animals. From time to time a watercraft struggled upriver, or a raft loaded with goods, shoving off from the bank where it had been moored for the night, was steered by its crew into the middle of the river to be dragged along by the current. The cold remained even in full sun, and by mid-morning we could still feel the horsesâ hooves crack through the frost and blades of graying pasture-grass, glassy with cold. To the west each morning, and even several days after we had arrived close to our destination a hundred leagues north, the empty fields were dusted with a white layer of frost until almost midday. Twice, we slept out in the open or, rather, tried to sleep, crammed around a meager fire that seemed to smother in the freezing night air, and after a few hours, when it seemed the horses had rested enough, stiff, numb, and drowsy, we took up our march once more. In the darkness of night, the cold-clotted stars did not even twinkle and the icy firmament encircled us, so sudden and crushing that one night I had the unmistakable impression that we inhabited one of its remotest, most insignificant, and ephemeral corners. Dawn had just broken, the air a blue-tinged rose that seemed to trap us in a glacial half-light, a sensation that increased the countrysideâs soporific monotony, but the sun, already high, turned everything crystallineâsharp, shining, and a little unreal out to the horizon which, no matter how we rode, always seemed fixed in the same place. That horizon so many think of as a paradigm for the outer worldâit is no more than a shifting illusion of our senses.
As we encountered the little rivers that flowed west into the Paraná, a lone prospect tormented me, though of course I tried not to discredit myself or to let it show: the possibility that the ferrymen who carried travelers from bank to bank might be missing, and that I would have to swim across, or perhaps use one of those unwieldy leather flotation balls, getting jolted about at the slightest movement. But when some of the rivers were without ferrymen,there were rafts in their place, and of the outposts where we spent the night, only two were close to the water. Of those outposts, only one was a real shelter, uncomfortable to be sure, but at least it was equipped with a clean mess hall, large and sturdy, as the others were little more than ruins, certainly dirtier and more run down. A caretaker in one of them was sick with drink, and we had had to shake him a few times to alert him to our presence, which apparently roused him a little and gave him enough energy to get to his feet. The alcohol, which had already burned through his insides, was eating away at his outsides too; he was the sort of drunkard who always appeared to be living in a state of terror, spending all his time watching the door and starting at every sound, and three or four times in the space of an hour he even left the mess hall to scan the horizon; later, with the first swigs of liquor that loosened the tongue of the otherwise laconic Osuna, the guide explained that the caretaker, utterly alone in the dead center of the countryside, was afraid of an Indian attack.
The following day in the large outpost, eating a nice roast the caretaker had prepared in the courtyard, conversation turned from the cold and encroaching winter, which already threatened all the outposts along the length of the river, to chief Josesito, a Mocovà Indian who had rebelled some time ago with a band of warriors and had attacked outposts, towns, and caravans. The people at the outpost and the travelers who spent the night there knew many stories about the chief, though it was hard to tell if they were true or were just legends attributed to him. After hearing a number of anecdotes, one of the soldiers escorting us declared, with a kind of alcohol-fueled pride, that he had known Josesito in the Barrancas, before the chief turned violent, and that three years earlier, when a company of
As we encountered the little rivers that flowed west into the Paraná, a lone prospect tormented me, though of course I tried not to discredit myself or to let it show: the possibility that the ferrymen who carried travelers from bank to bank might be missing, and that I would have to swim across, or perhaps use one of those unwieldy leather flotation balls, getting jolted about at the slightest movement. But when some of the rivers were without ferrymen,there were rafts in their place, and of the outposts where we spent the night, only two were close to the water. Of those outposts, only one was a real shelter, uncomfortable to be sure, but at least it was equipped with a clean mess hall, large and sturdy, as the others were little more than ruins, certainly dirtier and more run down. A caretaker in one of them was sick with drink, and we had had to shake him a few times to alert him to our presence, which apparently roused him a little and gave him enough energy to get to his feet. The alcohol, which had already burned through his insides, was eating away at his outsides too; he was the sort of drunkard who always appeared to be living in a state of terror, spending all his time watching the door and starting at every sound, and three or four times in the space of an hour he even left the mess hall to scan the horizon; later, with the first swigs of liquor that loosened the tongue of the otherwise laconic Osuna, the guide explained that the caretaker, utterly alone in the dead center of the countryside, was afraid of an Indian attack.
The following day in the large outpost, eating a nice roast the caretaker had prepared in the courtyard, conversation turned from the cold and encroaching winter, which already threatened all the outposts along the length of the river, to chief Josesito, a Mocovà Indian who had rebelled some time ago with a band of warriors and had attacked outposts, towns, and caravans. The people at the outpost and the travelers who spent the night there knew many stories about the chief, though it was hard to tell if they were true or were just legends attributed to him. After hearing a number of anecdotes, one of the soldiers escorting us declared, with a kind of alcohol-fueled pride, that he had known Josesito in the Barrancas, before the chief turned violent, and that three years earlier, when a company of
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