20: "To the country: Part 2"

Sole and I slept in til noon on Saturday. We were going to the country, to a farm outside Maciá that her uncle José takes care of.

It was hot and windy and humid. We left her grandma’s house and walked down the main street. We stopped at a kiosk to see if they had El Uno, one of Paraná’s daily newspapers. An article of mine was going to be in it. I had been writing what I called portraits of contemporary U.S. culture. This week’s was going to be on David Foster Wallace.

We didn’t see an Uno. We asked the lady and she said it doesn’t come to Maciá.

We passed an office building, the only one on the street. It had black tinted windows and was surrounded by a tall dark fence. There were delivery trucks in the parking lot.

This was the headquarters of Huevo Campo (“Country Egg”), which is one of biggest egg distributors in MercoSur. The Roths are the family that own the company. They’re the richest people in Maciá and their son went to Harvard. They own a school, and an evangelical church, too.

On the website of Huevo Campo it says "producido por familias que creen en el Poder y Amor de Dios" (made by families that believe in the power and love of God).

We got to the edge of town after walking a few more blocks. We passed some speed bumps. A warning sign called them donkey humps (lomo de burro).

We walked under a tree, to wait in the shade and try to hitch a ride to the farm. Sole’s aunt, Dioni, and José were cooking an asado for us, with chicken and sábalo, a big river fish. The food was almost done and we should’ve been there already.

A couple of cars and trucks came by on the gravel road. Sole stood up and put out her thumb but they just looked at us and pointed down the road and kept going.

They were going to work at a recycling plant, she said. The plant was a quarter mile down the highway. You could see it from where we sat.

I took some pictures and Sole and I drank from a bottle of Sprite she’d bought. We drank with a straw. That’s usually how they drink from plastic bottles in Argentina.

She called her aunt and they came and picked us up in her uncle’s new used car.

We got in. They told us we should’ve gotten up earlier, that no one’d be headed out this way so late in the day.

We drove along the highway. A guy on a horse was coming in the other direction. He was wearing baggy brown pants and a white shirt and a flat brimmed hat. He had a knife hanging from his belt.

I asked if that was a gaucho. I said it was the first real one I’d seen.

That’s José’s son, Sole told me. José’s a gaucho, too, she said. José was wearing an aqua blue polo and khaki slacks and moccasins and glasses.

We got to the farm. We pulled up to the house and got out and a pack of dogs came up and barked at us.

In the yard of the house was a cage with a couple of parakeets. They were squawking and screeching when we got close. Dioni said they do that with strangers. She came over and talked to them and they quieted down. She got them to repeat what she’d say.

Behind the parakeet cage was a big pen with ducks and roosters and chickens.

Sole went inside and got a plastic pitcher and we went to a big mulberry tree in the front yard to pick berries.

She stood on a plastic chair and I held the pitcher. The ripe ones fell from a touch. The juice stained our fingers and hands.

The food was ready and we went inside and sat down to eat.

The sábalo had a lot of bones and you had to feel the meat in the front of your mouth, with your tongue and your teeth, carefully, so you didn’t swallow any.

There was a tomato and onion salad, squash, and homemade bread. We drank a knock-off lemon lime soda.

Dioni served fruit salad for dessert.

After lunch Sole and I left the farm and walked on a path through the monte, to a creek.

There were cows grazing in the forests along the way. We walked past an electric fence that wrapped around another field.

We saw the nest of a bird up in the trees. It’s made of dried mud and is called an hornillo, which means little oven. It’s got an entrance on one side, like a cave.

There were ducks in the creek. They had a blue in their feathers that glowed in the sunlight.

When we headed back the cows stopped and turned and stared at us. We stopped, then walked ahead, slowly. The cows relaxed and some turned away and some kept looking, but none of them moved.

We got back to the farm in the late afternoon.

We sat down at a picnic table under a portico, in the backyard, to eat some more fruit salad.

José took a sheep from a pen and brought it close by and strung it up by one leg from the mulberry tree.

Sole got nervous and started breathing hard and telling José no. She turned away and covered her eyes.

I kept eating the fruit salad and turned to look at what José was doing.

He cut the sheep’s neck and let the blood pour onto the ground. It was thick and steaming and splashing into the dirt and the grass and the fallen berries.

The dogs came close and waited with their tongues out.

The sheep kept kicking after the blood had drained.

José began butchering it. He cut off the hoofs and tossed them to the dogs. You could hear the crunch while they chewed them. There was blood and wool on their snouts.

I was taking pictures. I had never seen this before.

Dioni called me over. She was posing with one of the dogs. It was up on its hind legs and had a cap on its head. I took a picture then turned back to the sheep.

José stripped and pull off the wool, then split the stomach.

José was talking to Sole and I. He took out the kidney. It was bright blue and wet. It’s the kidney, he said, just like you have. He tossed it into the grass and a dog went for it.

He pulled out the rest of the organs in one big bundle – the stomach and intestines and all that – and threw them onto the lawn.

The dogs ran for them and chewed and ripped them apart.

A black cat came by and tried to nibble at the organs but a collie growled and it backed away and had to watch.

Each dog took different parts. The collie took the stomach. It split it open and green mush oozed out and didn’t smell good. It was partially-digested grass, José said.

A tiny black lab was eating the small intestine. The stuff inside was splattered on its paws. It pulled at them like spaghetti.

The dogs looked happy and focused.

José was wearing the same clothes as earlier. There were big dark stains on his pants now.

Dioni took me and Sole into the barn, past big tractors, past sacks of feed and fertilizer. We went into one part that was dark and stuffy. There was a cardboard box on the ground. It had a half-dozen puppies in it. They were feeding on its mom.

We shined a flashlight inside and the mom – a tiny, short-haired dog – looked up at us. Sole took one of the puppies out of the box. It fit in her hand. She put it back and we left.

We walked into the chicken coop and Dioni and Sole collected the eggs. José came by and threw seed to the birds and they all came by and started pecking and fighting.

The day was getting late and we were going to head back into town. José had butchered the sheep for somebody and had to drop off the meat.

Dioni took the parakeets out and put them into a tiny cage to bring them with. They´ll bite everyone but her, she said.

We got into the car and drove down the road to the gate. I got out and opened it up. José drove ahead but then Sole shouted that I’d left my door open. They stopped and shut the door, then I closed and locked the gate.

Well, I did something on the farm, Sole said.

We got into town and walked to Sole’s mom’s house. She made empanadas for us. Sole didn’t like them much and got out the leftover perdix from the night before.

We went back to Toni’s for ice cream afterwards. Toni served us again.

We went home and changed and then went to one of the two social clubs in town and had a couple drinks with some of Sole’s old high school friends.

* * *
Sunday we slept in again then got up and walked to Dioni’s house for lunch. José made tallerines, which are a pasta like spaghetti, from scratch.

We got there late and they and Jose’s son - the gaucho - had already finished eating. They served us plates and we sat and ate while they had seconds.

José´s son didn´t speak much. Sole said he´s studying biology in Paraná and hitchhikes back and forth from Maciá every week. He works on the farm on the weekends. His hands were so big the fingers looked swollen.

We finished and left and stopped by to see Sole’s friend Diana. She was working at an ice cream parlor. Along the way we passed a nice two-story house that had the same black fence around it as the Huevo Campo office. Sole said it was one of the Roth homes.

We got to the ice cream parlor. It was connected to the house of an old couple, who own the store and make the ice cream there.

When we went up to the counter I could see through into the living room. The curtains were drawn and an old man was sleeping in a recliner.

We got two-scoop cones and played a card game. Nobody came in. I did a magic trick that I’d learned when I was in middle school by taping and studying a David Blaine TV special. He’d done it for villagers in the Amazon.

Diana’s shift ended and we walked together to go see another old high school friend. She was with her baby – a boy who was about a year old. We drank tereré, which is mate served cold with fruit juice.

The sky was getting dark and we headed back to Sole’s grandparents’ house to pack our bags. We had to buy bus tickets to go back to Paraná. Since it was Sunday we had to wait for the station attendant to show up at 7:00 PM. The bus was coming at 7:40 and we had to meet it at a highway junction 10 miles outside Maciá.

José and Dioni came by to say goodbye and take the key to the house. One of the dogs came with them in the car.

Another dog came up and got into a fight with José’s and he threw a rock and it ran off.

Sole and I said bye and left and got to the bus station. Her brother Pepe was going to give us a ride to the junction. He had to get up at 3:00 AM the next day to do his mail route.

The bus station attendant wasn’t there at 7:00. We waited as the sun set and the sky looked stormy towards where we were headed.

The guy finally showed up. He was bald and sweating. He got the computer turned on and we asked for the tickets. He said there were three seats left. We bought the tickets as Pepe showed up in his station wagon.

I rode shotgun and Sole sat in back. When we got up to speed he asked me if I wanted to put on my seatbelt. Argentine’s don’t wear seatbelts.

We got onto the highway. It was a two-lane road. There was no shoulder, just a strip of grass and then fields. It was windy and Pepe went into the grass a couple times. There was lightning up ahead and it smelled like rain.

We got to the exchange. A couple other cars and a couple other people were there, waiting for the same bus.

We got out and it was breezy and cool and you could see the storm close-by but it never started raining. I took a few more pictures while Sole talked to her brother.

The bus showed up and we got on. Our seats were in the way back. We drove into the storm and the rain and lightning.

We got back to Paraná around 10:30.