by Cesar Aira
On their way back to Buenos Aires, the two guests let their horses set their own pace. They took the low road, enjoying the evening air as the English often do, saying little to each other; the silence of the empty fields allowed them to speak without raising their voices even though their mounts went different ways around the ruts in the track. They watched as a startled chaja bird scrambled away from them in panic, falling all over itself as it did so. Both of them simultaneously thought of the Restorer. Plump pigeons bent the branches of some terebinth trees almost down to the ground. No doubt they were settling for the night. To their left, the dun-colored river was as still as a lake; only where the water lapped against the edge of the green-tinged shoreline was there any sign of movement, and then only if one peered closely. Thoroughly familiar with this landscape, the Consul ceased to pay it any attention, and concentrated instead on political matters. This meant he was neglecting his guest, but that did not worry him unduly. He was one of the old school of diplomats who considered it no part of a consul’s duties to act as a guide for his fellow countrymen. He kept his courtesies to a strict minimum, and on this occasion felt he had more than done his duty with the visit to the country’s main attraction, the Dictator. Besides which, there were two further considerations: first, if it were true that Clarke intended to travel into the interior, he could obviously look after himself in Buenos Aires; and second, politics gave him a lot to think about: so much indeed that twenty-four hours a day were not enough. So the Consul became completely engrossed in his own thoughts. Clarke meanwhile let his horse pick its own way. Rather than staring at the land, he was looking up at the sky, which was a wash of purple, with broad streaks of blue and pink. It was still stiflingly hot, and the atmosphere was oppressively humid. The silence was crisscrossed by the whirring of insects. . . . When the Consul raised his eyes again he was intrigued by what Clarke was doing. He had let go of the reins and his hands were busy doing something at the level of his stomach. From behind, the Consul had no idea what this might be. He pushed his horse on, twisting to one side so that he could find out without seeming indiscreet. Clarke was concentrating so hard he did not even notice. He was holding a small metal box open in his left hand, and doing something inside it with his other hand. The Consul recognized the apparatus as a chromatograph. It was made up of rows of tiny metal rings, into which Clarke was inserting needles with a dexterity that spoke of long practice. The Consul moved no closer. More than a waste of time, the operation seemed to him sinister: it was like sticking pins into the soft colors of the sunset.
A few days later, with all his preparations for the journey to the interior completed, the naturalist made another trip out in this same direction, but this time he rode considerably further, to a village north of Buenos Aires where a well-known painter lived in seclusion. On this occasion, Clarke traveled alone. He set out in the early morning, enjoyed a solitary picnic mid-route at around eleven, took a siesta under a weeping willow on the riverbank, then continued unhurriedly on his way, at little more than a snail’s pace. Below a certain threshold of speed, he found it hard to direct the horse: he was unsure whether they were advancing or not. He wanted to find the painter awake, but knew that whatever allowances he made, he always underestimated the length of siesta that people slept in these tropical climes. There was no well-defined track, and nobody seemed to be about. Just once he met a cart driven by a black man dressed in a green livery as brilliant as a parrot’s plumage. A child of about four or five ran in front, shooing off the pigeons that settled in the path the cart was inching its way along. The draught animals were a spectacle in their own right: twin white oxen, which had been so badly castrated that with the passage of time (they looked to be hundreds of years old), they had taken on the appearance of Japanese bulls, with swollen dewlaps and so many folds of white skin dangling from their backs that they appeared to be covered in sheets of marble, like Bernini statues in Rome. The two men greeted each other with great courtesy as they passed. At the time, it seemed to Clarke that the black man was wearing a pair of eyeglasses, but afterward he was not sure he had seen correctly. A little further on, where the riverbank became steeper, he saw a group of creatures which from a distance he took to be crabs, but which turned out to be hedgehogs lying uncurled in the sunshine. A curious thing happened. The hedgehogs, which are the most timid creatures imaginable, saw him at the very moment he caught sight of them, but instead of reacting as a group, they did so one by one, and though this was a very rapid process, Clarke was able to see how each of them took flight. Not that it could really be called a flight: hedgehogs move extremely slowly, but if frightened, they do contrive to disappear somehow or other. As Clarke watched, each of them rolled up into a ball, and this meant they all began to roll down the riverbank and into the water. One after the other, until there was not a single animal left, before the Englishman had so much as dared to blink.
Prilidiano’s siesta was shorter than usual that afternoon, but it was not without its disturbing phantoms, which was normal, far too normal. It was pure habit, as with children. And this man, so important for Argentine history in his century, had a great deal of the child about him. He was plump, impetuous, imprudent, fearful, a slave to his passions, the plaything of the wildest fantasies. Every day he conjured up this theater of horror within the confines of his villa at the top end of San Isidro village: but only while the sun shone, because he always slept a dreamless sleep for all the hours when it was below the horizon. He was unmarried, with no close family, and no servants since he had placed himself in the hands of Facunda Lopez, who had started out as his cook, but by now had also taken over the duties of maid, housekeeper, gardener, and even groom. Facunda was a well-rounded woman of around forty years, who had no need to learn any erotic tricks to keep her master in the palm of her hand, because he was already there, and always would be. Whenever she talked to herself — and sometimes when she was speaking out loud too, as she was no model of discretion — she called the painter “Repetido,” because he always made love in exactly the same way, without any variation, and never missed a day, with his childlike insatiability. She went to him, without fail, when his siesta was coming to an end; she watched him pretending to be asleep for a moment, then flung herself on him.
For several months now, Prilidiano had been painting a picture for his own pleasure. It was the first time he had done this, without the painting being commissioned. Just for himself, not to be sold. This had unnerved him somewhat: at first he had doubts as to what kind of art might emerge from this gratuitous act. Painting with his usual excruciating meticulousness, he watched as the image slowly took shape, and it was just like any other. Perhaps it was art after all. He worked even more slowly than usual, because he was painting in his spare time. His original idea had been to paint Facunda sleeping her siesta naked. Naturally, the painting was and always would be his secret. But precisely in order not to let slip even a fraction of that secret, which was far more valuable than the canvas itself, he wanted to paint Facunda a second time, in the same bed, alongside the first figure. Muddleheaded as he was, he did not realize that this meant he would be portraying two women rather than the same one twice. By the time he caught on, it was too late. This totally confused him. He was a genius, but things like this were always happening to him. At least he had learned his lesson. And since he truly was the Repetido, he went on learning it siesta after siesta.
Although not unknown, visits to the villa were rare. When the Englishman turned up in mid-afternoon, the two inhabitants of the house were still sleepy. Facunda came out to hold his horse. She asked him who he was and what he wanted. After he had told her, Clarke began to feel it was impertinent of her to insist so much on whether he really wished to see the painter. Of course he did. Did he wish to see him, or to have his portrait painted? If the latter were the case, he would need to learn to be patient. He had chosen the slowest artist in the world. Annoyed at this unwanted and trivial advice, Clarke strode into the living roo
m without waiting for the woman to invite him in, and sat down. Within a minute, the artist appeared. Clarke thought it must be his son, but it was the man himself. He was not in the least as Clarke had imagined him: a plump, dark-skinned youngster, turning bald although no one would have taken him to be more than twenty-five, and with the asymmetrical, slanted eyes of a lunatic. He had no manners, but the Englishman had enough for them both. Clarke explained he had been given the address by an aunt of the house owner, and then launched into discreet praise of the painter’s work. This was the first time that Prilidiano had heard anything of the sort. He agreed with everything he was told, with a charming ingenuousness. Facunda, who had apparently disappeared for good, suddenly reappeared in the room with a bottle of chilled claret and two glasses. In the twinkling of an eye, the two men downed half the bottle. As he warmed to his visitor, the painter confessed he was thinking of traveling to Europe to become a little less ignorant. Clarke spoke strongly against the idea. Prilidiano had all he needed for his development in Argentina. The artistic scene in Europe was exhausted; before much longer all the old world painters would start emigrating to the new. What about technique? the painter asked. He already had more than enough. And the old masters? When it came down to it, the Englishman said, they were not worth the effort. They continued in this vein for some time. Prilidiano was sorry he did not have any of his paintings in the house to show his enthusiastic admirer. He did have one, that of the two Facundas, but that was not finished and besides, it was not something to show to others. What he could offer were a few works hanging on the walls of the living room. Clarke stood up politely. They turned out to be pictures woven in wool and esparto grass by Manuelita Rosas, who had given them to the painter. Clarke stared at them without the slightest idea of what to say. They were abominable, wretched. Over the previous few days he had seen perhaps half a dozen portraits by Prilidiano in Buenos Aires salons. He thought them better than Reynolds and Gainsborough put together, the sign of true genius, not so much for the incredible psychological insight into their sitters they demonstrated, though that in itself was sublime, but for the way they created a surface. In that, they were beyond compare. Prilidiano achieved a visual clarity that was pure visibility, a way of taking the surface to the surface of the picture and making the two come together, of creating painting at the precise point where the viewer was — unbeknown to himself — wishing it might be realized. The painter’s triumph went far beyond the teasing interplay of ingenuity and knowledge. Manuelita’s ridiculously labored woolen offerings were the exact opposite. Could it be out of sarcasm that the genius had them hung in his living room, and was showing them off in this way? Clarke found it impossible to decide.
Once they had exhausted their discussion about painting, they sat down again and turned to the visitor’s plans. Clarke was a naturalist, and his intention was to travel into the hinterland to study several animals, and one in particular, which a number of scientific institutions in Europe were interested in.
“Well,” Prilidiano said lightheartedly, “if you take a good embalmer along with you, I suppose you’ll be able to get some fine specimens.”
No, that was not the Englishman’s intention at all. He said that the last thing he wanted to do was to embalm anything. He was not aiming to collect things, quite the opposite. He briefly outlined the new theory according to which some animals were descended from others, which meant there was no point in preserving them in any one fixed form. Nor was there any point taking them off somewhere else because according to another, complementary theory, in ancient times all the continents had been joined together as one . . . the painter’s mind was filled with confusion. His guest might just as well have been talking Greek. He preferred to change topics, especially as something had occurred to him.
“So, you’re going out . . . into the desert?”
“Yes.”
“But isn’t that where the Indians are?”
“Well, yes.”
“But my friend, as soon as they set eyes on you, they’ll kill you!”
“I hope I’ll have the chance to take proper precautions.”
Prilidiano did not insist, because his gadfly mind had already gone into reverse. However absurd the idea about some animals being descended from others might be, it had given him a notion as to how he might resolve the dilemma of his painting of Facunda taking her siesta. Which at the very least was proof that some ideas can descend from others. But he did not stop there (he always promised himself he would pick up the threads of his thoughts later on). It was no great matter that the Indians kill a traveler; that was a risk to be run like so many others. The question needed to be posed on a more general level. How could one be happy traveling? Wasn’t it a contradiction in terms? For years, he had been postponing his study trip to Europe because he could not imagine a life other than the one he was living, down to its minutest details. On the one hand he placed too much importance on happiness; on the other, he did not consider it so important that he should go in search of it. Painting and love were everywhere or they were nowhere. In a flash of inspiration of his childish, impish brain, Prilidiano got to the bottom of Darwinism and turned it completely upside down. Every change meant turning full circle. Eternity itself was a process of change, it was the present, the proof of happiness, and each and every one of these words was interchangeable.
“I’d really like to go with you,” he said, gloriously inconsistent, “but I can’t. I have so much to do!”
Before his expedition into the desert, Clarke paid a second and final visit to Palermo to say farewell to the Restorer and to thank him for providing him with a guide or “tracker,” a gaucho by the name of Gauna or Guana. He called on Rosas one Saturday afternoon at the epiphanic hour. After they had paid Manuelita the customary compliments, they shut themselves in Rosas’s office to talk. As usual, the Restorer looked relaxed and unkempt, his face bright red from all the wine he had drunk during a gargantuan barbecue he had eaten with the provincial governors. He smelled of grilled meat and wine. He had kept abreast of all the Englishman’s movements. That was the advantage of having a secret police, although it was no secret to anybody that he had one: he got to know everything about everybody else. But by the same token, they all knew everything about him, because in order to have a police force, he had to live a public life. Consequently,
the two of them wasted no time on practical matters. Instead, they talked about languages. Clarke’s Spanish was particularly good for a foreigner, something which he modestly put down to an innate talent. Rosas considered himself blessed with the same talent, to a remarkable degree. He had never put this to the test, nor did he need to do so, because his certainty required no proof. With such a gift, he was saying, he would like to try not such simple languages as English or French, but something really difficult like the babble of the black people. He might at any time decide to study and then write a grammar of the Argentine Bantu language. The Englishman nodded his assent.
“And please don’t think,” Rosas went on, “that I would be driven to this out of boredom, as I have no lack of things to keep me busy. And I do not mean simply political matters. If only you knew how many domestic problems I have to deal with! Take this fellow, for example . . .” A little boy, one of his countless illegitimate children, had sneaked into the study, and was watching them from the depths of an armchair. “He has got it into his head to start squinting recently, and I’m worried he might get caught in a draught and stay stuck like that forever. I know that physiologically my fears are groundless, but I can’t help it, I can’t shake them off. He, however, could shake off his wretched habit, but he persists in it because he knows how much it upsets me.” The boy, a silent and pleasant-looking child, focused on them both perfectly well; perhaps he had no idea even of how to squint. “Although I must admit that when I was his age, I spent my whole time cross-eyed. But I’m not the kind of parent who is happy simply to say: ‘I was seven too once.’”
In respons
e, Clarke merely nodded. He considered Rosas a genius; if not for languages, then for his “small talk.” This latest digression, for example, had been a ruse to find out just how much Clarke knew about Indian societies. But Clarke was not that stupid. Of course he knew what squinting meant to the Indians. Moreover, he was one of the few Europeans of his day who could have explained it in one of the native American languages. He had no intention however of telling the Restorer this, not even to fill a gap in the conversation.
