The Hare

by Cesar Aira

  “What d’you think you’re doing?” muttered the drunkard.

  “Animals, wild beasts!”

  “What are you saying?”

  The pair swapped the grossest insults. Luckily, neither of them could hear the other, because the Indians were shouting even louder than them. Clarke kept feeling at his belt in search of a revolver he had not worn for fifteen years; Miltín slipped and fell to a sitting position and stayed there, howling like a banshee.

  Happily, outside the circle of violence, Gauna had retained a minimum of sangfroid. He sent the boy to grab Clarke, while he himself went to round up the horses. With the greatest difficulty, seeing he was in no great shape himself, Carlos succeeded in dragging Clarke some distance from the fire, where Gauna caught up with them and made them mount up.

  “Animals, animals!” Clarke shouted, among other things.

  The Indians did not even bother to prevent them leaving. Perhaps they were in no state to do so. What they did do was launch all kinds of scabrous taunts in their wake. One in particular, a man with a formidable voice, shouted after them for a long while. Clarke was sobbing with indignation and nerves. It was the moon which finally calmed him down. They rode on for two hours, at random of course, the main thing being to put distance between themselves and the camp. They halted when Carlos fell straight off his horse with a dull thud. The chill of the night had cleared Clarke’s head a lot, and he was worried by the fall, but the boy lay fast asleep and snoring on the ground. They spread out their things there and then, and, surrendering themselves body and soul to the mercies of the night, slept like logs.

  The next day, as was only to be expected, their timetable was turned upside down. They slept all morning: since it was cloudy, the sun did not wake them. Then they rode for a while, their heads throbbing and their stomachs churning. What few comments they made were about the disgusting murder and how savage the Indians were. Gauna was even more taciturn than usual; it was obvious that he was obsessed by some idea. They were fortunate enough to come across a picturesque stream, where they bathed to refresh themselves from the heat of a gathering storm, then they drank a hasty cup of tea, and took a siesta. The rain woke them. Sheltering beneath the trees, they waited a long while for it to cease, and when it eased to a drizzle, they set off in the gloomy dusk. It continued to rain off and on, but since they were neither hungry nor sleepy, they continued to ride until, around midnight, the sky cleared and the moon came out. Immediately, they halted to make a fire, then, in marked contrast to the previous night, spent a short time sitting round it in silence, and soon fell asleep.

  The next day was one of brilliant sunshine and gentle breezes. Their spirits lifted, the bad dream was left behind. The air was so clear that the horizon, perhaps the only thing to be seen, stood out with a special clarity. They could almost make out the far side of it, as if the line had become crystalline, a prismatic extension that divided the visible from the invisible, and broadened perspective beyond the normal. And it was precisely at this point that they saw the wanderer whose changing position had given the Englishman such cause for reflection.

  “There he is again,” he said to Carlos.

  “I can see him, I can see him.”

  “Is he coming or going?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you!”

  “Let’s see . . . if he is moving from left to right, that means he’s traveling in the same direction as us; if it’s the opposite, then he’s bound to cross our path without our realizing it, so that we’ll see him on the other side, on any other side, because that depends on where we are at the time. . . . What a mess! We should draw up a timetable, plot our relative positions in black and white. It makes me afraid we’re lost. I think I’m going to have to have a serious talk with Gauna.” He lowered his voice as he said these last words, but fifty yards ahead of them the gaucho’s shoulders shrugged visibly.

  In the meantime, the wanderer had vanished again, like a speck of dust drifting out of a sunbeam.

  “Who can it be?” said Clarke.

  “Some Indian or other.”

  “Of course. But where is he going? What is he thinking? Isn’t it intriguing to ask oneself that kind of question?”

  “All questions are intriguing, Clarke: if not, they wouldn’t be questions.”

  “Do you know what it made me think of, a moment ago? Of Natural Man. There was a time when I read about nothing else. In the last century it was an intellectual fashion . . . it still is, in fact.”

  “Natural Man?”

  “Yes. With a little philosophical effort, you can imagine the characteristics of a man stripped of all the prejudices of reason, culture, customs, and so on. It’s similar to building an automaton, but by taking bits away rather than adding them. In the end you’re left with the essence, the naked heart . . .”

  “But that’s very poetic!”

  “And scientific as well. Getting to know distant and exotic peoples, like the Indians we see here, fills one with ideas about Natural Man. Or at least it does me, who lacks imagination.”

  “But we are always creating people in our fantasies.”

  “Rousseau, one of the inventors of the idea of Natural Man, says that the creation of one man by another is the most obvious sign of a failure of education.”

  “In that case, he was the one with no education.”

  “He did die mad.”

  “Really? That often happens to philosophers.”

  “That’s the way of the world.”

  “Isn’t it rather repugnant to create monsters?”

  “If you think about it properly, yes. But that takes us back to Natural Man by another route. From the outset, man is a kind of monster, an improbable conjunction of mind and body.”

  “What about those Indians we were with the night before last? Would you say they were natural or artificial?”

  “Both things.”

  “But which side would you say they were closer to?”

  “What would you say?”

  “Natural, in spite of everything.”

  Clarke suddenly remembered his responsibility — however fleeting and accidental — as the educator of a young mind. He thought of the inevitable failure. This led him along tracks that took him back into his own past, and his autobiography (as he knew better than anyone) bore a mysterious relation to Natural Man. He spent the hours and leagues until lunchtime pondering these thoughts, while beside him Carlos Alzaga Prior was equally wrapped up in himself. Shortly after their siesta, toward the end of the afternoon, they came across a flock of ostriches, and soon afterward met up with the men hunting them, who turned out to be from Coliqueo’s tribe. When these Indians heard that the white men were intending to visit them, they put on a show of great amazement at the (nonexistent) coincidence, and escorted them to their camp, forgetting all about the ostriches — who, to judge by the speed they were traveling, must by now have circled the globe.

  7: The Duck’s Egg

  “The duck’s egg is the most effective of all,” Coliqueo declared with an air of finality.

  Clarke felt completely overwhelmed by the situation, out of place, struck dumb. The tent was full of women, children, dogs, and a fire where water was constantly being boiled for tea. Despite the fact that two of the leather sideflaps had been rolled up to allow air to circulate, the tent was still thick with smoke, so that Coliqueo and Clarke’s eyes were as pink as if they had been weeping profusely over the death of a loved one. And that in a sense was what Clarke had been doing, because he had sat vigil all afternoon over the dead body of Truth. Coliqueo was the prototype of the dishonest Indian, which might be comical at first, but became increasingly depressing as time went by. For his guest, that time had been and gone a long while since.

  The way they had arrived at the duck was tortuous in the extreme, even though with hindsight it seemed not only direct, but even over-hasty. All the Indian’s lies and deliberate misleadings came together as if they were part of a deliberate stratagem. Of
course there was no plan: Coliqueo did not have the brain for that. But on reflection, the twenty-four hours that the three white men had spent in his camp were nothing if not predictable. As he began to listen to the story of the duck’s egg, Clarke was at pains to go over in his mind what had happened up to that point. He did this quickly, but in a detailed fashion, because the secret of his fatalistic acceptance lay in the details. It did not matter that there was a gap in the conversation; there had been others before that, and with less reason; besides which common courtesy, to which he continued to pay tribute even among these savages, owed him this respite. His interlocutor could put up with a silence. In all fairness, it was the least he could do.

  Coliqueo was a tall, thin, ungainly man, as black as an African, with the face of a Chinese gangster and flowing locks lightened by chamomile. He wore a filthy army uniform that revealed his skinny grease-covered frame (the Indians were so brutish that they used grease even when dressed in clothes). Like all the rest of them, Coliqueo drank; he had that animal, cruelly cunning streak that the Indians got from habitual drinking. Although he was supposed to come from the most blue-blooded Mapuche aristocracy, he had no manners whatsoever. Clarke was surprised to find himself put out that Coliqueo indulged only in the briefest of squints when he sat down to talk with him. After all, he told himself, what did it matter to him. The Duke and Duchess of Kent, whom he encountered in his own country, did not turn cross-eyed on formal occasions, and nobody thought any the worse of them for that.

  The chaos and promiscuity of Coliqueo’s encampment were in stark contrast to the courtly disposition of Salinas Grandes. In fact, it was a provisional settlement, or rather a seasonal one, as in the winters these Indians took advantage of the hospitality of their white allies. Although they were totally influenced by the white man, they were no less Indian for it; on the contrary, some of their peculiarities were spectacularly exaggerated. They had chosen to spend the summer in an area of low hills, through which a narrow, treeless river ran.

  The previous night, when the three white men had arrived, the Indians had been in the middle of a feast. They were celebrating the wedding feast of Coliqueo’s eldest son, a youth who atop a magnificent body had the same head as his father. Coliqueo was proud that his fifteen sons all looked like him. He made them line up in the bonfire light for Clarke to inspect: and it was true, they did all have his features, some more, some less. Some indeed had almost none; but here imagination and goodwill came into play, plus their progenitor’s assertion.

  There were both drawbacks and advantages to arriving in the midst of an Indian feast as they had done; among the latter was the fact of being able to mingle almost unnoticed among the uproar and to observe without themselves being the object of unwanted attention. And the savages lent themselves almost excessively to observation, smothered in grease, turned into mirrors. They even performed a dance, in which the men came together, moved apart, formed circles, lines. They performed it as if against their will: holding themselves rigid, pretending to be clumsy, to be drunk, slow, or forgetful. In order to represent drunkenness, they drank like fish; the rest followed naturally. The women of the tribe meanwhile stood apart in their own disheveled group, screaming at the tops of their voices. Once the men’s dance had finished, they began to sing. A chorus of victims of the worst imaginable tortures could not have come out with a more terrible noise. Then after these attractions, everyone drank and screamed some more. They had all eaten unbelievable amounts of meat. Several cows, doubtless specially fattened for the occasion, had been slaughtered. The three white men stayed close to each other and refused as much as courtesy would allow, making their ribs of meat last as long as possible, merely wetting their lips in the mugs of liquor that were passed round. Even so, Carlos turned green and had to go and be sick; after that, he went from fire to fire and group to group, looking without much hope for Yñuy. Gauna, who on this occasion was very careful with his drink, fell in with some relatives of the chieftain, while Clarke had to put up with the latter’s ceaseless chatter until it was almost morning. He could never have recalled half of the senseless stories the Indian had told him. Coliqueo spoke incoherently, not so much due to the drink (which was to blame only for the general stupidity of his talk) but because he thought this made what he said sound more serious, more impressive. He did in fact possess a quite logical mind, but for some reason Clarke could not fathom, he believed that this quality was for second-rate people, or only to be used for domestic purposes. He created monstrous sentences, joining the subject of one with the predicate of another, in order to increase their vagueness. The Voroga dialect lent itself to contortions of this kind: indeed it seemed as though it had been specifically created for them. Eventually, the fires went out (they were fetid, made of dry manure) and in the vague daylight the Indians looked bleary-eyed and gloomy. So everyone went to sleep. On his and the others’ behalf, Clarke turned down the chieftain’s offer of his tent. He said they were accustomed to sleeping in the open air, and found it healthier. Since Gauna had asthma, and had suffered an attack during the feast, his little lie sounded convincing. The result however was that Clarke could not get a wink of sleep because of the daylight. Instead, in a state of indignant stupor, he went over Coliqueo’s endless nonsense in his mind. The Indian chief had not even asked him what his name was, or where he came from. He had spent the whole time talking, and about what? About what, good God? The worst of it was that he created the same sort of monsters from his topics as he did from his sentences. It was the method of a born liar: in that way, he did not even have to commit himself to his lies. And as for the other matter, the one which had brought Clarke to the camp, the tribe did not appear to be interested in war in the slightest, and their leader still less: but then, it was probably best not to put too much weight on the previous night’s impressions. Carlos was sleeping on his gear, his mouth wide open. Gauna had gone off on his own to join some other white men he had met among the Vorogas, one of whom he knew from before. Clarke had shared no more than a few words with them, but promised himself he would sound them out during the day, if Gauna had not already done so in private.

  The Vorogas got up very late, and Coliqueo did not appear until one o’clock. Clarke and his companions were given some sticky cakes for breakfast, washed down with a bitter boiled maté. Clarke and Carlos spent a long while staring at Indian men and women, who were busy doing nothing. There was no one for them to exchange a word with. The white men in whose company Gauna had spent the night did not seem much more promising. Gauna introduced them to his former friend, a half-caste by the name of Aristídes Ordóñez.

  “What do you know about Cafulcurá?” Clarke asked him point-blank.

  “Who?”

  Clarke turned to Gauna: “Can he really not know who Cafulcurá is?”

  “Don’t you know who Cafulcurá is?”

  “No,” said Ordóñez.

  “Have you never heard of him?”

  “I don’t get involved in Indian matters, boss.”

  “What do you do, then?”

  “I write.”

  This was enough to awaken Clarke’s dormant interest.

  “You’re the chieftain’s scribe?”

  “That’s right, by your leave.”

  “And who on earth does that madman have to write to?”

  “He dictates endless memorandums, all of them addressed to Rosas.”

  “Since when could you write?” Gauna asked him, with his habitual suspiciousness.

  “A priest taught me.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one who used to stay in the houses . . . the one with the pigs, you remember?”

  “Ah, that one,” said Gauna.

  “What happened to the pigs?” Clarke asked. Gauna did not even deign to reply, but stared into the distance. Ordóñez answered on his behalf: “He bought four pigs, and they all died of the evil eye.”

  “That priest,” Gauna condescended to comment, “was the dumbest perso
n who ever drew breath.”

  “By the way,” Clarke said to Ordóñez, “what’s the matter with Coliqueo? Is he smoking too much?”

  “No more than normal.”

  “How about drink?”

  “Yes, of course. He likes a bit of everything.”

  “He says things that are hard to interpret.”