The Temptress (La tierra de todos)

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

In the summer time the somewhat murky interior of the boliche was invaded by unbelievable multitudes of flies frantically seeking refuge from the consuming heat of a land forever thirsting. At night the reddish glow of the lamps kept clouds of these pests in a state of aggressive wakefulness. Slow, tenacious, lazily obstinate, they fell into the food, swam about in the gravy and tumbled drunkenly into the glasses. If one chanced to open one’s mouth, at once there were some flies in it; they buzzed in one’s ears and plunged into one’s nostrils. Each spoonful of food in the short trip from plate to mouth was beset by these intruders who alighted on it with tenacious feet and cautiously outstretched wings.

Some of them of course were slaughtered. But there were so many of them, so discouragingly many, that finally all attempts to destroy them were abandoned out of sheer weariness. One learned finally to blow them patiently out of the way, or quietly spit them out when they strayed into one’s mouth.

There were other parasites too, equally obstinate in their assaults upon the dwellings of this little town lost in an immense solitude. As the numbers of human beings were greater per square foot in the boliche, the number of these pests was greater there too. From the roof and the walls, blood-sucking insects descended on the rough skins of the clients, perforating them and swelling like balloons with the blood they drew from them. And there were others that crept up from the ground, clinging to the heavy boots of the customers, and slyly making their way towards the flesh that they scented. In winter time when the doors of the boliche were closed, the air grew thick with tobacco smoke, and smelt of gin, sour wine, wet clothing, and shoe leather. The establishment meanwhile was run with an equal disregard for the convenience or even the comfort of its patrons, and for economy. There were scarcely any chairs in the place. The guitar-players had, it is true, horse-skulls to sit on; but the majority of their audience dropped on the ground when they were tired; yet, on the shelves behind the counter, impressive stores of champagne bottles were renewed every week.

When the day laborers received their fortnight’s pay, the Galician had to minister to the most grotesque orgies. The workmen who had no families and who could spend all their money for their own pleasure, devised banquets of Babylonian extravagance, recklessly ordering innumerable tins of Spanish sardines, and nearly as many bottles of Pomery Greno, to wash these tid-bits down. There were times at La Presa when not a mouthful of bread was to be procured, but the customers of the Galician’s, obliged to live on hard tack though they were, knew the taste of pâté de foie gras, and how much a bottle of Moët and Chandon costs. On the evenings between pay-days, gin and whiskey soothed the silent thirst of this or that patron, or gave another the stimulus he needed to go on talking.

The inexhaustible theme of conversation was the question as to when the trains would begin making regular stops at La Presa, instead of simply stopping at the dam when there was machinery to be unloaded there for the construction work.

To the inhabitants of the settlement it seemed a gross injustice that the trains should make no stop before Fuerte Sarmiento, under pretext that the engineering work in the river was not yet completed, nor the adjacent lands irrigated, and that consequently there could be no question of colonizing there.

In the old world the towns came first; then railroads were built for them. In this new land it was the reverse. First the rails had been laid across the desert and at every fifty miles a station was built, around which a town sprang up.

“Why shouldn’t we have a station in La Presa? Aren’t there more than a thousand souls in this settlement?” Gonzales, the liberal patriot, was indignantly inquiring. “Everyone knows that the train stops for mail at lots of places where there is nothing but a horse tied to a hitching post. What we need is someone to represent us at Buenos Aires.”

But, in the interval, the Gallego’s patrons were content with making guesses as to the date when the train would begin to stop at the dam settlement, putting up cases of champagne bottles as bets on the event’s taking place in one month or another.

Here and there chatted groups of those who were not interested in dancing, or in the women who were assembled in the boliche on much the same footing as the champagne and gin bottles and equally purchasable.