This Thing Of Darkness (57 page)

‘Conscripted? That cannot have pleased you, after all those years as a slave.’

‘Oh, sir, I tell you, General Rosas is a great man, sir. He has give me this
posta,
sir, to command all by myself. Now the general, sir, he has make my dream come true, sir. He is an uncommon great man, sir.’

‘Will you not join us, Michael? Will you not come and play at cards with us?’

‘Oh no sir. Michael is a black man, sir. I cannot sit at cards with white men, sir, that would not be right, it would be disrespectful, sir.’

Embarrassment and confusion mingled in Darwin’s expression. ‘Really. I should be quite honoured.’

‘No sir. You are most kind to Michael, sir, but that would not be the right thing, sir, not the right thing at all.’

He headed off to fuss over the night’s bedding. The gauchos cackled quietly among themselves.

‘I don’t know why he bothers with his flowers and crucifixes so,’ said Esteban, ‘when all he has to look forward to is a knife in his back.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Darwin sharply.

‘Posta-
keeper is the shortest job in the world, Don Carlos. The Indians will come. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow night. Maybe next month. But they will come one night, when he is alone. And they will kill him and burn his
posta.
To be a
posta-
keeper, my friend, is a one-way ticket to hell!’

‘I thought you did not believe in God.’

‘I do not believe in God. But I never said I do not believe in hell. We are all of us going to hell, Don Carlos!’ Esteban laughed, cheerfully and throatily.

Michael reappeared with a fresh pot of
maté
and a solicitous look. ‘I bring you some fresh hot tea, sir. I think maybe your old tea was gotten a little cold, sir.’

‘Michael . . . ?’

‘Yes sir?’

‘Do you not worry that perhaps, one night, the Indians will come?’

‘Oh, they will come right enough, sir, they will come, I know that for sure. And when they come, Michael will sell his life dearly, sir, I know that for sure as well.’

‘But aren’t you . . . aren’t you
scared?’

‘Michael has live a long time, sir, long enough for any man. And the general, sir, he has give me my dream, a little house of my own, sir, and make me a happy man. So when the Indians come to take it back sir, well, then Michael won’t have nothing to live for no more, sir. So Michael will sell his life dearly, sir, when they come.’

He smiled at the simplicity of the equation, and moved away once more.

 

After the fifth
posta,
a black peaty plain opened out before them, with meadows of long grass and silvery patches of surface water. Ducks and cranes congregated on the mirror-smooth pools, and flocks of ibis flapped overhead. It was, Darwin told a phlegmatically unimpressed Covington, exactly like Cottenham Fen. They saw herds of wild deer, and clusters of ostrich, cattle and wild horses cropping the increasingly lush grass. That night giant hailstones as big as apples fell upon the
posta,
leaving the ground all about strewn with dead animals, and badly cutting the face of a gaucho who put his head outside to take a look.

‘One more cut won’t make a difference to
that
face,’ remarked one of his fellows.

When the meat from the animals pounded to death by the hailstones ran out, one of the gauchos killed a deer, by the simple expedient of walking up to it and slitting its throat.

‘They are afraid of men on horseback. Not of men on foot,’ he explained.

The complete opposite of the reactions of a British deer,
thought Darwin.
Yet the responses of a British deer are established from birth. Proof - absolute proof - that knowledge can transmute from generation to generation.

Late on the eleventh day, as they trotted across a gently undulating plain of emerald grass, the breeze gusting in their faces, the gauchos stopped dead as one, as if someone had flicked an invisible switch. A deer stood silhouetted on the crest of a rise ahead, itself stock still, ears pricked. Esteban motioned urgently for silence.

‘What is the matter?’ hissed Darwin.

‘That deer. Something has alarmed it. Something upwind. Something out of sight.’

He gave the order to dismount, and to keep as low as possible. One of the gauchos darted forward, his knife clamped between his teeth, and as he approached the brow of the rise, slithered forward on his belly. Peering over the ridge, he made hand signals back to the rest of the party.

‘Three horsemen. They don’t ride like Christians,’ said Esteban.

‘Are they Indians?’ hissed Darwin, shocked.

‘
¿ Quien sabe?
If they are no more than three, it does not signify.’ ‘What if there are more than three? Maybe there are hundreds of them nearby!’

‘
¿Quien sabe?
But load your pistol, and be ready to ride.’

Darwin’s heart pounded in his chest. Indians, here, so close to Buenos Ayres!

A few minutes ticked by, excruciatingly slowly, but nobody moved an inch. Darwin’s stomach felt impossibly heavy, like a pound of lead. The watcher on the hill lay stock still on his stomach, staring intently ahead. Then, finally, he moved. He stood up with a hearty belly laugh, and began to wave his arms manically back at them.

‘¡Mujeres!’
the man shouted across the meadow.

‘They are women!’ said Esteban with relief. ‘That is why they don’t ride like Christians - they are women!’

‘Women?’
said Darwin, incredulously. ‘Women from
where?’

 

The mystery was solved a mere league further on: a new
estancia
spread itself confidently before them, clean white lines at right-angles to the shining turf. The added presence of an entire troop of cavalry, heading south from Buenos Ayres, had obviously emboldened the women-folk sufficiently for them to go out exploring for ostrich eggs.

Darwin’s party approached the
estancia’s
main gate in scrupulous observation of the correct etiquette. There they waited, without dismounting, until the proprietor Don Juan Fuentes was fetched.

‘Ave Maria,’
said Esteban, saluting him.

‘Sin pecado concebida,’
replied Don Juan. Conceived without sin.

After that they were permitted to dismount, and their horses were taken away to be stabled. Following a passage of stiltedly formal conversation concerning conditions on the trail, a request was made - and granted as a matter of course - for overnight accommodation within the
estancia
walls. Furthermore, the celebrated
naturalista
Don Carlos was invited, as Don Juan’s guest of honour that night, to a grand supper in the main house.

The sun blessed the
estancia
with its last few precious rays, then withdrew for the night. Safe inside the compound, Darwin decided to go for a stroll around this isolated outpost of civilization. The troops had lit their campfires, and were busy slaughtering a mare for their evening’s feast. The hideous squeals of the victim gave the flickering firelight a primitive aspect: a bucket had been fetched to collect the animal’s blood for drinking, and the thick crimson liquid pooled in the rusty vessel as if some Aztec ritual were being prosecuted. Liquor bottles were busily uncorked, and many a
cigareto
was ignited in the fire. The troops were at ease, confident. They knew that they were on the winning side, that Rosas would lead them to victory. Darwin retreated inside before the knife quarrels began.

Don Juan Fuentes’ guests assembled in their finery for supper at ten, far later than they would have done in Europe: there were cavalry officers in full dress uniform, and ladies of the house in figure-hugging gowns that flared from the hip. There were knives and forks and bowls too, the first cutlery Darwin had seen for some weeks, but the bowls held nothing but vast mounds of mare’s flesh, exactly like those the troops were busy wolfing outside. The rough-hewn tables and chairs, the jugs of water and the beaten-earth floor put him in mind of a monastic refectory. There was no glass in any of the windows, and mosquitoes clouded the wavering candlelight like motes of soot. The talk was of General Rosas, and war, and the inevitability of final victory; such was the cultural and technological superiority of the white Christian race. Only when Darwin lit a
cigareto
with a Promethean - the new kind, which could be struck dry against any surface - did the talk of war cease. All talk, in fact, ceased. The table was paralysed, spellbound. Darwin struck another Promethean against his teeth. A rich landowner from Cordoba offered him a whole dollar for one of these magic sticks. The ladies’ interest in the English
naturalista
suddenly blossomed. Then Darwin went one better: he produced his pocket compass. Unbounded astonishment followed, as the stranger proved himself capable of pointing out the approximate direction of Buenos Ayres, Cordoba and Mendoza, all by reference to a tiny machine kept in his pocket.

The lady to Darwin’s left, a slender beauty with raven hair piled up in a jewelled comb, levelled her deep, dark eyes with his and told him that she had not been feeling well all evening: would he care to come to her room later that night, to effect a cure for any lingering traces of her ailment, using his little magic device? How on earth to react to such a brazen request? Thank heaven that Covington was elsewhere, making a fool of himself with the gauchos, no doubt, and not here to drink in his master’s rich embarrassment. What perverse, sullen pleasures would he have taken from such an exchange? Darwin dithered. Really, he did not know how to behave in such circumstances. Was this
senorita
really a
lady?
Were there any real
ladies
in this part of the world? The question hung, pregnantly unanswered, between them. Then, the
senorita
settled the issue: she leaned forward, elegantly, seductively, and offered Darwin a morsel of roasted mare’s flesh from the end of her own fork. He recoiled in astonishment. What manner of etiquette was this? Really, he had chanced among barbarians.

Making his excuses as hastily as possible, he drew back his chair, stumbled to his feet and took his
cigaretos
and Prometheans out into the night air. The cooling breezes of August took the edge off his anxiety, and soothed the sweat from his brow. He felt his pulse rate diminish. A silhouette staggered towards him out of the firelight, losing itself momentarily in the intervening blackness, before lurching finally into the oil-lamp glow at the door: a grinning soldier, quite profoundly drunk.

‘Good evening,’ said Darwin, politely, in Spanish.

The man bared all his teeth in a wolfish smile. Then he vomited, suddenly and violently, and a stream of regurgitated mare’s blood splashed red across Darwin’s new white boots.

 

They stayed three more days at the
estancia,
and towards the evening of the second day Harris caught them up. He was attached to a small troop of horsemen heading swiftly northwards, and was sweating profusely. To Darwin, the sight of a half-educated Englishman, even one with large damp patches spreading south from each armpit, was an improvement on the local sophistication level that could hardly have been bettered had King William himself shown up.

‘Terrible business at
posta
four,’ said Harris matter-of-factly.

A sinking feeling settled upon Darwin’s gut.

‘The place was burnt to the ground when we got there. Indian attack. Of course the
posta-keeper
had been murdered, poor devil. Elderly negro fellow. He had eighteen
chuzo
wounds. They cut him to pieces.’

‘Did he sell his life dearly?’ asked Darwin, his voice barely audible.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Nothing... it is nothing.’

‘Did he sell himself dearly, did you say? I’ve really no idea.’

 

Darwin was keen to be away after that, to get back on the trail with his gauchos, to recapture the heady sense of freedom that had characterized the earlier part of the trip. They left the weary Harris behind again, a little miffed perhaps, but the sealer’s spirits were soon raised once more by the enticing prospect of a feast of roasted mare’s flesh. The party travelled north, across rich green plains thick with milling herds of cattle, horses and sheep, interspersed with beds of giant thistles that towered high above their heads. Finally, on the twentieth day, they came to the outskirts of Buenos Ayres. But all did not seem well. Plumes of smoke drifted upwards from the city centre. There was precious little traffic on the road.

‘This is not good,’ said Esteban, checking and rechecking the smoothness of his dagger’s slide into and out of its scabbard. ‘Don Carlos, you must push on to the city?’

‘Yes... I mean, I have to rendezvous with the
Beagle.’

‘Very well. Then we shall proceed. But slowly.’

They pressed on watchfully, the outlying barns and cowsheds of the city gradually falling behind. Presently, they came to a roadblock, manned by a heavily armed gang of cut-throats. Rifles jutted at them from both sides of the road. The dangers of putting a foot wrong were emphasized by the swaying corpses of three or four fellow travellers, which dangled unpleasantly from the surrounding branches.

‘What is happening in the city, my friends?’ asked Esteban, loudly and confidently.

‘What is happening,
friend,
is that we have taken control of the city for Rosas,’ said the leader of the cut-throats, clearly enjoying his new-found status. ‘No more will government officials plunder the state. No more will judges be bribed. No more will the head of the post office sell forged government notes. Either you are for Rosas or you are with our friends here.’ He motioned to the corpses swinging waxen in the trees.

‘We come from General Rosas’ camp on the Rio Colorado,’ avowed Esteban. ‘We are his men.’

‘What about
them?’
The cut-throat gestured to Darwin and Covington.