Sevastopol by Emilio Fraia

Author:Emilio Fraia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811230926
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2021-06-01T00:00:01+00:00

Adán breathed heavily. There was ecstasy in his voice. He told this story and paused. He took another drink from the bottle. He began to babble on about something and grin and suddenly he slapped his forehead, saying he’d remembered something else. He had seen a pig on the property that morning. Lying in the middle of the dirt road. It looked like an ox. It was pink, extraordinary. There was a chunk missing from one of its ears. Must have lost it on a barbed wire fence. It just laid there staring at me, you should’ve seen it. Then it got up and disappeared behind the bushes.

When he shared this, in spite of all those heartwarming stories of man and animal coming together, tales of great friendship, Adán said he wanted to eat the pig. He smiled. You keep hogs here, don’t you? He took another swig. His hands were shaking, clutching the bottle. On the farm, there were half a dozen chickens, one scrawny horse, ducks, a skeletal parrot, which Nilo never got rid of, even though he knew it was wasting away and on the verge of disintegrating into a heap on top of an old wardrobe — but no pigs.

Nilo said he could have pork brought in from town. But Adán wasn’t talking about just any pig, he was talking about that particular pig. He smiled. The tennis court was on the upper part of the property. From the concrete bench, you had more or less an overview of the surroundings. There was a winding road, a gentle sloping hill. Behind that, the river, Mr. Hermes’s farm, the mountains of eucalyptus trees that looked out of place because they were so tall.

Nilo said he would ask his employee, Walter, to see about it. The pig must be from someone’s livestock. From Hermes’s farm, odds are. Hermes’s farm is big. A few years ago, his children came in and modernized everything. They started to keep bees, invested in fruit trees, coffee, vegetables. All to supply a chain of stores. They created a chain of stores. Organic produce. Sustainable agriculture. But they didn’t once consider giving up the eucalyptus trees. That’s where the money was. The old man deals in eucalyptus trees. Has for many years. Little by little the mountains were covered with eucalyptus. If he’d planted eucalyptus, Nilo would have been rich. Nothing he tried to grow really worked out. People said that when Nilo bought the place, he had a wife and a baby daughter. They said he was interested in things like meditation, magic, alternative healing. He wanted to create a community, that’s what they said. But then he got it in his head that he could have an inn. He invested what he had, built the little cabins. Then time passed. A long time, nobody even knew how long anymore. It was already like that when Walter arrived. Everything seemed to have happened in another lifetime. Walter often says that it’s a region made for eucalyptus trees.

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