Hernán Díaz - In the Distance

The only certain thing was that Clangston lay east of San Francisco. He regretted that he had paid so little attention during his trip with the Brennans. But after all those years drifting around the country, he could guess that while going east they also could have steered a bit north—they never went too deep into the desert. Therefore, since he knew he was south of San Francisco, he intended to find the sea and then head northeast in a snaking diagonal line that must, at some point, put him near Clangston.

The journey was like so many of his other journeys. He had grown too accustomed to privations to feel them. The few wonders he encountered seemed old and tired. Nature was no longer trying to kill or to amaze him. But although he had spent the greatest part of his life in those prairies, deserts, and mountains, he still was unable to feel that they were his own. After thousands of nights under those same stars, he woke up as many thousands of mornings under that same sun and trudged for as many thousands of days under the same sky, always feeling out of place. That land—its beasts and plants—had fed him for such a long time that it had become, in a strict sense, part of his body. If Lorimer was right, the vastness around him was now his flesh. And yet, nothing—not the countless footsteps taken or knowledge acquired, not the adversaries bested or the friends made, not the love felt or the blood shed—had made it his. Except for his brother, there was little he missed about his Swedish childhood, but sometimes he thought that that brief period (which, compared to the long and eventful years that had followed it, was so short that he had yielded to the illusion of believing that he could remember every single day spent at the farm since he was old enough to be aware of his surroundings) was like a pinhole in the unending expanse, and everything—the plains, the mountains, the cañons, the salt flats, the forests—had drained down through it. Immense as they were, those territories had never held him or embraced him—not even when he dug into the ground and found shelter in the earth’s bosom. Anyone he met, including children, had, in his eyes, more right to be in that land than he did. Nothing was his; nothing claimed him. He had gone into the wilderness with the intention of coming out on the other end. That he had stopped trying did not mean that this was now his place.

For the first few weeks, he kept up his habit of avoiding people. It was easy to stay clear from the few houses and hamlets he spotted in the distance, and in those tracts, where robbers and vandals presumably abounded, he, a shy stranger minding his own business, was invariably left alone. Still, there were strange indications of human presence in those regions. One morning, he found himself facing a line of tall poles. They were about twenty paces from one another, strung together with a cable tied at the very top. Some birds perched on the black rope. The line was long enough to bend with the surface of the earth in both directions, shrink, and vanish. He felt an unaccountable kind of apprehension riding under the cable, as if he had crossed the border into an unimaginable territory.

As he proceeded north, the scattered hamlets became neighboring villages and even towns. Riding around them undisturbed was not too hard, but it became difficult to evade wranglers with their cattle, farmers with their produce, and merchants with their goods. Normally a tip of the hat was sufficient. But traveling on, a new obstacle put him face-to-face with strangers—fences. He had barely seen them in America before, and only around houses. Now they sliced through the plains in every direction. Some railings were long enough to divide the horizon in two. A few times, it took him a couple of days to find his way around them. Long or short, these detours inevitably led to a brief exchange with some laborer leaning on a wooden post. During his first conversation, he could barely utter a word. He could not hear anything over the inner rumble of fear, and his face refused to do what it should. But that day, Håkan made a great discovery: it did not matter. Most men were as laconic as himself, and the rest were too eager to tell their own stories to listen to anybody else. Whether Håkan spoke or not—whether he even seemed engaged at all or not—had almost no effect on others. Still, he never dismounted during these conversations, convinced that once on his feet, his height would become apparent. That aside, there was not much else to do. When greeted, greet back; when spoken to, look down; for most questions, a vague grunt. Throughout the following days, he asked a few of these cattlemen about Clangston. The first ones he spoke to had never heard of the place, but farther up north, most people knew about it. The mining town, they called it. He was headed the right way, they said.

Ever since those five men had come to the burrow, Håkan had been surprised to discover that almost everybody out west was young. Perhaps this had always been the case, and he had failed to notice it when he was young himself. But now he seldom saw anyone his age. The vigorous men he encountered seemed to acknowledge his years with a respectful bow of the head. Taking advantage of this, Håkan made himself look older, weaker, and smaller by slouching and shrugging on the saddle. His bepatched attire added to the character. Sometimes, when spoken to, he pretended not to hear. With each new performance, he perfected his role. He started to droop his head and squint from underneath his calculatedly furrowed brow, barely visible behind the long strands of hair that, with great deliberation, concealed his face. His voice became a trembling, creaky mumble. He knew it was his imagination, but it seemed to him that his yellow draft horse was playing along with his character, looking down and sighing despondently each time they stopped. The orange mane even poured over his forehead—like Håkan’s hair over his—when, with dejected apathy, he reached for a blade of grass. The more Håkan played the role of the infirm, the more he enjoyed it. Not only because he felt safe in the disguise of his shriveled and shrunken body, but also because he found an immense and unexpected pleasure in deception. Falsehood was a new experience for him. During those days, he realized that, except for the incident with the tincture and the quail stew, he had never lied or betrayed anyone’s confidence. He did not think this was because he had been an exceptionally virtuous man. It was just the way things had turned out.

Farther up north, the black soil turned into pale dust, the fences vanished, and the country went back to its own kind of order—an organization that Håkan never understood but always revered. He slept in one of his portable leather shelters and ate only a few pieces of charqui a day. The impulse to trap, skin, and tan was almost impossible to repress. Those tasks had defined his life for so many years, and he barely knew what to do without the daily contact with those small bodies and the surprise of their anatomies freed from fur. But he abstained. He wanted to keep his clothes clean and would rather not look and smell like a trapper with his musky spoils hanging off his saddle. Just a poor old homesteader on his workhorse.

One afternoon, as he reached the top of a hill, he saw a road penciled in the distance. Horsemen and wagons in puffs of dust. Even coaches. According to the last man he had spoken to, the road had to lead to Clangston. Håkan turned around and looked at the desert. He would never see it again.

He rode into Clangston at dusk, making himself more decrepit and smaller than ever. Gothenburg, Portsmouth, San Francisco, and the sheriff’s town were the only cities he had ever set foot in. Having spent only a few moments in each of them, he had no accurate notion of their size, but Clangston was infinitely busier than all of them. For a while, he sat on his horse amid the tumult and the din, stunned. Then, at a foot pace, he rode into town. Wagons and carts overloaded with clanging wares rushed by, their drivers jerking the reins, vociferating, and insulting their own horses and distracted passersby alike. They hurled imprecations at him for riding so slowly and erratically, and someone even lashed him on the shoulder. People of all sorts walked briskly up and down the streets. Workers with shovels and pickaxes, ladies in the finest dresses imaginable, boys on errands, youths on arrogant horses, crews of Chinese miners, gentlemen in coats shinier than any of the ladies’ dresses, men with hungry eyes and slipshod shoes, waiters with trays full of food and drink, tight packs of sternly dressed and heavily armed couriers carrying boxes and briefcases. And every foot—covered in patent leather or rugged buckskin, resting on the thinnest soles or the highest heels, wrapped with rags and twine or laces and buckles—had to tread on the black, brown, and red slime that covered the street from threshold to threshold like a stagnant river of mud, excrement, and rotting food. But the sludge did not slow anyone down. Even the numerous drunkards and beggars seemed to be in a hurry, stumbling from one side of the street to the other with pointless resolution or, with businesslike expeditiousness, soliciting money and food from strangers. In dusky public houses, drinking was not a matter of leisure but either an excuse to conduct various transactions or an activity undertaken with the utmost rigor and dedication. Around green tables, cards were dealt, received, and played with brisk earnestness. Wild melodies coming from unseen instruments whose sounds Håkan did not recognize clashed against each other like simultaneous arguments in different languages. Behind a window, pink faces were being shaved. Grown men with boyishly naked cheeks. Mustaches, whiskers, oddly shaped beards, hair so sleek it seemed combed with honey. Women dangled under spires of curls and ringlets. Abstracted and disdainful, these ladies paid more attention to their ruffled hems hovering over the slime than to the constant brawls around them. On a threshold, by a wagon, under a billboard, at a counter, someone was being yelled at, shoved, punched, or kicked. Some fights were broken up; others were encouraged by loose circles of onlookers. Luxurious carriages drove by, pulled by teams of four and even six horses. Floating on their subtle springs and braces, the ornate cabs seemed to be bobbing on placid waters instead of rolling through the muck—at least until they got to a street corner, where, invariably, there was another carriage or wagon wanting to cross or turn, resulting in a turbulence of horses nervously neighing and huffing while the coachmen screamed and cracked their whips in the air. Inside, the women, with calculated indifference, looked ahead. Would the lady who had held Håkan captive still be alive? Where was her inn? He looked right and left, trying to find that single block with no opposing sidewalk that had been the beginning of Clangston, but there were so many buildings and so many streets. All constructions, from stables to taverns, looked new but also worn by constant activity. There were many elaborate houses, some of which reminded him of the ornate dresser he had found in the desert years ago. Almost every building was some sort of shop. Many sold goods, while others were simply full of rows and rows of desks at which groomed clerks in shirtsleeves toiled away on large sheets of paper. Despite stillness reigning in these places, it was plain that the anxiety and the strain of those scriveners bent over their ledgers exceeded that of any man yelling or fighting on a corner. All the stores were busy. In bright, hectic showrooms, customers examined each piece of merchandise with expert eyes, gravely compared different items presented by aproned salesmen, haggled, bought things by the dozen. Sacks, casks, and boxes were brought out from backrooms and placed on shelves and counters. Fabric was rolled up into soft pillars. Wires and ropes of different kinds were spooled into massive wheels. Bundles were opened, their contents displayed, inspected, and sealed up again. Confections and fruits glistened in their glass cabinets and domes. Scores upon scores of packages were ceaselessly being wrapped in brown paper and tied with sisal string. Money changed hands. Gold in different forms—coins, small ingots, nuggets, dust. There was also some paper money. The commercial frenzy overflowed the confines of the stores and poured out on the streets in the form of stalls and stands with wares of every sort. And beyond these makeshift displays thrived yet another, smaller, form of trade. With shrill, hoarse cries, peddlers, street traders, and merchants with boxes strapped to their torsos walked around advertising their products. The ones without boxes were preachers, and there was a great profusion of them.