Collected Fictions

Martín Fierro

Out of this city marched armies that seemed grand, and that in later days were grand, thanks to the magnifying effects of glory. After many years, one of the soldiers returned, and in a foreign accent told stories of what had happened to him in places called Ituzaingóor Ayacucho.* These things are now as though they had never been.

There have been two tyrannies in this land. During the first, a wagon pulled out of La Plata market; as the wagon passed through the streets, some men on the driver's seat cried out their wares, hawking white and yellow peaches; a young boy lifted the corner of the canvas that covered them and saw the heads of Unitarians, their beards bloody.* The second meant, for many, prison and death; for all, it meant discomfort, endless humiliation, a taste of shamefulness in the actions of every day. These things are now as though they had never been.

A man who knew all the words looked with painstaking love at the plants and birds of this land and defined them, perhaps forever, and in metaphors of metal wrote the vast chronicle of its tumultuous sunsets and the shapes of its moon.* These things are now as though they had never been.

Also in this land have generations known those common yet somehow eternal vicissitudes that are the stuff of art. These things are now as though they had never been, but in a hotel room in eighteen-hundred sixty-something a man dreamed of a knife fight. A gaucho lifts a black man oft" the ground with the thrust of his knife, drops him like a bag of bones, watches him writhe in pain and die, squats down to wipe off his knife, unties his horse's bridle and swings up into the saddle slowly, so no one will think he's running away from what he's done. This thing that was once, returns again, infinitely; the visible armies have gone and what is left is a common sort of knife fight; one man's dream is part of all men's memory.