The Exiles and Other Stories by Horacio Quiroga

Author:Horacio Quiroga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press Austin

A Workingman

One afternoon, in Misiones, I had just finished my midday meal when the bell rang at the front gate. I went outside and saw a young man standing there, with his hat in one hand and a suitcase in the other. The temperature was easily forty degrees centigrade, and on the curly head of my visitor it seemed more like sixty. He didn’t appear to be the least bit troubled, however. I had him come in, and the man moved ahead smiling and looking curiously at the five-meter-wide crowns of my mandarin orange trees, which are, by the way, the pride of the region—and mine.

I asked him what he wanted, and he answered that he was looking for work. Then I looked at him more carefully.

For a laborer, he was dressed absurdly. The suitcase was of tanned leather, of course, and with plenty of straps. Then his suit, of brown lambskin without a single stain. Finally, his boots; and not logger’s boots, but goods of the finest workmanship. And above all the elegant, smiling, and self-assured manner of my visitor. He was a laborer?

“For all work,” he answered happily. “I know how to swing the axe and the hoe . . . I worked before this in Foz-do-Iguaçu, and planted a field of potatoes.”

The fellow was a Brazilian, and spoke a frontier tongue, a mixture of Portuguese, Spanish, and Guaraní, and very rich in piquancy.

“Potatoes? And the sun?” I remarked. “How did you manage that?”

“Oh!” he answered shrugging his shoulders. “The sun’s no trouble . . . You be sure to turn the earth a lot with the hoe . . . And come down hard on the weeds! Weeds are the worst enemy by the potato.”

That’s how I learned how to grow potatoes in a land where the sun—besides killing vegetables by simply burning them as though pressed by a flatiron—shrivels up red ants in three seconds and coral snakes in twenty.

The man looked at me and at everything around him, visibly pleased with me and my surroundings.

“All right . . . ,” I told him. “Let’s try a few days . . . I don’t have much work right now.”

“That doesn’t matter,” he answered. “I like this house. It’s a very nice place.”

And turning toward the Paraná, which was flowing sleepily at the foot of the valley, he added with satisfaction:

“Oh, you devil of a Paraná! . . . If the boss he like to go fishing, I’ll go along with you . . . I had a great time at the Foz with the catfish.”

On that I could agree; for amusing himself the man seemed adept as few are. But the fact is that he amused me too, and I burdened my conscience with the pesos he’d eventually cost me.

As a consequence, he left his suitcase on the table on the veranda, and said to me:

“Today I don’t work . . . I’m going to look over the town. I’ll start tomorrow.”

Out of ten peones who

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