The Temptress (La tierra de todos)

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

The trench-diggers were giving voice to their opinion of the alpataco, that hateful bush that rises but a short distance above the ground but sends its iron roots, that defy and even shatter axes, down into the ground for a distance of thirty feet. To dig out one of these bushes keeps several men busy all day, with the result that whenever the laborers come upon one the air quivers and becomes blue with exclamations and profanity.

Friterini, a pale youth, with hair brushed boldly back from his forehead, burning black eyes, and bare arms, rushed off, as soon as he had served the clients, to join some Spanish workmen at a small table, and to describe to them in the mongrel Italian soon acquired by those sons of Italy who come to Spanish-speaking countries, the beauty of his native city.

“ ...Brescia! Ah, Brescia was something far different from this blazing desert, this sand heap, and well of thirst! Not that it was a big city, no, that wasn’t the point, but it was beautiful, and all the youths took their mandolins with them when they went out to make love, and there were girls one could love there too.... Ah, Brescia!”

The Gallego, leaning over his counter, was lending an attentive ear to his older customers, the jinetes or riders of the country, those who had covered every foot of it from the Andes to the Atlantic, from the Colorado to the straits of Magellan, sometimes cattle accompanying purchasers, other times exploring parties, sometimes prospecting for water and pasture lands. Their patience defied time; for them the weeks and months of their journeys were no more than so many days.

One of them liked to tell of his last trip, an exploration of lonely lakes hidden between spurs of the Andes. He had gone on this expedition as a guide or baquiano for a European scholar to whom he had been recommended by another scholar guided by him in the same fashion some twenty years earlier. It was during the first expedition that the remains of huge animals of pre-historic epochs had been found, gigantic skeletons that were then and there labelled and boxed up to be put together again later in the museums of the old world.

The second trip had been even more unusual; the scholar who undertook it was also looking for pre-historic animals; but he expected to find them alive; for among the scarce inhabitants of the mountain chain a conviction was passed on from generation to generation that there still existed in the Patagonian desert enormous creatures and fantastic forms, the last remains of a fauna that had arisen during the first eras of life on our planet.

There were even some who were certain that they had seen, from a great distance, it is true, the gigantic plesiosaurus plunging into the death-quiet waters of the Andene lakes, or feeding on the vegetation along their banks. However it was always towards dusk, when the mountain range spread its purple shadows over the plain, that these creatures appeared. There were always, of course, sceptics to affirm that such sights as these appeared only to those who, as they returned from some distant boliche, carried in their bellies a good supply of liquor.

The old baquiano did not commit himself as to the substantiality of the beasts in question. There were arguments on both sides of the question....

“In a whole year we never found one of those animals, and we scoured all the territory from lake to lake and from Nahuel-Huapi to near Magellan. But with my own eyes I have seen tracks in the ground, larger than elephant hoofs ... and the people living around those places saw them too. And once, near one of the most distant lakes, I found heaps of dry dung so large that they could not have been those of any known animal. My scholar gentleman didn’t answer when I asked him what he thought of these signs ... you could see he was wondering where the beast’s lair might be ... and who knows? We might have found the beast himself if we had continued a little longer on that track. But perhaps, when there are more people in those parts, some one of these solitary creatures will be discovered at last.”

The proprietor of the boliche liked best of all to ask these elderly customers of his to talk to him about certain mysterious personages who had passed through the region years earlier, just at the time when the Indians had been driven out, and colonies were being established. They were personages whose adventures sounded like the inventions of a novelist; they had more often than not been born in palaces; and like many of the saints, they had abandoned the house of their fathers to endure every kind of privation, renouncing all the comforts that would naturally have been theirs by prerogative of riches and rank, renouncing even their very names, in order to be vagabonds, to know the harsh pleasure of savage liberty.... Juan Ort, for instance, whose name was a familiar one to all the old inhabitants of the territory....