Amazing I can still remember it…
But offering a meat thermometer to an Argentinian grill master was like offering a compass to a search dog.
When all our money ran out, my cowboy pulled a few strings and got us both jobs on a ranch out on the Pampas. I rewarded him for his efforts by calling him a cab.
That took us away from the city and the waiting. Dad was to be the caretaker and I was to serve an old man who virtually lived in a world of his own. Even though the wages were low, our accommodation and keep were free. This was a marvellous way for us to start in our new world.
100
At the Bennis’
1949
Looking at a map of the world, if you place the head of a drawing pin on Buenos Aires with its tip pointing towards the South Pole, that was where the ranch was, on the banks of the Salado River: La Quinta de Crío. Eighteen people lived here, all with the same surname: Benítez. It was clearly a Hispanicisation of the original surname Benni.
A few cows were milked to meet the needs of the household, but otherwise the flat land of the farm was split into two between its pale yellow wheat fields and luscious green pastures for the black cattle. The buildings were white during the day but pitch black at night. Never have I experienced the type of darkness they have on the Pampas. Around the house were a few ombu trees topped with huge crowns, and the path to the next farm was lined with spindlier plants. Their leaves seemed dark against the golden cornfields, like plumes of ash shooting out of a still sea. Otherwise the landscape was like the Great Steppe of Russia, La Pampa.
Beyond the trees, at a short distance from the farm, stood a shed that managed to include a bedroom, a living room and a toilet. Inside it sat a fat man in his seventies in a makeshift wheelchair, who because of his lack of a throat looked like a mountain of flesh. His small head rested on multiple chins like an ornament on a cake. It was the strangest face I’d ever seen: a big nose with an even bigger mouth. Without smiling, his mouth stretched from ear to ear. His eyes, on the other hand, were tiny and translucent yellow. His skin was thick and rough and lined with deep wrinkles, which were interspersed with tobacco-stained warts. He was the most hideous man I’d ever seen, a heap of flesh with jaundiced eyes. The first thing that came to mind was a lizard.
Dad was engaged in general farm labour, while my job was to milk the cows in the morning and at night and tend to the old man in the shed. He was deaf, dumb and blind. The door creaked every time I stepped inside with his bowl of porridge. The air was heavy and saturated with human odours. I couldn’t help thinking, how could my life have been turned upside down like this? Just a few months previously I’d been sitting with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir and the other kids in a café by the lake in Reykjavík, and now I was sitting at the other end of the globe, feeding a crocodile with a teaspoon. Because despite his lizard-like features, he was known as the Crocodile, El Coco.
His two nephews, both men in their forties, sat inside the farmhouse with their extended families over loud meals, in white shirts with rolled-up sleeves that exposed their muscular, sunbaked arms. It was they who managed the farm and ordered my father about like a grovelling dog, and they called me Evita from the very first day, as soon as they’d measured me up with their goatish, wanton eyes. They’d never heard of Iceland and could never remember the name. Dad and I called them the Bennis. Their wives were real cooking machines, short, stocky creatures with nipples popping out in every direction. The house was crammed with children of all ages, everything from small floor lizards up to sixteen-year-old señoritas, who were as white as the walls they slid along and only became visible when they blushed. The matriarch of the Bennis had a yellowish-brown shrivelled prune of a face and never had a kind word to say about anyone except for the black dog who licked her hands and face after meals.
Watching over this entire herd was Gustavo, the head of the clan, hanging high on the kitchen wall, a big-nosed man in a black-and-white photograph that had been retouched in the manner that was fashionable back in the years before the war, with a crazed gaze that relentlessly yelled: El día pasa! El día pasa! (The day is passing! The day is passing!)
His widow, Dolmita, still lived: an elegant lady of Romanian origin, born on the banks of an Alpine lake in the mid-nineteenth century, who had once seen Wagner himself mount a horse. She tottered about the house with trembling hands, like a bird with shivering wings. A skeletal figure with skin stretched over her skull, she spoke Spanish with an unfathomable accent. Her nose, though, still kept its European dignity and attested to her aristocratic origins, which had, however, shipwrecked against that rock called Gustavo, because her descendants, who filled every courtyard and patio here, showed no trace of culture of any kind. Just a bunch of illiterate, carnivorous rodents. The old lady looked like a guest in her own house.
The couple had had three sons. The oldest had fled home at an early age with his father’s mistress. According to the latest news, he now lived with ten dwarf Indian women in the Andes. The second son, the father of the Bennis, had been killed by a combine harvester in a work accident, and the third was the deaf, dumb and blind reptile in the shed.
I soon realised that the household despised the Crocodile. Even the mother with the regal nose would have nothing to do with him and assured me that he could neither see nor hear, knew nothing, and understood nothing, he was just a dolor de la tierra, a pain of the earth. His father must have felt some affection for him, though, since he had left him half the land. The Bennis strictly prohibited me from bringing the Crocodile anything that could be considered a treat. El Coco was given the exact same ration of porridge at almost every meal, and his weight was therefore a total mystery to me.
‘Obviously some disease,’ Dad said.
They were forced to keep him alive, however, because as a young man he’d had a son with a travelling whore from Paraguay. He was called Big Ben and had appeared in the fullness of time, a tall brute who demanded his father’s money and made the farm his home by force. Faultless in appearance but cursed with a faulty temper, he managed to stir up every marriage on the farm and finally made off with the farm’s savings. Rumour had it that Big Ben was now a renowned knife fighter in the bars of La Boca, one of Fair Winds’ roughest neighbourhoods.
The big family in the kitchen therefore shared half the land with the Crocodile. If he kicked the bucket, his half would go to this son, the criminal. They couldn’t allow that to happen. I therefore played an important role on that farm. My task was to keep El Coco alive until his son was murdered in a knife fight, as a fortune-teller in the village had prophesied. According to her, it would happen when the son reached the age of thirty-three. He had just turned thirty-two.
In the evenings the Bennis practised knife-throwing in the stable.
101
El Coco
1949
What kind of an existence was this? To be unable to hear, see, or express anything? Maybe they were right to call him the Crocodile, more beast than man? He always sat in the same place, under a tall chest of drawers on top of which a clock ticked loudly, beside a robust but lopsided bridge table. An intricate jigsaw puzzle lay on top of the green flannel. While his hands were working, he fixed his reptilian gaze on a small window on the southern wall beside the door that creaked every time I entered. This gave me an excellent preview of my future life in the garage. I played the part of Lóa, let him know I was there by touching his right shoulder. He greeted me with a sound that travelled from the depths of his throat and seemed to be full of prolonged suffering, like the groan of an unknown creature trapped in a dungeon so deep that no one could see it. But as time passed I learned to discern joy and even a smile in those guttural sounds.