The Dead Man

Horacio Quiroga

The Dead Man

Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

With his machete the man had just finished clearing the fifth lane of the banana grove. Two lanes remained, but, since only chirca trees and jungle mallow were flourishing there, the task still before him was relatively minor. Consequently the man cast a satisfied glance at the brush he had cleared out and started to cross the wire fence so he could stretch out for a while in the grama grass. But as he lowered the barbed wire to cross through, his foot slipped on a strip of bark hanging loose from the fence post, and in the same instant he dropped his machete. As he was falling, the man had a dim, distant impression that his machete was not lying flat on the ground.

Now he was stretched out on the grass, resting on his right side just the way he liked. His mouth, which had flown open, had closed again. He was as he had wanted to be, his knees doubled and his left hand over his breast. Except that behind his forearm, immediately below his belt, the handle and half the blade of his machete protruded from his shirt: the remainder was not visible. The man tried to move his head—in vain. He peered out of the corner of his eye at the machete, still damp from the sweat of his hand. He had a mental picture of the extension and the trajectory of the machete in his belly, and coldlv, mathematically, and inexorably he knew with certaintv that he had reached the end of his existence.

Death. One often thinks in the course of his life that one day, after years, months, weeks, and days of preparation, he will arrive in his turn upon the threshold of death. It is mortal law. accepted and foreseen: so much so that we are in the habit of allowing ourselves to be agreeably transported by our imaginations to that moment, supreme among all moments, in which we breathe our last breath.

But between the present and that dying breath, what dreams, what reverses, what hopes and dramas we imagine for ourselves in our lives! A vigorous existence holds so much in store for us before our elimination from the human scene! Is this our consolation, the pleasure and the reason of our musings on death? Death is so distant, and so unpredictable is that life we still must live. Still...? Still not two seconds passed: the sun is at exactly the same altitude; the shadows have not advanced one millimeter.

Abruptly, the long-term digressions have just been resolved for the man lying there; he is dying.

Dead. One might consider him dead in his comfortable position. But the man opens his eyes and looks around. How much time has passed? What cataclysm has overtaken the world? What disturbance of nature does this horrible event connote?

He is going to die. Coldly, fatally, and unavoidably, he is going to die.

The man resists—such an unforeseen horror! And he thinks: it's a nightmare; that's what it is! What has changed? Nothing. And he looks: isn't that banana grove his banana grove? Doesn't he come every morning to clear it out? Who knows it as well as he? He sees the grove so perfectly, thinned out, the broad leaves bared to the sun. There are the leaves, so near, frayed by the wind. But now they are not moving. ... It is the calm of midday; soon it will be twelve o'clock.

Through the banana trees, high up, the man on the hard ground sees the red roof of his house. To the left, a glimpse of the scrub trees and the wild cinnamon. That's all he can see, but he knows very well that behind his back is the road to the new port and that in the direction of his head, down below, the Parana, wide as a lake, lies sleeping in the valley. Everything, everything, exactly as always: the burning sun, the vibrant air, the loneliness, the motion#less banana trees, the wire fence with the tall, very thick posts that soon will have to be replaced... Dead! But is it possible? Isn't this one of many days on which he has left his house at dawn with his machete in his hand? And isn't his horse, his mare with the star on her forehead, right there just four meters away, gingerly nosing the barbed wire?

But yes! Someone is whistling... He can't see because his back is to the road, but he feels the vibration of the horse's hooves on the little bridge... It is the boy who goes by toward the new port every morning at 11:30. And always whistling From the bark#stripped post he can almost touch with his boot the live-thicket fence that separates the grove from the road; it is fifteen meters. He knows it perfectly well, because he himself had measured the distance when he put up the fence.

So what is happening, then? Is this or isn't it an ordinary midday like so many others in Misiones, in his bushland, on his pasture, in his cleared-out banana grove? No doubt! Short grass, and hills, silence, leaden sun... Nothing, nothing has changed. Only he is different. For two min#utes now his person, his living personality, has had no connection with the cleared land he himself spaded up during five consecutive months, nor with the grove, work of his hands alone. Nor with his family. He has been uprooted, brusquely, naturally, because of a slippery piece of bark and a machete in the belly. Two minutes: he is dying.

The man, very weary, lying on his right side in the grama grass, still resists admitting a phenomenon of such transcendency in the face of the normal, and monotonous, aspects of the boy who has just crossed the bridge as he does every day.

But it isn't possible that he could have slipped! The handle of his machete (it's worn down now; soon it will have to be changed for another) was grasped just right between his left hand and the barbed wire. After ten years in the woods, he knows very well how you manage a bush machete. He is only very weary from the morn#ing's work and is resting a little as usual.

The proof? But he himself planted this grama grass that is pok#ing between his lips in squares of land a meter apart! And that is his banana grove and that his starred mare snorting cautiouslv by the barbed wire! The horse sees him perfectlv: he knows she doesn’t dare come around the corner of the fence since he himself is lying almost at the foot of the post. The man distinguishes her very well, and he sees the dark threads of sweat on her crupper and withers. The sun is as heavy as lead, and the calm is great; not a fringe of the banana trees is moving. Every day he has seen the same things... Very weary, but he's just resting. Several minutes must have passed now... And at a quarter to twelve, from up there, from his house with the red roof, his wife and two children will set out for the grove to look for him for lunch. He always hears, before anything else, the voice of his smaller son who tries to break away from his mother's hand: "Pah-pah! Pah-pah!"

Isn't that it…? Of course, he hears it now! It's time. That's just what he hears, the voice of his son... What a nightmare! But, of course, it's just one of many days, ordinary as any other! Excessive light, yellowish shadows, oven-still heat that raises sweat on the motionless horse next to the forbidden banana grove.

...Very, very tired, but that's all. How many times, at midday like this, on his way to the house, has he crossed this clearing that was a thicket when he came, and virgin bush before that? He was always tired, slowly returning home with his machete dangling from his left hand.

But still he can move away in his mind if he wants; he can, if he wants, abandon his body for an instant and look at the ordinary everyday landscape from the flood ditch he himself built—the stiff grama grass in the field of volcanic rock, the banana grove and its red sand, the wire fence fading out of sight in the distance as it slopes downward toward the road. And, farther still, the cleared land, the work of his own hands. And at the foot of a bark-stripped post, thrown on his right side, his legs drawn up, exactly like any other day, he can see himself, a sunny little heap on the grama grass—resting, because he is very tired. But the horse, striped with sweat, cautiously motionless at a cor- ner of the fence, also sees the man on the ground and doesn't dare enter the banana grove, as she would like to. With the voices nearby now—"Pah-pah!"—for a long, long while, the mare turns her motionless ears toward the heap on the ground and finally, quieted, decides to pass between the post and the fallen man—who has rested now.