«Deuma afpule pun, mapuche mapu meu wengetuai itrovill monguen…»
He dreamed of the horses again.
They came up the river path, the same one the women took down to the water with their jars, and the mud that reached Levi's ankles did not slow them. They were taller than any beast of the Mapu. They snorted steam, the whites of their eyes showing, their hooves shod in iron, and on their backs rode the wingkas. They had no faces. Where the face should have been they wore iron, iron that screeched at the joints each time the rider leaned down to cut.
Levi had never seen a wingka. He knew them from the people who came in from the coast with torn blankets and still eyes, and from the warriors who came back from the north with fewer companions than they had left with and went days without speaking. That was enough for the dream. He supplied the rest.
There came a short clap of thunder with no cloud to account for it, and a man fell far off without anyone having touched him. The rukas burned. The thatch was soaked through and burned all the same. A bearded soldier dragged a girl by the hair and laughed with his mouth open, showing his gums. Pailallef sat against the rewe, run clean through by something long that would not stop quivering, the kultrún in his lap and both hands still on the hide, and he looked at Levi as if he were about to ask him for water. Beside the path they had set heads on lances. Levi knew those faces. He had eaten with them.
Then came Loncopán.
His brother was fighting in the mud with their father's spear. The obsidian point shattered against a chest of metal, and Loncopán went on with the broken shaft, then with his knife, giving ground toward a wall that had not been there a moment before. Levi wanted to shout at him to look to his left. He had no voice. The horse came out of the rain and Loncopán turned too late. The hooves caught him in the chest. They drove him down. The mud closed over the scar on his face, over his open mouth, and the horse went on trampling without looking at what it trampled.
Levi woke with the scream lodged crosswise in his throat.
The ruka was dark. It smelled of wet firewood, of leather, and of bodies sleeping too close together. For four days the rain had been beating on the thatch at the same pace, and all that was left of the hearth was a red eye in the ash. His shirt was stuck to his back and his hands were shaking.
Something warm touched his fingers. Alón had lifted his head and was licking his hand without a sound. Levi sank his fingers into the rough fur at the dog's neck. He had pulled him out of a hollow log on the riverbank after a flood, when the pup fit in one hand and shook worse than Levi was shaking now, and had carried him home inside his shirt. Ever since, Alón had slept against his feet and followed him everywhere, even when Levi threw stones to make him stay.
"The horses again?"
Kumiray had not moved, but her eyes were open; Levi saw the embers reflected in them. His mother had slept little since the people from the coast began arriving.
"They were here," Levi said. "In the lof. Loncopán…"
"Loncopán is asleep in his ruka with his spear beside his head, like every night." She ran her hand over his sweat-soaked hair. Her palm was hard from grinding maize and from stretching wool on the witral, and there was a faint tremor in her fingers that Levi noticed and pretended not to notice. "It was a dream."
"Pailallef says dreams are warnings."
"Some are warnings. Others only frighten."
"And how do you know which is which?"
"That's what Pailallef is for."
Levi did not answer. Pailallef had sung for three days and three nights on the riverbank when the flood took his father, and the river had given nothing back: not the body, not a shred of his blanket. Since then Levi had listened to the machi's songs with the serious face one wore for the old ones and his mind somewhere else. What could a song do against a horse? He had never seen a spirit turn aside a spear or close a wound. He had seen Loncopán wait for a huemul downwind half a morning without moving a foot, and that was worth something.
And yet there were afternoons in the forest when he stopped without knowing why. The shadows under the oldest coihues leaned toward him, the way people lean in to hear someone speaking low, and Levi would stand still until his feet went numb, waiting for something that never came. He had told no one about that.
Kumiray settled beside him and, very softly, began to sing.
It was the fever song. She had sung it to him the winter Levi was six winters old and burned for nine days. It began low, like water while it is still far away, and rose and fell among the stones:
Water down from the mountain,
take the fever from the child;
carry it far to the sea,
for the sea gives nothing back.
That was all. She sang it twice, the second time slower, and on the last line she dropped her voice so low that you had to guess it. Levi was twelve winters old. He was too big for that song, and the boys his age would have laughed. He did not ask her to stop.
Above the hearth stood his mother's witral, a half-woven blanket stretched between its posts. From the top crossbar, tied with a leather thong, hung the wooden chucao Levi had carved when he was nine with Loncopán's knife. It had come out with a crooked tail and one eye bigger than the other, and Kumiray had hung it there anyway, where she saw it every time she passed the shuttle. In the half-dark it was only a lump. Levi looked at it until the song was over.
"Sleep, Levipani."
Only she called him that, and only when she wanted something to stay inside him. His father had given him the name: Levipani, the swift puma. Lientur had spoken it aloud on the riverbank, with his son in his arms and his feet in the water, so that the water and the earth would hear it, and afterward he had said the words that are said at every naming in the lof. Then, one winter, Lientur went up that same river to look for some kinsmen, the flood came, and he did not return.
Levi had a single image of him left, and he tended it the way one tends an ember: his father lifting him onto his shoulders beside the water, his big hands closed around Levi's ankles, his face turned up to look at him, laughing, his hair wet with spray. Nothing more. He did not remember his voice. Only that laughing face and the noise of the river below.
"Here the earth knows who you are," Kumiray murmured, already half asleep. They were the river's words, the words of the naming. "Don't be afraid of a dream."
Levi did not fall asleep again. He listened to the rain until he stopped hearing it.
* * *
By morning the rain had turned to drizzle. Levi went out behind the ruka to piss and found Loncopán sitting under the eaves of his own, their father's spear across his knees, binding the obsidian point to the shaft again with a strip of wet sinew.
His brother was twenty winters old and moved like someone older. The scar ran from under his left eye down to the corner of his mouth, pale against his brown skin, and it tugged a little at his lip when he talked. An arquebus had burst close to his face in an ambush in the coastal forests; that was all he would say, and when the children asked for more, he asked them in turn whether they had brought in the firewood yet.
"Mother says you screamed," Loncopán said without looking up.
"I didn't scream."
"Then the dog screamed." He pulled the sinew tight with his teeth and knotted it. "What did you dream?"
Levi thought about lying. With Loncopán it never worked.
"That a horse trampled you."
Loncopán sat looking at the spearpoint. He ran his thumb along the edge, slowly, without cutting himself.
"Horses don't come up into the forest," he said. "Their legs get tangled in the quila and they break their forelegs on the roots. We live in the forest and they live on the plain, and each of us knows why." He raised his eyes. "If you ever see one, you don't run for the plain, even if it looks easier. You run for the quila."
"Have you seen many?"
"Enough."
He held out the end of the sinew for Levi to grip while he made the last turn. Levi held it hard, harder than he needed to. When he was done, Loncopán put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed once, the way he squeezed the shaft before a throw, and got up to go see the men who were mending the corral stockade.
Levi stayed under the eaves with the smell of wet sinew on his fingers. In the dream, the horse had come out of the rain in the middle of the forest.
* * *
That night the rain came back harder, and Kumiray sent him with a bundle of dry firewood to Painecura's ruka.
They called him Painecura, blue stone, for his eyes: over the years they had gone white and bluish, the color of the ice that forms on puddles at dawn, and he could no longer see past the fire. He was the oldest of the kimches, older than Ayllapangui, and on rainy nights the children crowded into his ruka because he had the biggest hearth and knew more epew than anyone. Levi had stopped going two winters ago. He was not a child anymore.
When he pushed aside the hide over the doorway, the old man lifted his face toward the sound.
"Lientur's son," he said. "You tread like him, on the heel. Put that by the fire and close up, you're letting my heat out."
There were six or seven children around the hearth, the littlest still with snot hanging from their noses, and they squeezed together to make room for him. Levi set down the wood and stayed on his feet by the door, his back against the post, so it would be clear he had not come to listen.
"Tell it again," a girl asked. "The one about the stone."
Painecura took his time. He threw a branch on the fire, waited for it to catch, and spoke toward the flames, as if they were listening too.
"This happened when the mountains still walked, when the Mapu was young and did not yet know where to put the rivers. So they say. There was a lof on the slope of the mountain, and up above, on the mountain, there was a stone. It had a hollow in its brow, like this, the way a hand cups when you ask for water. And the people of the lof, when a grief weighed on them, went up. The man who had lost a son went up. The woman who had lost her husband went up. They knelt, they wept into the stone's hollow, and the stone drank it all, and they came down light, the way people come down who have left their load by the path. So they say.
"The people were grateful. They brought it chicha. They brought it piñones. They said to it: good stone, stone that eases us.
"But what eats grief learns the taste of what the grief is wrapped around." The old man ran his tongue over his gums. "First it ate the weeping for the son. Then it ate the son's face. Then it ate his name. And the mother came down light, so light, and no longer knew what she had gone up for.
"A winter came when no one in the lof remembered their dead. No one said their names by the fire. And the dead, since no one named them, could not find the way up. They stayed among the trees, made of smoke, without faces. They walked at night looking for someone to call them, and no one called them. So they say.
"In that lof there was a weaver. Her children had died, three of them, one each winter, and she never took her grief up to the stone. They told her: go up, woman, let it go, walk light. She said: no. It is mine.
"That weaver went up the mountain. And on the stone she drew the order of the world, the four sides, the sun and the moon, the way it is painted on the kultrún, so that the stone would remember its place. Because they say the stone was the lid of something. A door. And that what it ate was on the other side." Painecura raised a finger, and the children fell silent though no one was talking. "Then she stood before it and said the names. Her children's first. Then those of all the dead of the lof that she remembered. And the people who had followed her, hearing her, began to remember, and they told her other names, and she said them. With each name, the stone grew colder. With each name, it closed a little. Until it was closed.
"The door was closed with names. So they say.
"And the weaver left the hollow empty, there in the middle, so that no one would forget it is hungry. Since then, no one goes up."
The fire crackled. A small boy had fallen asleep against his sister's shoulder.
"And the smoke dead?" the girl asked.
"They went up. They had names now." Painecura turned his white eyes toward where the children were, more or less. "What has no name cannot stand against what the earth has named. That is why we say the names of the dead. It isn't for them. It's for us."
Levi pushed himself off the post. A story to keep children from going up the mountain, that was all it was, like the one about the ngürü that eats those who stray from the fire, or the river that takes those who bathe alone. Pailallef had said his father's name for three days and three nights at the water's edge, shouting it by the end, and the water had gone on flowing just the same. Names did nothing. You said them so as not to hear the noise of the water.
"Good night, grandfather," he said, and went out into the rain before the old man could answer.
It seemed to him that Painecura had turned his face toward the door. With those eyes there was no telling.
* * *
The rain eased on the third day, just enough for the women to venture out. With the mud swallowing every track, the men hardly hunted, and the lof ate what the forest gave up to those who knew how to ask.
Kumiray knew. Levi followed her with the basket along a path he could not have found alone, and watched her part the moss with two fingers to uncover the orange changles, or sink the tip of a stick into the ground exactly where a thick root worth the trouble lay. She did not search: she went straight to it. She smelled the air before turning toward a stream. She stopped when a bird stopped singing and waited to learn why. Levi had been born in that forest and still got lost when the fog came down; Kumiray seemed never to have been lost in her life.
They went down to a creek the rain had turned into a brown river. On the far side grew a thicket of quila and coligüe so dense it looked like a wall. A chucao was calling somewhere, off to the right, with that short cry that sounds like laughter.
Kumiray stopped with one foot still raised.
Levi went still before he understood why. The chucao fell silent. The water kept running, but suddenly the sound seemed to come from far away.
Then came the smell, a musk thicker and wilder than any wildcat's. The back of Levi's neck prickled.
The ferns on the far side of the creek parted and a female puma stepped out.
She was as long as Loncopán lying stretched out by the fire, and longer, counting the tail. Her coat, dark with water, clung to the muscles of her shoulders, and she walked without a sound over the wet leaves. Behind her came two spotted cubs, clumsy, who stumbled into each other and sat down on the bank.
The puma raised her head and looked at Levi.
Not at Kumiray, who was closer. At him. Her eyes were the color of resin held up to the light, and there was neither fear nor anger in them. She looked at him the way Loncopán looked at a spearpoint before binding it: slowly, searching for the flaw.
Levi was not breathing. He heard his mother beside him, or felt her: her right hand closed on the handle of the bone knife she wore at her belt, so tight her knuckles had gone pale. She did not draw it. Drawing it would have been a question, and neither of them wanted to hear the answer. The creek was not wide. One leap would carry the puma across.
A heartbeat passed, and another. The water ran between them. Levi felt something stretch between his eyes and the animal's, something thin and taut, like a fishing line at the moment when the fish has not yet decided whether to pull or let go.
The puma blinked, slowly, once. Then she turned, brushed the ferns with her tail, and went back the way she had come. The cubs followed, tumbling after her. The smell lingered a while. Then there was only wet earth.
Kumiray let out her breath in a long whistle. She put a hand on Levi's shoulder, heavy, and left it there.
"The pangi has seen you," she said.
"She saw both of us."
"She looked at you." Kumiray was still watching the ferns, where there was nothing now. "Your father gave you the puma's name. Today she came to see whether you deserved it."
Levi wanted to say that it was an animal, that pumas look at things, that it meant nothing. He opened his mouth to say it. The chucao called again, this time on the left, and Levi closed it.
They filled the basket in silence. All the way back, his mother let go of his shoulder only to climb over fallen trunks.
* * *
That afternoon Kumiray told of the encounter in front of Ayllapangui's ruka, where the kimches sat when it was not raining. She told it without embellishment, the way she told how many sacks of piñones were left in the storehouse, and when she finished, the drip from the eaves could be heard.
Levi stood behind her, with Alón pressed against his legs. He did not like having so many old people look at him at once.
Not all of them were looking at him. Old Llanka, sitting at the far end of the log with her blanket up to her chin and her knotted hands still in her lap, was looking at Kumiray. She had been looking at her the whole time she spoke, without blinking, her sunken mouth pressed tight, the way you look at someone who owes you something and pretends not to remember. Kumiray did not turn toward her even once. Levi could not understand what his mother might owe that old woman, who in winter always sat in the spot farthest from the fire though no one told her to.
"A female with young," Painecura said at last, his white eyes turned toward the sound of the eaves. "A female with young does not let herself be seen. If she let herself be seen, it was because she wanted to."
No one added anything for a while.
"To watch over him," said another of the old men.
"To watch over him," Painecura repeated, and nodded.
Pailallef sat a little apart, the kultrún in his lap, brushing the hide with his fingertips without quite striking it. His eyes were on Levi. Not on Kumiray, who was speaking, nor on the old ones. On him. Levi held his gaze for a moment and then studied the mud on his own feet.
"Which side was the chucao singing on?" Pailallef asked.
"The right," Levi said. "Before."
"And after?"
Levi hesitated. He knew. He had known since the creek; he had heard it, and kept it. He, who snickered at the machi's songs, had been waiting to hear which side the bird would sing from.
"The left."
Pailallef nodded slowly and went back to brushing the hide of the kultrún. He did not say what it meant. In the lof everyone told it their own way: that the left was bad, that the left was good if you were going hunting, that it depended on which way the listener was facing. The machi told none of them.
Millanao shifted on his guanaco skin. He was the more cautious of the lof's two lonkos, a man who spoke little and always after the others, and when he did, the others fell silent.
"To be looked at by a spirit is not always a gift," he said. "It leaves a mark. And the wekufes see those marks too."
No one answered him. Painecura stopped nodding. Kumiray put her hand on the back of Levi's neck, and he felt that there was no warmth in it, the way her hands went when she spent a long time washing wool in the creek.
As they got up to leave, Levi saw that old Llanka was still watching his mother. Kumiray passed by her, a step away, and the old woman spat in the mud near her feet, weakly, the way one spits out a husk. Kumiray did not stop.
"What's wrong with her?" Levi asked, once they were out of earshot.
"She's old," his mother said. "Her bones ache."
Levi thought it was old men frightening a boy, as always, and old women who spat for no reason. He thought about saying so. But he still had the puma's eyes in his own, and in his chest that taut thread that had not quite snapped when the animal left. He let himself be led back to the ruka without opening his mouth.
* * *
That night it did not rain. For the first time in many days, the silence of the roof woke him.
The ruka was still. Kumiray was breathing deeply beside him, and on the crossbar of the witral the wooden chucao was a darker stain against the dark. Alón slept against his feet. Levi lay looking at the smoke hole, where a patch of threadbare sky showed, with two stars, and waited for sleep.
Instead, he felt something else.
It came from below. From the packed-earth floor beneath the hides and, deeper still, from the mud. It was thin and cold, like a root when you pull up a plant and feel that it never ends, that it goes deeper than the plant has any right to reach. It was taut. And it was pulling.
It pulled at something further in than the body, at the place where you feel your breath run short before you cry. It pulled toward the outside of the ruka, beyond the corral stockade, toward the forest above, where the mountain closed in and the old ones would not let the children go.
Levi laid his palm on the earth. The cold climbed up his wrist.
He got up.
He told himself he was only going to look at the mountain from the doorway, and as he told himself so he threw the blanket over his shoulders and took two steps toward the entrance, barefoot, treading where he knew nothing creaked. The thread pulled unhurried, with the patience of a root. Levi took a third step.
Alón crossed in front of him.
He had not heard the dog get up. Alón stood between him and the hide over the doorway, legs spread, hackles raised from nape to tail, and he was growling. Not at Levi. He had his muzzle against the gap at the edge of the hide, where a thread of night air came in, and he was growling outward, low and steady, a growl Levi had never heard from him.
Levi drew the hide aside with two fingers.
Outside, the mud of the lof gleamed faintly under the threadbare sky. Beyond the corral, where the slope began and the mountain became a single black mass, something was sitting. Small, gray, ears high. A fox. It sat motionless at the edge of the forest, facing the ruka, and Levi knew, though he could not see its eyes, that it was looking at him.
The thread pulled.
"Levipani."
His mother's voice, behind him, hoarse with sleep. Levi let go of the hide. He stood with his hand in the air a moment, the fox still in his eyes and the cold climbing through the soles of his feet.
"I went out to piss," he said.
Kumiray did not answer. Levi lay down beside her again and pulled the covers over his head. Alón did not go back to his feet. He stayed lying at the entrance, his muzzle against the gap, and every so often he growled.
At dawn, in the mud in front of the ruka, there were fox tracks. They came right up to the hide over the doorway, turned in a circle, and went back toward the mountain.
* * *
The complete novel is available in Spanish.