The blink of an eye, a millisecond of shadow. A bird or passing cloud. Aprile didn’t have time to think of anything else. The object fell quickly, with a crash, about thirty feet away.
The day had been just like any other. Aprile opened his Tupperware and was looking at the canned peas, rice, and tomato slices. He pictured his wife in the kitchen a few hours before, still in her nightdress, her hair messed up, too sleepy to consider frying a steak. He, meanwhile, had been sweating in the barn, diluting the glyphosate and filling the sprayer. He should have brought one of the salamis he had hanging on the back wall next to his tools. But it was too late now.
Sitting with his face to the October sun, on the running board of the sprayer parked in the middle of the field, he started to do sums. Aprile’s life revolved around sums. Year after year, the same never-ending calculations. Yield, tonnage, how much to sell and how much to put away for the next season. By lunch time he was focused on the spraying: sixty hectares so far, the whole afternoon ahead of him, at least three more days’ work.
He glanced at the ground at his feet, the springiness of the new shoots. The night before, Elsa had been going on about hiring someone. “We need a vacation,” she’d said in bed before turning off the lights. “Talk to Liébana, will you?” But that was out of the question, thought Aprile as he chewed on his lunch. Liébana was a foreigner, better to keep your distance.
Then came the half-second of shadow. The object crunched as it hit the ground and eventually reached a standstill near the fence. Aprile took a moment before hopping off the running board. The object was large, weighty, and mangled. Around it spread a dark liquid, like juice from a squashed fruit. A leg stuck out at an impossible angle, shreds of clothing fluttered in different shades of blue, a head of blond hair seemed to float atop the pulp.
•
One police car would have been plenty, but the call on the radio had piqued the interest of the entire force, and soon the field filled with uniformed gawpers. Officer Spataro took Aprile over to one corner by the fence and told him about the call from the airline, the anonymous manager on the other end of the phone.
“He was out of his mind.”
The news soon spread. The flight from Mendoza to Buenos Aires had taken off with twenty-nine passengers. Minutes after the emergency landing, most of them were speaking to journalists. On the radio, one woman reported that it had all happened in a flash: the door had started to make an odd sound and the stewardess had gone over to check on it. Then the door peeled away from its frame like bark from a dead tree. The plane lurched violently and the stewardess’ scream was lost in the roar of the outward rushing air. “Poor girl,” the woman concluded before bursting into tears.
•
Under Aprile’s watchful gaze, the forensic team set up their paraphernalia. They wrapped the body in a black plastic tarp and called an ambulance. When he saw the trail of trodden soybeans, Aprile complained. He heard voices behind him. The vans were lined up in a row. People climbed over the fence and strode toward him in groups, some with cameras on their shoulders. Aprile walked to meet them, waving his arms. In the end, the police let them take the shots they needed, only what was necessary, before sending everyone to the house a few fields away.
The occupation lasted until midnight. Aprile was forced to answer, with an expression that the next day’s reports described as the result of post-traumatic stress, the same questions over and again. Elsa appeared sometime after eight in the evening, her hair done up and a smile on her face, carrying a tray of freshly baked cookies. The TV crew fell upon it like a shoal of piranhas.
Aprile would have preferred to get right back to work, but a stewardess doesn’t fall from the sky without causing a ruckus. The police and TV vans left but were replaced by public investigators, airline lawyers, and municipal officials. Aprile opened the gate for them all and watched them from the gallery. After a while, they likewise invaded the house, and Aprile allowed himself to be interviewed without even a mate to tide him over, and despite having nothing more to add to what he’d already said.
Meanwhile, Elsa answered the telephone and collected all the newspaper clippings in a folder. Aprile didn’t read them. Neither did he watch himself on TV. Whenever his face appeared on screen looking red and ruddy, surrounded by microphones, he instantly changed the channel, ignoring his wife’s protests.
When the field was finally vacated, he spent hours on the sprayer, coming and going from one fence to another, lost in the rumbling of the engine and the clouds of glyphosate, feeling as though he’d recovered a sense of equilibrium he’d never known he had. Or maybe not. Maybe his head just started filling with numbers again, and he didn’t have time to think of much else.
Then another strange incident occurred. As he was turning the machine around to retrace his path, he suddenly felt dizzy. He stopped the sprayer just before he hit the fence, and sat still in his seat, hands stuck fast to the steering wheel. His stomach churned from nausea, his forehead throbbed. But then it was over: just a few seconds later, he felt fine.
•
Summer came early with a promising bout of rainfall in late November. Aprile sprayed fungicide, measured humidity levels, and applied more glyphosate. To affray some of his expenses he rented his machines to a neighbor for a few weeks. Meanwhile, the crop continued to grow tall and thick, a gleaming sea of green in every direction, rippling occasionally in the warm breeze.
At Christmas their two daughters, who lived a long way away, came to visit with their respective families. On New Year’s Eve, Aprile got off his tractor half an hour before midnight. When he finally arrived at the table, one of his sons-in-law served him some cider, and Elsa made a plate of cold cuts and potato salad. No one reproached him for working so late.
“Country life,” Aprile said apologetically, and unnecessarily.
•
The next incident occurred at the end of January. The couple were in the kitchen having dinner. There wasn’t much to talk about, and the chirping of an unseen cricket emphasized the silence from its corner. Elsa looked out the window, where the sun still resisted the horizon.
“I can’t believe we’re halfway through summer already,” Elsa remarked.
Aprile coughed and spat. On top of his spaghetti bolognese, right on the grated cheese, lay a green cricket, bitten in half. Antennae still moving, the bug dragged itself across the plate with its forelegs. Aprile threw his hand over his mouth and ran to the sink.
The insects had spread throughout the house. They were coming out of drawers and drains. Aprile and Elsa found them in their clothes, under pillows, in the jars of homemade preserve. The bitter smell of dead insects assaulted them in waves.
One afternoon, Aprile was walking across the garden on his way to the barn when he saw the hairy caterpillars at his feet. Green and yellow, long as his little finger, they all crawled in the same direction. Aprile followed them back to the fence: they emerged from the fields where the crops were growing.
“Rubén!” shouted Elsa from the gallery.
She had her back to him, staring at the thousands of hairy caterpillars piling up on the patio, one atop the other, those at the bottom crushed by the accumulated weight of their brethren. Aprile left Elsa arming herself in the kitchen, spraying the broom with insecticide, and drove off to Campo Labrado.
At the counter of the agrochemical outlet, he demanded to speak to the owner.
“What did you sell me, Fiori?” he shouted. “Tell me exactly what you sold me!”
Standing immobile among the bags of fertilizer and cans of herbicide, still wearing his reading glasses, Fiori didn’t know what to say. Aprile kicked at the closest object, a cardboard cutout of a head of wheat with muscular arms, and left the premises in a rage.
A while later he was back in the fields, staring at the crop with his hands on his hips, indifferent to the few caterpillars still trying to escape. He thought back to previous harvests, but he couldn’t remember any as high as the one which stood before him now. He reached out to the closest plant and felt its rough-textured leaves and sturdy stem. The plants were intertwined with one another, forming an almost perfectly smooth surface of vegetation.
Something made him look up. A whisper from the depths of the field, quietly slithering from among the rows. Aprile asked who was there and thought he heard a gentle giggle in reply. A woman’s voice. The wind swirled around the plants.
He heard nothing more.
•
That night, while Elsa was scrubbing dishes in the kitchen, Aprile saw a glow through the window. The light seemed to emanate from below, as if from the ground itself. Cricket green, and now electric. Neon cricket green. An eerie, phosphate green. The glow intensified and dimmed at regular intervals as though in response to a melody he couldn’t hear from within the house. Then it changed. The green switched to an incandescent, dripping red.
“What’s wrong, Rubén?”
Elsa looked at him worriedly as she dried her hands on a dishcloth.
“There,” said Aprile. “Look at that.”
“At what?”
“The soybeans, Elsa. Look, they’re glowing.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Of course there is. Look, it changed color again.”
•
After that, he stopped rising early. He’d lie in bed until halfway through the morning, curled into a ball, mumbling in his sleep. Elsa called their daughters but they told her not to worry. It was a passing phase, he was getting old, nothing serious. Then they’d start chattering about their own children, their first teeth, the cost of summer camp.
In late February, while Elsa read on her side of the bed, Aprile said a name that didn’t belong to her or their daughters in his sleep. Elsa never made the connection. She might have remembered the police, the cameras, the folder of newspaper clippings, but a lot had happened since then, the name was quite common and jealousy is jealousy. Elsa simply ran through all the women she knew, identifying those who seemed worthy of suspicion. For several days she punished Aprile with unsalted vegetables and burnt meat.
These angry messages went unnoticed. Every evening, he stopped what he was doing and sat in the gallery. He didn’t take his eyes off the field until Elsa appeared to tell him that dinner was ready. On several occasions he told her that he wasn’t hungry and to leave him alone. And increasingly, he talked to himself.
“Green, now red,” he said. “Green, now red.”
•
By the middle of March the crop had started to wither and dry out. The crickets had ceased their assault on the house, and only the rare hairy caterpillar was found inching up the wall. Elsa asked Aprile if he would hire the Velázquez brothers this year, three men who always turned up in the area at harvest time. Elsa and Aprile sat in the gallery in a pair of armchairs, cold mate on the wicker table. Somehow she sensed that something lit up inside her husband. A spasm, or a momentary spark. Aprile stared out at the crops, glassy eyed, then the spark went out.
“The Velázquez … ?” he asked, bending over and clearing his throat. “I don’t know, I need to do the sums.”
A chimango flew over the garden.
“It’s lovely like this, don’t you think?” Aprile said, leaning back. “The crop, I mean.”
Elsa frowned.
“What do you mean? It’s all dried out.”
It soon became apparent that Aprile was shirking. The Velázquez brothers rolled up in their truck and ten minutes later were back on the road, driving in the opposite direction. Elsa and Aprile argued. She said they couldn’t afford to waste time: if it rained again, the harvest would be lost. He said he was tired, she could do what she liked.
The next morning, while her husband slept, Elsa drove into town. First she asked at the agricultural cooperative, but they flatly refused: Aprile had been thrown out years before following an unresolved case, something about improperly registered trucks. Then she asked at Don Jerónimo Seed Supplies. The manager told her to come back next year.
When she entered the Los Cipreses office, Liébana was sitting behind his desk with his arms crossed, eyes fixed on the glass door like a spider waiting for its thread to jiggle. The contractor offered her coffee and said that this year’s harvest would be historic, worth several of the previous years’ put together. He tapped away on his calculator. Before suggesting percentages, he told her that he didn’t usually make deals at the last minute.
On her way back, as she drove along the dusty road, Elsa rehearsed what she planned to say to Aprile, trying to work out how not to give him a heart attack. Liébana, it had to be Liébana. In the end she decided to be completely honest. She found her husband in the gallery, still in his pajama bottoms. She told him everything.
Aprile looked as though he might say something, then he shrugged.
“Whatever you think’s best,” he said, scratching his bare chest.
That day, Elsa cried for the first time in a long time. She called her youngest daughter, the more understanding of the two, and told her the situation had taken a turn for the worse. Her daughter promised that she’d be there within the week. She also asked her mother to make an appointment with a professional in Campo Labrado. And to please stay calm.
•
The Los Cipreses combine worked until it was full and then spun around and headed for the farthest fence, where three trucks hulked by the road, waiting for their turn to be loaded. Later, they would reappear empty.
In the afternoon, Elsa put a mug down on the wicker table.
“It’s broth,” she told her husband. “Drink a little, it’ll make you feel better.”
Aprile grunted in annoyance without looking at her. At least now he was wearing his pajama top as well. Elsa considered what was wrong with the picture: the combine in the fields and her husband in the gallery. Liébana’s prediction that this would be a historic harvest suddenly took on a new, private meaning. The Aprile she knew had disappeared with the first rays of autumn sun. This was a different man.
The Los Cipreses employees asked if they could continue working through the night. Lightning flashed on the horizon, better not to leave it until tomorrow. Elsa gave them permission through the kitchen window. Then she closed it and the men hurried back into the fields.
Only the headlamps of the combine were visible. There remained a large, dark swathe of withered plants to go, but Aprile saw something else. The greens and reds had given way to a clear, glinting gold. The combine labored in a sea of melted sunlight, and the seeds that fell from the hopper into the wagon twinkled like stars. Aprile had never seen anything so beautiful.
Again, he heard the woman’s gentle laughter. It echoed from far away but sounded close too, as if floating around him, stroking him. This was what Aprile felt as he staggered drunkenly through the field. He clambered over the fence and dove right into the soybeans.
Kneeling down, almost kissing the soil, he knew she was there, sitting in front of him, hugging her golden legs, her golden hair brushing the ground. He looked into her eyes and she returned his gaze. The laughter was gone along with everything else. The combine could be heard in the distance, its headlights barely piercing the clean, bronze air.
•••
Manuel Crespo was born in Buenos Aires in 1982. In 2010, his novel Los Hijos Únicos (The Only Children) won a national novel competition entitled “Laura Palmer is Still Alive,” and was published that same year by Gárgola Ediciones. His first story collection Fosfato (Phosphate), from which Ceres is taken, won the 2018 National Arts Fund Award for the Story Collection. He edits the International Literature section for www.revistaotraparte.com.
Kit Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires. He has translated dozens of Latin American and Spanish writers for a wide array of publications, and writes reviews for Ñ, Otra Parte, and the Times Literary Supplement. His translation of The Naked Woman by Armonia Somers (The Feminist Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the ALA National Translation Award.