The Insufferable Gaucho Read Online Free PDF

left, more as a ritual than a sanitary measure, but it couldn’t do
any harm.
    When Bebe and the two writers came back from a walk around Capitán
Jourdan, they found Ibarrola still unconscious on the table, and Pereda sitting
beside him in a chair, observing him intently like a medical student. Behind
Pereda, equally absorbed by the sight of the wounded man, stood the ranch’s
three gauchos.
    The sun was beating down mercilessly in the yard. Son of a bitch!
shouted one of Bebe’s friends, your dad’s gone and killed our publisher. But the
publisher wasn’t dead, and made a full recovery, except for the scar, which he
would later display with pride, explaining that it had been caused by the bite
of a jumping snake and the subsequent cauterization; he even said he felt better
than ever, although he did return to Buenos Aires that night with the
writers.
    From then on, there were often visitors from the city. Sometimes Bebe
came on his own, with his riding clothes and his notebooks, in which he wrote
vaguely melancholic stories with vaguely crime-related plots. Sometimes he would
come with Buenos Aires luminaries, usually writers, but quite often a painter,
which pleased Pereda, since painters, for some reason, seemed to know much more
about carpentry and brick-laying than the bunch of gauchos who hung around Alamo
Negro all day like a bad smell.
    On one occasion Bebe came with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was
blonde and had steely blue eyes and high cheekbones, like an extra from the Ring
cycle. The only problem with her, according to Pereda, was that she talked a
lot. One morning he invited her to go for a ride. The psychiatrist accepted. He
saddled up the mare, mounted José Bianco, and they headed west. As they rode,
the psychiatrist talked about her job in a Buenos Aires mental hospital. She
told him (and the rabbits that surreptitiously accompanied them for parts of the
way) that people were becoming more and more unbalanced—studies had proven
it—which led the psychiatrist to conjecture that perhaps mental instability was
not so much a disease as a stratum of normality, just below the surface of
normality as it was commonly conceived. All this sounded like Chinese to Pereda,
but intimidated as he was by the beauty of his son’s guest, he refrained from
saying so. At midday they stopped for a lunch of rabbit jerky and wine. The wine
and the meat, a dark meat that shone like alabaster when touched by light and
seemed to be literally seething with protein, fuelled the psychiatrist’s poetic
streak, and, as Pereda noticed out of the corner of his eye, prompted her to let
her hair down.
    She began quoting lines from Hernández and Lugones in a well-modulated
voice. She wondered aloud where Sarmiento had gone wrong. She ran through lists
of books and deeds while the horses trotted imperturbably westward, to places
Pereda himself had never reached on previous excursions but was glad to visit in
such fine although occasionally tiresome company. At about five in the
afternoon, they spotted the shell of a ranch house on the horizon. Enthused,
they spurred their mounts in that direction, but at six they were still not
there, which led the psychiatrist to remark on how deceptive distances could be.
When they finally arrived, five or six malnourished children came out to greet
them, and a woman wearing a very wide skirt that bulged voluminously, as if
there were some kind of animal under it, coiled around her legs. The children
kept their eyes fixed on the psychiatrist, who adopted a maternal attitude,
though not for long, since she soon noticed, as she later explained to Pereda, a
malevolent intention in their gaze, a mischievous plan formulated, so she felt,
in a language full of consonants, yelps, and grudges.
    Pereda, who was coming to the conclusion that the psychiatrist was not
entirely in her right mind, accepted the skirted woman’s hospitality, and during
the meal, which they ate in a room full of old