The Captive

This story is told out in one of the old frontier towns - either Junín or Tapalquén. A boy was missing after an Indian raid; it was said that the marauders had carried him off. The boy's parents searched for him in vain; years later, a soldier just back from Indian territory told them about a blue-eyed savage who might be their son. At long last they traced him (the circumstances of the search have not come down to us, and I do not want to invent what I don't know) and they thought they recognized their child. Marked by the wilderness and primitive living, the man no longer understood his mother tongue but, meek and incurious, he let himself be led to his old home. There he stopped - maybe because the others stopped. He stared at the door as though not understanding what it was. All of a sudden, ducking his head, he let out a cry, darted through the entranceway and the two long patios, and burst into the kitchen. Without a second's hesitation, he plunged an arm up behind the soot-blackened mantelpiece and drew out a small knife with a horn handle that he had hidden there as a boy. His eyes lit up with joy, and his parents wept because they had found their lost son.

Maybe other memories followed upon this one, but the Indian could not live indoors and one day he left to go back to his open spaces. I would like to know what he felt in that first bewildering moment, when past and present merged; I would like to know whether in that dizzying instant the lost son was born again and died, or whether - like a child or a dog - he managed to recognize his people and his home.

[1957]