In the Mountain Lies the Treasure: (A Mirage)

To my brother Haroldo, who told me the tale. To the poet Federico Jovine Bermúdez, with whom I shared it one bohemian evening.

The Chimera

They were resting now. They had taken a break from the road on the banks of the Tumbaca stream. From that serene spot they could no longer see the houses in the town below, which as they traveled uphill had slowly become a set of indistinct signposts in the increasingly indistinct valley. All they could see above them was the thick forest, and, hammering on Dolores Peralta's mind, the faraway mecca of the coffee-growing district. That, the coffee district, was where Dolores Peralta was heading with her seven women and Lolito, her young assistant.

They were ready-to-trot-women (the phrase was Haroldo's), the best whores in Dolores Peralta's stable.

The mule, released from its harness by young Lolito, shook its head, grazed docilely on the field, drank water from the stream, and then, satisfied, sprawled under the shadow of a carob tree. The group got ready to enjoy the first meal of the day. They had bread, sausage, and a pot of spaghetti. The road itself would furnish them with meat: a hen or chicken out of those ranging free on the hills near country villages. They all felt so happy; it was the rest, the snack, the illusions Dolores Peralta had sown in the minds of her girls when she had talked to them of the money they would make in the coffee district. Diligently, they spread out a broad square of perforated canvas on the moist grass. Dolores Peralta captained the meal with egalitarian frugality. Lolito took his ration away in a hamper to the banks of the stream and sat on a stone, his feet dancing in the water as he ate.

They had left town before the cocks crowed. Following the bustle of preparations, they marched on in silence through the sleeping streets. Once beyond the last houses, as they began to vanish in the horizon, they broke into a song; but after a while the journey consumed their strength, and they had moved on, hill after hill, hurling complaints, until Dolores Peralta allowed them to rest.

An hour later they resumed their journey. A long and arduous hike awaited them. Up there, they did not know precisely where, they would find the brigades of peasants picking coffee in the plantations owned by Petronio Peralta and Salvador Lluveres. The harvest was good and money was plentiful. They would return with pockets overflowing.

"Gold is gushing out up in Las Cajas; there are more than a thousand men working Don Petronio's and Don Salvador's plantations," Dolores Peralta had overheard someone say a few days before.

Not stopping to inquire further, she picked out her girls. Things weren't going well in town. Money was scarce, and the pimps spent their time frolicking in bed with the whores. Get ready, girls, we're gonna put those bodies to work. Our boon is up there, she had said, signaling, with a gesture of her index finger, that they were heading up the hills vanishing in the distance.

The hours went by, as if pushed on by the fresh and whistling breeze. The small troop, on the other hand, advanced more and more slowly. Unaccustomed as they were to stomping through the hills, by four o'clock they were undone. Dolores, the only one to have ridden the mule till then, proposed they not stop. Darkness would soon come, and she wanted to move on, but the girls begged to stay there till morning. She agreed, and they prepared the surroundings so they could spend the night. Lolito appeared an hour later with two dead blue-billed ciguas and a live chicken, and was greeted by the women's cries of jubilation.

"Good, Lolito, you can work magic with that slingshot! You're a wizard, boy!"

They...