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naked horsemen, polygamy, stench, and magic.
An Englishwoman, reduced to such barbarism!
Moved by outrage and pity, my grandmother
urged her not to go back. She swore to help her,
swore to rescue her children. The other woman
answered that she was happy, and she returned
that night to the desert. Francisco Borges was to
die a short time later, in the Revolution of '74;
perhaps at that point my grandmother came to
see that other woman, torn like herself from her
own kind and transformed by that implacable
continent, as a monstrous mirror of her own
fate....
Every year, that blond-haired Indian woman
had come into the pulperías* in Junin or Fort
Lavalle, looking for trinkets and "vices"; after
the conversation with my grandmother, she
never appeared again. But they did see each
other one more time. My grandmother had
gone out hunting; alongside a squalid hut near
the swamplands, a man was slitting a sheep's
throat. As though in a dream, the Indian
woman rode by on horseback. She leaped to the
ground and drank up the hot blood. I cannot