The Adventures of China Iron. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

it clearly has a top, where the stalk connects it to the tree, and a bottom. And which tree does the earth hang from? It doesn’t. So the orange didn’t help me much either. Anyhow, I began thinking that on the top half of the planet, not just in England, things grew upwards more easily. Apparently there were hills and mountains and it was full of tall trees as high as several men on top of each other. How many men? The highest trees would be ten or fifteen men high. Do they look like ombús? A bit, but the trees there are taller than they are wide, elongated; the ombú is squat, as if gravity was stronger in the bottom half of the planet and everything was flattened or forced underground. Gravity was what made things fall down. So how come it didn’t squash us all – me, Liz, Estreya, the wagon, the oxen, mules, cows and horses?

      That night, Liz made a stew out of an armadillo that I’d caught and butchered. She cooked the poor creature in its own shell. She added ingredients that I was beginning to recognise; a mixture of onion, garlic and ginger with cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, chilli pepper, peppercorns, cumin and mustard seeds. Everything bubbled away in the shell, and when it was done, Estreya and I had our first taste of spicy food. Everything we were experiencing was new to us; ideas, sensations and even our taste buds were expanding under the British Empire.

      Dragons and My Pampa All Mixed Up Together

      While the land grew into a whole globe in front of me, another world took shape on the wagon. Me, Liz and Estreya were a trinity, within a rectangle starting from the oxen, one line along the roof, another at the trunk to the rear of the wagon and one running along the ground.

      ‘Only here in the pampa could a wagon create a bird’s-eye view’, observed Liz and so I found out what perspective was and noted that indeed, the few animals that stand out on the plains – hares, cuys and armadillos, the flamingos in the lagoons, herons, the occasional puma if we managed to see one – are always alert and quick but they take fright at just about everything. Anyway, the fauna of the flat pampas seemed to be stuck to the ground. The animals didn’t stretch up like giraffes, those amiable-looking, long-necked animals that eat from the tops of trees; nor did they extend themselves like gigantic elephants, using their trunks like hands. From up high or from down low the world looked different; it also looked different from behind a turning wagon wheel or from the highest branches of an ombú. In those days of discovery I tried looking from lots of different angles: I walked on all fours seeing what Estreya saw, the pasture, the creepy crawlies that went about on the surface of the earth, cows’ udders, Liz’s hands, her face, food on plates, and everything that moved. I leant my head on the heads of the oxen and I put my hands next to my eyes and I saw what they saw, only what was right in front of them, the cattle track and the uncertain horizon they strove to reach. I also stood on my hands, seeing first feet and knees and wheels and hooves and then what was above them. And I began to see other perspectives: the Queen of England – a rich, powerful woman who owned millions of people’s lives, but who was sick and tired of jewels and of meals in palaces built where she was monarch of all she surveyed – didn’t see the world in the same way as, for example, a gaucho in his hovel with his leather hides who burns dung to keep warm. For the Queen, the world was a sphere filled with riches belonging to her, and that she could order to be extracted from anywhere; for the gaucho, the world was a flat surface where you galloped about rounding up cows, cutting the throats of your enemies before they cut your own throat, or fleeing conscription and battles. I took over the cooking some nights so that Liz could draw all the things I couldn’t quite imagine from her descriptions: I had my special loves. I loved the tiger, like a giant orange stripy puma, I loved the hippopotamus, an animal with an enormous mouth and the square teeth of a child, a kind of wagon with hard skin and four fat short legs, a creature that likes to live inside rivers, and I loved zebras, those African horses with stripes. But the dragon aroused such passion in me, that beautiful beast made from horrible beasts: the eyes of a locust, the horns of a zebu, the snout of an ox, the nose of a dog, the whiskers of a catfish, the shaggy mane of a ñandú, the tail of a viper, the scales of a fish, the claws of a gigantic chimango, and with potent phlegm made of fire. The dragon was an animal that I liked to imagine flying above our heads and over our roof like a guardian angel: why shouldn’t a wagon be a house protected by a dragon? Liz liked to captivate me, she needed my awe-struck gaze, my laughter, the joy that her tales and her exquisite drawings, so beautifully precise, gave me. This I understood when I saw myself drawn by her, looking just like what I saw every morning in the looking glass, but made of lines, without colour. She told me the story of the dragon one night, while I was grilling some tararira fish I had just caught. About how the first four dragons had been born in the China Sea, and how they played around flying and swimming and breathing fire all the time; about how one day they felt sorry that men were going hungry, and about how they flew to see the Emperor of the Sky who was listening to a fairy orchestra in his jade palace. About how he turned to them, furious at having been interrupted, and although he promised rain, the rain never came; about how the four dragons then decided to take water to spit on the earth, about how the emperor got angry, about how he buried them under rocks as enormous as everything we could see as far as the horizon; about how the dragons cried and cried until they turned to water and formed the four rivers of China that were called the Long River, the Yellow River, the Black River and the Pearl River, because those were the dragon’s names.

      I slept like a baby once Liz had explained to me what jade, fairies and an emperor were, and what the fire was that came out of the insides of those good animals who were turned to water. I put the shotgun away, dragons and my pampa all mixed up together, all the while asking myself if it was thanks to the dragons that the whole earth shone when the river burst its banks.

      At the Mercy of the Caranchos

      It only took a few days of wagon, dust and stories for us to become a family. Entwined in our burgeoning love we laughed at old fears of being abandoned, of being defeated, of falling to the ground without the strength to get up, stuck to the ground and left at the mercy of the caranchos, of being reduced to what we are: a structure of bones and minerals, like stones. Weaving ourselves as one, we were slow to notice that the near nothingness we were crossing was starting to look like an abandoned burial ground; we ploughed on blithely, as if we were travelling through paradise, though maybe I’m wrong, maybe paradise isn’t a place to travel through, it’s simply a place to be. Where would one want to go from here?

      Days of going more or less in a straight line had passed without us seeing a single cow, Indian, white man, or horse. Weeks of flat days as if there was nothing in the world but weeds, one or two little mules, and the caranchos. Occasionally at night a hare would be dazzled by the light from our campfire and Estreya would give chase and sometimes catch it. That and the earth pearled with bones when the wind or rain came. The dust was merciful, covering everything including the skeletons lying by the wayside; little by little it covered them leaving faint relief carvings, imperceptible burial mounds, little more than oversized ant hills, but also teeming with life, the life of worms born in dead flesh.

      Until the rain came again and once more we’d see a cemetery of Indian braves at our feet: we could make them out because they were one with their weapons and animals, as if the heroic skeletons of the pampas were centaur fossils, said Liz. I didn’t know what a centaur was and I definitely didn’t know that Indians could be brave. I think it was with that story and that discussion that we reached the third week of our journey. We rested, we washed again, this time in an almost crystalline river with just a pair of herons for company. Nor did I know what a desert was, even though I realised that so much emptiness couldn’t have been the natural state of this pampa. I didn’t know that a desert was exactly that, a territory with no population, no trees, no birds, without almost any sign of life in the day except for us. I thought desert was the name of the place where nobody lived but Indians. Either way, the desert was getting more and more frightening; we started having nightmares, sometimes even in the daytime. I began writing in order to fend off these nightmares. Liz would teach me my letters and tell me what prayer to say at bedtime. I still know some. ‘Dear Lord, please send us un amigo. And save us from the quagholes’.

      And if trust in our prayers wasn’t enough to send us off to sleep, Liz and I would drink a whisky, that elixir of life in Britain, water from Scotland’s water and above all, she explained to me, earth from Scotland’s earth, which turned barley into this nectar. They