The Cubs and Other Stories by Mario Vargas Llosa
“Got matches, Pop?”
Leonidas lit a match and held it between his fingers until the flame licked his fingernails. In the feeble light of the flame I thoroughly examined the knife. I measured its width and length; I checked the edge of its blade and its weight. “It’s okay,” I said.
“Chunga,” the Gimp ordered. “Go with him.”
Chunga walked between Leonidas and me. When we reached the others, Briceño was smoking and every drag he took lit up, for an instant, the faces of Justo, impassive, tight-lipped; Leon, chewing on something, maybe a blade of grass; and Briceño himself, sweating.
“Who told you you could come?” Justo asked harshly.
“Nobody told me,” Leonidas asserted loudly. “I came because I wanted to. You want explanations from me?”
Justo didn’t answer. I signaled to him and pointed out Chunga, who had kept a little ways back. Justo took out his knife and threw it. The weapon fell somewhere near Chunga’s body and he shrank back.
“Sorry,” I said, groping on the sand in search of the knife. “It got away from me. Here it is.”
“You’re not going to be so cute in a while,” Chunga said.
Then, just as I had done, he passed his fingers over the blade by match light; he returned it to us without saying anything and went back to “the raft” in long strides. For a few minutes we were silent, inhaling the perfume from the cotton plants nearby, borne by a warm breeze in the direction of the bridge. On the two sides of the riverbed in back of us the twinkling lights of the city were visible. The silence was almost total; from time to time barking or braying ruptured it abruptly.
“Ready!” shouted a voice from the other side.
“Ready!” I shouted.
There was shuffling and whispering among the group of men next to “the raft.” Then a limping shadow slid toward the center of the space the two groups had marked off. I saw the Gimp test the ground out there with his feet, checking whether there were stones, holes. My eyes sought out Justo: Leon and Briceño had put their arms on his shoulders. Justo detached himself from them quickly. When he was beside me, he smiled. I put out my hand to him. He started to back away but Leonidas jumped and grabbed him by the shoulders. The old man took off a poncho he was wearing over his back. He stood at my side.
“Don’t get close to him even for a second.” The old man spoke slowly, his voice trembling slightly. “Always at a distance. Dance round him till he’s worn out. Most of all, guard your stomach and face. Keep your arm up all the time. Crouch down, feet firm on the ground. If you slip, kick in the air until he pulls back.… All right, get going. Carry yourself like a man.…”
Justo listened to Leonidas with his head lowered. I thought he was going to hug him but he confined himself to a brusque gesture. He yanked the poncho out of the old man’s hands and wrapped it around his arm. Then he withdrew, walking on the sand with firm steps, his head up. As he walked away from us, the short piece of metal in his right hand shot back glints. Justo halted two yards away from the Gimp.
For a few seconds they stood motionless, silent, surely saying with their eyes how much they hated each other, observing each other, their muscles tight under their clothing, right hands angrily crushing their knives. From a distance, half hidden by the night’s warm darkness, they didn’t look so much like two men getting ready to fight as shadowy statues cast in some black material or the shadows of two young, solid carob trees on the riverbank, reflected in the air, not on the sand. As if answering some urgently commanding voice, they started moving almost simultaneously. Maybe Justo was first, a second earlier. Fixed to the spot, he began to sway slowly from his knees on up to his shoulders and the Gimp imitated him, also rocking without spreading his feet. Their postures were identical: right arm in front, slightly bent, with the elbow turned out, hands pointing directly at the adversary’s middle, and the left arm, disproportionate, gigantic, wrapped in a poncho and crossed over like a shield at face height. At first only their bodies moved; their heads, feet and hands remained fixed. Imperceptibly, they both had been bending forward, arching their backs, flexing their legs as if to dive into the water. The Gimp was the first to attack: he jumped forward suddenly, his arm tracing a rapid circle. Grazing Justo without wounding him, the weapon had followed an incomplete path through the air when Justo, who was fast, spun around. Without dropping his guard, he wove a circle around the other man, sliding gently over the sand, at an ever increasing rate. The Gimp spun in place. He had bent lower, and as he turned himself round and round, following the direction of his rival, he trailed him constantly with his eyes, like a man hypnotized. Unexpectedly, Justo stood upright: we saw him fall on the other with his whole body and spring back to his spot in a second, like a jack-in-the-box.
“There,” whispered Briceño. “He nicked him.”
“On the shoulder,” said Leonidas. “But barely.”
Without having given a yell, still steady in his position, the Gimp went on dancing, while Justo no longer held himself to circling around him: he moved in and away from the Gimp at the same time, shaking the poncho, dropping and keeping up his guard, offering his body and whisking it away, slippery, agile, tempting and rejecting his opponent like a woman in heat. He wanted to get him dizzy, but the Gimp had experience as well as tricks. He broke out of the circle by retreating, still bent over, forcing Justo to pause and to chase after him, pursuing in very short steps, neck out, face protected by the poncho draped over his arm. The Gimp drew back, dragging his feet, crouching so low his knees nearly touched the sand. Justo jabbed his arm out twice and both times and both times hit only thin air. “Don’t get so close,” Leonidas said next to me in a voice so low only I could hear him, just when that shape—the broad, deformed shadow that had shrunk by folding into itself like a caterpillar—brutally regained its normal height and, in growing as well as charging, cut Justo out of our view. We were breathless for one, two, maybe three seconds, watching the immense figure of the clinched fighters, and we heard a brief sound, the first we’d heard during the duel, similar to a belch. An instant later, to one side of the gigantic shadow another sprang up, this one thinner and more graceful, throwing up an invisible wall between the two fighters in two leaps. This time the Gimp began to revolve: he moved his right foot and dragged his left. I strained my eyes vainly to penetrate the darkness and read on Justo’s skin what had happened in those three seconds when the adversaries, as close as two lovers, formed a single body. “Get out of there!” Leonidas said very slowly. “Why the hell you fighting so close?” Mysteriously, as if the light breeze that was blowing had carried that secret message to him, Justo also began to bounce up and down, like the Gimp. Stalking, watchful, fierce, they went from defense to attack and then back to defense with the speed of lightning, but the feints fooled neither one: to the swift move of the enemy’s arm poised as if to throw a stone, which was intended not to wound but to balk the adversary, to confuse him for an instant, to throw him off guard, the other man would respond automatically, raising his left arm without budging. I wasn’t able to see their faces, but I closed my eyes and saw them better than if I’d been in their midst: the Gimp sweating, his mouth shut, his little pig eyes aflame and blazing behind his eyelids, his skin throbbing, the wings of his flattened nose and the slit of his mouth shaken by an inconceivable quivering; and Justo, with his usual sneering mask intensified by anger and his lips moist with rage and fatigue. I opened my eyes just in time to see Justo pounce madly, blindly on the other man, giving him every advantage, offering his face, foolishly exposing his body. Anger and impatience lifted him off the ground, held him oddly up in the air, outlined against the sky, smashed him violently into his prey. The savage outburst must have surprised the Gimp, who briefly remained indecisive, and when he bent down, lengthening his arm like an arrow, hiding from our view the shining blade we followed in our imagination, we knew that Justo’s crazy action hadn’t been totally wasted. At the impact, the night enveloping us became populated with d
We must have been gasping and eager, holding our breath, our eyes popping, maybe whispering gibberish, until the human pyramid cracked, suddenly cleaved through its center by an invisible slash: the two were flung back, as if magnetized from behind, at the same moment, with the same violent force. They stayed a yard apart, panting. “We’ve got to stop them,” said Leon’s voice. “It’s enough.” But before we tried to move, the Gimp had left his position like a meteor. Justo didn’t sidestep the lunge and they both rolled on the ground. They twisted in the sand, rolling over on top of each other, splitting the air with slashes and silent gasps. This time the fight was over quickly. Soon they were still, stretched out in the riverbed, as if sleeping. I was ready to run toward them when, perhaps guessing my intention, someone suddenly stood up and remained standing next to the fallen man, swaying worse than a drunk. It was the Gimp.
In the struggle they had lost their ponchos, which lay a little way off, looking like a many-faceted rock. “Let’s go,” Leon said. But this time as well something happened that left us motionless. Justo got up with difficulty, leaning his entire weight on his right arm and covering his head with his free hand as if he wanted to drive some horrible sight away from his eyes. When he was up the Gimp stepped back a few feet. Justo swayed. He hadn’t taken his arm from his face. Then we heard a voice we all knew but which we wouldn’t have recognized if it had taken us by surprise in the dark.
“Julian!” the Gimp shouted. “Tell him to give up!”
I turned to look at Leonidas but I found his face blocked out by Leon’s: he was watching the scene with a horrified expression. I turned back to look at them: they were joined once again. Roused by the Gimp’s words, Justo, no doubt about it, had taken his arm from his face the second I looked away from the fight and he must have thrown himself on his enemy, draining the last strength out of his pain, out of the bitterness of his defeat. Jumping backward, the Gimp easily escaped this emotional and useless attack.
“Leonidas!” he shouted again in a furious, imploring tone. “Tell him to give up.”
“Shut up and fight!” Leonidas bellowed without hesitating.
Justo had attempted another attack, but all of us, especially Leonidas, who was old and had seen many fights in his day, knew there was nothing to be done now, that his arm didn’t have enough strength even to scratch the Gimp’s olive-toned skin. With an anguish born in his depths and rising to his lips, making them dry, and even to his eyes, clouding them over, he struggled in slow motion as we watched for still another moment until the shadow crumpled once more: someone collapsed onto the ground with a dry sound.
When we reached the spot where Justo was lying, the Gimp had withdrawn to his men and they started leaving all together without speaking. I put my face next to his chest, hardly noticing that a hot substance dampened my neck and shoulder as my hand, through the rips in the cloth, explored his stomach and back, sometimes plunging into the limp, damp, cold body of a beached jellyfish. Briceño and Leon took off their jackets, wrapped him carefully and picked him up by his feet and arms. I looked for Leonidas’s poncho, which lay a few feet away, and not looking, just groping, I covered his face. Then, in two rows, the four of us carried him on our shoulders like a coffin and we walked, matching our steps, in the direction of the path that climbed up the riverbank and back to the city.
“Don’t cry, old-timer,” Leon said. “I’ve never known anyone brave as your son. I really mean that.”
Leonidas didn’t answer. He walked behind me, so I couldn’t see him.
At the first huts in Castilla, I asked: “Want us to carry him to your house, Leonidas?”
“Yes,” the old man said hastily, as if he hadn’t been listening.
The Younger Brother
There was an enormous rock at the side of the road and on the rock a toad. David took aim carefully.
“Don’t shoot,” Juan said.
Surprised, David lowered the weapon and looked at his brother.
“He can hear the shots,” Juan said.
“Are you crazy? We’re forty miles from the waterfall.”
“Maybe he’s not at the waterfall,” Juan insisted, “but at the caves.”
“No,” David said. “Besides, even if he was, he’d never think it’s us.”
The toad sat there, breathing calmly, its gaping mouth wide open, while from behind its bleary eyes it was watching David with a certain sickly air. David raised the revolver, took aim slowly and fired.
“You didn’t hit him,” Juan said.
“Yes I did.”
They went up to the rock. A small green blot marked the spot where the toad had been.
“Didn’t I hit him?”
“Yes,” Juan said, “you got him.”
They walked toward the horses. The same stabbing, cold wind that had escorted them on their journey was blowing but the land was beginning to change: the sun sank behind the hills, a vague shadow cloaked the fields at the foot of a mountain, the clouds curled around the nearest peaks had taken on the dark gray color of the rocks. David threw around his shoulders the blanket he had spread on the ground in order to rest and then, mechanically, he replaced the used cartridge in his revolver. Out of the corner of his eye, Juan watched David’s hands as he loaded the weapon and shoved it into its holster; his fingers seemed not to obey any intention but to act on their own.
“Want to move on?” David asked.
Juan agreed.
The road was a narrow slope and the animals climbed with difficulty, constantly slipping on the rocks, which were still wet from the past few days’ rain. The brothers kept silent. A gentle and invisible drizzle greeted them a little after they started up again, but it stopped quickly. It was growing dark when they sighted the caves; the hill, which everyone called Hill of the Eyes, was blunted and stretched out like an earthworm.
“Want to see if he’s there?” asked Juan.
“It’s not worth the trouble. I’m sure he hasn’t moved from the waterfall. He knows they could see him around here. Somebody’s always going by on the road.”
“Whatever you say,” Juan said. And a minute later he asked, “What if that guy was lying?”
“Who?”
“The one who told us he saw him.”
“Leandro? No, he wouldn’t have the nerve to lie to me. He said he was hiding at the waterfall and it’s a sure bet he’s there. You’ll see.”
They continued onward until nightfall. A black sheet enveloped them and in the dark the desolation of that lonely region with neither trees nor people was visible only in the silence, which increased until it became an almost physical presence. Bent over the neck of his mount, Juan kept trying to make out the blurred traces of the path. He knew they had reached the peak when they unexpectedly found themselves on flat ground. David suggested that they continue on foot. They dismounted and tied the animals to some rocks. The older brother tugged at the mane of his horse, patted it on the flanks several times and whispered into its ear: “Hope we don’t find you frozen tomorrow.”
“Are we going down now?” Juan asked.
“Yes,” David answered. “Aren’t you cold? It’s better to wait for daylight in the pass. We’ll rest there. Scare you to go down in the dark?”
“No. Let’s go down, if you want.”
They began the descent immediately. David went first, carrying a small flashlight, and the column of light swung between his feet and Juan’s, the golden circle pausing for a second
“Let’s rest here,” David said.
They sat down alongside each other. The night was cold, the air damp, the sky clouded over. Juan lit a cigarette. He was tired but not sleepy. He felt his brother stretch and yawn. A little later David stopped moving; his breathing was smoother and more rhythmical and from time to time he let out a sort of murmur. In turn, Juan tried to sleep. He made his body as comfortable as he could on the rocks and tried with no success to clear his brain. He lit another cigarette. When he had returned to the ranch three months ago, it had been two years since he had seen his brother and sister. David was the same person he had hated and admired ever since childhood, but Leonor had changed: she was no longer the little girl who used to poke her head in the windows of the shack in order to throw stones at the imprisoned Indians, but a tall woman with primitive gestures, and her beauty, like the countryside around her, had something brutal about it. An intense brilliance had appeared in her eyes. Juan felt a sickness that blurred his sight, an emptiness in his stomach as after a jab of anger every time he associated the image of the man they were hunting with the memory of his sister. Still, at dawn of that day when he saw Camilo cross the clearing separating the ranch house from the stables to get the horses ready, he had hesitated.