I pulled the plate to my side of the table; I knew it would make him furious.
“That’s what happens when you can no longer do the thing you know best how to do,” he went on. “That’s what I was thinking: then you die.”
I tasted the eggs, but by then they were cold. It was the last conversation we had; after that he took three stumbling steps toward the living room and fell to the floor, dead.
* * *
A journalist from a local paper comes to interview me a few days later. I sign a photograph for the article that shows Tego and me beside the cannon, him in his helmet and red suit, me in blue with the box of matches in my hand. The girl eats it up. She wants to know more about Tego. She asks if I want to say anything special about his death, but I don’t feel like talking about it anymore and I can’t think of anything to add. Since she doesn’t leave, I offer her something to drink.
“Coffee?” I ask.
“Sure!” she says. She seems willing to listen to me for an eternity. But I scratch a match against my silver box to light the flame of the stove, several times, and nothing happens.
ON THE STEPPE
Life on the steppe isn’t easy. You’re hours away from everything, and there’s nothing to look at but a giant tangle of dry shrubs. Our house is several miles from the nearest town, but that’s okay: it’s comfortable and has everything we need. Pol goes to town three times a week. While he’s there he sends off his articles on insects and insecticides to the agricultural magazines, and he does the shopping, following the lists I prepare. During those hours when he’s not here, I carry out a series of activities that I prefer to do alone. I don’t think Pol would like it if he knew about what I do. But when you’re desperate, when you’ve reached your limit like we have, then the simplest solutions—candles, incense, whatever advice the magazines give—all seem like reasonable options.
There are many fertility recipes and not all of them are trustworthy, so I choose only the most sensible ones and follow the instructions to a T. I have a notebook where I take notes about any relevant detail, any tiny changes I notice in Pol or in me.
It gets dark late on the steppe, which doesn’t leave us too much time. We have to have everything ready: the flashlights, the nets. Pol cleans everything while I wait for the time to come. Cleaning off the dust just for it all to get dirty again lends the thing a certain air of ritual, as if before starting out we were already thinking about how to do it better and better, attentively reviewing the routine of recent days to find any detail that could be adjusted, that could lead us to them, or at least to one: ours.
When we’re ready, Pol passes me my jacket and scarf and I help him put on gloves, and we both sling backpacks over our shoulders. We go out the back door and walk into the fields. The night is cold, but the wind is calm. Pol goes first, shining the flashlight on the ground. Deeper in, the countryside sinks down a little into long hillocks; we move toward them. Around there the shrubs are small, hardly tall enough to hide our bodies, and Pol thinks that’s one of the reasons our plan fails every night. But we keep trying because several times now we thought we saw some, around dawn, when we were already exhausted. In those early-morning hours I’m almost always hiding behind some bush, clutching my net, nodding off and dreaming of things that seem fertile. Pol, on the other hand, turns into a kind of predatory animal. I see him move off, hunched over the plants, and he can stay there, crouching and motionless, for a long time.
I’ve always wondered what they’ll really be like. We’ve talked about it several times. I think they’re the same as the ones in the city, only a little coarser, wilder. Pol, though, is sure they’ll be different, and although he’s as excited as I am and there’s not a single night when the cold and exhaustion convince him to leave the search for another day, when we’re out among the bushes, he moves with a certain wariness, as if from one moment to the next something wild could attack him.
Now I’m alone, looking out at the road from the kitchen window. This morning we slept in and then had lunch. Then Pol went to town with the shopping list and his magazine articles. But it’s late, he should have been back a while ago and there’s still no sign of him. Finally, I see the pickup. As he’s pulling up to the house he waves his hand out the window. I go out and help him with the groceries, and he greets me by saying:
“You’re not going to believe this.”
“What?”
Pol smiles. We carry the bags to the porch and sit in the chairs there.
“So,” says Pol, rubbling his hands together. “I met a couple, and they’re great.”
“Where?”