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his whip, but in the end her husband won the race,
he hadn't been captain of a cavalry regiment for nothing, and the rancher and
the rancher's son got up from their seats and clapped, good losers, and the
rest of the guests clapped too, excellent rider, this German, extraordinary
rider, although when the little gaucho reached the finish line, or in other
words the porch, he didn't look like a good loser, a dark, angry expression on
his face, his head down, and while the men, speaking French, scattered along
the porch in search of glasses of ice-cold champagne, the lady went up to the
little gaucho, who was left standing alone, holding his horse's reins in his
left hand (at the other end of the long yard the little gaucho's father headed
off toward the stables with the horse the German had ridden), and told him, in
an incomprehensible language, not to be sad, that he had ridden an excellent
race but her husband was good too and more experienced, words that to the
little gaucho sounded like the moon, like the passage of clouds across the
moon, like a slow storm, and then the little gaucho looked up at the lady with
the eyes of a bird of prey, ready to plunge a knife into her at the navel and
slice up to the breasts, cutting her wide open, his eyes shining with a strange
intensity, like the eyes of a clumsy young butcher, as the lady recalled, which
didn't stop her from following him without protest when he took her by the hand
and led her to the other side of the house, to a place where a wrought-iron
pergola stood, bordered by flowers and trees that the lady had never seen in
her life or which at that moment she thought she had never seen in her life,
and she even saw a fountain in the park, a stone fountain, in the center of
which, balanced on one little foot, a Creole cherub with smiling features
danced, part European and part cannibal, perpetually bathed by three jets of
water that spouted at its feet, a fountain sculpted from a single piece of
black marble, a fountain that the lady and the little gaucho admired at length,
until a distant cousin of the rancher appeared (or a mistress whom the rancher
had lost in the deep folds of memory), telling her in brusque and serviceable
English that her husband had been looking for her for some time, and then the
lady walked out of the enchanted park on the distant cousin's arm, and the
little gaucho called to her, or so she thought, and when she turned he spoke a
few hissing words, and the lady stroked his head and asked the cousin what the
little gaucho had said, her fingers lost in the thick curls of his hair, and
the cousin seemed to hesitate for a moment, but the lady, who wouldn't tolerate
lies or half-truths, demanded an immediate, direct translation, and the cousin
said: he says . . . he says the boss . . . arranged it so your husband would
win the last two races, and then the cousin was quiet and the little gaucho
went off toward the other end of the park, dragging on his horse's reins, and
the lady rejoined the party but she couldn't stop thinking about what the
little gaucho had confessed at the last moment, the sainted lamb, and no matter
how much she thought, his words were still a riddle, a riddle that lasted the
rest of the party, and tormented her as she tossed and turned in bed, unable to
sleep, and made her listless the next day during a long horseback ride and
barbecue, and followed her back to Buenos Aires and all through the days she
was at the hotel or went out to receptions at the German embassy or the English
embassy or the Ecuadorean embassy, and was solved only days after her ship set
sail for Europe, one night, at four in the morning, when the lady went out to
stroll the deck, not knowing or caring what parallel or longitude they were at,
surrounded or partially surrounded by forty-one million square miles of salt
water, just then, as the lady lit acigarette
on the first-class passengers' first deck, with her eyes fixed on the expanse
of ocean that she