Blood Makes Noise (19 page)

He’d lain there two days, wandered the fence between this world and not.

There was no doctor in the village, only an old woman with cotton yarn who stitched his cut throat together with darning needles. Fever descended immediately. The wound swelled, broke a stitch, and oozed muddy pus onto his chest.

He would either die or he would not. But he lived. Lay another fifteen days and rose scarred and unsure if he was nearly dead or the dead nearly living. His limbs had gone cold, and that never changed.

The boy tried to speak, and the sound was tomb gravel. So he spoke little. He didn’t ask about his mother, but his father felt the need to say something. The words were vague, self-hating, and the boy absorbed none of it. He had, in his own mind, come to an understanding. His mother had been a ghost, brought the owl as a messenger of his own death and, on leaving, had left him a ghost as well. From the children who had come to gape at the
damage, he learned of his mother’s final curse laid on the village as revenge.

It was short in realization.

Before the change of seasons, as his mother’s head dried and blew away, the cattle began to weaken. Struck as if by plague, they slobbered, bled from ears and anuses, and died in fantastic numbers. Whole herds bloated and putrefied in the sun, legs sticking out cartoonishly. The gauchos tried to keep the cattle moving, as if the curse was something that could be outrun. They tried herbs, faith healers, even priests, and still the cattle stumbled, bled, and died.

When the state biologists finally roared through, exhausted by the enormity of what was sweeping the land, they mumbled only one suggestion, before skidding off to the next devastated estancia: burn them.

And so the cattle were heaped into great medieval bonfires, lighting the edgeless land with a thousand burning hillocks. And the gauchos stood by holding their torches, scarves over their mouths against searing flesh, and as one their eyes fell on the boy and his father. For while the desperate biologists had a word for this,
encephalomyelitis,
the village knew it was the witch’s curse. And it was the boy and his father that had brought the witch among them.

On those nights, with an entire nation’s identity vaporizing in a million funeral pyres, Alejandro would walk away from the hellish islands of flame into dark grass and there, alone with the wind, would seek his future. The grass spoke to him those horrible nights, but the language was not yet clear. And Alejandro vowed, even as his universe was soaked with gasoline and set alight, that he would listen until the grass revealed itself to him in cadences he could understand.

By month’s end, a third of Argentina’s cattle had been heaped and burned. By midsummer the estancia was ruined, the village abandoned, the boy and father riding slowly down the path
through faces hot with damnation, out of the village, forever. They settled in Córdoba, now just two more of the scores of suddenly rootless, confused gauchos, limping in pitifully on proud horses, begging for work in mills and assembly lines.

His father found a job in the canning factory; the boy scrounged aluminum scraps. They slept outside the town, on a dirty strip that ran south of the river. There were stars here, but his father spoke little of them. The boy, whose voice still carried the rattle of the grave, spoke less and less, till he rarely spoke at all.

Come morning they would stake the horses along the riverbank and cross the bridge to the city. The boy would hunt for his scraps along the slag heaps of the factories, dragging them in burlap sacks to the one-eyed tallyman, who’d exchange them for a small lump of copper coins.

Come lunch he’d be with his father, watching the leathery hands tear themselves on aluminum rims, watching the proud gaucho stance that on the assembly line looked only stumpy and foolish. Come lunch the boy watched his father die a little.

There were rumors of gaucho jobs on far-flung estancias, and the rumors were always false. What few herds escaped the catastrophe were herded jealously in pens to protect them from the rampaging microbe. The cattle no longer roamed free and, as simple as that, the gaucho’s life ended.

It had been the hope of returning to the pampa that held his father together, and when that hope crumbled, so did the man.

Gin, then cards, then a cheap particleboard casket after a dispute over gin and cards. They didn’t cut his throat, like on the pampas, just shot him twice in the chest, like in the city. The thin casket, still bearing a sawmill’s pencil markings, was lowered into a pauper’s pit among the slag heaps where Alejandro hunted for scraps. The local priest said some things but never got the name right. Before his service even ended, the small wooden cross
tumbled in the wind. The boy righted it, stood there silent, and thought,
Now I am an orphaned ghost.

The next day they took him to the orphanage.

Listen:

The tiny slap of kerosene on parquet floors. Alejandro’s head pounds with the reek of it but he continues pouring through the house, a large house, and the wafts are overpowering.

The mansion belongs to the chairwoman of the Sociedad de Beneficencia, an ancient creature whose precious metal clanks like a Persian queen. The Sociedad benefits orphanages, and this orphan has been sent to the chairwoman’s mansion because he refuses to speak.

For a month now he has scrubbed her floors, washed her dishes, all tasks not unusual for the Sociedad’s charges, but Alejandro has also stood each night on her carpet and been slapped when he won’t speak, and Alejandro never speaks.

Tonight, after her ritual slapping of the boy, the chairwoman leaned down to Alejandro’s ear and hissed two words:
Witch child
…And the boy understood that one of them would have to die.

Stirrings above. Alejandro runs for the front door. He can hear the shuffle of slippers on the steps as the great oaken door swings open on fearsome hinges.

“Who is it?” The voice gripped with sleep. “What is this smell?”

The boy draws the match from his coat, strikes, but too hard, and the head snaps off. He fishes for another, drops it, and his reservoir of courage vanishes as the old woman in a dressing gown comes to him in the dark, carrying an unlit candle.

“You there. Who are you?”

And the boy is going to answer when the chairwoman says softly, “Alejandro?”—and strikes her own match to the candle.

The boy remembers the woman’s face going bright, then warm nothing as he was blown across the street.

He woke in miniature and thought himself dead. The bed conformed to his nine-year-old body. Through his blurry, damaged vision the walls seemed heaven blue with a short doorway through which tall, indistinct figures in white stooped to enter. He thought they must be angels.

The angels spoke in soft whispers, and there seemed something hidden and bright at their center they were both protective of and deferential to. When they leaned over him, their faces disappeared in streaking ceiling lights and he thought,
I am being judged for what I have done.
With a voice that had but a single burst left, he spoke: “Please don’t send me to hell.”

The faceless heads in white parted and revealed at their center the tall, slender source of their heat and light. It was wondrous and beautiful and Alejandro thought,
God is a woman with blonde hair
.

God leaned close to his bandaged face and whispered, “You are safe with me, my son, and I will never let you go to hell.”

Shh.

I’m scared.

Don’t be.

I can’t see.

You were hurt in a fire, my child. It is temporary and it will pass.

Can you please hold my hand?

It is my honor, Alejandro.

I saw you in heaven.

You were tired and there were many drugs for your recovery.

I love you.

I love you too, my child.

I looked in the grass for my future, but all I saw was fire.

Fire is what purifies us.

Don’t ever leave me.

I am here for all the sons and daughters of my nation, Alejandro, and I will never leave any of you.

The pain subsided, the blindness lifted, but the memory of Her stood fixed absolute in the boy. An angel’s touch, a mother’s voice. There were gifts and flowers left for him, for all the children in the ward, each inscribed,
With all my love, Evita
.

Her portrait hung on the walls with a prominence and regularity usually reserved for the Virgin. Each child woke to it, went to bed with it, and like Alejandro, prayed to it. For this was Her hospital, built from CGT funds, constructed, as was Her whim, on a child’s scale. There were doctors and nurses, all in the uniform of the Eva Perón Foundation.

The staff spoke daily to the boy, tried to coax friendly words from him, but he needed only the portrait on the wall and nothing else existed for him.

While he waited.

A week turned into two. They asked who he was, how he had come to them. They told him it would be time to leave soon. He didn’t acknowledge their words.

Then one day he felt the light without seeing it.

From the door. At the very center of their pointless gaggle, shielded by it.

It was Her.

He hardly reacted, so certain was he Evita would come, morning light kindling blonde hair alive and more than woman.

She gazed down at the scars of old darning stitches on his neck.

“My doctors tell me you do not speak, that you will not leave the hospital.”

“I love you.”

“And I you, my son. But you are well and should be with other children, where you can play and learn.”

“I waited for you.”

She touched his forehead. “I am here, Alejandro.”

“I don’t ever want to leave you again.”

She stroked his brow and said quietly, “You have suffered much my child, haven’t you?”

He wouldn’t cry, and She loved him for that.

“Clerk.” Her voice flat and aimed at a colorless suit.

“Yes, Mrs. Perón.”

“Where is this boy scheduled to be sent?”

Flipping pages. “Accordia Orphanage, Senora.”

“I want him given a family instead. A real mother and father in a real town far from the corruption of this city.”

“It is done, Senora.”

She crouched down to the boy, took his hand. “You and I are joined in our hearts, my son. Though we will be apart, always will our thoughts be together. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“My little
soldado
. When you are older, you will come back and be part of my foundation. You and all the children of our nation will work together to change the world. Can you hold this faith over the coming years?”

“Yes.”

“And so it is done.”

She released his hand, nodded to the clerk, and was gone.

On the fourth day after Evita died, his stepparents dragged the young Alejandro back into the house. He fought but he was weak and half frozen and his knees bled from nights spent kneeling in the howling open. His stepparents considered destroying the shrine—it unnerved them—but they hesitated, frightened by the boy’s devotion, frightened in some measure by the shadow of Her.

That shadow was long and heavy the week after Her death. This had been one of Her towns, the kind of humiliated, wind-blown place that fueled Her climb to greatness. There had been passionate speeches by the mayor, collections taken from people who had nothing to send flowers to a woman dead, all the while the gnawing, numbing feeling filling them that their time, the time of places like this, had suddenly passed. The gait of the town stuttered, conversations failed midsentence, and a ten-year-old boy built a small shrine he prayed to day and night, without food, without care for himself, until his stepparents dragged him, near-dead, into warmth.

He was forbidden to pray to it, but the shrine never came down and with time became a kind of town relic. This tiny pile of stones, a blonde-haired doll, the runny heaps of altar candles. Watched, tended, prayed to secretly at night on bare knees, all by the boy.

The stepparents Evita’s foundation had sent him to ran the only gas pump in the village, servicing the infrequent traffic of cargo trucks and slick urbanites weekending at the nearby estancia. The boy did his work, rarely spoke, spent entire days sitting on a stool staring into space, thinking…