Let me think. My editor called me on a Tuesday and I left on a Wednesday and here I am on a Friday floating in the Pampas.
The Gaucho’s assistant met me at the rail station and introduced himself as Backpfeifengesicht. I refused to attempt the pronunciation. There had to be some things I wouldn’t subject myself to.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” I said.
“Mmm.”
“. . .”
“. . .”
Silence—no, removal—is the primary rule of the Gaucho and his makeshift city, the foundation upon which his nature was created. By nature, I mean his environment, not his being. Although they seem to feed from each other. I think of him like a roach and his surroundings the kitchen filth. Is the roach beautiful, in a Darwinian way? Or is the roach dirty from the point of its nascent in afterbirth?
“. . .”
“Very good, you will do well here,” the assistant whispered.
“May I make a collect call?” I asked.
The assistant’s face emanated blueness in the unabated sunlight. He gestured across the street and watched me walk into the empty phone booth.
“It’s ten hours in a stinking car… I don’t care if he’s Alexander the Great… King of the Pampas means zilch… I’ve never worked for a cheaper outfit in my life… The Department of Labor wasn’t even this bad… I’m surrounded by exotic grasses, how exciting…”
My editor coughed on the other end of the line.
“Of course, I’ll get the good stuff,” I said. “But I’m a foreign correspondent, I’m not going to pretend I won’t be buried behind football scores… You’re a tremendous sonofabitch.”
That’s how I ended every call with him.
I came back covered in sweat and shared a disjointed smile with the assistant.
“He will meet you now,” he said.
He led me to a small Volkswagen beetle and we proceeded to careen across the desert floor, seemingly without direction. During this ride, I realized life was an illusion. The hills and mountains never came closer. I bit my nails until they bled.
The Gaucho and his silhouette waited for me in front of his house. The building appeared to stretch for miles. He appeared to be taller than the structure’s roof. In this moment, I should’ve understood the implication: a basement was necessary.
“Hello Backpfeifengesicht,” said the Gaucho.
“Hello.” The assistant dropped my bags on the house’s wooden porch and then turned around to walk into the desert.
I shook the Gaucho’s hand and introduced myself. He ignored me and pointed at his assistant.
“I gave him the name Backpfeifengesicht. Do you know what it means?”
I shook my head.
“Neither does he.”
Life is filled with people we do not know. We do not know their purpose; we do not know their names. We do not know their significance in our lives until we are dead and can look back upon our interactions in totality. No man is an island, said Donne.
The Gaucho showed me to two wrought-iron chairs and a small black table under a thin, leaning tree. “This is where we’ll eat,” he said.
I sat down and unpacked my backpack, placed my tape recorder on the table and measured his reaction. He looked at me like one looks at a fridge that is not quite cold enough. A small crooked woman brought out roasted rabbit and freshly made rolls and I partook without hesitation, the Gaucho watching on in observation.
So, it’s true, it seems he refrains from all things—food, drink, intercourse—every bodily necessity, maybe breathing itself. Living? Perhaps.
I turned to him. “My first question is: what do you love about the Pampas?”
He waved his hand, dismissably. “You’re not here because of the Pampas. The Pampas would’ve brought you here much sooner if you gave a rat’s ass about them. They tend to do so; they tend to magnetize their prey. You’re here because of the rumors, right?”
“Sure,” I said after another bite of food. “Then what do you think about the rumors?”
“They are good, very good. People assume the choice of isolation means a desire for disconnection. No, it’s very good to come about with a legend.”
I noticed a group of young children crowded on the porch, watching us. My eyes wandered across their faces and I decided they were the personal embodiment of the desert. Maybe a cruel joke on my mind. A cruel joke on the senses.
The Gaucho persisted: “There’s some truth behind the matters and there’s some nonsense and I won’t go into all of that.”
“You must understand I’d like to investigate a little bit.”
“I’ll show you some things.”
The Gaucho ripped a piece of the rabbit with his teeth and spat it out, leaning back in his chair, tipping his hat over his eyes.
I must cite his palms. A bushel of hair in the center. The two of them softly tensing together in a knot.
“I will show you some things in time,” he repeated.
I noted this moment, whereupon I grew hard to simple hallucination, as in connection with Rimbaud. I felt a witching in the passing of the hours. Nightfall came at once. We toured many rooms, many rooms, and I carefully chose one to sleep in. No furnishings, a small carpet and a dresser with no drawers.
“This is my room,” the Gaucho said.
I left to relieve myself—my scatological remnants seemed to excruciate the longer I was exposed to that dry air—and when I came back, a small bed had been moved into the room. His wiry body extended out over the wooden frame. On the floor, a pillow and a knitted blanket. I thought he was asleep at the time.
“Tomorrow we will go hunting,” he said.
When did all of life deteriorate inside of me? The edges should be much clearer. I’ve tried to remember, tried to remember lots of things. The Gaucho has made me sleep on the floor. He watches me through the night. I can imagine his stubby black teeth.
Have I become the wrong person? Is my real self sailing on a lake away from this grime? Indeed, this is what the world has come to. Remember what Fate said: “Fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind.” Is this the only possibility of my self?
At dawn, we took two of his horses from a stable connected to the house. We carried with us no provisions, only weapons and a few pieces of candy in our pockets. The children waved goodbye to us from the porch. The Gaucho motioned at them with his gun, his shoulder raised slightly in their direction.
He seemed to circumnavigate the desert floor via traces of dust.
“Is all of this yours?” I gestured outwards across the still landscape.
“Nothing is mine. The Pampas does not belong to anyone,” he said.
After a few miles, we reached a small, non-descript gully and stopped. The Gaucho surveyed. I rested my eyes, only for a few moments before waking up to a shot. The Gaucho stared down the barrel of his rifle while chewing some ginger root.
“What did you see?” I asked.
“Nothing.” he said. “I’m simply announcing my presence and intent.”
We rode on and I observed swirling phenomena off in the distance. The Gaucho slouched with the softening rigidity of a cadaver. The back of his neck looked silver and sweatless. The following sentence entered my mind: The Gaucho drinks the baby’s blood. I will need to come up with some literary justification for using that as a lead. Journalism is a race to be the king of the flies.
The Pampas presented me with a harsh beauty I had never realized. In many ways the opposite of the soft ugliness of the Gaucho. His horse made a whining sound as it stumbled on.
I understood the silence from the Gaucho to be a test. A test to reveal whether or not I was privy to his philosophical fortress. A way to know if I was there only to investigate or to immerse myself.
This writing process will be a wax flow. Even the simple construction of sentences will be agonizing. I will sit at a desk, if I’m lucky, and re-write the sentences until language becomes alien jargon. My editor will call it gonzo. Gonzo, eh? Gonzo, motherfucker? Gonzo i.e. out of consciousness and into the ether. This belongs in a magazine and not as part of the news. Please be transcendent and show extreme veracity. No one believes it. I’m only human, I can only write as myself, my devastated self. I can only depict our devastated selves, the Gaucho and his rotting core, his dream. I’ve written this picture before. I’m writing all the time in my head. I memorize my thoughts and log them in a mental book and it grows and grows along with my age and my darkness. Yet, the Gaucho’s mind is silent. He’s squeezing it out of me, like an anaconda. When will he take me there? When will he take me to his horrid place?
Off in the distance, I finally spotted some movement outside of ourselves—surely, a mirage? No, someone walking on his own plane, unburdened by the dry violence of our surroundings. Backpfeifengesicht, rejoining reality, this world’s matrix obscuring his existence until his visage appeared in front of us. And the Gaucho? His horse staggered toward the assistant with its spindly legs.
We walked for miles, dare I say hundreds, until we came face to face. The Gaucho remained on his horse and chewed his cud, looking further into the desert. Backpfeifengesicht, his black and blue eyes, his faint-haired body, stopped in front of us, as if we were preventing him from continuing his walk to nowhere. And then the Gaucho raised his rifle and pointed it at his assistant’s temple and they both held in their separate poses and I put my hands up, fully knowing my flesh would be no obstacle to the bullets at the whim of the Gaucho’s touch, but he pulled back and his horse moved on and Backpfeifengesicht continued to walk in his aimful direction into the vast of the Pampas.
Here it goes: the bloated King of the Pampas favors the blood of babies. This unknown Gaucho, exclusionary and rooted in the deep nowhere, prefers the fresh feeling of a visitor. His domain is like a warehouse left to ruin, inhabited by a sunny cult. Those subject to his beckon are volunteers. The Gaucho breathes no violence. The Gaucho breeds humans. Such are the urban whispers. The Gaucho breeds humans, he breeds flesh and membrane. If you look closely, this is the pinpoint of the entirety of South America’s population. He bakes them old; he bakes them young. He’s a reverse siphon. If you know of the Gaucho, you’ve heard it all and then some. The government leaves him alone because he provides the basis for the tax structure of society. No one goes looking for him—because, what does it matter? This old Gaucho came out of his proverbial cave to meet with this very reporter, at the behest of this paper’s beloved president. A favor, if you will. Fancy that, the Gaucho is a businessman as well. See below for a picture of the Gaucho’s prick. If you’d like to know him, let’s really get to know him. Mister President, here is the spread of the Gaucho’s shadowy crotch. You made me sleep on a wooden floor for this. A black and white photo of a cowboy’s pecker. Whoopie. I’m putting in my time card and expense report and getting the fuck out of here. I’ll disappear to Chile, how about that? There’s plenty of kings there who’d like their dicks in the paper. I’m sorry, the Gaucho, back to the Gaucho. He’s a stoic bastard and it wouldn’t surprise me if every word of him is true. Isn’t it a fuckin’ crime to write like I talk, like I think? Dear reader, it’s only a matter of time before they shipwreck me back to the States.
After a few minutes of vacuum-sealed silence, the Gaucho turned to me. We waited for each other.
What would be next, what the hell could be next, what will it be?
“I can’t listen to you speak right now,” said the Gaucho.
I understood it was time to return to his house.
I waited for dinner but it never came. Instead, I think, the Gaucho offered me some pipe tobacco and I accepted with the intention of smoking on the porch where I could view the nakedness of the terrain. He told me they grew the tobacco year-round. I saw nothing to corroborate his story, but I believed him. Like his words, the brown shoots disintegrated under the burn and I entered a strange state, the buzz of the chemicals placing me in a coffin. The Gaucho patted me on the back and walked inside while I breathed in more smoke.
I am really from beyond the grave. Rimbaud, again.
As I waited for the Gaucho to return, I attempted to pick up my article within my mind, at least the initial stream-of-consciousness rambling river of a memo I always tended to start with. But I found myself succumbed to a paralysis of the imagination—a frog suck, suck, sucking away at my brain—and the plodding hesitation filled me with the jagged possibility I had been infiltrated by the Gaucho’s disease, the kind to sneak under the skin, not the type to bludgeon a poor unsuspecting soul, the type to stare at you in the eyes as it weakens you and propels you toward cool darkness. Bartleby’s syndrome, the famed malady of bodily insistence on No, blasted into time by the great Spanish hunchback and his power of not-writing writing. Yet, my body was not destroyed, only somehow calmed in this realization of a blessed existence in the realm of No. The Gaucho, God save his corroded heart, lived in quiet insistent removal and it appeared he was better for it, regardless of his supposed evil doings or perverse causations. Maybe I would mirror him, a prolonged writing drought acting to cleanse my deepest sinful urges: the compulsion to pen stories like those goddamn trash dealers, those slick men in mustachioed grins fucking little boys behind the diner and promising them jobs where they could be slathered in oil in exchange for rumors, nuggets, half-words about the town whore and the screams in the night.
Yes, the No of a coffin, as it was. In our time of final commune with the earth, the coffin refuses. In my effort to understand the Gaucho and his Pampas, I’ve fornicated with emptiness. Indeed, what is next? What the hell could be next? What is it? What is it?
I felt a tap on my shoulder and I turned to see the Gaucho waving me inside. We walked through a series of empty rooms, none I had seen before, everything paneled in plywood, up a flight of stairs to a red door, inside the door and down another flight of stairs, through a redder door and down three more steps onto a small platform. The heat smothered me immediately, as if the desert had been distilled into this dark room. A nest of green plant tendrils shifted across the concrete floor. The Gaucho flattened his hand over my mouth and I let him press into me. I had no guide for what to look for. The only sound was the exhale of hot air from the large grates in the walls. The Gaucho left me to my own judgment. What is meaningful and could it possibly be the same thing for each of us? The pressure to decide, to notice on my own, chilled my skin even in the center of this hot phantom. And then I saw it—I saw them—budding from the laurel vines, their small pink feet pushing the greenery across the floor. These infants and their half-formed skulls cupped by leaves. I couldn’t locate their genesis. The Gaucho didn’t seem to want to stop me from exploring, but this freedom chained me to his side. We watched the children inch over the room in short aching movements, the arm of the plant undulating, a slow pendulum, the uvula speaking for the Pampas. They cried in ebbs, dust moving across the floor in waveforms. I exited only after my breathing calmed.
Upon returning to the porch, I dumped out my pipe. Everything confused me and this confusion satisfied me in the slowness of life. Everything I’ve written and will write can be found in this moment. The murder of words feeds me. And suddenly, the sun did not feel as hot.
Close the border. The best way to learn something about something is from very far away. The truth becomes truer as it’s repeated. The truth becomes more of itself farther away from itself. Everyone knows these things and that’s why no one cares. These tremors underfoot are nothing but music for our creators.
The Gaucho moves slightly. I have become more aware. Of everything, really. The brief explosions inside my brain matter. He lifts his chin up. I look out to a leafless tree. No, a tall, hard grass. Everything is green; this is good. The brown must is a violation. Birth is a form of sleepwalking.
Dear Editor: Enclosed is my advance—it’s all in there in case you’re wondering, that’s really all of it, you cheap piece of shit. I don’t see any way I can continue to write about what everyone knows but no one reads. What is reading these days, anyway? Rehearsing our knowledge. What is it that Fate said again? “What’s sacred to me? …An understanding of what can’t be fixed?” Vaguely, I remember everything. I’d like to cover boxing like my friend once did. I’d like to watch the abuse these men take; do you get me? I’m sure you do. You can’t hold me forever. I remember everything—do you understand that? The memories are watercolors and they drip off the page. I remember it all, though, in some way.
The Gaucho cleared his throat. “I apologize for putting my hand over your mouth.”
“. . .”
“It is very important that the first sounds they hear do not come from a human.”
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J. Billings lives and breathes in Hilltop, USA. His fiction can be found in 3:AM, Black Warrior Review, Blood Orange Review, BRUISER, ergot., and LIGEIA, among other places. His debut novel The New Utopia was released last year via CLOAK.wtf.