The Adventures of China Iron. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

a fire going and cooking some meat without singeing or spoiling my nice dress, which I managed. That night I slept inside the wagon, which was much more of a home than my old shack. The wagon had whisky, a wardrobe, hocks of ham, biscuits, a shelf of books, bacon, oil lamps… Liz taught me the name of each thing. And best of all, at least by the standards of a young woman on her own, two shotguns and three full boxes of gun cartridges.

      I hugged Estreya tight as he curled up with Liz, plunging myself into their newly-washed, floral smell. I wrapped myself in those lavender-scented sheets, only later figuring out that the smell wasn’t a quality of the cloth the way the texture was, that smoothness which enveloped me that night and all the nights of what would be – broadly speaking and dividing things rather dramatically – the rest of my life. Among those perfumed sheets I felt Liz’s breath, smooth and spiced, and I just wanted to stay there, immerse myself in her breath, though I didn’t quite know how. I slept, peaceful and happy, snug amongst perfumes, bedclothes, dog hair, red hair and the shotgun.

      Everything Covered Me like a Second Skin

      Dear old Estreya, sparky and with a blue sheen to his black fur, was no longer new to the world and was learning nearly as much as me. We were growing up together: when we left, he only came up to my knee, and me, up to Liz’s shoulder. When we arrived, and we didn’t know we were arriving, he reached my waist and I was nearly as tall as Liz. I remember him as a puppy, sitting up straight like a gentleman with his ears down, eyes intent, and nose wet, even now he’s touchingly innocent when he trusts in the results of his good manners. I lived in a similar innocence, though I was beginning to feel a new fear. While I used to be afraid that there was nothing to life but La Negra, Fierro, and our ramshackle hut, now I feared the end of our journey, of the wagon, the smell of lavender, the shape of my first letters, the porcelain, the shoes with heels and laces, and all the words in two languages. I dreaded seeing anger on Liz’s face, or glimpsing something undefined and ghostly hiding behind a sand dune – sand dunes were starting to appear – or between the roots of an ombú tree, or out there in the dark amongst the creatures whose noises broke the silence. The creatures of the pampas are nocturnal, they come out of their tunnels and caves as darkness falls. I was afraid that something would send me back to my old hut and to my life as a china.

      I had gone from the raw to the cooked: the leather of my new boots was just as much leather as the leather on Fierro’s saddle, but it wasn’t the same kind of leather. The leather of the shoes Liz gave me was burgundy, glossy and supple, and it fitted my feet like a second skin. It wasn’t just the shoes and the leather: it was the cotton sheets, my silk petticoat from China – the real China where the girls really are chinas – the jerseys and the wool: everything covered me like a second skin. Everything was smooth and warm and caressed me and every step filled me with happiness, every morning when I put on my petticoat and the dress and jersey on top, I felt that at last I was complete in the world, as if up till then I’d been naked, flayed even. Only at that point did it hit me. The pain of being left to fend for myself at the mercy of the elements, before being dressed in these fabrics. I felt a violent passion for my clothes, my dog, my friend, a love which was as much fear as happiness, fear that they’d get broken, that I’d lose them, a love which swelled up and made me laugh till I could scarcely breathe, a heart-stopping love which came out in over-protectiveness towards the dog, the woman and my clothes, a love that watched over them with a shotgun. I was as happy as I was unhappy and that was more than I’d ever felt before.

      I wore wool a lot because we set off at the beginning of spring and it was still quite cold. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet but we were heading towards Indian Territory, to the desert.

      Under the British Empire

      One rainy dawn I put on my first ever raincoat. ‘The subjects of the British Empire have appropriate etiquette for all occasions’, Liz explained, outlining their manners and mountain ranges, their climates, deserts and forests. The details of all the clothing in the Empire built the world for me, a world that was round not flat. I’d never thought about it till then, my world map hardly stretched beyond the pampas and a few vague notions: Indian Territory, Buenos Aires, a watery abyss and then Europe, with Spain at the bottom and up there the British Isles, the cradle of men and weapons. This ball-shaped world came to life through Liz’s stories, half in Spanish, half in English. She started populating it with sacred cows, soft saris, hot Indian curry, African tribesmen with painted faces, elephants with tusks the length of a small tree, huge eggs laid by ostriches, the larger cousins of our ñandús, Chinese paddy fields, curly-roofed pagodas and coolie hats pointing up to the sky. As we travelled I began to understand some of these things, but the rest I understood much later, over the course of all the time we spent together. I found it hard to reconcile myself to the idea that we were on the bottom half of a globe when we seemed to be on the top, but no, Liz was sure that Great Britain was on top. How could that be? It was quite plain that your feet were on the ground wherever you were, even in the land of pygmies, gorillas and diamonds (hard transparent stones that are wrenched from deep inside rocks). She insisted that on top was Great Britain, the land where machines moved by themselves with burning wood as though movement was a huge bonfire, or as if the pieces of burning wood were horses. Or oxen, like ours, the four strong, docile oxen who pulled the wagon which enfolded me just like the silk petticoat and the awning proofed with wax that at the end of the day was just tallow from a cow, though it had previously been filtered many times through sandalwood and smelled like a heady flower, like a laudanum flower, I mean, like a drug, just like opium must smell. Opium was like caña but much stronger than our drink, she explained to me, and so many people succumbed to it in the North African heat, where men swathe their heads in a few metres of cloth for a hat, and women are covered from head to toe. The raincoat with its eastern smells covered me. The wagon, waxed like the raincoat and smelling the same, covered us. All three of us – not just me, but Estreya, who travelled on Liz’s lap to begin with, while I took the reins, and Liz herself. It was like we were secreting fine threads to make a shell or carapace, woven together like a kind of house made not from spider’s silk, straw, mud or the leathery shell of a crab, but gradually formed from the loops of words and gestures. From Liz’s story and my care for each of our possessions, a space was emerging. One that was ours, with the wagon which went steadily forward, with that empty land which was becoming as flat as it seems to those who have known hills and mountains. The vastness of the pampas was becoming flatter to me with every new tale of bustling London’s smoky sprawl; the desert horizon widened against a backdrop of African jungles; the prickly grass, the waving grass and the scrubby bushes became squat in contrast to the forests of Europe; these rivers without banks paled against her English rivers flanked by red-brick houses, so very different to our rivers bordered by mud and with nothing around but reeds, rushes, herons and flamingos, Liz’s favourites – luckily she likes the strong colours of the pampas. She said that everything there was shades of brown against the endlessly pale and transparent blue of the sky, except when the dust rose, or when different hues of green appeared, the young wheat springing green and glorious after summer rain, only matched, we thought then, by the green and pleasant fields of England.

      You only get the other colours in the sky at dawn or dusk, or in the flamingos who are always colourful. It was raining again and light was reflected on all living things, and on the dead, just the odd cow bone at that stage. The earth was burnished copper and our protective shell was growing around us, keeping the three of us warm. We were sustained by Liz’s words, Estreya’s pink tongue, and my rapture at being there, calm as a well-fed animal in the sun.

      Calm, but slightly confused: according to Liz, the earth was a round ball, and we were at the bottom. Maybe there was something about a stone in the North that pulled everything towards it, above Great Britain, because there was something above England, above everything, Liz explained, where the planet’s hat would be if the planet was a head, a head without a neck. What, with its head chopped off? No, just a round head without a body. Just a head, did I understand? No I didn’t; I’d never seen a head without a body. No, of course not, it was just an example. An example, she explained to me, was something you said to make an idea clear. But you don’t get heads without bodies, I insisted, so what can it be an example of, if it doesn’t exist? An example of things that don’t exist, but you’re right, she said, and she went back to talking about the planet, and this time she used