When I stepped onto the balcony and yawned, gauchos waved. These cowboys, I noticed, were not just waving, they were waving me down to join them. Even Baixinho, who I thought was furious with me. It was the morning of a big party, a churrasco, or barbecue, at the Fazenda Itú, a grand old cattle ranch in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
The pampas begin here. Rolling flanks of grass are punctured by odd thrusts of mountain range left behind by glaciers grinding southward for the big Ice Age meet-and-melt that made much of neighboring Argentina as endlessly flat as our Great Plains. The shapes of these exotically isolated protuberances are fantastical: flat-topped hills, symmetrical Fujiyamas, Egyptian pyramids, forested buttes, and mounds that look artificially piled up, like the one painted by Claude Lorrain in his Sermon on the Mount.
When I reached the front door, which framed what looked like every gaucho on the place assembled in two rows as if for a class photograph, I was mystified. They were grinning and whispering, and staring my way. Were those bills they were gripping? Was some ceremony for newcomers about to take place? Was the novelty of my height and nationality (I was the first American many of them had seen offscreen) actually growing instead of receding with familiarity? Every eye was on me.
Over the previous couple of days, I had tried in my bad Portuguese to talk to them and, despite my terrible horsemanship, to ride with them. To show my solidarity, I had even assisted in the slaughtering of a hog for the churrasco (and watched laughing children with knives jump in to cut the ring from the late porker’s nose).
A pit of firewood had burned all night down to coals. Now it was surrounded by poles staking sides of beef and lamb and pork, eyed by little owls perched atop red termite mounds and by the inevitable nosy patrols of caracaras. Relatives of my host, important people from nearby São Borja, and other ranchers were on the way. In the face of such glamorous distractions, I was flattered to find so much attention focused on me. When I stepped through the doorway into the bright sunlight, I discovered why.
The day before, a mischievous boy named Edgar had played a trick on me. He had gotten me to cut a watermelon for him and a pal from a patch behind a shed. They immediately (and, in retrospect, suspiciously gleefully) sat down to eat it. I had no way of knowing that this garden was the property of Baixinho, the short cowboy who was already angry about my interference in a werewolf matter. (A few days earlier, when the gauchos had shown me a wild animal roped in the back of a wagon and announced that it was a werewolf, I had demurred, assuring them that it was simply a big black fox—and suggesting that it ought to be released. Baixinho was outraged. He said he had personally seen this creature change into human form several times before they finally captured it. Blondie, another gaucho, said that because I was American and a college graduate, they should listen to me. The indigo-eyed werewolf nodded in agreement. I said it was none of my business, just my opinion, and walked away. But Blondie told me they had eventually let the fox go.) Baixinho had approached in a rage, intending to punish the thieving boys, and Edgar, spitting seeds and covered with watermelon gore, had told him that I, the American guest, had given the watermelon to them. Baixinho looked at me with astonished, impotent fury. First his werewolf and now his watermelon—had I been sent there by the Devil to torment him?
Pinterest
