This Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant story of youth, manhood, and mental illness by Uruguayan writer Tamara Silva Bernaschina, translated by Tim Benjamin. Young Vicente lives with his family in a small town, right across the street from the Gaucho—”all the terrors of this world in a single individual”—a gigantic man famed for his physical strength and rumored cruelty to children. Yet even as Vicente’s uncle and mother threaten him with stories about the Gaucho, the only violence Vicente has seen from him is self-directed: he has repeatedly attempted to hang himself from the tree outside his house. When the Carnival comes to Vicente’s town and Vicente finally experiences the violence and recklessness that have made the Gaucho a figure of local legend, he makes a choice that, small as it may seem, will change both their lives forever. Read on!
They’re going to ask me why.
—José Watanabe
I
He liked to wonder if the moments when his dad had to sprint across the street, wrestle down the enormous Gaucho from the tree from which he’d once again hung himself, were moments of life in the world, or of death. There must have been minutes that ticked by in which more people were born than died. And vice versa. Someone, somewhere, must be keeping count. This is what he thinks, he’s got an image in his head of a little bead with the Gaucho’s name on it attached to a wooden abacus, swinging back and forth between dead and alive. He watches the Gaucho through the kitchen window, big, gigantic, now crumpled in the dirt and gasping for breath, like Aunt Ermilda’s epileptic dog. His mother and Uncle Thomas are there too, standing behind him, breathing down his neck as they watch his dad and the Gaucho disappear into the little shack across the street, and then they all sit back down at the kitchen table and wait for him to come back with the details. His father comes through the door in a state, sweat soaking through the front of his shirt, glazing his brow. He wipes away the sweat and they all stare at him as he mumbles an I’m coming or something like that but none of them totally understand what he says, and nobody responds. Finally, he sits back down at the table, takes a knife to the food on his plate.
“Tongue was near out of his mouth by the time I got to him,” he says while he chews on a piece of chorizo. “I lowered him down and he’s crying about Silvia, but I made him swear he would cut this silly shit out. Once I finally got him inside I made him drink a glass of water.” “He’s going to really kill himself one day and I’d like to see it when he ties himself to that tree and there’s no one there to take him down.”
“It’s got be something pathological,” Tomas said, who since he started high school liked to use important words.
“Pathological,” Enrique says, shaking his head and making a drinking gesture with his free hand, for the table. He laughs then and adds, “his entire neck is all bruised up, can you imagine? Having to support a body like that in a noose.”
Vicente picks at his mashed potatoes in silence and feels his heartbeat quicken. He looks down at hi shirt and sees his heart moving inside him, he can see the bum-bum of fear. For Vicente, the mighty Gaucho is all the terrors of this world in a single individual. He lives across the street, he’s big, he screams and he kills chickens with his bare hands, twisting their necks with just his thumb and index finger. He can carry two fifty kilo barrels of water at the same time along with a shovel, all while mounted on his horse. From afar, he looks like a Roman gladiator. When Vicente lays down, in the silence of the night, he can almost hear the steps of the brawny giant coming from the other side of the street, crashing into the walls of his house in search of some rope strong enough to tie himself up for good, forever. Vicente’s uncle Tomas, already in high school, says the Gaucho’s so big because when he was a teenager he ate two neighborhood kids, and that they found the kids’ bones in his back yard, and because of that he never used his real name anymore so the police could never track him down. When Vicente isn’t behaving, his mother threatens to leave him outside, alone, so that the Gaucho can carry him off. And feeling himself start to tear up just thinking about this, he brings another spoonful of mashed potatoes to his mouth, waiting for someone at the table to say something else about what’s just happened.
But he’s distracted by the clinking of forks, mouths chewing through chorizos, undoing the covering with a rip of the innards, pulling out the fat and flesh of the pig they slaughtered the day before, whose name was Toto.
“It’s just that body must be able to withstand a lot of pain,” his mother says, as she gets up to refill the pitcher of water.
“I’m sure it can,” Tomas says, trying to be an adult.
Vicente looks at the table, the giant bowl of fruit salad, the homemade bread his aunt sent over, the peaches in compote, the pot of soup, and he wonders how much pain could fit in any of them after putting down so much food.
II
It’s Carnaval but no one in Vicente’s house goes to the parade. It’s too far and Aunt Ermilda doesn’t like the drums because she thinks it gets her heart rate up and she’s got a pacemaker, and so everyone is scared she’ll have a heart attack there. And also Tomas’s sister sobs every time she sees the big heads and all the children are always begging for caramel apples and cotton candy and no one ever has any money for that, and so one of the children starts her or his sobbing and their mother says That’s it and they all walk back home, dying from the heat and without having seen even a bit of the parade itself.
But in the Gaucho’s house, Carnaval means a party. Hardly into the start of the afternoon the Gaucho’s already started a fire and those in the neighborhood’s comparsa lay out the filets. There’s beer, there’s fried dough. Children running barefoot through the streets, trying to douse each other with water. Aunt Ermilda locks herself in Vicente’s room, on the second floor of the house, covers her ears with two pillows tied together with a scarf, and tries to sleep. The rest of the family sits on the sidewalk and watches the revelry unfold across the street. Vicente never gets up the nerve to cross over to the Gaucho’s side, but he does throw water bombs from the border between his house and the giant’s. The cousins run, terrified, from dogs nipping at their heels. And the Gaucho, like a peacock in full display, is the most charming host, bringing out chairs, refilling cups, laughing loudly over the music.
The drums precede the spread of bodies in the Gaucho’s yard. At dawn he dances alone, in circles, amongst the clothing he’d hung to dry and neglected to take down. His daughters and cousins and friends and neighbors dance as well, around the barrel grill which still has some flame left in it. And they will doze off and eventually awake to the full morning, still drunk and covered in dew.
III
The mighty Gaucho gallops to the edge of the path and, from the saddle, stretches his arms out toward Vicente. He grabs the latter by the armpits, lifts him up for a moment, then drops him and gallops on, with a cackle. The eggs Vicente was carrying drop from his hands and crack on the loose stones. He can feel neither his heart nor his tongue nor his eyes where the pressure to cry starts to grow. He feels only that warmth over his legs, and he looks down and sees his gray tube socks becoming soaked in his own piss, the orange shorts he’s got on darkening between his legs, and he manages to back away from the path, into the ditch beside it. He needs to get his breath back. He needs to wrangle back his soul which had started to flutter off. He imagines himself lifting up, into the air, like those people his aunt says she sees whenever the family attends a wake. He breathes inwardly. No breath escapes him. He thinks that if he spends enough time in the water, made brackish by the sun, he’ll turn into a toad. A toad covered in scales. He imagines himself green, tiny, tinier, slimy and hideous. And there he stays for a while, not crying but shaking, having dropped the eggs, having lost his soul.
“But how can you piss yourself like that!” his mother exclaims and rips his shorts off, which makes him totter a bit. “You’re traumatized!” She looks at Vicente’s father, who’s sitting in a chair so he can stare at his son straight on: “You’ve traumatized him with all your stories!
Look at the poor creature, he’s pissed himself!”
“Don’t put this on me, woman, it’s you that leaves him outside, scared shitless. The Gaucho this and the Gaucho that. You don’t want that argument!”
Vicente stands there in the kitchen, pink with shame. He stammers something they can’t understand. His mother looks at him with horror.
“And now I see that bully has left you with a stutter! Speak up!”
So Vicente speaks and with the words come the tears, because he’s embarrassed that his father has seen him with his clothes wet with piss, and he says something like it was only that he had to suddenly really go but it wasn’t a big deal anyway, it wasn’t. But though he tries to, while he says this he can’t stop shaking.
IV
The Gaucho’s terrier is old and pint-sized, and the two form a strange pair. If someone were to spy at the dog from afar and didn’t know any better, they might think they’re looking at a puppy. But really it’s an old dog. It walks slowly and it hardly ever barks anymore. Vicente waits until the Gaucho’s out of sight to go out to the patio and call the dog from the door of the kitchen. He calls it once, twice, three times; he throws little rocks that never quite reach the dog, half-deaf. It finally turns around to look at Vicente. Its tail starts wagging.
Vicente taps on the ground with both hands, calls it again. The dog approaches, licks the sweat from Vicente’s forearms. The center of its eyes are off-white and white hairs sprout from around its snout and follow down the entirety of its small frame. It’s got a nose covered in grime. Fur rough and pale. Vicente takes the dog in his arms, pats its head, brings his mouth toward the dog’s ear, says Such a pretty dog, such a pretty dog. The dog’s ears twitch, bothered by Vicente’s whispering. Vicente grabs the dog off the ground, carries it upstairs, to his room.
V
During dinner Vicente’s dad tells them the news. He tells them earnestly, sadly. He says: The Gaucho’s cuzco is missing. Tomorrow we’re going out to look for the poor thing. Ermilda says something to the tune of it probably died of old age, because she saw it when it was born and even she wasn’t so old back then. Tomas says that he hopes the dog isn’t dead—he liked how it trotted along with him as he went to school each day. Vicente…Vicente doesn’t say anything. The lightning whips down along the hillside, close by and then further off. They walk along bent over, and each time another there’s another flash, they put their hands over their heads, as if this will protect them. There’s no trace of the dog anywhere; they think the clap of thunder probably has him scared, that he must hiding in some ditch or running around terrified through open country, looking for shelter. They whistle, they call the dog’s name, because there’s nothing else to do but keep looking. Better to be moving, even if it’s to start going back.
“God I love that dog. I brough him into the world,” the Gaucho says, and he grips onto a boulder for a moment, as if he’s going to fall. “He’s a great companion.”
“Of course he is, how’s he not going to be? They’re the most faithful animals. How is it not going to be a great companion.”
The sky lights up. The bolt opens a breach in the time of the countryside and suddenly all movement is suspended in air. Each stone, branch, sheep, cow, each member of the search party is suspended, levitated into the air for a few moments, magnetized by the imminent electric charge, and all living beings there have the same fleeting thought: I hope it hits somewhere else. The two men get down on the ground, they lay next to the stones and put their hands over their ears. One, rail thin and fragile as a dry leaf; the other solid, imposing. When the bolt makes impact somewhere nearby, the Gaucho squeezes his search companion’s shoulder and they are both there for a while, quiet under the sudden downpour, united by a bond of fear, or that desperation one feels, suddenly caught in a storm.
VI
By now it’s been over for a while, but the electrical charge still floats between the houses. The air has turned orange while the sun, far off, hides behind the clouds and hills. The ditches are flooded, the frogs croak endlessly and the ovenbirds announce the end of the downpour. Through the window, the trees, the electric cables, the entire world looks like it was taken up and shaken by some invisible titan. This is what Vicente thinks when he looks out through his window. He sees the Gaucho leaves his house to head out toward the hill. He’s got a chair over his shoulder and rope tied around his arm like a coiled snake. He walks through the country not with the delicacy of the white hares, those fleeting stars of the pastures, but like a bull dragging the world behind it. He comes to the willow standing against the ravine, past the line of eucalyptus trees. He places the chair on the ground. Vicente presses against the window and starts to breathe through his mouth; the window fogs up for a moment with his breath and it’s hard to see out of it. The dog wakes up. It comes out from under the bed, wagging its tail. Vicente’s heart seizes up.
Then, he watches.
Translated from the Spanish by Tim Benjamin
Tamara Silva Bernaschina was born in Minas, Uruguay, in 2000. Desastres Naturales (Natural Disasters) is her first book. It won two Bartolomé Hidalgo Prizes, one for Narrative and the other for Revelation. Her novel Temporada de ballenas received an honorable mention in the Juan Carlos Onetti literary prize. Since 2018 she splits her time between Aiguá and Montevideo.
Tim Benjamin‘s prose, poetry and translations have been published in various outlets. He won the 2017 Solstice Short Story competition for “A Visitor” and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his poem “A Lifeline”. He splits his time between Argentina and the United States.