Tierra del Fuego (16 page)

“No, no!” Ana cried when he grabbed her from behind, put his hands on her breasts and kissed her hard on the neck.

Then they stood there, not knowing what to say. She looked at him with her deep gray eyes, her face transfigured and pale. He took a few steps back. He seemed somehow diminished, as if accepting defeat after that uncontrolled impulse. In a shaky voice, he said, “I'm sorry . . . I didn't know what I was doing . . . it was madness.”

“It doesn't matter,” the woman said, and then, raising a corner of her apron to her eyes, as she had when she was startled at the sight of the naked god, she added, “But I have to tell my husband.”

“No, please don't!” Esteban cried.

“Yes, yes, the husband must be told!” she replied, her voice cracking as she uttered the word “husband,” and she wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron.

Vladimir and his six workers came back at lunch time as always, and sat down around the rustic-style trestle table. He sat at one end of the table and Esteban at the other. Ana generally ate between serving the courses, sitting discreetly at the corner of the table beside her husband. None of them ever spoke much, especially when there was food in front of them. So they were all surprised when Ana, before serving her husband, said to him, “I need to talk to you . . .”

“Go on.”

“Not here. In the bedroom . . .”

Husband and wife went into the adjoining room, which was separated from the kitchen by a wooden partition wall. The workers were too busy eating to notice how pale Esteban was, but they all looked up, startled, when they heard a loud roar of laughter. There was something so strange about the timbre of that laughter that all of them, even the terrified Esteban, thought the lighthouse builder had gone crazy. The laughter ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and Vladimir came back in and sat down and Ana served him.

Once the dish had been served and she sat down at the corner of the table beside him, Vladimir started laughing again, less loudly but with a hint of sarcasm this time. It was strange behavior indeed, and the men waited for an explanation.

“Want to know something?” Vladimir said, quite calmly. “This boy thought he could have my wife!”

The six workers looked at him nervously, thinking he really might be crazy. It wouldn't be the first case of a Yugoslav immigrant going crazy. “This boy thought he could have my wife!” The words rang in Esteban's ears like the echo when a shell explodes.

“Oh, yes!” Vladimir went on. “Ha, ha, ha!” And again he laughed, and the laughter boomed like an anchor reaching the seabed.

“Forgive me,” Esteban stammered, as six curious pairs of eyes turned to him. “Let me explain . . .”

“Not to me . . . She's the one you have to speak to . . . You may have better luck if you change tactics . . . Explain to her! Explain to her! Not to me, no, not to me! She's the one you have to make a play for! Ha, ha, ha!”

“For God's sake, Vladimir!” Ana said, standing up to serve the next course.

In a daze, Esteban stood up and left the house. At first he walked with a certain dignity, but then the six workers saw him quicken his pace.

“As long as he doesn't throw himself in the sea,” one of them said.

“The guy won't go anywhere near the water,” Ricardo said, and made an attempt to laugh with Vladimir. But when he saw Esteban disappear into the gully, he felt uncomfortable and stopped.

Vladimir also stopped laughing and started eating his stew like a bull rooting about for food, snorting loudly. A few bits of the stew got stuck in his bristly blond mustache. His tangled beard was the color of a peat bog at twilight, the few gray hairs that ascended like a trail of ashes toward his temples indicating that he was nearly fifty. Ana was at least ten years younger than him.

He continued eating, saying nothing more about the matter. There was a grim expression on his round, moonlike face. The workers finished their lunch in silence, occasionally stealing a glance at Ana, who was bustling about with her head slightly bowed. Several times, Ricardo, the former seal hunter, moved his head like an otter coming back to the surface, breaking the winter ice.

The men always worked from morning to night on the scaffolding, seeing the framework of iron and concrete gradually take shape. Usually they whistled or sang songs of their own invention as they worked, but that afternoon even Ricardo, who liked to amuse them with his jokes, was silent. Vladimir joined in the work, placing the iron, mixing the concrete, but his heart did not seem to be in it either. The men, who were mostly easy-going types, could not stop wondering what ­exactly the young man from Santiago had done, or what Vladimir was going to do next. They found it hard to believe that those strange roars of laughter during lunch had been the end of it all. Surely, they were more like the first rolls of thunder presaging a storm.

A strong west wind started lashing the men as they worked on the half-finished tower. Then a fine drizzle came in from the gulf, where the sea was churning on the horizon, and by nightfall they had had to take refuge in the house. Such were the hazards of working in the stormiest area of the South Pacific.

“The man could die out there on a night like this,” one of the carpenters said, as they were getting ready to go to bed after dinner.

“There's a seal cave behind one of those promontories,” another man said. “He could shelter there.”

“Isn't he your friend?” someone asked Ricardo.

“Hah!” he replied. “He didn't jump in the water for me the other day when we were gathering sea urchins, so why should I go out on a night like this to look for him?”

When all the other men had gone to bed, Vladimir was still up, staring at his wife. She was blinking, the way the lighthouse her husband was building would surely blink on stormy nights like this, piercing the heart of the darkness to guide a ship to Puerto Refugio . . .

“Leave the bar off the door, so he can come in!” he said, as he went to bed.

The storm broke around midnight, but to these hardened men it was like a mother's lullaby and they did not stir from their sleep. Ana, though, was woken by the rougher song of the wind on the corrugated zinc roof. The house, she thought, might break apart at any moment or be carried off by the rain and the wind. Whenever the wind died down, the song became almost melodious, and from each corner a different kind of whistling could be heard, as if the different Aeolian gods had come together to compose a strange symphony. The great waves of the Gulf of Penas pounded the cliffs and seemed to make the whole earth shake.

Vladimir woke to see his wife praying.

“What are you praying for?” he said.

“Vladi . . . For you, and for me!”

“Aren't we both here?”

“I'm asking God to make sure this house isn't blown away.”

“We aren't going to be blown away. This storm's not even force twelve!”

“Well, I need to pray anyway . . . for all those who are in danger on the sea.”

“You're here with me . . . Stop your praying and let me sleep.”

For a few moments, husband and wife listened to the storm.

“All right,” he said. “Carry on praying if you like, for those who are out at sea . . . Though I don't see the point, because they have no choice.” And, turning his back on his wife, he went back to sleep, like a huge seal. After a while, his heavy snoring entered into competition with the wind. To Ana and her trembling heart, this snoring was like another prayer, and she fell asleep, safe in the lee of his powerful back, although still thinking of all those who had to spend that terrible night at sea in the storm . . .

But not so much of Esteban, because she had heard him creep back in just before she had started praying—although she hadn't dared to tell Vladimir, being still fearful and confused by the way he had reacted. She had never before heard him laugh in quite that way, and, just like the men, she was still waiting for the full force of his anger to be unleashed.

But Vladimir continued to disappoint everyone, even Esteban, who was quite puzzled by his behavior.

“And how goes it today? Did you or didn't you? How was it? Did you get the treasure?” he would ask every time he ran into him in the house.

And these teasing questions would inevitably be followed by a raucous, primeval burst of laugher, just like the one they had heard that first day, even though more than a week had now gone by.

Two or three times, Esteban, feeling humiliated, had had to leave his food untouched and go out of the house to breathe. At other times, he would walk, dazed, along the cliff in the direction of the sea and would not return until after Vladimir and his men had left. Ana would leave his lunch on the stove to keep it warm, but after a while she stopped serving him. Only hunger, darkness or the hostile weather of the gulf could force him to accept the food, and he would slip into the house with a hangdog look on his face. The workers were also starting to feel worn down by those daily remarks. They would have preferred Vladimir to come to blows with Esteban, instead of having to listen every day to that humiliating interrogation and then that strange laugh. Ana moved about more nervously than ever, avoiding the eyes of the men, who seemed to be blaming her for something . . . Sometimes she regretted telling her husband, and would also have preferred to see the matter resolved with a good thrashing rather than hearing those insulting questions and that cruel and increasingly tedious laugh.

As time passed, everyone started to feel sorry for Esteban, and a suppressed hatred for Vladimir and his cruel jibes grew among them. But Vladimir kept going, obsessively, like a drop of water that falls and falls until it starts to erode a solid block of stone. The bleakness and isolation of the place made the fall of that laughter all the more maddening to their shattered nerves. If any of them had followed Esteban when he fled to the cliffs, they would sometimes have found him sitting there, crushed and weeping, and at other times standing with his hands tensed, ready to throw himself into the sea, or swaying in the wind like a rag doll.

“The man's going to end up in the sea, Don Vladimir!” Ricardo said one day.

“You can fish him out!” Vladimir replied sarcastically. “Didn't you use to go gathering sea urchins with him? You're his friend!”

“I don't have any friends . . .” Ricardo said grimly, under his breath.

“That's obvious . . .”

At last, one day, a siren announced that the cutter was putting in again with material and provisions.

No sooner had the commanding officer stepped ashore than Esteban rushed forward and asked him to take him back up north.

“What's been going on here?” the young officer asked Vladimir.

“Nothing, lieutenant . . .”

“Why's the man in such a hurry to leave?”

“Ask him. He must be bored with the work . . .”

The cutter set sail that same afternoon, with Esteban on board. As she rounded the point where the lighthouse was going up, she hooted briefly, and the sound rolled across the solitude like the cry of a wounded animal. Vladimir and his men took off their caps and waved them in farewell. Like an echo, Vladimir's laugh rang out for the last time.

Back at the house, Ana was sitting on a small, rough ­wooden bench by the door, covering her eyes with the corner of her apron, even though there was no one there to see her weeping all the tears she had in her.

 

Francisco Coloane was born on the southern Chilean island of Chiloé. His stories and novels, spanning almost sixty years, have been translated into over ten languages. He was awarded the National Prize for Literature in 1964 in Chile, and the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Republic. The movie
Tierra del Fuego
(2000, directed by Miguel Littin) is based on Coloane's story of the same name.