Sacramento tore off a leaf and it turned out to be an insect, he was about to grab a stick but it was a snake, he heard the beautiful song of a bird and it too turned out to be a snake: a singing ophidian.
“I’m never going to learn,” he said, disheartened. “Nothing here is what it seems and everything acquires the gift of transforming itself into its opposite. The only certain thing is the hungriness with which the jungle looks at you; let down your defenses for a second and you’ll get swallowed up.”
Eight days later, green, weak, and moldy from the humidity and lack of sun, their stomachs out of sorts from drinking amoebic broth and chewing corozo seeds, they found themselves on an old camino real opened by the conquistador Jiménez de Quesada along the Río Opón, upon which the Troco wanted to build a road to Campo Escondido and so was recruiting fresh blood for the work of leveling and moving earth.
They arrived around midnight and were greeted by the miracle of the river transformed into a bed of placid stars, which at the edge came away from the water and took off in flight.
“Those floating lights you see are female lightning bugs calling their mates,” said Payanés.
“Such tireless vegetation, so many creatures giving off light, so many males trying to copulate,” said Sacramento. “Nature is a very loving thing, hermano.”
They removed their shoes and lay down among the rest of the men, beneath the immense sky and with their heads firmly resting on their shoes, which are the most cherished possession in the life of a foot traveler. Despite their precaution, they went to sleep with four and awoke with three: Payanés’s two and only the right shoe belonging to Sacramento, who sat in a gully hugging his widowed shoe and began to cry. He cried from exhaustion and because he was an orphan and because of the desolation of his abandoned foot, which was condemned to the sharp edges of the rocks and to the itching from the ticks and chiggers that embedded themselves in the plants, where they lay their crops of eggs.
“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday you get the complete pair,” Payanés said consolingly, handing him a tin can of hot coffee. “Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I’ll have it. Two Sundays a month for you, two Sundays for me.”
“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday,” corrected Sacramento, “the first son of a bitch who lets down his guard tonight will have to limp around, because I’m going to steal a left shoe.”
“Why would they have only stolen one?”
“It must have been some damned one-legged thief.”
“It won’t be hard to recognize him then.”
“What if the thief has all of his legs, and if someone else had stolen only one of his shoes too?”
“Then that means that a cycle has begun that not even God can end.”
Sacramento and Payanés racked their brains trying to imagine what luck could befall two men with three shoes, when toward them came an old man, ill-humored and mumbling curses.
“I’m getting out of here,” he said, chewing his words, as Sacramento studied the sturdy pair of raised-heel boots with leather straps the old man was wearing. “If you want my place you can have it. I’d rather die of hunger in my homeland than leave my bones buried in these shitty swamps. They’re plagued with bugs, look, there goes one, and there’s another. They say they bite, the filthy creatures. I’m getting out of here, yessir, before a fucking bug eats me.”
“Well, if you’re leaving, why don’t you do me the favor of leaving me your boots?” proposed Sacramento, inspired by the muses of his desperation.
Astonished, Payanés looked at him.
“What do you mean, my boots?” the old man shot back. “Do you by chance have a million pesos to give me for them?”
“I don’t have anything to give you for them, but look at my situation and you’ll understand, somebody stole my shoe, which there is a great need for around here, and since you’re going home and probably have another pair waiting for you there…”
“And how am I supposed to get home, fly? Stupid idiot. That’s just what I need, some blockhead to start asking me for presents. Maybe you think I look like baby Jesus?”
Stubborn in his foolishness, Sacramento kept arguing reasons for mercy and heaping on descriptions of his misfortune, refusing to recognize that there is no human power that can convince a stranger to cross the mass of the Andes unshod, of his own will, for no good reason and without receiving anything in return.
“What do you mean that you’re leaving us your place?” Payanés, who was sharper at this sort of dealing, asked the old man.
“There’s plenty of work to go around here, what there’s not enough of is willing men. The only requirement for a man is that he have two hands, bring his own tool, and be willing to work like an animal and leave the child’s play behind. And your shovels? Where are your shovels?”
“We don’t have shovels.”
“They only hire personnel with tools.”
“Serious problem, hermano,” said Payanés to Sacramento, removing his red baseball cap to scratch his head.
“Well, if you want I’ll sell you my shovel.”
“Well, seeing that it’s an old shovel, and I’m not exactly rich…”
The give and take of the negotiation started high, rapidly descended to midrange, and stagnated with the bartering of trifles — the shovel for the red cap, a pound of coffee and the shovel for the missal that Sacramento was carrying, the coffee for the red cap — until the old man convinced himself of the calamitous insolvency of his opponents and chose to move on to look for a higher bidder.
“Don’t go,” said Sacramento, grabbing him by the sleeve. “I’ll give you my shoe for your shovel.”
“What in the hell do I need with a single shoe?”
“In case someone steals one of your boots…”
“That would never happen, who’s going to steal it?”
“These unfortunate things happen, look at me. Anyway, an extra shoe will certainly serve you more than a broken shovel on your journey.”
The old man left for his homeland with Sacramento’s shoe in his pack, while the two boys agreed to take turns with the endowment: While one rested the other would work with the shovel and Payanés’s shoes, and the next day they would exchange roles.
“Repeat after me: Pick, you are my father; shovel, you are my mother”—that was the only instruction given to them by the foreman before he exploded the dynamite that reduced a huge rock to gravel, sending monkeys and parrots to the moon.
That’s how they started to work, and to suffer. They clung to their shovel as if it were the sword and shield of a wandering knight and with it they opened the way among the thousand torments of the jungle, paddling among the stagnant waters at the edge of the river, which boiled like a thick, rancid soup and gave off a fetid vapor that impeded their breathing.
“It’s malaria,” diagnosed someone. “This poisonous air is what they call malaria.”
“Don’t be ignorant, malaria doesn’t fly around on its own, it spreads by mosquitoes,” corrected someone else. “They’re called anopheles. Only the female bites, and she lives only seven days, but in that time she can infect at least seven men.”
“And those seven men are bitten by a hundred flies who then bite seven hundred more men, until there’s not a healthy Christian in the whole departamento of Magdalena.”
“Or in all of Colombia.”
“Well, the truth is that yes, they are biting,” complained Payanés, and the statement bothered Sacramento, because it made real a nuisance that until then he had managed to ignore.