Cow Read online

  Ambrosio watched him stepping out, watched the brass on his gun barrel glinting in the sun. He stopped patting along his seams and rivets, picked up his birch broom and hurried off after the farmer. The shooting was going on without interruption now.

  Ambrosio flapped and fluttered up the path, he tripped and tramped and trotted along the edge of the road, for a couple of paces he tried to break into a run, then he swore: ‘Hijo de puta! Qué país!’ and he went back to his reeling progress of before, wrestling the while with his broom, which he first carried over his shoulder, then trailed behind him like a tail, and then used like a stick, rowing through the air. Quite out of breath, he reached the edge of the wood, he hurried through it, leaning forward like a hen in too much of a hurry, and in constant danger of falling flat on her beak.

  Knuchel had left the village road that led up to Innerwald, and was making for a little rise. It was pasture land, fenced in the Innerwald manner with barbed wire stretched from post to post. Ambrosio had passed this little hill four times every day, it was a hump, a hillock, like many others in the highlands, but now there were three red flags stuck in the ground here, red cloth on 2-metre-high poles dotted on the pasture. And it was behind there that the shots were going off.

  The farmer disappeared behind the hill, Ambrosio could just see his brown felt hat. He took the broomstick in both hands and slowed his pace. Creeping along, ducking his head, he approached one of the flags. The shots were so close now, he could hear them whistling, feel them ripping the air. No longer did they boom and echo, they went off smartly: crack! crack! crack! They pained him, almost as if they were exploding in his head.

  Ambrosio left the path behind the red flag, went into the grass, took a few more steps, and suddenly flung himself onto the ground. The shooting was coming from a barn very close to him, and he’d almost strayed into the line of fire. The scene imprinted itself onto his mind in a flash: there were gun barrels levelled, behind them men lying on their bellies on brown mats with contorted faces, jaws pressed to gun butts, eyes clenched shut, and limbs shaken from the recoil after firing. A picture of pain and fury – here in this gently undulating landscape? In the middle of these carefully tended pastures?

  Ambrosio lay down flat and buried his face in the grass. He heard the empty cartridges tinkle onto the stone floor of the barn, and how the locks of the gun snapped shut between shots. Dragging the broomstick along by his side, he crawled back, not yet daring to stand up. He was scrabbling through the grass on his belly when a hand gripped him by the ankle. He kicked himself free, turned and leapt to his feet, brandishing the broomstick.

  ‘Ma che cosa, che cosa fai tu? Piano, piano!’

  Ambrosio looked into a pair of dark eyes that were no Knuchel eyes, and into a half-laughing, half-scared face where there was no fleshy pink blob, but a proud nose, narrow and slightly hooked, far finer altogether than a Knuchel nose. Ambrosio swore in his surprise: ‘Qué cabrón! Hijo de puta! Un italiano! Eres italiano. Un italiano en este pueblo!’

  ‘Che vuoi! Italiano, italiano! Mi chiamo Luigi, eh sí, Luigi!’ said the other.

  ‘Tu eres Luigi?’ asked Ambrosio.

  ‘Sí, sí, Luigi!’

  ‘Me llamo Ambrosio yo.’

  ‘Fa piacere,’ said Luigi and pointed to the broom that Ambrosio was still holding threateningly aloft.

  Ambrosio stood helplessly in the middle of this pasture, pointed his broom in every direction, and listened to the cracking and whistling of gunfire and listened also to the vowel-rich words Luigi was addressing to him. Luigi spoke joyfully and exuberantly, but Ambrosio wasn’t listening to what he was saying, only to the sound of it, the melody, and it calmed him down. When Luigi held out his hand to him a second time, he shook it and followed him, still talking and gesticulating wildly, back down the hill. Luigi stopped behind another hump on the slope. ‘Ecco,’ he said. From this position, they could see the whole shooting range. The marksmen’s barn was on the left, and up on the right, towards the village, what they were aiming at. Black-and-white targets disappeared into the ground, only to resurface again, accompanied by red pointers.

  ‘Hijo de puta!’ Ambrosio wanted to turn away. Away from this banging. What kind of secrets would the other hills be concealing? What was behind the one over there? What was behind that wood, and what did the brown patch of earth over there signify? A bottomless abyss in the midst of treacherous green? And why was everything around him stacked up on itself? One fence on another, hill behind hill, mountain after mountain, right up to the cloudless blue sky? Never again would he take a chance like that.

  *

  Even before the church bell started tolling and drove the men of Innerwald out of their shooting barn, singly or in groups, but all of them with their fists round their rifle slings, Luigi was opening the door of the cowshed on the Boden farm. He did so with dramatic gestures, fiddled around for an unnecessarily long time with the bolts, gabbling away wildly all the while. It was only when he switched the lights on that he became hushed and almost reverent.

  At the click of a switch, the twenty cows lying in the straw stopped their ruminating. Luigi waved to Ambrosio, and then in long Sunday strides he paced about like a sergeant in a barracks yard, clapped his hands and shouted: ‘Hey, ufe! Ufe! Ufe there!’

  Ambrosio watched as one cow after another jerked her head backwards and got to her knees, how folded hindlegs searched for solid footing in the straw, how they already lifted their cruppers slightly, how they stretched their hip joints and at the same time moved out their right forelegs and set down their right feet. Ambrosio saw that bits of straw were shaken from skin and udder no less energetically than on the Knuchel farm, that evidently all Simmental cows were equally orderly, and that the Boden farm cows needed only half a minute to carry out the order to get up out of the straw and stand to attention in two tidy rows. ‘Muy bonito,’ he said, nodding to Luigi. ‘Muy bonito.’ Yet it hadn’t escaped him: there was no bull in the cowshed here either.

  Encouraged by this demonstration of obedience on the part of his cows, Luigi demanded of one last restless animal that she stop twirling her tail. He gave her a smack on the crupper, and punched her. When a kick on the left hindleg met with no more success, Luigi laughed to cover his disappointment, and turned back to Ambrosio, gabbling about the peculiar character of the cows in the prosperous land.

  Ever since their meeting at the firing range Luigi had been laughing and talking and swearing without stopping. He had also plucked at Ambrosio’s overlarge clothes. He himself was wearing a brown suit, yellow shirt and black shoes. On the meadow overlooking the Innerwald firing range, he had produced a white pocket handkerchief and spread it out on the grass before sitting down. Thereupon, without interrupting the spate of his conversation, he had pulled down his cuff-links from inside his jacket sleeves. Ambrosio had stood and watched, propped up on his broom. And then it had been the turn of his necktie. As Luigi had plucked away at it, he had come to talk about the shooting range. He had explained the significance of the various pointers that were hoisted up after every shot. Luigi knew when one of the Innerwalders had scored a bullseye. The shooting was quite good today, he’d said, and when everything about his suit had been set to rights, he had pointed down to the Boden farm, and the scattered fields and pastures that belonged to it. Over there was the barn, the building next to it was the bakehouse, and behind it were the property of the retired farmer and the new cowshed. The new cowshed over which he had his own ‘camera’, his own room with running water, ‘acqua calda e fredda’. Ambrosio had got out his cigarettes and offered Luigi one, whereupon he had been invited to come and take a closer look at the Boden farm.

  As they had left the cowshed, Luigi carried on with his explanations. He knew the sky over Innerwald, he had discovered which way the wind blew on the highlands, and talking the while, he conducted Ambrosio to ‘camera mia’. He had a bottle of GRAPPA there, and some NESCAFÉ as well.

  The room was in a newly construc
ted farm building, which housed a tractor garage and machine shed as well as open accommodation for fattening animals. The new boards creaked under the lino as they went in, and they could hear animals breathing, and, at regular intervals, a humming noise that was caused by the automatic watering gear which hadn’t been given a separate supply source. In the middle of the room was the bed, with a table next to it, and on the ceiling, a piece of flypaper on which insects, mostly caught only by one foot or wingtip on the honey-yellow surface, had frozen in extraordinary positions.

  Luigi put the GRAPPA on the table, tipped some coffee powder into two glasses, held them under the hot tap of the wash basin, got out of the raffia suitcase on the floor a couple of boxes of lump sugar stamped REMN. OX INNERWALD, and offered Ambrosio one of the glasses, while he stirred the other with his finger. Meanwhile, he was explaining, pronouncing the ‘k’s and ‘ch’s as ‘g’s, all about the Gnuggel farm and the ‘chisser’, punctuating his melodious Italian with the occasional proudly rendered bit of local dialect, even the odd oath, calling several men ‘fugging greeples’. However, the field-mouser, whom he had praised and whom he had much to be thankful for, was his ‘golleague’.

  Luigi warned Ambrosio ‘in nome di Gesù Cristo’ not to go too near the shooting hut again, he would be taking his life in his hands, because no one here could take a joke anyway, least of all during their target practice. He himself had once poked his nose in there when he was still new in the village. He had really just wanted to see what was going on. And ‘mamma mia’, two of them had dropped him in the nettles. ‘Wops’ had no business in the shooting hut, it wasn’t a fairground booth, they had said. And suspected him of being a spy. ‘Attenzione! Molto attenzione!’ said Luigi, with his finger wagging.

  After a few swallows from the bottle of GRAPPA, Ambrosio began to thaw out too. First, he just said that he had a bottle of COÑAC in his own room, but then he became more expansive, until he too became quite carried away by the sound of his own voice, and bubbled and talked away quite as eagerly as Luigi. Soon they were both talking at once, and filled the little room with their languages. They talked and talked, with shining eyes, amusing themselves so much that they frequently burst out laughing, toasted each other, and pointing at the broom which Ambrosio had left in the corner, ironically aped a few rifle drills. The bottle on the table was empty before they’d even begun to ask themselves how much the other could understand of his talk.

  When the bells rang out to signal the end of the service, Luigi accompanied his guest out to the Boden farm pastures. Slapping a fencepost with his palm, he repeated his suggestion that Ambrosio should come along to the ‘Ogs’ in the afternoon, to meet his ‘golleague’ the field-mouser. Ambrosio accepted, shook hands with Luigi, hoisted the broom onto his shoulder, and started on the walk home, past the hill with the red flags. So long as the bells were ringing, the shooting wouldn’t start again, Luigi had shouted after him.

  In the little wood above the Knuchel farm, a woman came towards him on a bicycle. She climbed the slope effortlessly, and pedalled silently past Ambrosio. He had stepped down into the ditch, and marvelled at the woman’s enormous thighs and equally massive calves.

  As he turned into the farm road, he saw Knuchel. He was standing in a pasture and prodding about in a molehill with the toe of his boot, before bending down to continue with his hands. Shaking his head, he got up again, and, seeing Ambrosio, showed him a couple of earthworms wriggling away. ‘They’re good for the soil,’ he said, ‘this here isn’t!’ and kicked at the molehill.

  ‘Let’s go in and eat,’ he said. ‘There’s boiled beef today.’

  *

  In the quiet evening hours, and on Sundays, when there was no work to keep him from his broodings, and the longing for his wife and family made him particularly melancholy, it had become a necessity for Ambrosio to go and sit in the byre among the cows. Here he was able to think and dream, it was here that he felt sheltered and understood, ever since that night he’d spent there, when he’d first arrived in the prosperous land. It smelled just like the cowsheds of Coruña: of straw and whitewash, of timber and tar, of milk and manure.

  When Ambrosio shut the door behind him, he was feeling stirred up. He smoked several cigarettes, kept the dungflies away from him with his only newspaper, which he’d read long before, and stared at the cows dozing in the straw.

  He found the cows as doughty as Knuchel and ever so buttoned up. They too preferred gestures. Before they ever mooed, they would clash horns a couple of times, kick out, piss and shit on each other and flick their tails. But then their discretion didn’t seem unnatural to Ambrosio, the cows were certainly less taciturn than all the silent types he met both in the farm and the village.

  ‘Qué país!’ He scratched his bald spot, spat into the gutter and nodded at Blösch’s calf, which was standing beside his bench and staring at him sorrowfully over the top of its tin muzzle, as though full of understanding and sympathy.

  A snort came from Baby at the back end of the cowshed. In her boredom the stupid cow was feeling sorry for herself. Baby was so clumsy that she often caught her front foot in her rope and chain, or found herself trapped in the bars of the manger by one of her long horns. Ambrosio had already had many occasions to be angry with her. She was slow-witted, and no milk pail could be safe when she was around.

  ‘Qué país de vacas tontas,’ he sneered. Next door to Baby, Spot shook her head and rattled the chains. She was bothered by a fly in her eye. When Ambrosio turned away again, his attention was caught by something on Check’s hide. Those large red patches on her had never struck him in quite this way before. He tilted his head one way, then another, he blinked, stood up, was it the poor light in the cowshed playing tricks on him? He went nearer no, there was no doubt about the shape, peculiar, the outline was one he knew well, the area between the patches on her back, that was the top of the Iberian peninsula, there, below Check’s hipbone was Barcelona, there was the Costa Brava, and down on the belly was Gibraltar, precisely, it was the outline of Spain, there, up by the shoulder was Coruña, and the edge of the patch on the cow’s skin flickered before Ambrosio’s eyes, and his thoughts started to wander: those Knuchel cows! It was worth it, watching them in their meekness, closely and often. Ambrosio studied the expression on their faces, he examined the peaceable architecture of their bodies, whose jagged clumsiness seemed made for putting down roots and standing still. Who could imagine one of those imposing but coarsely joinered lumps doing a gallop, never mind participating in natural animal combat?

  He couldn’t conceive a real liking for these animals. As a short little southerner he had cause enough to be wary and mistrustful of anything outsize and overgrown, and this particular breed had just been poured too stiffly into its cumbersome form. He would have liked the animals to have had a little more gaiety, he doubted whether they felt properly happy in their lethargic bulk. It was an imposition on them. And the eyes! They were far too honest, the way they peered out of those vast and hollow skulls! Domestic animals! he thought contemptuously. No, he had already wasted too much time looking for some trace of fury in their expressions for him to feel able to admire these Simmental cows. He hadn’t found even a grain of wit about them, only morbid forbearance and dignified passivity. In their lofty fussiness, and their exaggerated sense of their own worth, there was nothing to compare with the pride and the nimble rage of a young bull from Coruña.

  But for all their bloody-mindedness over unimportant details, Ambrosio was prepared to allow them a civilized readiness to compromise on serious matters. A bloody fight, a fight to the death, that didn’t exist for them. And he couldn’t deny that these overbred bodies had something reassuringly decent about them, it might well be dull, but the warmth they radiated, their incessant inner activity, their endless ruminating, digesting, multiplying, lactating, producing-even-while-they-slept, all that impressed Ambrosio in spite of himself. Sometimes their uninterrupted productivity seemed positively godlike to him,
and he learned to respect it. It all made it still more unfathomable to him that, as yet invisible but menacing enough, the butcher’s knife should be hanging over them, Blösch and Baby, Flora and Check and Spot. Every cow in Knuchel’s shed had a vertebra that one day would be split. All of them would one day climb unwept and unsung the shit-smeared ramp of a cattle-truck and disappear in the direction of the slaughterhouse.

  With one last look at Check’s flecked skin, Ambrosio left the cowshed to go up to the village, to the Ox.

  The flags were no longer out above the little wood, and the shooting had stopped. With his beret on his head, Ambrosio walked along the verge of the road, beside the fences. He passed three children playing, a dog, and, once again, the woman on the bicycle going downhill this time, swooping past him at a terrifying speed. And through a lath fence he saw beside the fire pond the cheeser’s wife bending down over a flowerbed. Her dress had sweat stains under the arms, and was stretched tight and blue across her back. On a dungheap was a cockerel resting on one leg.