The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

101 El Coco 1949

What kind of an existence was this? To be unable to hear, see, or express anything? Maybe they were right to call him the Crocodile, more beast than man? He always sat in the same place, under a tall chest of drawers on top of which a clock ticked loudly, beside a robust but lopsided bridge table. An intricate jigsaw puzzle lay on top of the green flannel. While his hands were working, he fixed his reptilian gaze on a small window on the southern wall beside the door that creaked every time I entered. This gave me an excellent preview of my future life in the garage. I played the part of Lóa, let him know I was there by touching his right shoulder. He greeted me with a sound that travelled from the depths of his throat and seemed to be full of prolonged suffering, like the groan of an unknown creature trapped in a dungeon so deep that no one could see it. But as time passed I learned to discern joy and even a smile in those guttural sounds.

He was generally dressed in a tan shirt and brown trousers that were fastened high above the waist. I was told he dressed himself and took care of his own bodily functions, since despite being in a wheelchair he had full use of his legs. The worn-out linoleum bore witness to all of this heavy man’s leg movements from the bed to the toilet and from there to the jigsaw puzzle: a four-square-yard patch that was lighter than the rest of the linoleum – the kingdom of darkness and silence.

He never went out.

His father had made the wheelchair after the fortune-teller in the village had forecast that the deaf-mute would be paralysed at the age of thirty-three. It was the most loving piece of craftsmanship I’d ever seen; even the spokes of the wheels were made of wood. I later realised that El Coco never dressed himself but instead slept in his clothes in sheets that hadn’t been washed since before the war. I soon started washing them, doing my best to ensure that no one saw me hanging up the Crocodile’s sheets. It then took me a week to get him to change clothes and an equal amount of time for him to thank me. Even though his nostrils were clogged with hair, he could smell the odour of fresh laundry every time I passed him with clean bedclothes and underwear, and grunted with an ugly smile. I later allowed him to place his hand on my cheek in gratitude. His palms and fingertips were surprisingly soft, considering the roughness of the rest of his hands, and his fingers were surprisingly refined. He gently stroked me and smiled. I saw him in a new light. And put a pair of sunglasses that my father had bought in Baires on him. The human mountain sighed with pleasure, and his lizard eyes could now no longer intimidate me.

I started spending more time with him, even helping him with the jigsaw puzzle. It felt oddly cosy to sit with this massive beast, decoding the gasps he exhaled. And bit by bit a longing to bring cheer to this man grew in me. I managed to smuggle in some cups of maté to him, the Argentine tea, which the poor man had been denied for decades. Then I picked flowers from his mother’s garden and placed them under his big nose. He responded with a palm dance. I also brought him honey, which he acknowledged by drawing a swarm of bees in the air. I took this as encouragement and found further things for him to smell: an open tomato, a rat’s tail, fresh chilli… and each time, using his homegrown finger language (which gradually acquired as many nuances as the colours of a butterfly’s wings), he could tell me which object belonged to what smell.

Finally, I came with a lump of lukewarm bull dung and placed it under his nose: then he sneezed and laughed for the first time. The laughter spurted out of him like a jewel that had been buried in the earth for decades. Coco wasn’t the simpleton eating machine everyone imagined. He had the sense of smell of a hunting dog. That great nose that he had inherited from his father was his only funnel into the world; all his senses were poured into that. The deaf-mute could even smell my moods and was now starting to draw them every day: tired, happy, sullen, in love, hung over, homesick, or worried about Dad. I was starting to avoid his nose in an unconscious attempt to guard myself, as if it were a sophisticated X-ray machine.

And I could rely on his razor-sharp sensitivity for just about anything. A local boy had stolen a rose for me from Dolmita’s garden and walked down to the river with me. The sun was setting and our long shadows shimmered on the surface of the water, almost reaching the opposite bank, though not in unison. In exchange I snatched his handkerchief from him, which I now placed under the nostrils of the clairvoyant’s nose. He sniffed the material and passed his verdict with a simple gesture of the hand: the boy was too stupid for me. I, of course, saw that for myself on our next date and couldn’t bear the sight of him after that. Diego was his name, and he had a head like an Easter egg: terribly sweet and brown but totally vacuous inside.

My respect for that unfortunate man in the shed grew from day to day. Conversely the low opinion I had of the Bennis sank even further. They behaved like a stupid mob in a simplistic fairy tale, underestimating the true treasure of the family by exiling him to a ramshackle hut where there was no heating on those cold winter nights that the South Pole blew in.

His original name was Johan Hector, born in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 1883. His mother descended from a famous line of goldsmiths, Lupesca, if I remember right, and his father was an Italo-German brewer’s son, Gustavo Benni. In 1900 the family had immigrated to South America in search of gold and green forests. After three years of roaming down the coasts of the Atlantic, they ended up in a silverless Silver Land and got into cattle breeding. Life was no better or worse than it had been back home by the Alpine lake, just different. The main difference was that now all their dreams had been erased from their lives, like the mountains. The future was no longer an uncertainty that glowed behind the next hill; it simply loitered in the courtyard like a black dog. It wasn’t there, but here, not a dream but a fact. That’s what life is like on the steppe. On the Pampas, every man stands alone, up to his neck in his own life without any escape from himself, not even with his eyes – he sees nothing but his own shadow.

Johan Hector Benni, who later became Juan Héctor Benítez, was born blind and slightly deaf but then lost all his hearing at the age of five when he slipped out of his brother’s view and wandered to the mouth of a tunnel, where he got a train in his face. It was back in the pioneering days of rail transport in Switzerland. ‘It passed so close to him that it left a streak of blood on his little forehead.’ Since then he had lived in darkness and silence but learned to see with his nose, listen with his palms, and talk with his fingers.

I handed him a letter from my mother. He carefully felt the envelope and lifted it to his nose, sniffed the stamp, smiled, and gesticulated that Iceland was ‘like a brass band.’ Then he pulled the letter out of the envelope and read it with his nose like a myopic mole. He said that Mum missed me terribly but was fine otherwise. So it wasn’t a lie, what she’d written on the sheet that I had hidden from my father.