The Tank’s Curb

A short story by Jorge Verón Schenone

Beginning

Juana took her hand off the iron when she heard Elvira shout from the pond. But she didn’t look down. She looked toward the house, toward the open window of the gallery, where on the oak table there still lay the papers that Don Héctor had signed with the very hand he used to raise his glass at every harvest.

Below, her father’s farm stretched over three hectares of almost black green. From the wooden platform, four meters above the ground, the train whistle toward Tigre cut the air to the north; to the south, the dust of the Camino Real rose behind the Ford 28 truck, already returning from the Central Market with an empty bed.

To one side of the quebracho pillars that held the sheet‑metal cylinder, the pond opened. The tank’s drainpipe dripped there, keeping the water fresh and oxygenated. Her sister Elvira, muddy up to her knees, dug at the shore. At twelve, Elvira still believed that fish understood the language of secrets. She whispered to them as she tossed crumbs, fascinated by the orange flash of the golden carp rising to the surface, showing their bellies shiny as copper coins.

Development

Beyond the eucalyptus grove, the farm’s ecosystem roared with its own cadence. Near the compost bins, the Creole pigs – pink, with broad backs – rooted through the chard scraps. In a shaded corner of the sty, the smallest piglets suckled on rags soaked in warm milk, tied to short chains anchored to a post so that, in their desperation, they wouldn’t drag them into the mud. Next to the house, Panchín and Marcelo ran, raising dust, dodging the Rhode Island Red hens with their mahogany feathers and the Plymouth Rocks, which from a distance looked grey because of the barring on their plumage. In the center of the yard, a Creole rooster with a black chest and greenish sickles watched arrogantly, crowing off‑beat. Seven children. Seven reasons why Don Pancho got up before dawn and came back with his hands cracked by the hoe handle and the cold. Nino, Chiquita, and Anita played hide‑and‑seek among the corn rows, their shrill voices bouncing off the brick wall of the shed where the salami hung in winter.

—¡Juana! —shouted Elvira, shielding her eyes from the glare—. There’s a new one! It’s not gold. It’s bronze, almost the color of the mud at the bottom.

Juana didn’t answer at once. She remembered the papers. Don Héctor’s signature, the lifelong partner, the man who ate at their table every Sunday and clapped Don Pancho on the back, calling him “brother.” The red numbers, the invented debts, the fake invoices for seeds that were never bought and the machinery that never reached the farm.

She remembered her father sitting, head in his hands, while Don Héctor explained in a soft voice with evasive eyes that the only way out was to sell. Three hectares of black soil, furrows tended for twenty years. The chorizos and blood sausages that Grandma taught them to stuff with hands stained by fat and paprika on slaughter day, the salami curing in the shade, and dawns with bitter mate. All in exchange for settling a debt that Don Pancho had never incurred.

—Come down, come see it —insisted Elvira, splashing water on her espadrilles.

Juana leaned her hand on the iron ladder. The smell of wet earth and hay rose with the afternoon heat. She could go down, kneel in the mud beside her sister and tell her that dark carp was the last king of a kingdom about to be dismantled. She could explain that Don Héctor had driven a knife into her father’s back with the same hand that brought them peppermint candies on Sundays. She could tell her that soon men with theodolites would come to measure the lots, that the eucalyptuses would fall, that the pond would be filled with rubble and that brick walls would rise over the beet fields.

But she looked at Panchín tripping over his own feet as he chased the rooster, heard Anita’s crystalline laugh shouting “no peeking!”, and saw Elvira’s sweaty nape, bent over the water as if the whole world were reduced to that pond and that bronze fish.

Ending

Juana let go of the iron and started to descend, rung by rung.

—I’m coming —she said, placing her hand on her sister’s shoulder—. Give it another crumb, it must be hungry.

And she said nothing more.