Caballos

Caballos is the mare Renato gives Simona after their marriage, first a companion through which she comes to love the remote landscape and later a casualty of his control. Her death strips away one of the few attachments and capabilities Simona has gained in her confined life, sharpening the danger of the escape she is still trying to imagine.

Gift and Life on the Estate

After the wedding, Simona moves with Renato to his large estancia near Junín, in the sparsely settled countryside around Fortín Tiburcio. The austere house is shared with Renato’s sisters, Augusta and Salomé; both are cold toward Simona and deferential to their brother. While Renato treats her tenderly, he gives her a mare. Simona learns to ride and begins to cross the estate on horseback, gradually growing fond of the surrounding landscape. For the first two years, she is almost content with her life there.

The mare is more than a gift within this early period of relative ease: riding gives Simona a way to inhabit the immense plains as something other than an intimidating enclosure. The text ties her growing attachment to the place directly to learning to ride, making the animal a companion in the change from fear of the landscape to affection for it.

Isolation and the Mare’s Death

That partial contentment gives way to confinement. Renato increasingly leaves Simona at the estate with his sisters, who watch her closely and monitor her menstruation. After a doctor tells her that Renato is sterile, he beats her and breaks two of her ribs. Salomé takes charge of the mail, cutting Simona off from letters from her family. Renato also tells her on her twenty-eighth birthday that she will never set foot in Buenos Aires again.

Simona secretly resolves not to reach her thirtieth birthday at Fortín Tiburcio. The thought of suicide initially seems like a way to escape, but imagining her own death makes her recognize that she does not want to die. She begins to think constantly about escape, while Renato keeps her under watch. The mare, once given as a gift and associated with riding across the estate, is shot dead by Renato. The account identifies her death as one of the practical obstacles to Simona’s escape: she does not know how to drive, and she sleeps in a locked room.

Narrative Significance

The mare’s fate marks the narrowing of Simona’s available world. Her earlier rides had helped transform a desolate landscape into somewhere she could love; the killing of the animal removes that companionship and closes off a means of movement just as she is searching for a way out. The relationship is grounded in Simona’s experience of the mare, rather than in an independent account of the animal’s perspective, but the mare’s death has material consequences for her choices and vulnerability.

That loss also makes the later flood a reversal of the estate’s boundaries. After days of heavy rain, the Arroyo Salado rises, the fencing is torn away, and cattle are swept toward the water. Renato summons Simona to go with him to deal with the livestock. The mare is not part of the flood episode; her earlier death establishes what Simona has already lost before an outside force disrupts the enclosure that had kept her trapped.