatred with the most violent disdain.
But it was Troncoso in whom our tragic find seemed to produce the strongest effect. Possessing a conscience apparently confused by its inconsistencies even as they perceive their interlocutors’ skepticism, oftentimes the mentally ill try to put on an appearance of normality, only contriving to give their observers an impression of pretending, even theatricality. Though common to many patients, that impression was considerable in Troncoso’s case, and the corpses of the poor, murdered travelers intensified it further. Though he avoided the burial, he tried to enact his mounting agitation by any means, as if warning us that our terrible find obviously confirmed all his absurd beliefs. He kept his distance but did not refrain from aiming reproachful, if not disdainful, glances at us, to which he added a determined expression that figured exaggeratedly in his features, as if to send us a message. On the plain’s boundless stage, mounted sweaty and gesticulating on his roan, skin darkened on the parts of his face that went uncovered by his disheveled, white-streaked hair and beard, he looked like one of those bloodthirsty romantic heroes who, exaggerated by the artificial means of stage machinery, might shock an overly-credulous public in the theaters of Milan or Paris. And as he was not unaware that the word delirium is derived from the Latin verb for to leave the groove or track, that same night, supported by El Ñato’s conspiratorial coddling, Troncoso put that etymology into action.
The very next morning, on his master’s orders, the obedient Ñato came to give me Troncoso’s last message. His irregular and ostentatious script had filled two whole pages at full tilt with incoherent stupidity, outlining his absurd ambition to go out to meet Josesito and talk him into unconditional surrender, thus helping federate the tribes of South America into a single independent State. When I finished reading these febrile insanities and looked up, indignant, I could sense El Ñato watching me with a malevolent and satisfied air, and by his expression understood that he and Troncoso had managed to evade my tyrannical watchfulness at last. For a few seconds, I lost control of myself in a fury and, forgetting my obligations as a civilized man, I seized El Ñato by the shoulders and shook him so violently that his red neckerchief, perhaps poorly secured due to the early hour and his rush to bring me Troncoso’s bulletin, slipped back and fell to the ground, leaving bare El Ñato’s completely bald head. The surprise disoriented me for a few moments, and as my shouts had begun to attract sleeping folk to my wagon and because it was El Ñato’s baldness, more than my rage, that drew stares from the newcomers, there was a comic reprieve in the tragedy, and in the expressions of several I thought I glimpsed the brief thought that it was his baldness that had caused such a scandal. (Dr. Weiss asserted that pure tragedy exists only in the domain of art, and that in reality, even in its most appalling aspects, one always finds it tempered by some comic element, grotesque or even ridiculous.)
Consider my situation: A family had entrusted us with one of its members, a patient, for whom Dr. Weiss’s Casa de Salud represented the last hope for recovery and I, having kept him in my care for a few weeks, had let him escape my watch in open country to go meet with a band of savage Indians. As he had twelve hours’ lead on us and we knew that he and his horse were impervious to fatigue, it did not seem overly pessimistic to think he had already caught up with Josesito and his men, or that the Indians, with the same instinct as animals who unerringly surprise their prey, had already sensed the presence of a stranger in the barren land and had pounced upon him. Guarded by a ten-soldier escort, Osuna and I went in search of him across the endless plain, where a hint of spring had greened the grasses over the past two or three days, but an unseasonably scorching summer was already beginning to yellow them. During the days of our search, it was not Troncoso and his roan that we expected to find, but the rider’s bones, already bare and sun-bleached in the lonely countryside. When, for all his expertise, Osuna lost the trail, it was through his patience that he picked it up once more, several hours later. But Troncoso’s crazed energy, transmitted down into his mount, seemed to multiply the hours of our disadvantage. While we were condemned to rest, borne as we were upon poor human bones, they seemed to travel on the magical wings of delusion, which no obstacle of space or time can resist, and which would impose its outlandish and stubborn laws before crashing against the rocky indifference of the outer world. As the hours and days of search continued to accrue, my fear of not seeing Troncoso alive again grew stronger each time the traces of his movements dropped away, though they always reappeared; at last, now convinced that there could be no other possible ending, it took all my effort, as we galloped, dreary, across the soporific desert, not to let apathy defeat me: Such is the force with which that deserted land, once traversed, destroys all that we had accepted as familiar in ourselves before entering.