What remained of the man cried out, “I’ll pay for the calf, Don Carmen. I’ll give you whatever you say. I’ll give you my life.”
“At last, an offer I can’t refuse,” the boss said from high up on his horse, and he trotted off through the dust.
There were no witnesses, except for the horse, who by now is dead. Of the hired hand, eaten by the ants and the sun, not even his name is left. Only his bones, arms spread like a crucifix on the red earth. And Don Carmen wasn’t the sort of man to talk about such things, because private property is part of private life, and that’s nobody’s business.
Nevertheless, Alfredo Armas Alfonzo told the story. He was there without being there, and he saw without seeing, the way he has seen everything that has happened since the world became the world in this wide valley split by the Unare River.
Carnal Hunt
Arnaldo Bueso turned fifteen.
His elders celebrated the birthday with a great hunt in the woods on the banks of the Ajagual River. It being his first hunt, they assigned him a place in the rear and left him in a dense thicket with instructions not to move. There he lay, gazing at the.22 that gazed back at him, while the hunters loosed their dogs and set off at top speed.
The barking faded into the distance; the sounds slowly ebbed away.
The rifle remained, hanging from a long belt tied to the branch of a tree.
Arnaldo did not dare touch it. Flat on his back, hands behind his head, he entertained himself watching the birds flutter about in the leaves. The wait was long. Lulled by birdsong, he fell asleep.
The crash of breaking branches jerked him awake. Paralyzed with fear, he managed to make out an enormous deer stampeding toward him. The deer jumped, got snagged in the rifle belt, and Arnaldo heard a shot. The animal fell dead.
The entire town of Santa Rosa de Copàn celebrated the unrivaled triumph: a sure shot from below, mid-leap, straight to the heart.
At home with friends some years later, Arnaldo interrupted an animated round of drinks. He asked for silence, as if about to give a speech. Pointing to the enormous antlers that bore witness to his first and final hunting glory, he confessed, “It was suicide.”
Carnal Affront
A man imprisoned by desire walked alone in the elements. The soft hills of the countryside not far from Montevideo swelled into disturbing curves of breasts and thighs. Paco gazed upward, seeking escape from temptation, but the sky denied his eyes the peace they sought: the clouds moved in step, swaying as one, offering themselves to each other.
Paco’s sister Victoria, who owned the farm, had warned him: “Absolutely not. No chicken stew. Don’t touch the chickens.”
But Paco Espinola had studied the Greeks and knew something about the question of fate. His legs urged him toward forbidden territory, and, obedient to the voice of destiny, he went along.
Much later, Victoria watched him approach. Paco walked slowly, and he carried something dangling from his hand. When Victoria realized it was a dead chicken, she turned into a fury.
Paco called for silence. And he told the truth.
He’d entered the coop in search of shade and saw a redfeathered hen. He gave it a few kernels of corn, the hen ate them and said, “Thank you.”
Then another hen, the color of snow, just as polite, came over to eat and also said, “Thank you.”
“But then this one came along,” Paco said, swinging the bird from its wrung neck. “I offered her a few kernels. She wouldn’t touch them. ‘Won’t you eat, sweetie?’ I asked. And she raised her crest and said, ‘Go fuck your mother.’ Can you imagine, Victoria? Our mother? Our mother!”
Diet
Sarah Tarler Bergholz was very short. She didn’t have to sit down for her grandchildren to comb her hair, which fell in tight curls from her pretty face to her belly button.
Sarah was so fat that she couldn’t breathe. In a Chicago hospital the doctor told her the obvious: to bring her height and weight back to proportion, she had to follow a strict diet, avoiding all fat.
She had a voice of silk. Her brashest statements sounded like intimate confessions. As if sharing a secret, she fixed her eyes on the doctor and said, “I’m not sure life is worth living without salami.”
The following year, embracing her undoing, she died. Her heart failed. To science, the cause was no mystery; but we’ll never really know whether her heart tired of eating salami or of giving.
Food
Nicolasa’s aunt taught her how to walk and how to cook.
Beside the wood stove, her aunt revealed the secrets of dishes that, through inheritance or invention, would emerge from her hand. That’s how Nicolasa discovered the ancient mysteries of the Mexican table, and learned to celebrate astonishing marriages of savory flavors to piquant spices that had never before had the pleasure of meeting.
Soon after the aunt died, complaints started pouring in from the cemetery. The racket coming from her grave was so bad that the dead couldn’t sleep. Until someone made use of her recipes, she was not going to rest in peace.
Nicolasa had no choice but to open a little place. Where she sells meals to go that would delight the gods, if only the unfortunate gods didn’t live so far away.
Unstill Life
Alfredo Mires Ortiz wanted to compile a list of the customs and seasons of Cajamarca. The local people suggested a few categories:
eclipse
rain
flood
mist
frost
gust
whirlwind
Alfredo agreed. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Natural phenomena.”
With time, Alfredo learned.
The eclipse happens, he learned, because the sun and the moon can’t get along, sun of fire, moon of water. The couple is so quarrelsome that when they meet up, the sun either burns the moon or the moon douses the sun.
The rain, he learned, is the sister of the rivers.
That the earth’s blood runs through the rivers, and that flooding results when blood is spilled.
That the mist has a fine time playing tricks on people out walking.
That frost is one-eyed, which is why it burns the crops only on one side.
That the gust licks its lips eating seeds planted under a new moon.
And that the whirlwind spins because it has only one foot.
Soul in Plain Sight
According to an ancient belief, the tree of life grows upside down. Its leaves burrow into the earth, its roots gaze at the sky. It offers not its fruits but its origins. Rather than hiding underground what is most intimate, most vulnerable, it bares its roots, exposing them to the winds of the world.
“That’s life,” says the tree of life.
The Ginkgo
It is the oldest of all trees, around since the dinosaurs.
They say its leaves prevent asthma, cure headaches, and relieve the discomforts of old age.
They also say that ginkgo is the best remedy for poor memory. This claim has been proven. When the atom bomb turned the city of Hiroshima into a blackened wasteland, an old ginkgo was leveled near the epicenter of the explosion. The tree was burned to cinders, just like the Buddhist temple it protected. Three years later, someone found a little green shoot peeking out from the charcoal. The dead stump had sprouted. The tree revived, opened its arms, flowered.