Читать книгу Accidentals - Susan M. Gaines - Страница 9

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It’s funny the things you notice, or don’t notice, when you’re a kid. I didn’t remember noticing how flat and dull Uruguay looks from the air. Flying south over the lush chaos of Brazil you see the colors fade, the greens grow paler, the land treeless, shadowless. For the last two hours of the flight, I sat with my nose pressed to the window, wondering why in the world I’d agreed to come on this trip to nowhere. That’s what my mother’s country looked like to me then, just an empty, stepped-on, nowhere place. I had thought I might like that, an empty place—but gazing out the plane window I suddenly realized that when I thought of empty places I was imagining wild places. Forests and rivers with whitewater rapids, granite, alpine lakes, black bears and eagles, southwestern deserts and red rock, coyotes and vultures…. I did not think of endless miles of grass. Cows. Horses. A few sheep. More cows.

When we’d reboarded in São Paulo for the last leg of the flight there was an odd stench on the plane—Mom said it smelled like used tampons—and the pilot, in his welcome-aboard announcement, apologized and said there were cattle up front. I leaned across Mom and looked up the aisle toward the curtains that partitioned off first class. “They have cows up there?” I asked without thinking, and the woman sitting in front of us said, to no one in particular, “Sólo en Uruguay,” and then the man across the aisle leaned over and said to me, “They have excellent grass cocktails on Uruguayan flights.”

You could tell the Uruguayans on the plane because they were all shaking their heads and making sarcastic remarks. Mom was laughing too hard to say anything, and I was still trying to figure out where they could put cows on a passenger jet. The stench was enough to make you want to skip lunch.

“Uruguay takes its cows very seriously,” Mom said finally. “But I do think he meant in the cargo space up front.”

She was laughing then, but a couple hours later she leaned past me to peer out the window and broke into tears. That’s another thing I’d never noticed before, Mom overcome with emotion at the sight of Uruguay. “You okay?” I asked, and she nodded and leaned back in her seat without saying anything. Maybe, I thought, it was because she was returning for good this time.

We stayed in Abuela’s house, a big gray concrete affair that my grandfather had designed in what Abuela called the “modern” style of architecture. It looked like the front half of an old industrial ship, broken off and beached on the corner, the front porch straddling it like a forecastle, little porthole windows in the side. Inside, it tended to be too dark—brown leather and dark-stained pine furniture, gray granite stairs, the walls painted beige—and Abuela was in the habit of leaving the heavy wooden blinds down all day, which made the otherwise comfortable house a bit depressing. Mom would go around opening the blinds in the morning, and then Abuela would go through and close them, until finally they compromised with half open, so at least you felt like you were in the ship’s living quarters instead of its cargo hold. Mom told me there used to be lots of houses built on the ship motif, but most of them had been along the Rambla, the boulevard that followed the coast and was now lined with ugly new high-rise boxes. With everyone worried about the country depopulating—an incomprehensible worry for someone who grew up in California, but definitely at the top of the Uruguayan complaint list—and so many empty buildings, it was hard to fathom the high-rises. Tía Elsa, who lived in one, told me people liked them because they were comfortable and modern. Abuela said they were an investment, safer than the bank. And Juan Luis said it was all part of a money laundering operation for rich Argentinians. None of this clarified matters, though I did understand that it was a little like the stock market, where what mattered was the perception of value, rather than any innate qualities of usefulness.

At home, most news about “the economy” seemed to be relegated to the business section of the newspaper, which I rarely read. But in Uruguay, the economy was a daily component of the front page, right up there with the soccer matches and the cows. Even my effervescent tía Elsa, who’s the last person in the world you’d expect to read the business section of the newspaper, grumbled in a knowledgeable fashion about the failing economy—the fickle Uruguayan peso, the boarded-up stores, her sister’s son who couldn’t find a job, the brain drain of young people to the United States.… As far as I could tell, Mom’s idea that the country was trying to reinvent itself was wishful thinking that only she was party to. The United States, on the other hand, appeared to be an unsinkable economic Titanic in 1999, and everyone who stopped by to see Mom that first week thought she was going the wrong way. In fact, none of them really seemed to comprehend that she was there to stay—including Abuela, who was an unwitting but essential part of Mom’s repatriation plan.

“Why are you working so much?” she asked Mom, on our fourth day in Montevideo. “You’re on vacation, you should go to the beach and relax.” Mom, it seems, was trying to make up for a lifetime of absence by fixing things up around Abuela’s house. She’d already enlisted my aid to install a lock on the upstairs terrace door, which Abuela had booby-trapped with a board and a cowbell. Now we were cleaning all the junk out of the little room off the entryway that was my temporary bedroom. My grandfather had used the room as an office, and though the desk was long gone and it now contained a narrow pine bed and several layers of out-of-use objects, everyone still referred to it as “la oficina de Papá,” nearly four decades after he’d moved out. His books and journals still occupied the bookshelves, and most of the old papers and clothes we’d been sorting through had belonged to him.

“I’m not here to relax,” Mom snapped, trying unsuccessfully to heft the box she’d just filled with trash. “Gabe can go if he wants,” she added in English. She hadn’t spoken English to me since we got off the plane, but she was clearly trying to irritate Abuela, who didn’t like to admit that she couldn’t understand.

It was too cold to be lying around on the beach—September was not exactly vacation time in Uruguay—but I wouldn’t have minded taking a walk down to the Rambla. It didn’t, however, seem wise to abandon Mom just yet. She was mad that Abuela wasn’t taking her plans seriously, but as far as I could tell, Abuela’s remarks were just her odd way of showing affection—she was never exactly the demonstrative type. If anything, I figured, she was afraid to believe that Mom was going to stay, afraid of being disappointed. But Mom was always overreacting. I picked up the box she was struggling with and turned to carry it out, but Abuela was standing in the way.

“What’s in there?”

“Trash,” Mom said.

I leaned over so Abuela could see into the box, but she wanted to go through it so I set it back down on the floor. Perhaps it was just because I’d grown, but she seemed even tinier than I remembered, an oxymoronic cross between gnome and cherub. Her skin was otherworldly pallid and smooth, her hair a translucent halo, her round face caved in at the mouth, and her glasses were so thick and yellowed with age it seemed doubtful she could actually see through them. She was just a grandmother, a slightly eccentric old lady—but her esteem was a seriously coveted commodity in the Quiroga family.

“These are still serviceable.” She extracted a pair of worn pink bedroom slippers from the carton and held them up. “Where are you taking this stuff?”

“Mom said I should leave it for the bichicomes, next to the dumpster across the street.”

“Mendigos,” Abuela corrected me.

Bichicomes was what people called the guys who went around the city on horse-drawn carts and picked through the curbside dumpsters for recyclables, but the word was too Uruguayan for Abuela. She was trying to teach me “proper” Castilian Spanish.

“Mendigos are beggars,” Mom told me. “Not the same thing as bichicomes.”

“Bichicomes comes from English,” Abuela said, as if that explained everything—and then I laughed, realizing for the first time that the word was a perversion of the word “beachcomber.” She looked into the box again and extracted a music cassette. “And what about this?”

“Mamá, it’s tango. You don’t like tango.”

“Elsa might like it.”

“Elsa has a CD player. She never listens to tapes anymore. Anyway, the tape is torn.”

Abuela slipped it into the pocket of her housedress. She surveyed the room, as if trying to guess what other valuables Mom would want to get rid of. “You’d better just set things aside for me to look through,” she said, and then she trundled off with her pink slippers.

“I grew up in this house,” Mom fumed. “I don’t want to feel like a guest here.” She was tugging at a mass of extension cords, trying to untangle it. “She doesn’t even like pink.”

“I guess she doesn’t want us to throw anything away.”

“Those must have been Mercedes’ slippers.”

“Whose?”

“Papá’s second wife.”

I laughed. “How did they get in here?”

She looked around the room at the jumble of broken light fixtures and dishes, unused blankets and piles of old newspapers. “Juan went over there and cleaned up after Papá died. Looks like he just stashed everything in here, trash included.” She gave up on the extension cords, which were all missing plugs, and tossed the whole mess into the box.

“I could take stuff out at night,” I offered. “After she goes to bed.”

Mom looked at me and started giggling like a conspiring teenager. “She won’t even know it’s gone,” she said.

I could have slept upstairs in my uncles’ old bedroom, the way I had when I was small. Or stayed with Elsa and Juan, where there was a computer and Internet access, not to mention Elsa’s good cooking. But I liked this cramped little room off the entrance, with its two porthole windows, in the prow of the ship. The streetlamp on the corner cast a pleasant yellow glow at night, and I could hear the most intimate of conversations as people walked home in the wee hours, the comforting clip-clop of horses’ hooves when the bichicomes made their morning rounds.

The wall across from my bed was lined from floor to ceiling with dusty old books and journals, and between helping Mom with her filial guilt projects and visiting with her old school friends and relatives in those first few weeks, I started poking around in them. I’d suddenly become self-conscious about my clunky Spanish, and I thought reading might improve it. Mom had a small library of Uruguayan books at home, but I’d never explored it beyond the tattered collections of Mafalda cartoons, and I had the literacy of a seven-year-old. Though Mom had jabbered at me in Spanish all my life, I’d been answering her in English since first grade, only really speaking Spanish during our Christmas visits to Montevideo.

At first, I forced myself to look up every word I didn’t know, but that meant I spent most of my time shuffling through the wispy yellowed pages of Abuela’s two-volume Real Academia Española. I’d look up a word, and then I’d have to look up words in the definitions and I’d end up darting from dictionary entry to dictionary entry until I lost track of my original inquiry and abandoned whatever I was trying to read. After an afternoon of this, I gave up on the dictionary and started just looking at illustrations and reading past the words I didn’t know. Amazingly, it worked. If I didn’t fret about individual words, I found I could read pretty much anything I wanted to. There was a certain mystique to it, pulling a book from the shelf at random, blowing the dust off, and flipping through the musty pages, pausing on whatever caught my fancy and letting my mind float free above the text, a comprehensible whole somehow emerging from incomprehensible pieces. I guess all Mom’s jabbering had left a more substantial trace in my brain than I realized.

Mixed in with my grandfather’s architecture books were a lot of old magazines and journals, including installments from something called the Enciclopedia uruguaya that was full of illustrated essays about Uruguayan culture and history. Uruguay as seen from California was so inconsequential that it had hardly been mentioned in my geography studies, but here it was center stage. I read about how José Gervasio Artigas had gone galloping across the grasslands with his wild brigades of gauchos, calling for freedom and equality, winning independence from Spain—surely a more colorful founding father than the stuffy old guys with white wigs I’d learned about in school at home. I understood for the first time why Uruguayans called themselves orientales, that it meant “easterners” and referred to the eastern bank of the Uruguay River, distinguishing them from the Argentinians on the other side. There was a book about the gauchos, who were the criollo offspring of surviving Charrúa and Guaraní, renegade Spaniards, and escaped slaves. They’d formed a nomadic cowboy culture, eluding colonial governments and living off feral cattle until the end of the nineteenth century, when the big estancieros fenced off the grasslands and the gauchos were reduced to serfdom. The book was full of reproductions of nineteenth-century oil paintings depicting life in the countryside as a paradoxical mix of bucolic and stark—Artigas and his mounted followers with dead bodies strewn casually around them, a gaucho relaxing on the grass next to his horse, another sitting on a stool with his guitar in a desolate, treeless panorama…. The paintings made me eager to get out of the city and see the countryside, but though the estancia was the main feature of Mom’s plan, we had to wait for Juan Luis to drive us out there and it was nearly two weeks before he got around to it.

They started arguing before we even got out the door of Abuela’s house.

“No one has stayed out there in years,” Juan said. We were standing in the foyer, the door open on a cool, clear spring morning. “The house isn’t livable.”

“That’s why we’re going,” Mom said. “To fix it up.” The estancia was a four-hour drive, and she wanted to spend the whole weekend there.

“We can take a look around, have a nice asado, and come back tonight,” Juan said.

I set down the two bags I was carrying.

“You can leave us out there.” Mom picked up the bags and headed out the door. “We’ll take the bus back.”

We followed her out to the car and Juan opened the trunk. “Did you ever take a bus to the estancia, Lili?”

She didn’t answer him. She deposited our bags, closed the trunk, and got in on the passenger side. I settled into the back seat.

Juan was laughing as he started the engine. “Lascano is as close as they get,” he said. “A nice forty-kilometer walk.” He caught my eye in the rearview mirror, and I couldn’t help smiling.

I liked my uncle, though I sometimes found him a little intimidating. He was an agronomist—cattle, grains, that sort of thing—not what you’d think of as a profession of intellectuals, but he spoke five languages and seemed to know everything about everything. I didn’t know why he and Mom were bickering so much that day, except that Elsa wasn’t around to lighten things up. Elsa and Juan Luis were such total opposites that when they were in the same room together, they almost seemed like parodies of themselves, my impenetrable uncle with his aura of brooding, unfulfilled brilliance, and Elsa, so warm, exuberant, and good-humored that your spirits lifted just being in her company. She was as expansive as she was physically compact, a chatterer, an enjoyer of tango, corny movies, and pretty knick-knacks—and Mom, who didn’t like any of those things, adored her in an unconditional way I’d never seen her adore anyone. But Elsa had no interest whatsoever in the estancia, and we were doomed, it seemed, to a day of Quiroga sparring.

Once we got away from Montevideo, there was hardly any traffic and not much to see, just mile after mile of empty grassland. Uruguayans say the land is undulating rather than flat, though billowing might be a better word, as if the grass were a blanket with the wind caught beneath it. We passed a couple of tiny towns and the occasional ranch house, here and there a horse-drawn cart or a bicycle in the middle of the two-lane highway. Rocha, the regional capital, was more than an hour and a half away from the estancia, but it was the biggest city around—a couple dozen paved streets laid out in a grid around a sleepy nineteenth-century plaza—and we stopped to buy fresh bread and meat for an asado. Then, with Mom and Juan arguing about the route, we headed out of town on a gravel road—the main route across the northeast part of the country.

We drove for some fifty kilometers, through a landscape of palm trees and grassland that seemed totally incongruous to me. I associated palm trees with Southern California, with beaches and shopping centers, or, in my imagination, with tropical islands. I didn’t expect to find them sprouting out of pastures in el país de las vacas gordas, the so-called land of the fat cows, which was what people liked to call Uruguay when they weren’t calling it el paisito. Off to the east we passed a large lagoon, one of a series that lined the coast from Montevideo to Brazil, and there the palms grew so thick as to form a forest, the only one I’d seen that wasn’t a plantation of imported eucalyptus or pines. The palms were native to the region, Juan said, but they were almost extinct—butiá, he called them. They produced a small orange fruit that the locals liked to use for jam and liqueur, but which wasn’t worth cultivating. The trees we saw scattered about the grasslands, he said, were all over three hundred years old, leftovers from when the Spaniards first introduced cattle, which ate all the young sprouts. The only young trees were in a few marshy patches the cattle couldn’t reach, like the one by the lagoon.

We came to a junction and turned inland onto another dirt road, which we followed for about twenty minutes, and then Juan started quizzing Mom about where to turn. He followed her directions and got us lost in a maze of dirt tracks, just to prove she didn’t remember how to get to the estancia. Then he backtracked to the road we’d been on and drove for another half mile before turning off on another unmarked dirt track, which we bumped along for fifteen minutes, turning at two more undifferentiated junctions, until finally, the track we were on simply ended.

We got out of the car in the middle of an unremarkable expanse of green. There was a one-story brick house and a brick barn and a concrete shed, all of which looked hopelessly abandoned. The only trees were a grove of sterile old eucalyptus along the drive to the house. It didn’t look anything like I had imagined it, though now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d envisioned the estancia. I guess I’d expected it to be more distinctive somehow, more of a place. Instead, the ranch structures appeared to be crumbling into the landscape, and the landscape itself was too mild, too flat and homogeneous to inspire much interest or respect. It was as though we had come all this way to visit an empty football field or a vacant lot. Mom, however, stepped away from the car and opened her arms to embrace the air as if she’d landed at the glorious center of the universe. She looked at me and smiled, and though we’d been driving with the windows wide open, she took the kind of deep, grateful breath that signifies release from long confinement in a stifling, airless place. She even smiled at Juan Luis, but he refused to acknowledge her mood.

“I told you it was run-down,” he said. We walked over to the house and Mom struggled with the warped, unpainted door. “The only one who ever comes out here is the paisano who works for Caruso, to check on his cattle,” Juan Luis went on. “And he doesn’t care about the house.” He reached past Mom and yanked open the door.

“One would think you would care,” Mom said, leading the way inside. “At least you could have painted the place.”

“Paint? Don’t be an idiot. As if I’m going to spend my time out here painting a bunch of crumbling bricks.”

Juan Luis was right. There was no glass in the windows, the thatch roof was entirely torn away in places, and there were weeds growing through the cracks in the tile floor. Mom stood in the middle of the spacious front room looking around. “I guess we need to patch this floor,” she said, nudging a broken tile with her foot. “Get someone to do the windows, and maybe replace the thatch.”

“I’ve been thinking about getting an architect to design a remodel. Or maybe just start over.”

“Bah, how bourgeois. You don’t need an architect to put in a few tiles, patch the roof. Paint.”

“I don’t want a bunch of chapucería—”

“What’s so wrong with a little chapucería?” Mom said, walking into the next room.

“What’s chapucería?” I asked Juan Luis.

“Ask your mother. She’s an expert. Lili,” he said, following her. “Translate chapucería for your son.”

“It means jerry-rigged,” Mom said as we followed her back into the big front room, a corner of which appeared to have been a kitchen.

“Slipshod,” Juan Luis said, in the near-perfect English he refused to speak with me. “It means slipshod.”

“A way to make something functional using what you have,” Mom said. “Better,” she added, switching back to Spanish and looking past me at Juan Luis, “than sitting around thinking about how to do it perfectly and never doing anything because it can never be good enough.” She went over to the sink and turned the faucet handle, but nothing came out.

“And the electricity?” Juan Luis said. “You won’t have water until we put a pump in that well—”

“What happened to the windmill?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but went outside to see for herself. We followed her around the back of the house to the well—I because I was curious to see the place, and Juan Luis because he obviously wasn’t about to miss a chance to rain on her parade.

The well was just a hole surrounded by a ring of crumbling bricks, and Mom’s windmill was missing a few blades and obviously hadn’t worked in years. She stood there looking up at it, Juan Luis standing by with his arms crossed and a smirk on his face, waiting to see what she would say. “We ought to be able to fix it,” she said. “It’s a pretty basic piece of technology.”

“That’ll get water to the house, but it isn’t going to get electricity out here,” Juan Luis said.

“Why not? If we can do one windmill we can do several. Or solar collectors maybe. And a solar water heater would be easy enough.”

Mom’s enthusiasm can be infectious, and I found myself looking around, thinking about the wind, as intrinsic to that landscape as the grasses, and imagining windmills scattered over the green, imagining self-sufficiency and sustainability, Mom’s revenge and her escape. But what most people find charming in my mother seemed to have a contrary effect on her oldest brother.

“Let me know when you want to be serious about discussing the estancia,” he said, and walked away.

“Qué plomo,” Mom mumbled. Whatever she meant by that. Juan was a blob of lead? She expanded on the theme as we walked over to the barn: her brother was a tedious bore and a pain in the neck.

The barn was just a brick shell with a dirt floor and a tin roof, all intact. Mom started taking inventory of the junk inside, making notes in the spiral pad she’d been carrying around—rusty hand tools, jars of nails and screws, boxes of used horseshoes, scraps of wood and broken tiles, horse harnesses hanging on the wall….

“My pony’s saddle!” Mom was in the far corner of the barn, caressing the worn, dried-out leather of a diminutive saddle as if it were in fact the pony of her childhood—as if here, finally, she’d found the warm, unconditional welcome she’d been missing from her brother and mother. She leaned down to press her cheek against the scrap of yellow sheepskin that covered the seat … but before I could comment, she bounced back into action and continued her inventory. When she’d finished, I helped her carry some packing crates and planks back to the house, and we set up a makeshift table and benches. Then she handed me an old straw broom, and went out to collect wildflowers from the pasture. It seemed a little ridiculous to be sweeping a house that had grass growing up between the tiles, but I complied, picking up the worst of the broken tiles and piling them neatly in a corner. Mom had returned with a bouquet of weeds and was arranging them in one of the empty jars when Juan Luis reappeared.

“All those years in yanquilandia really rotted your brain, didn’t they?” he said to Mom, who ignored him.

I looked up from pulling a clump of grass out of the floor and met his eye, caught between wanting to humor Mom and wanting to be considered sane by my uncle. I could smell the smoke from the fire he’d started out front.

“You want to do something useful?” he asked me. “Gather some more wood for the asado?”

“Sure.” I leaned the broom against the wall and followed him out to the fire.

“We don’t even have a proper parrillero out here,” he grumbled, squatting down to comb the first coals under the grate he’d set up on the ground. He directed me to what he called el monte, not a hill but a big patch of brush I hadn’t noticed on the far side of the pasture, behind the house and barn.

Glad for the excuse to explore a bit, I set off across the pasture. It was peaceful out there, and I realized that Mom and Juan Luis’s bickering had been getting on my nerves. It was just how they talked to each other, I thought. If you had a Quiroga’s skewed sense of affection, it might even be considered affectionate. I wasn’t paying much attention to where I was walking, just thinking about Mom and her brother, enjoying the soft give of soil beneath my sneakers, the grass catching under my jeans and brushing past my ankles, the warm breeze on my face … when suddenly the field exploded in a cacophony of angry screams and my attention turned from the estancia’s squabbling absentee owners to its current resident.

One of the loudest displays of avian fury I’d ever witnessed was coming from a single bird, like a Killdeer but larger and more ferocious. It had risen from the grass a few yards from my feet and flown off across the pasture, only to double back and land in its original spot, screaming bloody murder the whole time. It was a tero, I realized, common enough that you saw them in the grass along the Rambla in Montevideo. But I’d never seen those city birds do this. I squatted down in the hope it might relax, but it was no use, the thing just kept strutting back and forth across the grass with its beak open, making this god-awful alarm call, “tero, tero …,” though there was no nest or other reason I could see for it to be protecting that particular square yard of grass. It had a few thin feathers sticking up from the back of its head like some kind of anemic plume, combative red spikes poking out from its wing-pits, a fierce black stripe down its face, and a bright red bill and legs. When it flew, its wings showed an audacious flash of black and white. It was one of the most common birds of Uruguay, but to me it seemed exotic.

As I continued across the grass on my wood-gathering mission, I wished I had brought my binoculars, but I hadn’t even thought to unpack them from my suitcase in Montevideo. Some sort of a tanager swept past me as I neared the monte, but unlike any tanager I’d ever known, this one was a celestial, almost turquoise, shade of blue. There was a bird that reminded me of an oversized, overdressed kingbird calling insistently at the edge of the swathe of brush, a wheezing, inexplicably familiar, three-beat cry that was drawn out on the last note. It was making forays over the pasture to catch bugs, and it reminded me of a Western Kingbird. But the bill was heavier, the colors bolder—bright yellow breast, heavy black stripe through the eye—and it was stockier and brasher than most of the flycatchers I knew. As I moved in among the bushes to look for dead wood, it dawned on me why the call was so familiar: this was the bird whose incessant cries woke me every morning in Montevideo.

The monte was more extensive than I’d thought, even included some low-growing trees, and I’d almost gathered a full armload of wood before I discovered the stream running through its midst. There was no rush and gurgle of water over stone to warn of its presence, and I was standing almost at its edge before I noticed it, slinking quietly through the grass and brush, hardly flowing at all. I started back with my load of wood, and when I came out of the brush I paused to gaze out over the estancia. That’s when it struck me that it wasn’t as flat as I’d thought, because I was looking over the estancia, and I had walked up a slight incline to get to the creek, a slight lift in the land that was so gradual, so integral to its landscape, that it was hard to see it as a hill at all. It was pretty, I could see that then, the vibrant green of healthy grasslands tilting off to the horizon, a placid, guileless, open book of a landscape. But there was nothing spectacular about it, nothing to make me catch my breath, or raise my arms in celebration, nothing to inspire Mom’s rapture.

Mom and Juan Luis were both out by the fire when I returned with my armload of twigs and branches. I had an urge to tell them about the riotous bird in the pasture, though I knew it was one of those you-had-to-be-there sort of tales, and even then no one but another birder would find it amusing. Surely Juan would think I was crazy for being excited about a tero. He was in the middle of another argument with Mom, brandishing an unlit cigarette and waiting for the most strategic moment to light it, while Mom stared at the fire.

“You told me you weren’t doing anything out here,” she said. I dumped my pile of wood on the ground and squatted down to feed the fire. The fat on the lamb was beginning to sizzle, releasing an aroma that made me want to hyperventilate. “You said the land was just sitting here, that I could do what I want.”

“Papá always leased it to the Carusos for their cattle.” Juan fished a burning twig out of the fire and held it up to his cigarette, inhaling slowly and dramatically.

“I want to farm it, Juan.” She waved his smoke away and added, on cue, “Go ahead, give yourself and the rest of us lung cancer, that’s what we all need.”

“Liliana. Be reasonable. You’re talking about a garden, a hectare or two. Out of three hundred. Manuel Caruso has been working a rice rotation on his place up the road since the mid-eighties. It’s been wildly successful—”

“Rice? I’m trying to create an organic farm, and now you want to lease it out to grow rice? With who-knows-what pesticides and chemical fertilizers—”

“Don’t come at me with your ecology nonsense, you’re in the wrong hemisphere. And who says I’m going to lease it? I want to farm the rice myself. Lili, we’re talking about an estancia here, this is serious business.”

“Since when? Since when have you considered the estancia serious business? Look at this place—”

“Isn’t this ready?” I interrupted, poking at the meat with a stick. It looked done enough to me, and with Juan Luis criticizing Mom’s “tontería ecológica,” there was no way the conversation was going to end soon. Or well.

“Probably. Juan likes to overcook it.”

“You want it to be dripping blood?” He tucked his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, picked up the fork and carving knife he’d brought from Montevideo, and made a show of checking the lamb, but it was obviously ready. He sliced off chunks and pushed them to the side of the grill, and Mom and I loaded up the plates she’d brought and went inside to eat.

I wasn’t sure Juan Luis was going to condescend to join us at Mom’s makeshift table, but he followed us in and settled himself on one of the crates. He stared at the weed arrangement, trying to get a rise out of Mom—but she had her eyes on her plate and was furiously and single-mindedly sawing meat off of bone. We ate in deliberate silence for a few minutes, and then she looked up at Juan and threw down her best trump card. “Papá wouldn’t have wanted us to grow rice out here,” she said.

Juan let out a loud, sarcastic guffaw and reached across the plank for the bread. “How would you know what Papá wanted?”

I waited for Mom’s retort, but it seemed that Juan had just trumped her trump.

“Papá didn’t care about this place. He came out here for vacations, to go hunting, and that was it. Didn’t even do that, in the past twenty years. That’s why it’s so run-down.”

“I thought he was nostalgic about it,” Mom said softly.

“Nostalgic and caring are not the same. Nostalgic is pining for something that doesn’t exist. Caring is making something of what you have.”

“He loved the ducks,” Mom said. “The hunting.”

She had always maintained that hunting and hunters were barbaric, and now she was defending her father’s love for it? I opened my mouth to comment—but decided I’d better stay out of it.

“Everyone has tried to lease this land for rice,” Juan said. “Caruso wanted to bring it into his rotation system, and two contract rice growers that I know of, there may have been others. But Papá said no. He wanted to have it just sitting here with a few cattle on it. It’s a waste.”

“Well, we agree on something. The waste. But I thought you said this place was worthless.”

“It was,” Juan said, but didn’t elaborate. He cut himself a bite of lamb, shoved it into his mouth, then looked back at Mom. “Look, Lili,” he said more gently. “Do what you want with the house, I don’t care. And take a hectare for your vegetables. Or two or five—in fact take all the best land, up there behind the barn. There’s about ten hectares all told, and I’ll wager you’ll never use more than one. Do what you want, experiment to your heart’s content. I’ll work up a management plan for the rest—”

“Right. When’s the last time you drove out here? And now you’re going to ‘manage’ the estancia? What, Juan, in your abundant spare time? When you retire? Why didn’t you ever do that before? Why didn’t you ‘manage’ this place for Papá if you were so hot to—”

“Papá wouldn’t listen to me. He didn’t want me to have anything to do with the estancia.” Juan Luis picked up his plate and went outside, and Mom didn’t say anything else, just sat there staring at her plate as if she’d suddenly lost her voracious appetite for lamb.

I wasn’t used to seeing her so subdued, so easily cowed. She looked vulnerable, just a thin wafer of a woman balanced on a broken packing crate. I had an urge to comfort her, to come to her defense, though I had no idea from what, from whom, or how. Juan’s remarks seemed benign enough, if slightly patronizing, and their ideas about the estancia didn’t seem so impossibly incompatible, at least on the surface of it. They both wanted the land to live up to its potential, that was clear, to produce something more significant than a few cows. I didn’t know what was involved in growing rice, but as Juan pointed out there was plenty of land for the sort of thing Mom wanted to do. But though he begged Mom to be reasonable—something of an oxymoron, I must say—he also seemed intent on pulling all her strings. It can be gratifying to pull Mom’s strings, but Juan was pulling strings I didn’t know about, and I thought I knew them all. It occurred to me then that the two of them weren’t really arguing about the estancia at all, but rather, fighting some primordial sibling war that was beyond my comprehension.