The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Author:Gabriela Cabezón Cámara [Cámara, Gabriela Cabezón]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781916465664
Published: 2020-04-25T07:22:54+00:00

I woke a couple of hours later, by myself, and I didn’t know what to wear: my gaucho clothes were ridiculous but they were the only ones I had so I went back to Kutral-Có and had a wash to get the mud off, as it was starting to itch, and I put them back on again and added my flamingo blanket as a poncho. By a kutral quite near to the big fire, the cooking fire – there were many fires, they made constellations on the ground with all those fires – were Liz and Rosa, dressed like the Indians, with white tunics made of heron feathers that had touches of gold and russet from the scales of pejerrey fish and capybara fur. They were all so beautiful, as exquisite as any animal, like all animals, like the animals from which the clothes had been made.

There was no centre, as I’ve said, nor any ruka that was bigger than the others, but bit by bit and surely because of the novelty we presented, the night became organised around our kutral. Rosa went to the wagon for the gifts we had brought. The Indians liked the mirrors and what could have seemed like childishness on their part turned out to make perfect sense to me: they looked at the beauty of their reflections and they were gorgeous, as were the old men and women with their furrowed skin wrinkled by sun and snow and their white hair; as were the women who had just given birth with their swollen breasts; as were the men dressed like soldiers; as were the women warriors, because amongst these Indians – my people, my nation – the tasks are divided according to the simple criteria of ability, desire, and need.

We also presented them with the barrel of caña and what was left of the wine and the black cockerels that had grown during the last storm. Kauka loved them and I imagined her feathered, dressed as a jet-black warrior. I’d seen her flex her bow next to a fire to warm the string, she was strong and black and flecked with light like the most luminous night. Once the kutral got going, the other foreigners also joined us. There were captive Englishwomen who walked around freely and came over to hear the news from Liz: the Queen’s state of health, God save Her, how the railways were coming along, the power of the new machines, the slavery in the coal mines, the joy of the jewel-green fields of England, the force of the sea that alternated between lapping and lashing dear old Blighty. And they talked about this new life, they told Liz about freedom; she already knew a bit about that but she would find out a whole lot more and never want to go back to stiff upper lips, crossed legs nor even to England’s green and pleasant land. There were also German scientists who went around collecting phosphorescent bones, as if

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