Horacio Quiroga

The man stepped on something spongy, and then at once felt the bite on his foot. He jumped forward, and turned around with a curse to see the jararacussu coiled up, awaiting another attack.

The man shot a quick glance at his foot, where two little drops of blood grew painfully larger, and he drew his machete from his belt. The snake saw the threat and buried its head in the middle of its coiled body; but the blunt edge of the machete fell upon it, dislocating its spine.

The man crouched down to the bite, brushed off the drops of blood and pondered for a moment. A sharp pain spread from the two little violet points and began to invade his whole foot. Hurriedly, he bound his ankle with his bandana and followed the trail towards his ranch.

The pain in his foot grew with a sensation of taut swelling, and suddenly the man felt two or three stabbing pains that shot like lightning from the wound halfway up his calf. He stained to move his foot, and a steely dryness in his throat, followed by a burning thirst, yielded another curse from his lips.

He finally reached his ranch, and he collapsed onto a mill wheel. The two violet dots had now vanished under the monstrous swelling of his whole foot. His skin looked thin and stretched to the point of giving way. He tried to call to his wife, and his voice broke into a hoarse groan from his parched throat that was devoured by his thirst.

“Dorotea!” he managed to cry in a death rattle. “Bring me some rum!”

His wife came running with a full glass, which the man knocked back in three gulps. But he didn’t taste a thing.

“I asked for rum, not water,” he growled again.  “Bring me some rum!”

“But that is rum, Paulino,” his wife protested in fright.

“No, you gave me water!  I want rum, I tell you!”

The woman ran off again and came back with the demijohn. The man drank one glass after another, but he felt nothing in his throat.

“Well, this is getting ugly,” he muttered as he looked at his foot, which now looked livid and gangrenous. The flesh was bursting all over the tight knot of the bandana like a monstrous blood sausage.

The shooting pains continued to strike like lightning, and now reached his groin. The terrible dryness in his throat, which his breathing seemed to make hotter, grew worse all the while. When he attempted to sit up, a sudden urge to vomit held him for half a minute with his forehead leaning against the wooden wheel.

But the man did not want to die, and going down to the shore he got into his canoe. He sat in the back and began to paddle towards the middle of the Paraná. There, the current of the river, which flows at six miles an hour in the vicinity of Iguazu Falls, would take him within five hours to Tacurú-Pucú.

With cheerless energy the man managed to reach the middle of the river; but there his numb hands dropped the paddle into the canoe, and after another vomiting fit, this time of blood, he turned his gaze to the sun, which was now setting behind the hills.

His whole leg, up to the middle of the thigh, was now a deformed, rock-hard block bursting out of his clothing. The man cut the splint and cut open his trousers with his knife; his lower belly was swelling up with large, livid blotches and excruciating pain. The man thought that he would never be able to reach Tacurú-Pucú on his own, and he decided to ask his old friend Alves for help, although they had fallen out a long time ago.

The current of the river now rushed toward the Brazilian side, and the man reached the shore easily. He staggered up the trail, but about twenty metres up the hill, he collapsed, exhausted, face down on the ground.

“Alves!” he cried with all the force as he had; he listened in vain for a reply.

“Compadre Alves! Don’t deny me this favor,” he called out again, raising his head off the ground. In the silence of the jungle not a single whisper was heard. The man still had the courage to return to his canoe, and the current, picking it up again, sent it quickly drifting away.

That stretch of the Paraná flows through the bottom of an immense canyon whose walls, a hundred metres high, entomb the river. From the river banks, bordered with black towers of basalt, rises the equally black forest. Ahead, on either side, behind, the endless mournful rock walls, at the bottom of which the rushing river flows in incessant bubbles of muddy water. The landscape is fierce, and a deathly silence reigns over it. At dusk, however, its calm and gloomy beauty exudes a singular majesty.

The sun had just set when the man, half-stretched out on the floor of the canoe, felt a violent shiver. And suddenly, astonishingly, he wearily raised his head—he felt better. His leg was barely aching, his thirst was leaving him, and his chest, now free, opened up with slow inhalations.

The venom’s effect was beginning to wear off, there could be no doubt. He felt almost recovered, and although he lacked the strength to move his hand, the spray of the mist would give him back his full strength. He calculated that within three hours he would be in Tacurú-Pucú.

His recovery continued, and with it came a drowsiness filled with memories. He felt nothing in his leg or in his belly. Would his compadre Goana still be living in Tacurú-Pucú? Perhaps he might also see his old boss Mr. Dougald, and the receiver at the lumber yard.

Would he be there soon? To the west, the sky was now opening up like a golden fan, and the river had assumed the same colour. From the Paraguayan shore, now shrouded in darkness, the mountains dropped their twilight freshness with penetrating scents of orange blossom and wild honey. A pair of macaws flew high overhead, in silence towards Paraguay.

Down below, on the golden river, the canoe drifted swiftly, spinning around now and then in a swirling eddy. The man lying inside it was feeling better and better, as he lay there he wondered how long it had been since he last saw his old boss, Dougald. Three years? Perhaps not, not that long. Two years and nine months? Maybe. Eight and a half months? That was it, surely.

Suddenly the man felt that he was frozen up to his chest. What could it be? And his breathing too…

He had first met Dougald’s lumber receiver, Lorenzo Cubilla, in Puerto Esperanza on a Good Friday. Friday? Yes, or Thursday…

The man slowly stretched out the fingers of his hand.

“A Thursday…”

And he stopped breathing.

Translated by Martin Boyd

A follower of the Latin American Modernist school founded by Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío, and greatly influenced by the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) was a master of the macabre tale. Even his humorous tales are tinged with tragic and even horrific elements that reveal the savage and brutal justice of Nature. His work had a huge influence on the generation of Latin American authors that followed him, such as Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez.