The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

106 Night Coach to Baires 1950

Two weeks later we had to flee La Quinta de Crío. My father and I sat on a dusty coach for the capital, with a sleeping face wrapped in a cloth. The sun bathed the cornfields against the eastern sky, highlighting the dust particles that slowly danced in our eyes and seemed to have no idea of the sixty-mile-per-hour speed the Greyhound was travelling at. I was bewitched by those small particles that hovered in mid-air. Against the dark red material of the seats, they looked like minuscule suns, stars in a distant nebula, major events in an immense universe that was nevertheless compact enough to fit into the night coach to Buenos Aires.

‘But how could you… with… with him?’ was the only thing that was said on the journey.

A Slavonic woman wrapped in a shawl a few rows down turned to stare at us. We obviously looked like an unfortunate couple with our newborn child. A thin-haired man in his forties with prominent temples and his twenty-year-old wife, with slightly puffed-up cheeks and breasts that were swollen for the only time in her life. In a way that suspicion was correct. We had become some kind of damned couple. And now I had pushed out of me half a farm for the pair of us.

We spent a night in a seedy guesthouse by the train station. The blessed child slept under her mother’s watchful wing as the new Grandad lay sleeplessly counting the cucarachas crawling across the floor and walls. He was in just as much shock that night as the family on the farm that morning when they had heard the news of the girl’s paternity. I who had done my utmost to save and resurrect his life was now being condemned for all my efforts. The fortune-teller had pointed out the obvious: even though the child was a beautiful little blond, in some bizarre way she bore a strong resemblance to El Coco. Initially I denied it, but after some brief torture in his shed, the fat man had confessed to the conception in front of the Bennis, who went berserk on the farm. ‘La puta mierda!

I managed to hide the baby in a ditch until the storm blew over. Otherwise they would have drowned her in a milk bucket. They gave me about ten slaps each and then threw me into the dung channel in the cowshed. I bit the bullshit and cursed in silence. My father had been sent off to the market with some slaughtered bulls and didn’t come back until the afternoon. An hour later we had left La Quinta de Crío, but the heir was alive in my arms and that was all that mattered. In her name we would return and demand what was rightly hers.

But what would happen to Héctor now? Had I now signed his death warrant, as I’d done for my Hartmut Herzfeld, Aaron Hitler and Fräulein Osinga? What kind of a curse was I anyway? Spreading demons and death wherever I went. And hadn’t the Sorbian family been massacred because of me as well? A housewife, a cripple and a farmer.

There was a trail of seven bodies behind me.

How the hell had I turned into this? There were no murderers in my family on either side. God had obviously cast me in the role of the jinx.