El Gaucho

He sits under a gibbous moon collecting his thoughts, Deviants 27½ &27 hooking rocks off the Seder grocer’s awning. The last time this happened the dogmen chased them willy-nilly from town, the littlest dogmen yipping like a fouling child. ‘a stitch in time is worth nine’ (he said lousily), the ferry boat keeling, his grandmamma waving sadly so long from shore. ‘but what if he doesn’t?’ ‘trust me he will…’. ‘you will you’ll sneak up on him and push him over…you will you said’. Written in overgenerous strokes on a sheaf of yellow paper was the following: No matter what I say you’ll think I’m lying. That summer he found a horse’s head under the woolshed behind his grandparent’s boycotter’s shed. One of the ears was missing, the nose holes crawly with maggots and Irish moss. He was told by an old man with slow yellow eyes that farmers were known to sell their dead horses to the river men and the river men to the fishermen, the fishermen using the horses heads for sniggling eels in the brown river below the five-mile.

These are the people he met behind the woolshed: El Gaucho, Martín Fierro, La Vuelta de Martín, Fierro José Mármol, Baldomero Fernández, Moreno Ernesto Sábato, Manuel Mujica Láinez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Horacio Quiroga, Jose Asuncion Silva, Francisco Coloane, Fernando Villalón, Max Aub, Juan Larrea, José Bergamín Gutiérrez, Costa da Morte, Luis Andrés et Caicedo Estela. He met other people that summer other than the old man with slow yellow eyes and those listed above, mind you none as fetchingly.